Puzzle Alarm Clock

How many times has your alarm clock started beeping and all you did was hit snooze? Maybe once or twice you hit the "off" button by mistake and wound up late for work or your appointments of the day. Or a thunderstorm hit during the night, spiking the power in your house and you wake up to a blinking "12:00" display long after you were supposed to be up and moving. Well, your worries are over, since the Puzzle Alarm Clock is here!

Guaranteed to wake you up, this alarm clock is as fun as it is useful. Even if you would try, you cannot sleep through this alarm! Here is how it works:On the Puzzle Alarm Clock are four puzzle pieces. When the clock gets to where you have set it to go off, these four pieces get shot up into the air! Your job is to get those four puzzle pieces back into the alarm clock, because it won't turn off until you do!

After a workout like that,who could go back to bed?What a fun and safe way to make sure you make it to school, work, or appointments on time. All it takes to power the Puzzle Alarm Clock is 2 AA batteries and you can get your very own clock in 2-4 business days with express delivery. This alarm clock is an attractive piece and is travel friendly, too, since its compact design makes it easy to take with you when you are on the go.

How to Use Your Netbook As an Ebook Reader

Today there are a wide variety of portable devices that you can be using for many different functions. For many it's difficult to be carrying around too many devices. It's best to try to combine the functionality of many into a few simpler devices. If you are using a netbook, you can actually get away with not owning an ebook reader. Find out how you can turn your netbook into an ebook reading device.

There are thousands of free books online. Many of these can be read right from the internet. With your netbook, you can simply view these books in the browser and start reading. You can save these HTML documents to your computer so that you can read them even when you aren't connected to the internet.

Get a PDF reader for your netbook. Most should come with one by default. These PDF readers will be able to read the thousands of PDF books that are available on the internet.

You might want to be buying ebooks from the popular sources like Amazon. Luckily, there is a Kindle application that works for your computer. You can download this to your netbook and purchase books just like you would if you purchased the Kindle device. This way you have access to all these books that you read directly from your netbook.

Get some alternative ebook reading software for your netbook. There used to be lit and pdb formats that were very popular as these ran on the portable devices at the time a decade ago. Getting this type of software for your machine opens you up to thousands more books that you can be reading.

Get screen rotation software. You might want to read from your netbook horizontally and not vertically. This way you can hold the netbook like a book.

This is best done with the smaller and lighter netbooks on the market so it's not so heavy on your hands. Additionally find a good quality battery that will last. Turn off your wifi while reading to preserve your battery.

Razer BlackWidow Mechanical Keyboard May Be "The One"

We have a distinct love for mechanical keyboards around here, and we're always on the lookout for any new competitors. They aren't nearly as easy to locate as membrane keyboards, but the ones that are available are generally top-notch and built for gamers. But Razer claims that the units already out there simply don't live up to their new pair of mechanical keyboards, and while we would obviously need to test out one to confirm or deny it, there's no question that these two sound fantastic on paper.

Debuting this week at the GamesCom event in Germany, the Razer BlackWidow and BlackWidow Ultimate are two of the most fully featured mechanical  keyboards that we've seen. Razer claims that most mech boards on the market today are stiff and hard to operate, and they have worked for 3 years in order to create one that's elegant and easy to depress. To quote the company: "The Razer BlackWidow features a uniquely tactile mechanical key architecture that provides each key on the keyboard with a crisp response and tactile feedback similar to a mouse click. Coupled with a unique key actuation point halfway through the full travel distance, the optimized mechanical key structure found in each of the Razer BlackWidow's keys provide for greater precision and accuracy versus other traditional mechanical keyboards."So, light on your fingers but precise like a mechanical keyboard should be? We're in. And if the standard version isn't enough for you, the Ultimate version adds individually backlit keys with 5 levels of lighting, 3.5" audio and microphone out jacks as well as an additional USB port, all of which is on top of the fully programmable keys with on-the-fly macro recording as well as five additional gaming keys (available on both models). Razer plans to ship these two next month for $79.99 and $129.99, respectively.

Fish Robot As An Alternative Marine Propulsion System Of The Future

The team of Darmstadt researchers analyzed videos of fish’s motions and then developed a prototype fish robot that duplicated them, and are now testing it using the locomotional patterns of various species of fish in order to refine it and improve its efficiency.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2009/06/090609073154-large.jpg
The "skeleton" of the fish robot consists of ten segments. Including tail fin, it is about 1.50 meters long. (Credit: TU Darmstadt)Their fish robot, dubbed “Smoky,” consists of a “skeleton” composed of ten segments enshrouded in an elastic skin that are free to move relative to one another and caused to undergo snaking motions similar to those of fish by waterproof actuators. Including its tail fin, the fish robot, which is a 5:1 scale model of a gilt-head sea bream, is 1.50 meters long.

The researchers hope that use of their fish robot for ship propulsion will help prevent shoreline erosion and the underminings of submarine installations caused by ships’ screws. The fish robot’s “soft” drive action should also prevent the churning up of seabeds and riverbeds and its effects on marine plants and aquatic-animal populations.

HAPTICS

Haptics  is the science of applying touch (tactile) sensation and control to interaction with computer applications. By using special input/output devices (joysticks, data gloves, or other devices), users can receive feedback from computer applications in the form of felt sensations in the hand or other parts of the body. In combination with a visual display, haptics technology can be used to train people for tasks requiring hand-eye coordination, such as surgery and space ship maneuvers. It can also be used for games in which you feel as well as see your interactions with images. For example, you might play tennis with another computer user somewhere else in the world. Both of you can see the moving ball and, using the haptic device, position and swing your tennis racket and feel the impact of the ball.

Haptic technology, or haptics, is a tactile feedback technology that takes advantage of a user's sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, and/or motions to the user. This mechanical stimulation may be used to assist in the creation of virtual objects (objects existing only in a computer simulation), for control of such virtual objects, and for the enhancement of the remote control of machines and devices (teleoperators). It has been described as "(doing) for the sense of touch what computer graphics does for vision".

Haptic poetry, like visual poetry and sound poetry, is a liminal art form combining characteristics of typography and sculpture to create objects not only to be seen, but to be touched and manipulated. Indeed, in haptic poetry, the sense of touch (and, to a lesser extent, the other senses) is equal to, if not more important than, the sense of sight, yet both text-based poetry and haptic poetry have the same goals: to create an aesthetic effect in the minds of the intended audience.

Haptic perception is the process of recognizing objects through touch. It involves a combination of somatosensory perception of patterns on the skin surface (e.g., edges, curvature, and texture) and proprioception of hand position and conformation.People can rapidly and accurately identify three-dimensional objects by touch. They do so through the use of exploratory procedures, such as moving the fingers over the outer surface of the object or holding the entire object in the hand .ibson defined the haptic system as "The sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to his body by use of his body". Gibson and others emphasized the close link between haptic perception and body movement: haptic perception is active exploration. The concept of haptic perception is related to the concept of extended physiological proprioception according to which, when using a tool such as a stick, perceptual experience is transparently transferred to the end of the tool.

Haptic communication is the means by which people and other animals communicate via touching. Touch is an extremely important sense for humans; as well as providing information about surfaces and textures it is a component of nonverbal communication in interpersonal relationships, and vital in conveying physical intimacy. It can be both sexual (such as kissing) and platonic (such as hugging or tickling).

Touch is the earliest sense to develop in the fetus. The development of an infant's haptic senses and how it relates to the development of the other senses such as vision has been the target of much research. Human babies have been observed to have enormous difficulty surviving if they do not possess a sense of touch, even if they retain sight and hearing. Babies who can perceive through touch, even without sight and hearing, tend to fare much better. Touch can be thought of as a basic sense in that most life forms have a response to being touched, while only a subset have sight and hearing.

Spawning networks

Spawning networks are a new class of programmable networks that automate the life cycle process for the creation, deployment, and management of network architecture. These networks are capable of spawning distinct child virtual networks with their own transport, control, and management systems. This definition is created because the deployment of new network architectures, services, and protocols is often manual, ad hoc, and time-consuming.The definition was introduced in a paper titled Spawning Networks, published in IEEE Networks by a group of researchers from Columbia University, University of Hamburg, Intel Corporation, Hitachi Limited, and Nortel Networks.The authors are Andrew T. Campbel, Michael E. Kounavis, Daniel A. Villela, of Columbia University, John B. Vicente, of Intel Corporation, Hermann G. De Meer, of University of Hamburg, Kazuho Miki, of Hitachi Limited, and Kalai S. Kalaichelvan, of Nortel Networks. There was also a paper titled "The Genesis Kernel: A Programming System for Spawning Network Architectures", Michael E. Kounavis, Andrew T. Campbell, Stephen Chou, Fabien Modoux, John Vicente and Hao Zhuang. A first implementation of Spawning Networks was realized at Columbia University as part of the Ph.D thesis work of Michael Kounavis. This implementation is based on the design of the Genesis Kernel, a programming system consisting of three layers: A transport environment which is a collection of programmable virtual routers, a programming environment which offers open access to the programmable data path and a life cycle environment which is responsible for spawning and managing network architectures. One of the concepts used in design of the Genesis Kernel is the creation of a network architecture based on a profiling script specifying the architecture components and their interaction.

BitTorrent

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, and it has been estimated that it accounts for roughly 27–55% of all Internet traffic (depending on geographical location) as of February 2009.BitTorrent protocol allows users to distribute large amounts of data without the heavy demands on their computers that would be needed for standard Internet hosting. A standard host's servers can easily be brought to a halt if high levels of simultaneous data flow are reached. The protocol works as an alternative data distribution method that makes even small computers (e.g. mobile phones) with low bandwidth capable of participating in large data transfers.

A BitTorrent client is any program that implements the BitTorrent protocol. Each client is capable of preparing, requesting, and transmitting any type of computer file over a network, using the protocol. A peer is any computer running an instance of a client.To share a file or group of files, a peer first creates a small file called a "torrent" (e.g. MyFile.torrent). This file contains metadata about the files to be shared and about the tracker, the computer that coordinates the file distribution. Peers that want to download the file must first obtain a torrent file for it and connect to the specified tracker, which tells them from which other peers to download the pieces of the file.Though both ultimately transfer files over a network, a BitTorrent download differs from a classic download (as is typical with an HTTP or FTP request, for example) in several fundamental ways:

• BitTorrent makes many small data requests over different TCP connections to different machines, while classic downloading is typically made via a single TCP connection to a single machine.
• BitTorrent downloads in a random or in a "rarest-first" approach that ensures high availability, while classic downloads are sequential.

Taken together, these differences allow BitTorrent to achieve much lower cost to the content provider, much higher redundancy, and much greater resistance to abuse or to "flash crowds" than regular server software. However, this protection, theoretically, comes at a cost: downloads can take time to rise to full speed because it may take time for enough peer connections to be established, and it may take time for a node to receive sufficient data to become an effective uploader. This contrasts with regular downloads (such as from an HTTP server, for example) that, while more vulnerable to overload and abuse, rise to full speed very quickly and maintain this speed throughout.In general, BitTorrent's non-contiguous download methods have prevented it from supporting "progressive downloads" or "streaming playback". However, comments made by Bram Cohen in January 2007 suggest that streaming torrent downloads will soon be commonplace and ad supported streaming appears to be the result of those comments.

ROVER TECHNOLOGY

Rover Technology adds a user's location to other dimensions of system awareness, such as time, user preferences, and client device capabilities. The software architecture of Rover systems is designed to scale to large user populations.Consider a group touring the museums in Washington, D.C. The group arrives at a registration point, where each person receives a handheld device with audio, video, and wireless communication capabilities. an off-the-shelf PDA available in the market today. A wireless-based system tracks the location of these devices and presents relevant information about displayed objects as the user moves through the museum. Users can query their devices for maps and optimal routes to objects of interest. They can also use the devices to reserve and purchase tickets to museum events later in the day. The group leader can send messages to coordinate group activities.The part of this system that automatically tailors information and services to a mobile user's location is the basis for location-aware computing.This computing paradigm augments the more traditional dimensions of system awareness, such as time-, user-, and device-awareness.All the technology components to realize location-aware computing are available in the marketplace today. What has hindered the widespread deployment of location-based systems is the lack of an integration architecture that scales with user populations.Rover technology tracks the location of system users and dynamically configures application-level information to different link-layer technologies and client-device capabilities. A Rover system represents a single domain of administrative control, managed and moderated by a Rover controller.It Shows a large application domain partitioned into multiple administrative domains, each with its own Rover system - much like the Internet's Domain Name System" 2End users interact with the system through Rover client devices- typically wireless handheld units with varying capabilities for processing, memory and storage, graphics and display, and network interfaces. Rover maintains a profile for each device, identifying its capabilities and configuring content accordingly. Rover also maintains end-user profiles, defining specific user interests and serving content tailored to them.
A wireless access infrastructure provides connectivity to the Rover clients. In the current implementation, we have defined a technique to determine location based on certain properties of the wireless access infrastructure. Although Rover can leverage such properties of specific air interfaces,1 its location management technique is not tied to a particular wireless technology. Moreover, different wireless interfaces can coexist in a single Rover system or in different domains of a multi-Rover system. Software radio technology3 offers a way to integrate the different interfaces into a single device. This would allow the device to easily roam between various Rover systems, each with different wireless access technologies.
A server system implements and manages Rover's end-user services. The server system consists of five components: The Rover controller is the system's "brain." It manages the different services that Rover clients request, scheduling and filtering the content according to the current location and the user and device profiles.The location server is a dedicated unit that manages the client device location services within the Rover system. Alternatively, applications can use an externally available location service, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS).The streaming-media unit manages audio and video content streamed to clients. Many of today's off-the-shelf streaming-media units can be integrated with the Rover system.

Global Nanotechnology Market in Energy Sector

According to our research report “Nanotechnology Market Forecast to 2013”, the prospective growth in nanotechnology market will largely be driven by massive investment in nanotechnology R&D by both governments and corporate worldwide. Also, nanotechnology-based products will have an impact on nearly all industrial sectors.On the regional front, we have found that Asia-Pacific region will experience the fastest growth. Various countries like US, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, France, UK, China, Brazil, Russia and Australia have been studied in the report. We have chosen these countries for our study on the basis of their growth potential. To analyze the nanotechnology industry performance, we have segmented it by R&D funding and application areas. Electronics, cosmetics, defense and other emerging application areas have been covered in the report.Further, we have done an in-depth and quality analysis of nanotechnology industry by identifying current market trends and future growth areas. Additionally, we have found that technology innovation and government support will drive this market during the forecast period. We have also identified that Nanocoating, Nanomedicine, Nanofibres and other markets will be the key growth areas in future.

To give clients an unbiased view of the nanotechnology market, we have also analyzed the factors that can inhibit the market’s growth.The report provides a prudent analysis of the nanotechnology industry.“Nanotechnology Market Forecast to 2013” is a comprehensive research report that comprises of valuable analysis on the nanotechnology market across the globe. The research will provide a prudent analysis of the nanotechnology industry by studying the recent developments and their impact on the market. The report will help clients to analyze the leading-edge opportunities, prospective customer base, expected future outlook and all the other factors which are critical to the success of the global nanotechnology market.

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database.The Semantic Web was thought up by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There is a dedicated team of people at the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) working to improve, extend and standardize the system, and many languages, publications, tools and so on have already been developed. However, Semantic Web technologies are still very much in their infancies, and although the future of the project in general appears to be bright, there seems to be little consensus about the likely direction and characteristics of the early Semantic Web.

What's the rationale for such a system? Data that is geneally hidden away in HTML files is often useful in some contexts, but not in others. The problem with the majority of data on the Web that is in this form at the moment is that it is difficult to use on a large scale, because there is no global system for publishing data in such a way as it can be easily processed by anyone. For example, just think of information about local sports events, weather information, plane times, Major League Baseball statistics, and television guides... all of this information is presented by numerous sites, but all in HTML. The problem with that is that, is some contexts, it is difficult to use this data in the ways that one might want to do so.

So the Semantic Web can be seen as a huge engineering solution... but it is more than that. We will find that as it becomes easier to publish data in a repurposable form, so more people will want to pubish data, and there will be a knock-on or domino effect. We may find that a large number of Semantic Web applications can be used for a variety of different tasks, increasing the modularity of applications on the Web. But enough subjective reasoning... onto how this will be accomplished.

The Semantic Web is generally built on syntaxes which use URIs to represent data, usually in triples based structures: i.e. many triples of URI data that can be held in databases, or interchanged on the world Wide Web using a set of particular syntaxes developed especially for the task. These syntaxes are called "Resource Description Framework" syntaxes. It includes URI - Uniform Resource Identifier, RDF - Resource Description Framework, Screen Scraping, and Forms, notation3: RDF Made Easy, CWM: An XML RDF And Notation3 Inference Engine.

RAIN TECHNOLOGY

The name of the original research project was RAIN, which stands for Reliable Array of Independent Nodes. Rainfinity's technology originated in a research project at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal of the RAIN project was to identify key software building blocks for creating reliable distributed applications using off-the-shelf hardware. The focus of the research was on high-performance, fault-tolerant and portable clustering technology for space-borne computing. In short, the RAIN project intended to marry distributed computing with networking protocols. During the RAIN project, key components were built to fulfill this vision. A patent was filed and granted for the RAIN technology. It became obvious that RAIN technology was well-suited for Internet applications. Rainfinity was spun off from Caltech in 1998, and the company has exclusive intellectual property rights to the RAIN technology. After the formation of the company, the RAIN technology has been further augmented, and additional patents have been filed. RAIN is also called channel bonding, redundant array of independent nodes, reliable array of independent nodes, or random array of independent nodes. It is a cluster of nodes linked in a network topology with multiple interfaces and redundant storage. It is an implementation of RAID across nodes instead of across disk arrays. RAIN is used to increase fault tolerance.

BEOWULF CLUSTER

Cluster is a widely-used term meaning independent computers combined into a unified system through software and networking. At the most fundamental level, when two or more computers are used together to solve a problem, it is considered a cluster. Clusters are typically used for High Availability (HA) for greater reliability or High Performance Computing (HPC) to provide greater computational power than a single computer can provide.

Beowulf Clusters are scalable performance clusters based on commodity hardware, on a private system network, with open source software (Linux) infrastructure. The designer can improve performance proportionally with added machines. The commodity hardware can be any of a number of mass-market, stand-alone compute nodes as simple as two networked computers each running Linux and sharing a file system or as complex as 1024 nodes with a high-speed, low-latency network.

Class I clusters are built entirely using commodity hardware and software using standard technology such as SCSI, Ethernet, and IDE. They are typically less expensive than Class II clusters which may use specialized hardware to achieve higher performance.

Common uses are traditional technical applications such as simulations, biotechnology, and petro-clusters; financial market modeling, data mining and stream processing; and Internet servers for audio and games.

Beowulf programs are usually written using languages such as C and FORTRAN. They use message passing to achieve parallel computations. See Beowulf History for more information on the development of the Beowulf architecture.