Green Computing - Eco-Friendly Bamboo Laptop

Bamboo remains one of the most versatile grasses. It has increasingly been replacing plastics and wood products. It has also entered the world of computers. Here is an end-to-end eco-friendly bamboo notebook or laptop, an innovation in green computing. It is green throughout its life cycle — from conception and production, to recycling and disposal.

These notebooks, launched by ASUS Technology (India), are exquisitely designed with real bamboo to give a personalised and exclusive feel. It complies with RoHS (restriction of hazardous substances) and WEEE (waste electrical and electronic equipment) standards.

Stanley Wu, country manager (notebook business), ASUS India, says the gadgets have been made through a green procurement process. It has restricted the use of 37 hazardous substances which are opposed by the RoHS directive. Also, the notebooks use super hybrid engine that can extend the battery life by 35 to 70 per cent compared to other notebooks. This saving is achieved by intelligent monitoring of the power requirements of the components and automatically adjusting power levels.

Mr. Wu says the notebook is made from the Moso species of bamboo. With the advantage of eco friendliness, the notebook offers great performance with its premium configuration. It is light at just 1.57 kg. ASUS offers a two-year global warranty for the product.

The track pad is also made of bamboo. Each touch of the bamboo laptop brings you closer to nature. The entire panelling of the ASUS U6V and the mouse bundled along with it are made of bamboo. Every piece can be further enhanced with treatments that yield different colours, or by laser-etching distinctive designs on the bamboo-clad cover.

The notebook uses super hybrid engine that reduces the yearly carbon dioxide emission by 12.3 kg a piece. The company has so far shipped approximately six million notebooks a year. This works out to a massive reduction of 73.8 million kg of CO2 emission per year, equal to saving 36 million trees annually.

The ASUS U6V bamboo is priced at Rs. 1,10,000 in India. The company offers a 2-year global warranty for the product. Mr. Wu is confident that the notebook will usher in a new era of green computing.

Google Chrome Browser in All South Indian Languages

Google Chrome is now being offered in many Indian languages, with version 2 of the browser made available for download.The stable version 2 comes in Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya (on Windows Vista alone), Tamil, and Telugu. A Hindi version was available earlier.

What this means is that PC users who have Windows Vista as their operating system should be able to easily select the browser’s interface language by using the language-setting options. It should also be possible to switch from one language to another by changing the language option and re-launching the browser. The users can then see the browser menus and other associated content in one of the Indian languages (or any of the other available language options).

Google Chrome was “not just a browser but also a modern platform for web pages and applications.” The browser is based on open source software. It has been developed with Webkit, an open source browser engine, which was originally deployed for the Safari browser. The rendering of Javascript, a scripting language widely used in the Web environment, was also speeded up, Google said.

As for the release of the stable version 2 of the browser, Google itself said it did not give much weightage to version numbers, and these were “mainly a metric to help us keep track of changes internally.” For those already using older versions, the update ought to happen automatically.

How to login into Multiple GTalk Ids

Google Talk or Gtalk became an integral part of most of our life, and many of us are having multiple Google id’s for various reasons.
Is there any way to use more than one gtalk id at the same time??

Yes, in this wide open world every thing is possible,

Try out the following

1)Create a Shortcut for you Google Talk

2)Go to its Properties (Right Click -> Properties), just append “/nomutex” in the target text box. Eg: "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop\googletalk.exe" /nomutex

3)From now on launch GoogleTalk shortcut to log into multiple instances of gtalk.

--Gopi

Try it out and let me know if you face any problem on this.

Embedding a picture into an 8 byte file

Can we embedd a image file to a 1 kb text file?? isn't possible?? let us check it out

Follow the steps:

1.Open up the command prompt. You can do this by going to Start -> Run. Type in "cmd".

2.First thing to do is simply to create a text file using Notepad. In the command prompt, type "notepad test.txt". Notepad will ask you whether you wish to create test.txt. Click yes. Type in "3.141592" and save the file.

3.If you look at the file in Windows Explorer or command prompt, you will see that it is 8 bytes.

4.Now we need an image. Save the Google logo to your hard drive in the same folder as test.txt. Call it test.gif. Windows Explorer and the command prompt should report the test.gif file being 8,558 bytes large.

5.Now we need to embed the image into the text file we created. Type in "type test.gif > test.txt:rw".

6.Delete test.gif since it is now embedded in the text file.

7.Using Windows Explorer or the Command Prompt, ensure that test.txt is still 8 bytes.

8.An image couldn’t have possibly been embedded in the file you may ask. Don’t believe it? Type in "mspaint test.txt:rw". Microsoft Paint should now open up with the logo you embedded into test.txt.

So where have the 8,558 bytes disappeared? How can we store an 8,558 byte image in an 8 byte text file? How has the 8,558 byte image effectively become zero bytes?

do you know the mystery behind it..?

"Brain Twister" with Microsoft Calc and Mathematics

Many of us are using Microsoft application in most of our day to day life and with full of trust on it,

Believe it or not, Microsoft is not bug free and that too on one of the most widely used Microsoft calc

Try out the following

Open Microsoft calc (Run Command -> Calc)

Try out the following:

2704/42 = will work fine
2704/50 = will work fine
2704/52 =????

Can you find the answer (for 2704/52) using Microsoft calc????

Found the answer???
No, then try to find the answer for 52 * 52 = 2704
Is not simple? The answer is 52, when you test it in Microsoft calc, it will look as Microsoft calculator didn't calculate.

This is "Brain Twisting" feature of Mathematics. And Microsoft calc is an apt tool to twist it more.

With Google Earth Explore Occeans

Google has lifted the lid on its first major upgrade to its global mapping software, Google Earth.

Google Ocean expands this map to include large swathes of the ocean floor and abyssal plain.Users can dive beneath a dynamic water surface to explore the 3D sea floor terrain.

The map also includes 20 content layers, containing information from the world's leading scientists, researchers, and ocean explorers. Al Gore was at the launch event in San Francisco which, Google hopes, will take its mapping software a step closer to total coverage of the entire globe.

In a statement, Mr Gore said that the update would make Google Earth a "magical experience".

"You can not only zoom into whatever part of our planet's surface you wish to examine in closer detail, you can now dive into the world's ocean that covers almost three-quarters of the planet and discover new wonders that had not been accessible in previous versions."

Approximately 70% of the world's surface is covered by water, which contains nearly 80% of all life - yet less than 5% of it has actually been explored.

"With this, everybody can see the unbelievable beauty of our marine life and how incredibly threatened it is," said Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of the global marine programme at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
"We hope this major technological innovation will get the public more involved in marine conservation and encourage governments and businesses to stop driving ocean species to extinction."

There are also updates on the terrestrial side, including GPS tracking, virtual time travel (where users can observe changes in satellite images, such as the 2006 World Cup stadium or the desertification of Africa's Lake Chad) and narrated tours of imagery and content in Google Earth.

There are also updates to the Mars 3D section, so if users have had enough of the blue planet, they can always look at the red one.

Ref: BBC