Inertial Reference System
By webmaster | May 16, 2008
New universal heading reference systems are continually being developed and improved to meet new and existing requirements, with an all weather capability, for military and commercial aircraft. The Attitude and heading reference system provides an accurate determination of aircraft heading relative to true north. This is accomplished by use of fluxgate magnetometers, MEMS accelerometers and/or angular rate gyros, depending on the region of operation. Engineers and other personnel engaged in testing and evaluating aircraft systems have developed certain procedures of testing over a long period of time. These procedures, properly used, can aid in determining the acceptability of heading reference systems for an intended use.
In short, here’s how it works. First, you turn on the sitting motionless on the ramp. The inertial system senses angular motion (and it knows that this motion can only be in a east-west direction). This happens at a certain rate, that’s because the earth turns at around 15.04 degress per hour in space (the result of the 24 hour rotation and the annual rotation around the sun). At the equator, you have travel 21600 nm divided by 24 = 900 nm in space every hour by sitting on the ramp. If you go north and follow e.g. the 75 degree latitude around the earth and measure the mileage (or do the math), it falls far short of the 21600 nm at the equator. Therefore the rotational speed is much less until it reduces to practically zero at the poles (neglecting the rotation around the sun).
While it may take as little as 2 - 3 minutes to complete the alignment at the equator, it takes an easy ten minutes around the 70 degree north latitude. Further north and the system might not be able to align correctly before it starts to drift and might be unable to enter NAV mode because it doesn’t come up with useful numbers to satisfy its criteria for accuracy. It just gets more difficult to do exact calculations since the starting values are much smaller further towards the poles.
Topics: Engineering | No Comments »
Race for Sailing Robots
By webmaster | May 13, 2008
Microtransat Challenge is a racing competition for autonomous boats to be held in the Atlantic Ocean in the month of Sept/Oct 2008. There have been already 2 mini competitions taken place, the first in a Lake near Toulouse (France) and the other on the Irish Sea off the Aberystwyth, Wales, UK. The transatlantic race is scheduled to start from Viana do Castelo, Portugal and the finishing point would be between 10 degrees and 25 degrees North (near Bahamas) and 60 degrees West (near Trinidad and Tobago).
Although reaching the finishing point is a difficult task, the first boat to reach the finishing line will be declared as the winner and would mark a milestone in the history of sailing robots. If the event proves to be successful it would help the scientists to analyze the climatic change in oceans. Since these boats are unmanned, it would be easier for scientists to conduct their researches in dangerous zones also.
The competition is open to everyone – individuals, organization, companies, universities, colleges and schools. There is no entry fee as well as no winning prize (monetary) but the winner would surely earn the fame. The expected timeframe for this race is about 2 to 3 months and the competing boats should be no longer than 4 metres.
“Pinta, the Robot Sailing Boat” from Aberystwyth University, United Kingdom is one among the race participants. Other participants include Queen’s University (Canada), Team Savage (USA), Portencross Boys (UK), Team Robotboat (USA) etc.
Topics: Robotics | No Comments »
Make money thru web directory – affiliate program
By webmaster | May 10, 2008
There are various sources of making money online such as paid-to-survey programs, affiliate marketing, blog posting, cpc programs, paid for forum posting etc. Some money earning programs are not suitable for all or have hard to achieve target, minimum payout is too high and prone to risks of monetary loss or waste of time/efforts.
If you are a webmaster, here is an affiliate program from Elynex Web Directory which is easy to achieve and risk-free with no restrictions. Elynex.com is an established web directory which provides categorized links to quality websites. It has thousands of backlinks from various search engines, high alexa ranking and getting a backlink from this quality web directory will surely benefit the submitter’s website.
Talking about the affiliate program, it requires you to refer visitors to their web directory and if your referrer submits a link to this site with the necessary payment, you get paid $5 for each submission. This web directory offers links in 3 types:
- Regular Links (with reciprocal): $10.50 Lifetime
- Regular Links (no reciprocal required): $15.50 Lifetime
- Featured Links (Sub-folder accepted): $45.50 Annual Fee
More info can be found at Submit URLs page
You can sign up as an affiliate user thru “Register New User” page. Once you sign up you could immediately login to your control panel wherein you could enter your paypal address for payments and also receive the referrer code which is used to track your referrers. The control panel also offers referrer stats as from where your visitors came from and can also be filtered in parameters like days, weeks or months.
Payments are made on monthly basis (15th of every month) for purchases that have been made 10 days before the payday. If the purchase was made within the 10 days period it would be carried to the next pay cycle. All payments are made thru paypal which is the easiest and secure way of receiving money online. Moreover there is no minimum payout limit, which means even if you have one link sale from your referrer you would be paid $5 by paypal.
Unlike other affiliate programs, there are not many restrictions as how you could refer your visitors. You could insert the referrer code in your website, blog or even in your web directory if you have one. Other acceptable referrers include cpc programs such as adwords, newsletters and email marketing (unless it is not spam).
So get ready to sign up, insert the code and promote to earn those extra bucks with less efforts and no investment!
Topics: Internet | No Comments »
Web 2.0 for Business
By webmaster | May 7, 2008
Web 2.0 is an internet jargon which denotes information sharing and collaboration among users using the Internet as base platform. Sites that have implemented web 2.0 model have found great success in the recent times. Blogs, wikis, social-bookmarking sites, photo-sharing websites are the examples of web 2.0 model.
How can one deploy the web 2.0 technology in a business environment in order to be successful? Businesses which have offices spread out through multiple remote locations have been using email as a communication or knowledge sharing tool [updates]. An intranet corporate forum may be more effective wherein the users (staff) can raise questions and replies can be given by the management or the responsible person (staff). This information of question and answers will be helpful to other staffs as well and definitely help in saving time by answering the same question. Simultaneously any product or service related updates can be posted and any enquiries related to this update can be solved.
Blogs/ Wiki can definitely serve as a centralized knowledge base regarding the business’ service or product or even updates. Blogs play a vital role in sharing the company’s expertise. A RSS subscription to the intranet blog can help the company staffs to stay up to date. Wikis are useful knowledge base. Workers have the ease and advantage of learning about the company’s products/service/updates thru wikis instead of depending on superiors for common questions.
Folksonomy is useful in classification of content based on tags. Unlike conventional search engines which display search results based on text relevancy, content and backlinks, the social bookmarking sites are useful in finding information based on votes, tags generated by other users and popularity. In a practical sense, you would buy a product if your friend recommends it rather than a sales rep or company ad in newspaper boasting about their own product. Similarly users are more confident when the product/ service are positively reviewed by other users. Social bookmarking can be useful in promoting your business’ products or services.
Moreover these are free and easy to use. Its not late yet, if you haven’t utilized these above methodologies. You can make your business grow by capitalizing on the web 2.0 model and reap the benefits thru the techno-inventions.
Topics: Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Google updates Pagerank
By webmaster | May 1, 2008
The web search jumbo “Google” has updated the “PageRank”- Google’s proprietary algorithm of ranking web pages based on quality incoming links and content relevancy. Pagerank was applicable only for text links but recently there were news that Google has come up with a new technology that will assign PageRank for images also. Unlike the last update where many sites lost their PageRank, this PageRank update has brought smiles to many webmasters as their site’s PageRank has improved in the uptrend.
For those who are new to PageRank, it is a numerical weighting (0 to 10) which represents the value of a webpage based on the incoming links and relevancy. Most often new sites get the value of PR N/A or PR 0. Although PR1 to PR3 is easily achievable, PR4 and PR5 needs some work. For getting the value of PR6 one has to gain links from quality and authority websites. PR7 and above is awarded to authority sites which have huge number of backlinks and provide quality content. Google updates its PageRank once in 3 months, although its not guaranteed. Last year there was a big gap of more than 6 months. There are many free tools available in the Internet to find your website’s PageRank. For instance:Checkpagerank.net and Domainpagerank.com
As per the info found in Google’s Official Help Section (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=49215), PageRank does matters in SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). Google uses its sophisticated and obscure algorithm combined with PageRank in providing Search Results in google.com. There have been endless debates in regards to this. Some say that PR0 sites often rank well than sites with higher PR. But one should understand that the search results are not solely dependent on PageRank, the quality of content, text matching or relevancy also does factor in search engine results.
I also heard from few of the members in DP (forums.digitalpoint.com) that some of their new sites also got ranking (PR1 or 2) without gaining much links. The pagerank seems to have started updating from the last 2 days (April 28th and April 29th). The new ranking was visible only in few Google’s datacenters. It typically takes some time to propagate throughout all the Google’s datacenters. Today the ranking is visible in many pagerank checking tools.
Regardless of PageRank, if your site provides unique content and also to that of users-interest, your website will rank well in the minds of your visitors and grow dramatically!
Topics: Internet | 2 Comments »
Samsung Soul G400
By webmaster | April 27, 2008
Samsung‘s G400 mobile which was expected to be released in the month of June 2008 has hit the European Markets pre-date. The mobile phone will ship from Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium right from the month of May 2008. The mobile phone will be available in the shades of soul gray, steel sterling and platinum silver but the pricing is still unknown.
Samsung G400 is a slide phone with sleek design. It features a 5 megapixels camera, 4x digital zoom, image stabilizer and face detection technology. The phone measures 105.9×49.5×12.9mm and supports GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) class 10 (32-48 kbps), 3G HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) 7.2 Mbps, USB 2.0 and Bluetooth 2.0.
Samsung Soul G400 also features A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) which allows wireless transmission of high quality audio from one device to another over a Bluetooth connection. The mobile is also equipped with a secondary vide call camera, external touch screen display with support for 262K colors. The phone’s screen size is 240 x 320 pixels.
Topics: Mobiles & Telephony | No Comments »
IBM’s iDataPlex for web 2.0 computing
By webmaster | April 24, 2008
IBM has unveiled a new server design targeting the Internet companies and Enterprise users which would help them in saving power and provide improved services to web users. Named “iDataPlex”, the system leverages IBM’s Intel based blade server technology and uses all the industry standard components including open source software like linux.
IBM said that the iDataPlex architecture cuts power requirements by 40 percent compared to traditional servers. This is because cool air is easier to pull through the new server chassis because of their shallow 15-inch depth compared to normal servers, the spokesperson said.
IBM’s iDataPlex is suitable for financial sectors, research organizations and for web service providers like online gaming, streaming vids, social networking etc.
iDataPlex servers will be available by the month of June in US & Canada only. Other countries across the world can get it by the end of this year. iDataPlex is a custom built solution so the pricing will vary depending upon the configuration.
Topics: Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Service pack 3 for Windows XP
By webmaster | April 22, 2008
Microsoft had announced that it would release the third and the final service pack of Windows XP operating system on 29th of this month for public downloads. However it would be released earlier to the company’s business customers via the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) and TechNet subscriptions.
The Service Pack 3 will include all the updates since the Service pack 2 which was released in 2004. The Service Pack 3 will include many enhancements to the current version of Windows XP. A Microsoft staff said that “Windows XP SP3 bits are now working their way through our manufacturing channels to be available to OEM and Enterprise customers”.
Some of the enhancements in Windows XP Service Pack 3 are as follows:
Network Access Protection
This featured is already found in Windows Vista. It checks a computer for viruses or any other bugs before connecting it to a network.
Product Activation Model
In big firms where there are hundreds or even thousands of computers it is really difficult for the IT guys to activate the product during OS installation. This feature avoids activation or entering the product key during installation for each system. This is also imitated from Microsoft’ latest Operating System - Windows Vista.
Black Hole Router Detection
An improved featured in Service Pack 3 that will detect routers which send data packets silently (popularly known as black hole router).
Topics: Software | No Comments »
World’s first Watch with Windows CE 5.0
By webmaster | April 20, 2008
We would have come across many mobile phones that are based on Windows, Symbian or Palm Platform but here is wrist watch that runs on Windows CE 5.0 (Window’s OS for Embedded Systems). Priced @ $630 to $699 (estimated) the EPOQ EGP-98B is the first Smart Watch Phone of “Titan Global Commerce”, the marketers of EPOQ TV(s) and PDAs.
The EPOQ EGP-98B has a 1.8 inch OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen which is too small for Windows CE’s standard user interface. This Touchscreen display switches among the windows desktop, mobile phone and the conventional clock. The Wrist Watch is equipped with latest technologies such as 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, 1GB microSD card, 1.3 MP camera, voice recorder, Speaker (embedded) and microphone, stereo Bluetooth (with headset), A/V playback and WAP Web browser. The Wrist watch supports a talktime of 100 – 180 minutes and a standby time of 80-100 hours, thru the two lithium-ion batteries (rechargeable).
The CEO of “Titan Global Commerce” - Daniel Sparrow said that the specs could be subject to change and their company plans to ship this watches by May 2008. EPOQ EGP-98B would surely mark a milestone in the era of “Wrist Watches” and will win the hearts of many by serving as a 3.1 product (mobile phone, mini-desktop and a watch). Beware! It might win yours too!
Topics: Gadgets and Gizmos | No Comments »
Toshiba Satellite A200 - ST2043 Laptop
By webmaster | April 16, 2008
Toshiba Satellite A200 - ST2043 is an affordable, easy to use and customizable laptop offered by Toshiba Corporation, focused on students and home users. The laptop comes in an attractive glossy finish, bright blue indicator LEDs (light-emitting diode).
Toshiba Satellite A200 - ST2043 has a built in microphone, speakers, integrated webcam and secured with Fingerprint Reader. The laptop is packed with Genuine Windows Vista Basic Edition, has a 15 inches LCD monitor (1280 x 800), Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100, 80GB hard disk drive, DVD Drive, 6-Cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery, 1024MB SDRAM, 5 in 1 Card Reader, Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG (802.11a/b/g), 1.3M Webcam and includes 10/100 LAN Port.
Toshiba offers the option of customizing the components of the Laptop by which the buyer can select the components of his choice based on his requirement. Customization can be done in selecting the OS, CPU, Primary as well as a Secondary Hard Disk Drive, Speakers, Battery, Memory and Optical Media. Customizing the components may delay the shipping by around 8 to 10 days.
Toshiba Satellite A200 - ST2043 is priced at $783.20 (default components) and includes a standard 1 year Limited Warranty which can be extended for a 3 years period (after the standard warranty expires) by purchasing an Extended Service Plan.
Topics: Hardware | No Comments »
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