SUMMER VACATION

Greece in summer sounds great.

MY PET FOX

JUST A THOUGHT

I'd rather deprive someone of my company for the cost of being the whole day all alone, then spend several days after feeling nervous and incapable of functioning. Evil people will never change.
That' s why we all have to enjoy human kindness and beauty of the soul when we meet them. Good people are available, but a bright soul is so rare.

Green is good for the eyes.

FASHION CRAZE

I really like Beach Party Craze. Fashion Craze is another adventure of our well known character.

REBORN BABIES

Here they are! Are they real?
Yes, they are real DOLLS! Every girl's dream is a baby look-alike doll.
Here are some pictures to enjoy...

NEW GADGET

I've been busy. That's why I haven't written anything new. I really don't know what to put in my blog. How about a new gadget for a start.

Something completely different

Let’s say I need new furniture. Something to sit on, but not a chair. I might get a sofa and a few armchairs. But they all have to be both decorative and difficult to break.
I like orange and red. And many other colors, but these two are my favorites today. Let’s see what I’ve found with a little help of my friend Google.
More...

CardioTrainer

Physical activity today is a must. Too much food and no exercise are reasons for obesity, bad health and no social life. Who do you ask for help? CardioTrainer!
Start with walking. A real-time pedometer with GPS guidance will count your steps. This application records path, climb, pace, calories, and uploads the results to your website.
Continue with running. Race against your previous tracks. Be better then yourself. Look better every day.

Beach Party Craze Review

A really lovely game!
You can play it for hours. Great looking characters eat, drink, swim, dive, dance… In other words they party all day long and give you money for that. It’s a time management game, so you need to finish each level in set time and you receive additional points if so, but you won’t be punished if it takes you too long. This game will not make you nervous. You will relax. Beautiful colours, addictive music, interesting character behavior… Try it and see for yourself!

Beach Party Craze - beach games

How about playing one of the coolest beach games? Hit the beach in a contest to earn the most money! The sand and surf are your domain as you work against the clock to serve food and drinks, purchase souvenir shops and keep your stores stocked with the best goods. Keeping guests happy is hard work, but the sun-kissed colors and superb animation that leap off your screen will make it worth your time. You will play the beach game for hours! With a humorous storyline, dozens of upgrades to buy and addictive point-and-click gameplay, Beach Party Craze is sure to make a splash with the entire family! Download this beach game right now, enter into the world of sunshine and fun!

GEOTRACKER

Touristes and voyagers, enjoy Geotracker!

This iPhone geotagging application has many easy to use features, so it’ s a little more complex.

Geotracker is both useful and amusing.

The built-in GPS sensor reveals the location where the picture was taken so you’re able to see it later on the screen. And it keeps the record for you to recreate your travels. There are interesting features to play with: e.g. you can touch two locations on the screen and see the value of the distance between them. It supplies more precise location information.

Although you can’t use the application the moment you upload it because its complexity requires reading the Help file, the settings could be easily modified. Once you get the hand with it, you’ll have lots of fun using your finger friendly screen.

But that’s not all. It can also track location of the person you want to meet. And there is this quite interesting option: you make a list of people, and if any of them is whithin 100 m away from you, you will receive a message.

Geotracker provides you with information on the nearest restaurants, hotels, gas stations , shopping centers etc., and narrows the selection according to the prices or other criteria. Unfortunately not all of them are listed, so when in your car, try “the usual way”, open your eyes and look through the window.

The developers should consider updating this application in order to make it easier to use, and maybe try deferent colours or redesign it all. A tip for them: ask the consumers to find out what’s wrong, and you will have many more users of your, by my opinion, really promising application.

SHOULDN'T YOU GO OUT INSTEAD?

Parents complain that their children don't play anymore, they are always in front of computer screens and either play games or are on the Internet looking for new ones. But who's given them the very idea? Forty percent of the adults work with computers and almost seventy percent use them at home. They don't have time to pay attention to the real world around them. And the children look up to their parents and behave the same way. "Shouldn't you go out and play with your friends the normal way? Go out and don't bother me while I'm on the net!" does sound familiar.

WEB BROWSERS AND WORD PROCESSORS NOW CAN USE MULTIPLE THREADS

Multi-core CPUs are now available on the market, but some common programs still dump the entire process operation onto one core. Researchers from NC State University have discovered a way to break up programs such as web browsers and word processors so that they can use multiple threads. According to them, breaking up the more traditional programs into multiple threads means a possible overall 20-percent increase in performance. From an enterprise standpoint, this is good news, allowing workers to be more productive, saving time and money. Unfortunately, the current solution for "hard-to-parallelize" programs isn't merely a simple fix, nor is it readily available.

The solution was to remove the memory-management step from the process, running it as a separate thread. Typically a program will perform a computation, then perform a memory-management function, and then repeat the process via one processor core. Using the new approach, the computation thread and memory-management thread are executing simultaneously (in parallel), allowing the program to run more efficiently. This also opens the door to development of new memory-management functions that could identify anomalies in program behavior, or perform additional security checks. Most of today's consumer apps don't utilize multi-core CPUs effectively, but that may change down the line thanks to new programming and compiler technologies such as this one.

MUM ASTRONAUT

The space shuttle Discovery has successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS). Mission Commander Alan Poindexter finished the eight-minute link-up manoeuvre 215 miles (344km) over the Caribbean, Nasa said. The 13-day mission is one of the last before the shuttle programme ends later this year. The crew had to dock without the use of radar, because of the failure of a communications antenna. Nasa said that the crew had been trained to dock without radar and were able to use an "array of other navigation tools to precisely track the space station".

After docking at 0744 GMT, Commander Poindexter radioed: "Houston and station, capture confirmed."

The shuttle, which is carrying equipment and supplies for the ISS, blasted off on Monday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its mission puts more women in orbit at one time than ever before. On board Discovery are Nasa astronauts Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger and Stephanie Wilson and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) astronaut Naoko Yamazaki. They join Flight Engineer Tracy Caldwell Dyson, who is already aboard the ISS.

Naoko Yamazaki is the second Japanese woman in space. In Japan she is being called the "Mum Astronaut" , and her space flight has caused people back home to question the traditional roles of men and women .

Discovery's seven-person crew then joined the six people aboard the space station to begin more than a week of work together. The astronauts are due to carry out three spacewalks, to make repairs on the station and retrieve an experiment that was

placed on the exterior of the Japanese laboratory, Kibo. Discovery is also carrying an exercise machine to study the effects of weightlessness on the body's musculoskeletal system.

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MICROSOFT FOUNDERS LEAD TRIBUTES TO 'FATHER OF THE PC'

The "father of the personal computer" Dr. Henry Edward Roberts who kick-started the careers of Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen has died after a long bout of pneumonia at the age of 68.

Dr Henry Edward Roberts was the inventor of the Altair 8800, a machine that sparked the home computer era. Gates and Allen contacted Dr Roberts after seeing the machine on the front cover of a magazine and offered to write software for it. The program was known as Altair-Basic, the foundation of Microsoft's business. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said that Dr Roberts had taken " a critically important step that led to everything we have today".

Dr Roberts was the founder of Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), originally set up to sell electronics kits to model rocket hobbyists. The company went on to sell electronic calculator kits, but was soon overshadowed by bigger firms. In the mid-1970's, with the firm struggling with debt, Dr Roberts began to develop a computer kit for hobbyists. The result was the Altair 8800, a machine operated by switches and with no display. It took its name from the then-cutting edge Intel 8080 microprocessor. The $395 kit (around £1,000 today) was featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975, prompting a flurry of orders. It was also sold assembled for an additional $100 charge.

Amongst those interested in the machine were Paul Allen and Bill Gates.The pair contacted Dr Roberts, offering to write software code that would help people program the machine. The pair eventually moved to Albuquerque - the home of MITS - where they founded Micro-Soft, as it was then known, to develop their software: a variant of the Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (Basic).

"We will always have many fond memories of working with Ed in Albuquerque, in the MITS office right on Route 66 - where so many exciting things happened that none of us could have imagined back then," the pair said.

Dr Roberts sold his company in 1977.

He died in hospital on 1 April after a long bout of pneumonia.

FACEBOOK SCAM TAKES AIM AT WHOLE FOODS FANS

Scammers target Facebook fans of Whole Foods Market grocery store, promising a $500 gift card, but they're really out to swipe users' personal information.

Facebook is scrambling to squash the latest incident of malware to crop up on the popular social networking site. The company is working with Whole Foods Market, the Texas-based upscale grocery store, whose fans have been targeted by a confidence scam that offers a $500 gift card, but is really a ploy to snare users' personal information.The latest malware trap on the popular social networking site promises a $500 gift card to the upscale grocery store. But all you really get is your personal data exposed. Facebook and Whole Foods Market are scrambling to prevent fans of the upscale grocery chain from falling for yet another malware ruse on the popular social networking site.First discovered Thursday, the scam purports to offer a free $500 gift card to the Austin, Texas-based grocery chain and has been spreading virally through Facebook's "fan pages," infecting an unknown number of users' PCs and mobile devices.

INDIA TO LAUNCH SATELLITE USING OWN CRYOGENIC ENGINE

India's space programme is more than 45 years old. India will soon launch an advanced communications satellite, put into orbit for the first time by a cryogenic engine developed by its own scientists.

Cryogenic engines are rocket motors designed for fuels that have to be held at very low temperatures to be liquid. They would otherwise be gas. Officials say that only five countries in the world have this technology. Handling supercold (croygenic) propellants is not easy and the announcement THE launch is a  significant development for India as an emerging space power.

The new engine is being incorporated into the upper-stage of India's Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV). "It is a complex strategy technology," said Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) Chairman K Radhakrishnan.He said the rocket would send a heavy communications satellite into space on 15 April from the country's launch pad at Sriharikota in eastern India. India began developing cryogenic technology after Russia reneged on a deal to supply cryogenic engines in 1993 - following pressure from the United States, which believed India was using the technology to power missiles. "The best reply is to... build your own technology," Dr Radhakrishnan said.

India has been using Russian engines to launch heavier satellites into space for some time. It joins the US, Russia, Japan and China in having developed cryogenic engines. India hopes to emerge as a global player in the multi-billion dollar satellite launch market.

ROBOT NEWS

A primary school in Suffolk has won a national competition after building a working robot out of Lego. The Young Engineers Club at Trimley St Martin Primary near Felixstowe entered the First Lego League. They now go forward to the international stage - the World Festival in Atlanta, USA in April 2010. However, they need around £14,000 in sponsorship to be able to take the 10 children involved in the project.

US researchers Pieter Abbeel, assistant professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley and Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffieldhave created a robot that can pick up a towel from a pile of laundry, fold and then stack it.

FUTURE OF MOTHERBOARDS

Soon, 4.8 Gb/s USB 3.0 and 6 Gb/s SATA will be hitting the mainstream. But be careful when you buy your next mainstream motherboard; some don't handle these technologies very well. We compare three implementations and recommend best practice solutions.

This happens every few years when bottlenecks start impeding performance, but 2010 will be crowned by internal and external storage device bandwidth leaping forward to the point where we're, yet again, constrained by the speed of media and not a physical interface. SATA 3.0, running at 6 Gb/s, promises faster connectivity to the latest solid state drives and mechanical disks. Outside of the PC, we’ll be seeing more and more USB 3.0-based solutions able to move data at the storage devices’ maximum speed (as you likely already know, USB 2.0 holds back the storage performance of many devices in a big way). Existing bottlenecks will be gone—hopefully.

Add-in controllers enabling USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 have been available for several months, and are now hitting the mainstream (in fact, AMD recently added 6 Gb/s SATA support to its SB850 southbridge). NEC was first to release a full-blown USB 3.0 controller (µPD720200). Cross-compatibility with USB 2.0 is something users take for granted, and we haven’t seen any USB 3.0 hardware that wouldn't work on prior-gen hardware. GDA and VIA offer USB 3.0 hub controllers, and more designs will certainly be following.

The situation is similar with SATA 3.0. Marvell’s 88SE9123 is the dominant add-in component as the storage industry focuses on transitioning from 3 to 6 Gb/s in 2010. However, not all platforms are able to give these higher-throughput subsystems the bandwidth needed to run unconstrained.

The bandwidth issue is a product of chipsets with too little peripheral connectivity and motherboard vendors pressured to include copious value-added functionality. As long as USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s aren’t built into Intel's and AMD's core logic, those controllers remain add-on devices that require an interface with ample throughput. The interface of choice, naturally, is typically PCI Express, which currently spans two generations of technology. PCI Express 2.0 offers 500 MB/s throughput per lane, while PCI Express 1.x is limited to 250 MB/s. Clearly, a single-lane link cannot saturate the 6 Gb/s peak bandwidth of SATA 3.0 or 4.8 Gb/s ceiling specified for USB 3.0. Rated at up to 500 MB/s, a second-gen PCIe x1 interface is considered adequate.

Second-gen PCI Express is most often used in 16-lane links, giving the latest high-performance GPUs ample bandwidth. As far as we know, every mainstream platform offers at least 16 lanes, whether through the northbridge (AMD 785G, for example) or the processor itself (Intel's Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs). Enthusiast chipsets like AMD's 790FX and Intel's X58 Express offer (at least) twice this amount. Unfortunately, all other PCI Express lanes remain at 250 MB/s. There is an interesting difference, though, in how AMD and Intel handle this connectivity.

ome reason, all Intel chipsets available today only support PCI Express 2.0 on the primary links that are used for graphics. This applies to the 4- and 5-series chipsets employing the ICH10 southbridge. While Intel claims PCI Express 2.0 support on those links, it limits throughput to PCI Express 1.1-class performance. This is naturally a problem when we start looking at the latest high-speed motherboard-down controllers.

AMD, on the other hand, upgraded the link speeds on its 700- and 800-series chipsets, which means that current AMD mainstream and enthusiast chipsets don’t create bandwidth bottlenecks for high-speed add-on devices.

We took three P55 motherboards from Gigabyte and MSI that all come with different solutions to offer USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s connectivity. We analyzed SATA performance using Crucial’s new RealSSD-C300 and a Seagate Barracuda XT with support for the third-gen standard and found that not all solutions deliver ample bandwidth.

HARD DRIVES FOR A NEW DECADE

Western Digital’s Raptor family 10,000 RPM hard drive, with no direct competition in its spindle speed class, remains a coveted choice for enthusiasts and IT professionals building entry-level servers, particularly now that the latest VelociRaptor models have arrived with 450GB and 600GB capacities, improved specifications, and increased performance.

Seagate's Barracuda ATA excited the mainstream drive world in 1997 when it took the industry's first stab at 7,200 RPM desktop storage. It only made sense that a 10,000 RPM evolution would eventually follow. Given that enterprise drives had been running at 10K since 1996 with the Seagate Cheetah, adoption was only a matter of time and production volume.

In a way, Western Digital was "lucky enough" to be unlucky with its SCSI enterprise drive business from 1997 to 1999. From these efforts were born the roots of the Raptor series. Other drive manufacturers didn’t want to risk cannibalizing their existing server/enterprise hard drive business, but WD had nothing to lose. This remains one of the main reasons why the Raptor family is the only 10K SATA family on today's market. Although spindle speed hasn't changed since the original Raptor launched, there has been considerable progress on other fronts. Not only data density climbed but WD also transitioned the 3.5” Raptor into the 2.5” VelociRaptor, following the trend toward smaller drives for higher storage densities in server environments. This downsizing allows many more drives to be installed within the same dimensional footprint.

VelociRaptor has been on the market for almost two years—one the longest component product life-cycles we've seen in recent years. Amazingly enough, the 300GB drive still does rather well against its competitors. Only a few 3.5” drives deliver better low-level performance. However, application benchmarks show that the latest 7,200 RPM models are a better choice nowadays, as they offer more than six times the capacity with increased performance at similar price points. WD knows this, too, which is why the company is now out to reclaim the performance crown.