Hidden Utilities in windows

Windows Memory Diagnostic

Windows includes a Memory Diagnostic tool that can restart your computer and test your memory for defects, like the popular MemTest86 application. If you want to check your computer’s memory for errors, you don’t need a third-party tool — just open the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool.

Resource Monitor

The Resource Monitor application offers a detailed look at your computer’s resource usage. You can view computer-wide CPU, disk, network, and memory graphics, or drill down and view per-process statistics for each type of resource.

This means that you can see which processes are using your disk or network heavily, view which processes are communicating with which Internet addresses, and more. The Resource Monitor provides much more detailed resource statistics than the Task Manager does.

                                                                                                                                                                      

Disk Cleanup

Windows’ Disk Cleanup utility isn’t quite as hidden as some of the other utilities here, but not enough people know about it. It will scan your computer for files that can be deleted, from temporary files and memory dumps to old system restore points and leftover files from Windows upgrades. It does the same job a PC cleaning utility does, but it’s free and doesn’t try to extract any money from you. Advanced users may prefer CCleaner, but Disk Cleanup does a decent job.

Access it by searching for Disk Cleanup at your Start screen or Start menu.

Do you know that.......

Why Dont you need Anti-virus on Linux

Believe it or not, there are antivirus programs targeted at desktop Linux users. If you have just switched to Linux and started looking for an antivirus solution, don’t bother – you do not need an antivirus program on Linux.

There are some situations when running an antivirus on Linux makes sense, but the average Linux desktop isn’t one of them. You would only want an antivirus program to scan for Windows malware.

        The core reason you don’t need an antivirus on Linux is that very little Linux malware exists in the wild. Malware for Windows is extremely common. Shady advertisements push nasty software that is practically malware, file-sharing sites are full of infected programs, and malicious individuals target security vulnerabilities to install Windows malware without your permission. With this in mind, using an antivirus program on Windows is an important layer of protection.

For more details : here

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) Laminates for Structural Strengthening

Strengthening measures are required in structures when they are required to accommodate increased loads. Also, when there are changes in the use of structures, individual supports and walls may need to be removed. This leads to a redistribution of forces and the need for local reinforcement. In addition, structural strengthening may become necessary owing to wear and deterioration arising from normal usage or environmental factors.
                                     The pultruded CFRP laminate reinforcing consists of bonding the CFRP strip with the concrete structure using a high-strength epoxy resin as the adhesive. The CFRP strips are manufactured using a pultrusion process. The pultrusion principle is comparable with a continuous press. Normally 24,000 parallel filaments are pulled through the impregnated bath, formed into strips under heat, and hardened. These strips are uni-directional; the fibers are oriented only in the longitudinal direction. Correspondingly, the strip strength in this direction is proportional to the fiber strength and, thus, very high. Strips are produced with strengths of approximately 3,000 MPa in the longitudinal direction, and with a thickness of up to 1.5 mm and widths of up to 150 mm.

Full-Body Exoskeleton

Developed by the interactive robotics unit of CEA LIST, based in Paris, EMY (Enhancing MobilitY) is a full-body exoskeleton designed to help quadriplegic people walk again.
    The original technologies implemented in EMY were developed during the last 10 years by a team of 20 researchers and engineers from various research domains, including force-feedback teleoperation robots for nuclear facilities and haptic devices for virtual reality.
                                                     The particular design of EMY’s limbs, especially the arms (ABLE®), allows them to be used as haptic devices. The required high transparency is achieved using a patented, streamlined, mechanical transmission (screw-cable system) that minimizes friction and inertia. It also ensures that the current in the motor is an accurate image of the joint torque, so there is no need for a torque/force sensor. This is not only simple and reliable, but also energy-efficient and cost-effective.

A new era of Cryptography

Quantum Cryptography 

In the never-ending arms race between secret-keepers and code-breakers, the laws of quantum mechanics seemed to have the potential to give secret-keepers the upper hand. A technique called quantum cryptography can, in principle, allow you to encrypt a message in such a way that it would never be read by anyone whose eyes it isn’t for.
                                       Regular, non-quantum encryption can work in a variety of ways but generally a message is scrambled and can only be unscrambled using a secret key. The trick is to make sure that whomever you’re trying to hide your communication from doesn’t get their hands on your secret key.
                But such encryption techniques have their vulnerabilities. Certain products – called weak keys – happen to be easier to factor than others. Also, Moore’s Law continually ups the processing power of our computers. Even more importantly, mathematicians are constantly developing new algorithms that allow for easier factorization.
                  Quantum cryptography avoids all these issues. Here, the key is encrypted into a series of photons that get passed between two parties trying to share secret information. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle dictates that an adversary can’t look at these photons without changing or destroying them.

AIREAL

Tactile Gaming Experiences in Free Air

Interactions with computers have expanded into the physical world. Recent developments of low-cost gesture-tracking technologies, like the Microsoft Kinect, have enabled millions of users to interact with their computers by gesturing with their bodies. Furthermore, computer-vision tracking and registration techniques now enable novel projection-based displays to overlay projected images into our physical environments, creating entirely new augmented-reality experiences.

One missing piece in this emerging world of natural interfaces is the absence of physical feedback. AIREAL is a technology that delivers interactive tactile experiences in free air. Currently, users are still required to wear physical devices (for example, gloves, belts, vests) to receive tactile feedback, which hinders natural user interaction and limits the range of applications that can effectively employ tactile feedback. With AIREAL, interactive tactile sensations can be created in free air using compressed air pressure fields that stimulate the user’s skin. The system is designed to use vortices

A True ”Immersive” Water Display System

Aqua Top Display:

AquaTop Display is a projection system that uses white water as a screen surface. By using a depth camera to detect fingers on and over the water surface, the system allows users to interact with projected images by gestures such as protruding fingers out from under the water surface and scooping up the water with both hands. When users "float" on the water surface, they can fuse their bodies with the displayed objects for further augmented interaction by "becoming one" with the screen. These types of interactions are not possible with current impenetrable, rigid-body, flat surfaces.

Click here to watch the video : GO

Is this a Super Hero thing or what......????

• The latest invention from Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering sounds like something a superhero would have. A self-repairing plastic-metal material has been developed by a team of professors, researchers and graduate students.
• This is the first material of its kind that can sense pressure and heal itself when burned, torn or cut — a little bit like human skin.  The Stanford researchers report on their “flexible and electrically conducting material” in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
• One of the graduate student said “If you take a piece of cardboard, for example and you cut it into two, if you have this material, it brings the two pieces together to attach the two sides to each other without a need for glue — it does it itself. That is the magic.”
• Even human skin takes days to heal. So I think this is quite cool
  

Nuclear waste recycling for better power generation

Fourth-generation reactors and nuclear-waste recycling

Researchers aim to produce safe nuclear fuel that can be 80 percent recycled, compared to the current 1 percent; these fourth generation nuclear power systems can lead to a reduction of the amount of high-level, long-lived nuclear waste to a tenth of what it is today, while energy output can increase hundredfold.

“If it is possible to recycle as much as we think, at least 80 per cent of nuclear waste will be possible to recycle,” says Christian Ekberg. “This would also mean that eight times as much of the remaining waste could be included in the final repository, since heat generation is reduced. In addition, the amount of long-lived nuclides in residual waste is reduced, which results in a significantly shorter storage period. However, it is important to remember that the final repository is still an important part of the fuel cycle.”

How the great firewall of china works....

The Great Firewall of China, officially known the Golden Shield project, employs a variety of tricks to censor China’s Internet and block access to various foreign websites. We’ll be looking at some of the technical tricks the firewall uses to censor China’s Internet.

Understanding what the Great Firewall of China does can help us understand how certain organizations want to put Internet censorship into place throughout the world. If you think the Great Firewall just uses one method of censorship, think again — it uses a variety of tricks......

What is the Great Firewall of China?

If you haven’t been keeping track, China has a censored Internet. The Great Firewall of China is generally considered the largest, most extensive, and most advanced Internet censorship regime in the world.China censors content for a variety of reasons, often because it’s critical of the Chinese government or contrary to Communist Party policy. China doesn’t just block individual websites — they use techniques to scan URLs and web page content for blacklisted keywords like “Tiananmen” and block such traffic.

By blocking foreign social networking sites like Twitter and forcing their citizens to use alternatives like Sina Weibo, China is able to control social-networking sites, gaining the ability to censor posts on them. China also hires people who are paid to post content favorable to Communist Party policy on the Internet, attempting to sway public opinion.

For more details about the article click here

For  videos click here

Unbelivable construction

                                            

                                         For more images: Click here       

                          

The Palm Islands are an artificial archipelago (islands) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), off the coast in the Persian Gulf. Major commercial and residential infrastructure will be constructed by Nakheel Properties, a property developer in the UAE. The Belgian andDutch dredging and marine contractors Jan De Nul and Van Oord, some of the world's leading specialists in land reclamation, were hired to complete construction. The islands are the Palm Jumeirah, the Palm Jebel Ali and the Palm Deira.

Each settlement will be in the shape of a palm tree, topped with a crescent. The settlements will have a large number of residential, leisure and entertainment centers. The Palm Islands will add 520 kilometers of beaches to the city of Dubai.

The first two islands will comprise approximately 100,000 cubic metres (3,500,000 cu ft) of rock and sand. The Palm Deira will be composed of approximately one billion cubic meters of rock and sand. All materials will be quarried in The UAE. Among the three islands, there will be over 100 luxury hotels, exclusive residential beach-side villas and apartments, marinas, water theme parks, restaurants, shopping malls, sports facilities and health spas.

The creation of the Palm Jumeirah began in June 2001. Shortly after, the Palm Jebel Ali was announced and reclamation work began. The Palm Deira is planned to have a surface area of 46.35 square kilometres (17.90 sq mi) and was announced for development in October 2004. Before the impact of the global credit crunch hit Dubai, construction was originally planned to take 10–15 years.

Two other artificial archipelagos, The World and The Universe, are located between the Palm Islands.

For details : Click here

For virtual view : Click here

Frame that can hold even an elephant :)

• 

One of the largest and stiffest load frames available in Australia for structural testing is located within the TSE laboratory at Penrith. This frame has a maximum span of 5500 mm and a width of 2650 mm. It can presently accommodate specimens up to 1500 mm high, but other sizes can be accommodated by special request. A smaller frame with an enclosed volume of 2000 x 1800 x 1100 mm is available for intermediate sized specimens, and a small frame can accommodate specimens up to 1200 x 600 x 500 mm. All the frames are extremely stiff (load train stiffness up to 1200 kN/mm) and are therefore suitable for testing brittle and unstable materials and structures such as concrete pipes, composite members, and thin-walled elements such as spars and posts. The design of the frames is such that large panel-shaped specimens can be fitted into the frames. Indeed, TSE has the capacity to test larger panel-shaped specimens than most other laboratories in Australia. The largest loads that can be applied are 350 kN over a stroke of 250 mm.

The load frame facilities at TSE are ideally suited to testing full-sized timber, steel and plastic structural members. Fully-assembled timber floors have been tested under displacement control using the large-span facility, and smaller elements can be tested more easily using the other load frames. Load can be applied either uni-axially, or bi-axially under integrated bi-axial control based on displacement, load, or measured strain.

For more details : Click here

Visual Crypotographic Steganography

Visual steganography is the most widely practiced form of steganography. It started with concealing messages within the lowest bits of noisy images or sound files. We shall perform steganography on video files and hide the message in an encrypted format, thus achieving a multiple cryptographic system. The most commonly used technique is Least Significant Bit steganography (LSB steganography). But instead of traditional LSB encoding, we will use a modified encoding technique which will first transform the video using a Lazy Lifting Wavelet transform and then apply LSB in the sub-bands of the video that has been obtained. The proposed approach to video steganography utilizes the visual as well as the audio component. The lazy wavelet transform is applied to the visual frames, and the data is stored in the coefficients of the visual component. The length up to which it is stored is hidden using LSB in the audio component. Experimental results show that the proposed technique does not affect the higher and lower ends of the frequency distribution of the signal. Moreover, it has a high payload capacity and low computational requirements.

For the IEEE paper published on this model : Click here

Nano tubes for efficient computing

"As we approach the ultimate limits of Moore’s Law, however, silicon will have to be replaced in order to miniaturize further," said Jeffrey Bokor, of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley.

To this end, carbon nanotubes are a significant departure from traditional silicon technologies and a promising path to solving the challenge of energy efficiency in computer circuits. Carbon nanotubes are cylindrical nanostructures of carbon with exceptional electrical, thermal and mechanical properties. Nanotube circuits could provide an order-of-magnitude improvement in energy efficiency over traditional silicon technology.

Stubborn challenges:

These high-quality, robust nanotube circuits are immune to the stubborn and crippling material flaws that have stumped researchers for over a decade, a difficult hurdle that has prevented the wider adoption of nanotube circuits in industry. The advance represents a major milestone toward what researchers call "very-large scale integrated systems" based on nanotubes.

For more details : Click here