A Very Funny Essay

This is a true essay written by a CSS candidate at the CSS Exam held
in year 2002-2003 in Islamabad . The candidate has written an essay on
Cow:

"COW"

He is the cow. "The cow is a successful animal. Also he is 4 footed.
And because he is female , he gives milks, [but will do so when he is
got child.]. He is same like-God, sacred to Hindus and useful to man.
But he has got four legs together. Two are forward and two are
afterwards. His whole body can be utilized for use. More so the milk.
Milk comes from 4 taps attached to his basement. [horses don't have
any such attachment]

What can it do? Various ghee, butter, cream, curd, why and the
condensed milk and so forth. Also he is useful to cobbler, water mans
and mankind generally. His motion is slow only because he is of lazy
species. Also his other motion. {gober} is much useful to trees,
plants as well as for making flat cakes [like Pizza], in hand, and
drying in the sun.

Cow is the only animal that extricates his feeding after eating. Then
afterwards he chews with his teeth that are situated in the inside of
the mouth. He is incessantly in the meadows in the grass. His only
attacking and defending organ is the horns, specially so when he is
got child. This is done by knowing his head whereby he causes the
weapons to be paralleled to the ground of the earth and instantly
proceed with great velocity forwards. He has got tails also, situated
in the backyard, but not like similar animals. It has hairs on the
other end of the other side. This is done to frighten away the flies
which alight on his cohesive body here upon he gives hit with it. The
palms of his feet are soft unto the touch. So the grasses head is not
crushed. At night time have poses by looking down on the ground and he
shouts. His eyes and nose are like his other relatives.


This is the cow.

Bangladesh: One man's trash is another man's robot

 BEIJING, Oct. 9 (Xinhuanet) -- A robot that can swab floors, pick up objects and do other simple jobs is being developed by a Bangladeshi graduate student at a fraction of the cost of other humanoids.

    Feroz Ahmed Siddiky of the International Islamic University in Chittagong says his "IRobo" has spatial intelligence, responds to voice commands and is inexpensive because it's made from scrap materials he's scavenged from electronic shops and car mechanics.

    "On completion, this robot will comply with different verbal commands for tasks like shifting objects, cleaning floors and standing guard," Siddiky told Reuters.

    "It can also be used for some risky jobs like in coal mines, where workers commonly suffer many accidents."

    Siddiky has spent two years developing the robot and says it will take one more year of engineering before it's finished. Discussions about commercial production of his creation are currently underway with an Australian software firm.

    "I hope people will be able to buy it for less than 1,000 dollars," he added.

Nobel winners' discovery led to your iPod

This years Nobel Prize 2007 is given to the two scientists whose discovery revolutionized digital data storage, their research allows millions to sway to music on their iPods and to store a lifetime's photographs on palm-size devices.

Peter Gruenberg of Germany and Albert Fert of France were recognized for their independent discovery of giant magnetoresistance - an exotic phenomenon whose practical applications became ubiquitous in everyday life in less than two decades.

Among the results: The palm-size external hard drive that can hold a good chunk of your local library. The iPod that allows you to carry a thousand songs in your pocket. The computing revolution that allows your laptop to hold more information than a 19th-century warehouse.

"The raw understanding of how nature works is a great thing," Dean, vice president for research at IBM said. "The application of that knowing how nature works in the creation of something my mother can use is another great breakthrough - and as significant."

Their discovery that ultra-thin slices of metal have different electrical properties in a magnetic field not only changed the musical and computing habits of the entire planet but also altered the very landscape of how people think about information, and the ways in which music, movies and ideas can be shared.

Packing information into ever-more-compact spaces is at the heart of the success of devices such as the iPod. That success would have been impossible without the scientific discovery honored Tuesday.

The phenomenon of giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, is one of those ideas that seems impossible until someone shows how it can be done, and then it seems obvious. Hundreds of laboratories and companies today are expanding on Fert's and Gruenberg's idea, with results more striking than anything they had originally visualized.

How it works

Although giant magnetoresistance does sound a bit like one of those mutants in the "X-Men" movie series, it actually describes a phenomenon at the junction of electricity and magnetism: When two layers of a metal such as iron are separated by a thin layer of another metal such as chromium, the application of a magnetic field can change the resistance of the structure - which determines how much electricity will flow through it.

Without giant magnetoresistance, a lot of information still could be packed into a tiny space, but it would be unreadable. Effectively, GMR technology provides a sort of magnifying glass that allows electronic devices to read very tiny letters.

Fert, 69, is a professor at the University of Paris-Sud, in Orsay, France . Born in Carcassonne, France, he is married and has two children. Gruenberg, 68, was born in Pilsen in what is now the Czech Republic. Now a German citizen, he works at the Institute of Solid State Research, which is part of a scientific facility known as Research Center Juelich in western Germany. He is married and has three children.

Woman Ordered to Pay $222,000 for downloading and sharing music

A woman ordered to pay US$222,000 for downloading and sharing music files has decided to appeal the case.

A happy Jammie Thomas said on her Myspace.com blog that the appeal was announced by her lawyer, Brian Toder, in an interview with CNN.

"My attorney announced, on national television, with the RIAA watching I'm more than certain, we're going to appeal," she wrote in the blog entry. Winning the appeal will "stop RIAA in their tracks," she wrote.

Thomas was ordered last week by a jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota to pay $222,000 in damages to six music labels, representing $9,250 for each of 24 songs illegally downloaded and shared over the Kazaa file-sharing network. The case against Thomas was filed by the Recording Industry Association of America, an umbrella group representing music labels.

The verdict was a sign that RIAA might come out victorious in some of the more than 20,000 lawsuits it has filed against people for alleged Internet copyright infringement.

Thomas, who lives in Brainerd, Minnesota, has also set up a Web site to raise funds to cover legal expenses. As of Monday, supporters had donated $957.

Neither RIAA nor attorney Toder, of the Chestnut and Combronne law firm, could not be reached for comment.

The music labels involved in the suit include Capitol Records Inc., Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Bros. Records Inc.

Courtesy: PCWorldOnline

How Much RAM is enough?

Up to a point, adding RAM (random access memory) will normally cause your computer to feel faster on certain types of operations. RAM is important because of an operating system component called the virtual memory manager (VMM).

When you run a program such as a word processor or an Internet browser, the microprocessor in your computer pulls the executable file off the hard disk and loads it into RAM. In the case of a big program like Microsoft Word or Excel, the EXE consumes about 5 megabytes. The microprocessor also pulls in a number of shared DLLs (dynamic link libraries) -- shared pieces of code used by multiple applications. The DLLs might total 20 or 30 megabytes. Then the microprocessor loads in the data files you want to look at, which might total several megabytes if you are looking at several documents or browsing a page with a lot of graphics. So a normal application needs between 10 and 30 megabytes of RAM space to run. On my machine, at any given time I might have the following applications running:

• A word processor
• A spreadsheet
• A DOS prompt
• An e-mail program
• A drawing program
• Three or four browser windows
• A fax program
• A Telnet session

Besides all of those applications, the operating system itself is taking up a good bit of space. Those programs together might need 100 to 150 megabytes of RAM, but my computer only has 64 megabytes of RAM installed.

The extra space is created by the virtual memory manager. The VMM looks at RAM and finds sections of RAM that are not currently needed. It puts these sections of RAM in a place called the swap file on the hard disk. For example, even though I have my e-mail program open, I haven't looked at e-mail in the last 45 minutes. So the VMM moves all of the bytes making up the e-mail program's EXE, DLLs and data out to the hard disk. That is called swapping out the program. The next time I click on the e-mail program, the VMM will swap in all of its bytes from the hard disk, and probably swap something else out in the process. Because the hard disk is slow relative to RAM, the act of swapping things in and out causes a noticeable delay.

If you have a very small amount of RAM (say, 16 megabytes), then the VMM is always swapping things in and out to get anything done. In that case, your computer feels like it is crawling. As you add more RAM, you get to a point where you only notice the swapping when you load a new program or change windows. If you were to put 256 megabytes of RAM in your computer, the VMM would have plenty of room and you would never see it swapping anything. That is as fast as things get. If you then added more RAM, it would have no effect.

Some applications (things like Photoshop, many compilers, most film editing and animation packages) need tons of RAM to do their job. If you run them on a machine with too little RAM, they swap constantly and run very slowly. You can get a huge speed boost by adding enough RAM to eliminate the swapping. Programs like these may run 10 to 50 times faster once they have enough RAM!

Here are some interesting links:

• How RAM Works

• How Virtual Memory Works

• Check your virtual memory settings

• About the Virtual Memory Manager

Say Goodbye to PenDrive Viruses : Turn off Autorun and make your PC running smooth again :)

Now-a-days everyone has the necessity for a PenDrive or FlashDrive or lets just say Removable Storage Devices. And most of the Trojans or viruses gets spreaded from this means. You'll see commecial shops are very much afraid of using pendrives. Most of them deny service if you want to use a pendrive with you.

Now let us learn some VITAL technics to get rid of this messy headache once and for all. This article is collection of boosted tips & tricks altogether from the net and own experiences. We will learn how to fight with the infections from pendrive viruses like : DiskKnight, Kopa, Brontok etc and also kill them. In most cases we even wont need any antiviruses.

 

Tip 1.To disable CD autoplay in XP using either local group policy or, for an enterprise, an Active Directory group policy. The local group policy editor method: If you dont understand what these jargons mean dont worry just follow whats below :)

• Click Start
• Click Run
• Enter GPEDIT.MSC
  Group Policy mmc will popup. On left panel:
• Double-click Computer Configuration to open submenu
• Double-click Administrative Templates to open submenu
• Double-click System to open submenu
• Double-click Turn autoplay off option which will be near the bottom of the list in the right panel.

The default is the Not configured . Set it to Enabled.

Tip 2. XP supports autorun when you put a CD in the CDROM. To disable, set Autorun=0 to enable, set Autorun=1. If Autorun is enabled, you can disable the feature for any particular CD by holding down the shift key as you close the CDRom drawer. AutoRun should be disabled for kiosk PCs(ie. CyberCafe or shop PCs) and other environments where you are restricting ability to install new software. Cut and paste the following Windows NT / Windows 2000 Registry script text into autocdrom.reg file and run it:

REGEDIT4
BLANK LINE GOES HERE
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CDRom]
"Autorun"="0"
BLANK LINE GOES HERE

There is a potential downside to Autorun. In the background, NT / W2K / XP are constantly querying the CD / DVD drive whether anything new has been inserted. For high performance games, this can cause hiccups, unexplained pauses. Just turn it off if you suspect this is your problem.

Tip 3. Use the Kopa Killer to get rid of Viral Side Effects

This helpfull tool from vistaarc.com helps you to get rid of these:

Remove main executables of Mr. kopa from your PC

Enable Registry Permission

Enable Folder Options

Enable Task Manager

Delete kopa executables & autorun.inf from the root of your pen drive

Tip 4. Enable Registry Editor disabled by Brontok, Kopa, DiskKnight etc

Goto start and Run and type exactly the following and hit enter Viola! :

REG add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v DisableTaskMgr /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

or goto http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Security-Related/RRT-Remove-Ristrictions-Tool.shtml to get the freeware which will remove restrictions on FolderOptions, RegistryEditor and TaskManager

Tip 5. View and Terminate processes when task manager is disabled. I had to look for this option as Kopa killer software failed to Turn off a task(startup.exe) from the running processes. In my case a Kopa variant was still in memory after running the Kopa Killer from VistaArc.com

Use tasklist.exe from command prompt to see the list of running processes in XP

and to remove a process lets say knight.exe type the following at command prompt:

taskkill /IM knight.exe