Science & Technology Today

My best wishes to you and your families for a successful,eventful and exciting 2007.Hope you will have smooth slides down the tech-scape.

Soon UPC (Universal Product Codes) labels and bar-codes are going to disappear from products and boxes and will be replaced by RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags . Supply chain management, Automatic identification and data capture and Asset management industries have decided to embrace RFID in a big way. The trends in RFID adoption rate shows that everyone from DOD (US Department of Defense) to Wal -Mart to Blood banks are implementing RFID . The technology used in RFID has been around since mid 1940. RFID tags are essentially Integrated Circuits ( ICs ) with a Antenna, Transmitter and EEPROM for data storage. Passive RFID tags are powered by minute electrical current induced in the antenna by the incoming radio frequency signal which provides just enough power for the CMOS integrated circuit in the tag to power up and transmit a response. While the active ones have their own power source and have ranges up to few hundred meters and battery life up to 10 years. These RF...

During 2006 major companies have tried to add media players to their product list, largely because of the tremendous success achieved by Apple’s iPods . Microsoft launched Zune that allows users to easily swap songs between devices, SanDisk has launched its SanDisk Sansa with the built-in digital FM tuner,with which you can preset 20 of your favorite radio stations, and iRiver has launched iRiver clix with a new ultra-intuitive interface which works with both subscription and pay-per-song music services. Host of other media players from companies like Creative Labs, PALM, Toshiba, Coby and others have been launched as well. Apple’s iPod remains the market leader and is way ahead of its competitors but everybody is watching how Microsoft's Zune will takes a bit out of iPods market share.Though I believe there are other better products than Zune in the marketplace. The first model of the Zune device comes equipped with a 30 GB hard drive, built-in FM tuner with Radio...

I am in the music city Nashville for my Christmas holidays.Nashville has a replica of the Parthenon,the ancient Greek structure originally built in Athens in 432 BCE ( Before Common Era) and that was reason enough for me to go there.Greek mythology,history and philosophy has been the corner stone for development of art and literature over the centuries.Unfortunately we could not go inside to pay our respect to Athena--the goddess of civilization as it was closed for Christmas holidays.But it was satisfying enough to go round this architectural marvel and admire the achievements of the ancient Greek artisans and builders . We are enjoying our stay at Gayload Opryland immensely ,the Christmas lighting's around this place are just fabulous. All the four sections--Cascade,Garden Conservatory,Delta and Magnolia of Opryland are a great visual pleasure. The fountains in the the Delta create a breathtaking visual imagery and streams of water dancing to the music is unbelievable. We hav...

If you have wondered,why some people are talking as if in the air, it is because they are actually having phone conversations through a miniature headset mounted on their ear and connected to a cell phone somewhere nearby.This is all happening because of a short-range wireless technology called Bluetooth . The other common Bluetooth enabled devices around are cordless keyboards and mouse's. Believe me it is a great way to clear the mesh of wires around your computer. Bluetooth is now enabled in an array of products like PCs, Cameras, GPS devices, Handhelds , Cars and the list is growing everyday.After all it is making life easier then ever. The latest Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) operates in the data rate up to 3 Mbps in the global 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific, Medical (ISM) frequency band.Guys go get yourself some Bluetooth gadgets. Having seen the popularity of the Bluetooth going up steeply over the last few years, the electrical/medical and other industries...

Heard of P-traps before? Well it is not a device to catch some nasty wild animal nor is it a SWAT team strategy to catch some hardcore criminals.I had not heard of it until a few weeks back, when my daughter thought of doing a science project on this. It is the U- shaped pipe located underneath the sink and is considered to be a great invention in the plumbing world as it holds back fumes from floating back from the sewerage tank into the sink and into the bathroom/kitchen. You will not find a kitchen without a P-trap and these P-traps could be carriers for pathogenic bacteria. She also introduced me to the fact that the kitchen is dirtier than the bathroom and the kitchen sinks contains the worst food borne pathogens. While she collected samples from different households last week,I was left to do the plumbing work (opening and closing P-traps), my God some of them stank. The good news is that all samples we took are doing well and we have healthy growths of bacteria in all petridishe...

You can now legally unlock your cell phones in US, a court ruling to this effect came out last month. It is indeed a great news for cell phone users but the question is, do you want to do it in a highly subsidized cell phone market, where most of the new phones are in the range of $50 to $100 with a new subscription. The cost of unlocking the cell phone is in the range of $20 to $ 30 but with this process you will definitely lose the warranty and also some of the features like Bluetooth or Camera as most of the carriers’ tie-up these features with the locking software for revenue generation purpose. If you want to do it on the corporate level, then a host of security issues crop up like running of unauthorized applications on the unlocked cell phones that may make corporate network data susceptible. I think many of us will not take the trouble to get our cell phones unlocked,the only exception being if someone does it free but it is good to have an such option. However, the thing to...

Every magazine seems to be doing a story about the Person of the Year. So I thought of doing my Person of the Year story as well. And my person of the year is going to be......, it is not going to be a double talking and double crossing politician. It is someone who is doing a cleaning job for all of us, but we tech- workers are directly responsible for creating this pathetic job. With a heavy heart, I declare my Person of the Year: “E-Waste Salvage Yard Worker”. Today's throwaway culture is creating a toxic time bomb - e-waste. The numbers are in staggering tens of million tons of e-waste every year. All the electronic goods, when discarded and thrown away, end up in landfills or incinerators or, more recently, are exported to Asia. And I am talking about those Asian countries where it ends up in e-waste salvage yards and these unfortunate workers end up processing them. Here is the job description; Location: India, Pakistan Vietnam, Singapore and China. But I will be talking abo...

The latest issue of DISCOVER magazine has the top 100 science stories of 2006 and the number one spot is taken by renewable energy, which surprises me a bit. I have not seen a single new breakthrough this year on this front. There may have been some improvements on the already existing technologies like wind energy, geo -thermal power, fuel cells, bio-fuel etc., but nothing new. I do agree with them on what they say about the Tesla motors battery power car-- Tesla Roadster which is the most efficient car today . It is has great looks to go with climate-controlled 50 kilowatt-hour battery pack and the 248-hp electric motor. They are using the Lithium ion battery pack which should help overcome notorious memory problems associated with the Nickel cadmium batteries. But with a $100,000 price tag, who is going to buy it? Coming back to renewable energy as the top science story. I feel that the awareness about adopting renewable energy resources is definitely the top story of the year and f...

My friend showed me his latest priced possession--a BlackBerry Pearl this weekend and he was all excited , telling me great things about it. It is the latest of the products in the RIM portfolio and is a pretty sleek device. BlackBerry is not just confined to RIM devices anymore; it is available on some Nokia models, Tero 650 and Samsung SGH -t719. BlackBerry has become an inseparable part of our daily life for many of us, it is no more just a device to deliver e-mails but can be a substitute for mobile computing. I was amazed to find out that it can just do anything for your personal or business needs . The number of applications you can run on these devices is ever growing every day; I was really surprised to find out that there are nearly hundred or more third party applications available to run on your BlackBerry . I was particularly happy to see that we can now run Citrix client applications on BlackBerrys because running Citrix applications are essential part of my everyd...

We seem to be obsessed with taking multiple copies of data these days. For our personal data we take a copy on CD drive, USB jump drive, and an external HD drive and of course we have multiple copies on our computer as well. But when it comes to storing our business data, we are even more cautious and plenty of SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) /RAID (Redundant Array of Independent or Inexpensive Disks), disk drives and storage array across the network come handy. So we take backups everywhere. We make sure to leave a copy of our work on every folder and server. I have a gut feeling that every piece of data exists on at least twenty places on the network. I do not want to undermine the need to have backups and disaster recovery for a large organization but I think we are doing too much on this. Of course storage has become very cheap but filling up racks with these drives in our data centers is unnecessary. There are already some storage optimization software in market to remove...

This morning I was removing some of my old magazines from the book rack and got hold of an old Technology Review issue which had an Aubrey de Grey article on defeating the aging problem( which is associated with all living beings) by defining it as an engineering problem and using engineering principle to overcome it. What a great idea? (Visit web site www.defeataging.com )Who does not want to live longer, all of us,Right? Of course we have some self destructive jihads and some suicidal people and they do not count. Coming back to the use of technology in medicine, I think without using the latest engineering/software tools, no medical practice can run today. What is the problem in defining cell regeneration as an assembly line in a body? There is no reason to be skeptical about his approach. Good luck to him and I hope he has some breakthrough soon, I mean in my life time. Use Cellphones A recent study on long term use of the cell phone on human tissues has concluded it is safe---jus...

GHYANA derived from Sanskrit means the “Knowledge” and is the only path to achieve happiness, prosperity and liberation—if you believe in it. I have been planning to start my blog for a long time but kept on, delaying it for years and now that I have started one, I do not know where to start but as my title suggests, I am going to devote my blog to Technology, Telecom and Current Affairs. QA S/W Just finished attending a web seminar on the HP-Mercury -- Mercury Quality Center 9.0. It is a software suite for application testing and looks good from the front end. Screen roll ups and drill downs are great and all elements of software development life cycle are taken care of. How well the automated testing will work and the defect logs are created needs to be seen? If you guys are in software testing give it a shot. Wi-Fi Just read about the trials T-mobile is doing on handsets with GSM and Wi - Fi capabilities and I am sure it will work; I see a great prospect of saving valuable any ...