Technology Today and Yesterday(s)

[Mathew Steel 151]

That's really appreciated Chris, thank you! :)

 

TODAYS TECHNOLOGY

 

The Driverless Cars of Greenwich

These driverless cars have been tested in Greenwich recently. So far, they have been a great success. With a few problems like not working in heavy snow etc, the car still manages to perform greatly. Although not very fast, they are very safe for a prototype. Here are some pieces from an online article about these cars:

 

"An autonomous shuttle traversing the North Greenwich plaza beside O? Arena will mark a small but significant step on the way to what ministers and engineers hope will be a safer, less-congested, driverless future."

 

Business secretary Vince Cable said the trials, backed by ?19m worth of funding from the government, would keep the UK at the cutting edge of automotive technology and should bring more highly-skilled jobs to the UK.

 

?The projects we are now funding in Greenwich, Bristol, Milton Keynes and Coventry will help to ensure we are world-leaders in this field and able to benefit from what is expected to be a ?900bn industry by 2025,? he said.

 

 

This was only a short topic but it's something to think about. Do you think it will be as successful as they anticipate? If done correctly, this could lower car accidents, lower the speed of global warming and quite frankly, be a cool thing to see :P

Edited April 24, 2015 by Mathew Steel

[Crusader1307 298]

We REALLY NEED these in California! This is one "Cool" idea! Although a prototype, I can see these things working out great. Good one, Matthew! :)

[Charles of Tours 69]

The question is: can it do parallel parking for me? :lol:

[Mathew Steel 151]

TODAYS TECHNOLOGY

 

Steel Ships and Sea Mines

The H.M.S Defender is part of the new generation of Royal Navy ships. It is an incredible piece of engineering, it can seek out a small drone at a 40km distance, it's capable at tracking 2000 targets at once. It's a destroyer and it's meant to defend itself and the rest of the fleet, by taking out missiles before they even get close.

 

Like all ships, it has a design flaw. Which is the material it's made of, steel. If you take that much metal and put it to a big magnetic field (the earths) as it sails around. It's going to start being detected, by magnetic sea mines (which were developed during WWII). Nowadays you use complicated degaussing equipment on board a ship.

 

So, what if you needed a ship, which had the objective of clearing mines. You'd need to get close enough to see them, without setting them off. So comes H.M.S Middleton, a hunt class mine countermeasures vessel. It's able to do it without the mines detecting it and detonating it because it's made of glass-reinforced plastic. It's just a plastic boat. Seems the saying "keep it simple stupid" has a totally new meaning :)

 

(A photo of H.M.S Middleton)

[Mathew Steel 151]

I'd like to let everyone know what's happening. You may see that I still post on the forums etc but may not see much content being posted here. The reason simply is content, I don't want to share information on topics that I think are irrelevant or uninteresting. I'm working hard to gather lots of new things to post, so be sure to keep checking :)

[Crusader1307 298]

No hurry Matthew, take your time. Great articles take time and effort! :D

[Mathew Steel 151]

YESTERDAY(S) TECHNOLOGY

 

Routers and Modems - A common misconception

A lot of people often misuse the terms, router and modem. Most people think they are the same thing and tend to swap between terms when explaining something related to modems or routers. This however, is not right. They ARE in fact two different things and hence I decided to make this my next post.

 

A router:

A router is a small box that allows multiple devices to join the same network. Most modern routers offer wireless connectivity as well as Ethernet ports for wired connections. While connecting to a router provides access to a local network or LAN, it does not provide access to the Internet.

 

A modem:

A modem is a device that provides access to the Internet. A router must be connected to a modem to allow devices connected to the modem to access the Internet. Most routers are connected to modems via a specific Ethernet port. A modem connects to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) which typically provides either cable or DSL Internet service. Cable modems have a coaxial connection, this connects to a cable port on the wall. DSL modems have a telephone connector, or an RJ-11 jack, which connects to a telephone socket on the wall.

 

Perhaps you all knew this before reading my post, perhaps some of you didn't. Regardless, hopefully you learned something new by reading this :)

[EaglePrince 230]

I am one of those who has always been in struggle with this - router and modem... Thanks for telling the difference. Still, I do have a question. :) I have only one device in my room from which I get internet - I can connect two PC's (or laptops) to it by cable, I can connect two of those devices for watching TV (IPTV that is I think), and I can also turn on my own wireless network though it (correct me if I am wrong in anything). Does that mean that in this "router" I have two devices in fact: router and modem, or the modem is somewhere further? :)

[Mathew Steel 151]

It's actually very simple. With the advancement of technology, you can now get a router and modem built into one box. I'm assuming this is what you have. Glad the post helped you somewhat :)

[EaglePrince 230]

Your posts are indeed educating. :)

[Mathew Steel 151]

TODAYS TECHNOLOGY

 

How "Shazam" works!

Shazam is a really useful application I commonly use on my iPhone. It's purpose is for users to discover the titles of music they don't know. I actually used the application to find the song I posted in another topic. It really helped me out, I'm sure a few of you have used it to. So, how does an application, hear and recognize a song?

 

Shazam uses a smartphone or a PCs built-in microphone to gather a brief sample of audio being played. It creates an acoustic fingerprint based on the sample, and compares it against a central database for a match. If it finds a match, it sends information such as the artist, song title, and album back to the user. It builds a fingerprint for a song as a hash table, the key is frequency. When Shazam receives a fingerprint, it uses the first key and it searches for all matching songs. Then it moves onto the next key, shortening the results, it continues to do this until it finds an exact match. Then Shazam! You get the song title.

 

 

[EaglePrince 230]

I don't have a smartphone, but would it recognize the song after my "na-na-na-na", like when I know the melody, but I don't know the lyrics? :D

 

Or one needs to sing it, or one actually has to play a part of the song recorded from ratio, tv, etc? Just to add, any of those is pretty useful, but I am interested to know. :)

[Mathew Steel 151]

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Or one needs to sing it

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Well the point you made is quite interesting. Theoretically, no, one does not have to sing it. You can, again I am speaking theoretically here, hum the melody for the app to find the correct song.

 

Now practicality is an issue. Unless you have some amazing gift where your voice can sound identical to a piano or a guitar for example, then reaching the exact same frequency, or in this case pitch, (and so narrowing the search) is rather difficult. I have had luck in the past finding the song I wanted through singing a small part of it, but again, it's a lot harder :D

[EaglePrince 230]

This is nice to hear. :) I understand, but still, even though it does not always work, I do remember how there was an option on older phones to dial someone by saying his/her name. This wasn't much reliable, but it works much better nowadays. Even when it doesn't work, we do need to consider that sometimes not even human can understand what another person said - which name, and sometimes my brother wants to ask me "hey, you know that song 'nananana'", and I have no idea what song that is - even when that is a song by one of my favorite bands. :) But who knows, maybe some day machine gets better in this thing than a man can be. :)

Edited May 7, 2015 by EaglePrince

[Mathew Steel 151]

Hi all,

I understand this thread has been idle for quite some time. This is due to personal life getting on top of me and a lack of stigma to research into things. Recently, I've had some spare time and plan to revive the thread. I won't be posting here on a schedule, I'll be posting if I come across something interesting or have a good idea on what to post, this way I won't be posting any boring topics :)

 

YESTERDAY(S) TECHNOLOGY

 

Random Access Memory (RAM)

RAM is commonly referred to as primary memory. It's a computer storage location that allows information to be stored and accessed quickly from random locations on a memory module (hence the name). Since the data is accessed randomly, the computer can access the data much faster than that of a CD or hard drive. If RAM loses power, all data contained in memory is also lost.

 

Do not confuse memory with your hard drive, they store separate things. For example, RAM stores things such as the GUI or applications, whereas a hard drive stores permanent information, such as game saves or word documents. For obvious reasons, one a hard drive naturally has a higher storage capacity than RAM and also, hard drives don't lose information when unpowered.

 

As the computer boots up, parts of the operating system and drivers are loaded into memory, which allows the CPU to process the instructions much faster, hence taking less time before your machine is operational. After the operating system has loaded, each program you open such as the browser you're using to view this page is loaded into memory while it is running. If too many programs are open the computer will swap the data in the memory between the RAM and the hard disk drive.

 

RAM storage also has a capacity. Only a certain amount of memory can be stored on RAM in one PC up-time. For example. My PC has 8GB of RAM. Now, if I were to run a game, open loads of tabs on my web browser, use Skype and keep a word document active, my RAM storage would most likely fill up to 4GB (depending on what game is running and how demanding the other applications are). Although, no need to worry right? If I close the game, my RAM would return to an average storage level, well, by default, it should, but some applications cause memory leaks. Where temporary data which should be removed after the application closes, doesn't get removed. Meaning the RAM stays full, a user cannot manually remove data from RAM (without restarting the PC). If the RAM is full, your PC will attempt to write to the hard disk, which is far slower and of course, data from the hard drive isn't removed by a restart. This will cause a blue screen for Windows users, as the operating system attempts to prevent this from occurring.

 

Over the evolution of computers there has been different variations of RAM used in computer. Some of the more common examples are DIMM, RIMM, SIMM, SO-DIMM, and SOO-RIMM. Below is an example image of a 512MB DIMM computer memory module and what the typical desktop computer memory card will look like. This memory module would be installed into memory slots on the motherboard.

 

[Lord_Chris 251]

Good article, although plagiarised from here: http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/r/ram.htm

[Mathew Steel 151]

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Good article, although plagiarised from here: http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/r/ram.htm

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I did use that website to gain some more in-depth information. I'll put references etc next time, I don't want to take unworthy credit :P

[Crusader1307 298]

Ye Olde Stocks for you :lol: :lol:

Still interesting though, Matthew! :)

[Mathew Steel 151]

TODAYS TECHNOLOGY

 

Effective Power

While it's important to look at the advancement of technology and it's successes, it's important to note that we can learn a lot from technologies faults, bugs and glitches. Recently, a bug with Apple's iOS 6 has been discovered. A text can be sent to iPhone users which will cause the phone to crash (if using iOS 6 or newer) as it displays the notification. Now this only works when the notification shows as a banner, meaning the user must unlock the phone for it to crash. Also, it doesn't always work, although the majority of the time it does.

 

The text itself contains a certain sequence of Arabic characters that cause the phone to crash when displaying it as a banner. There have been a few theories to why the phone crashes while displaying the text but I feel the one I'm about to explain is the most accurate.

 

Here's the link to the video explaining why the phone crashes -

 

 

Now if you don't have enough time or your broadband isn't the best, or simply you'd rather read this theory. I will continue to explain what Tom's theory is.

 

The theory:

Any iPhone users will know that when receiving a text notification, the iOS will display the text in the banner (unless you change your settings). You may also know that if the text is too long to display the whole thing in the banner, it will shorten it. Now luckily Apple are clever, they code the iOS to shorten the text based off the screen size and the characters not by bytes. For example, if I sent a text containing "Hello world" the banner would have enough room to display the whole text, whereas if I sent a text containing "Hello world thank you for reading my post" it would be shortened to something similar to "Hello world thank..." again, this will change depending on the screen size.

 

Arabic characters are of course different to those of English. Some Arabic characters become longer as they connect to another letter, they change from one byte to two, yet still remain one character. The iOS doesn't understand this and so as it tries to display the sample text it simply can't understand how to shorten it and hence it crashes.

 

Please remember, this isn't a fact, this is simply a theory, an idea. Perhaps Apple will reveal the truth after fixing the bug, but really, I can't see that happening.

[Crusader1307 298]

Sorry for the late response Matthew, Good article! Found out some interesting facts.

[Mathew Steel 151]

It's been a while since the last one, so I thought I'd create two over the weekend :)

 

TODAYS TECHNOLOGY

 

HDD's and SSD's

There are a lot of different ways of storing information today, files, notebooks and USB's are to name a few. Most computers will have a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) whereas some may have a Solid State Drive (SSD). What is the difference between the two and the differences that great?

 

Let's begin with a HDD. A HDD uses an actuator that moves the read/write arm. These are electromagnets that position the read/write arm quickly and precisely. The read/write swipes back and forth along a platter. A platter is made of silver, this is where information is stored magnetically. A central spindle allows platters to rotate at a high speed. The information is stored in binary form. The read/write head is a tiny magnet on the end of the arm, this is used as a "pen" where information is taken and/or edited. An electronic circuit is used to control everything as a link between the HDD and your computer.

 

So what about an SSD. Well, instead of using magnets, an SSD semiconductor chips. An SSD has no moving parts as it is completely electrical and not mechanical, like a HDD. What does this mean exactly? This means that an SSD can read/write data far quicker than a HDD. Everything is electrical which of course is far quicker than a moving arm.

 

Of course, there are disadvantages to a SSD. For one, the price. Even a small 32GB SSD can cost about ?25, whereas a 32GB HDD would cost around ?10-12. At such a small size, it isn't a huge difference but as we move up the storage amount, the price difference is substantial. As well as this, they are vulnerable to power loss and electrical/magnetic currents, meaning data may be lost during such an event. Another would be that many SSD's still use more power than the standard hard drive, especially when idle.

 

Then again, after purchasing my own 1TB SSD for a laptop. I immediately noticed the increased startup, windows 7 seems to startup quicker than windows 8, which has had numerous ways to decrease it's startup time. Also, as someone who plays a lot of games, loading screen times are drastically reduced and for someone with little patience, this is a huge improvement from a HDD.

Edited June 19, 2015 by Mathew Steel

[EaglePrince 230]

Thanks for the interesting article about SSD and HDD. By the way did you mean to write 320GB above - instead of 32GB?

Regarding the possible power loss... Does that mean that one could lose data frequently if he has this problem in general, or it is only a possibility? I mean, it is only somewhat higher risk of losing data with SSD? Still, I believe that people who use SDD need to rely on UPS if they don't have laptops (with its battery) because of this higher risk?

[Mathew Steel 151]

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did you mean to write 320GB above - instead of 32GB?

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Nope, it's possible to buy a 32GB SSD, although rare, since they are mostly USB's, again, they use the same type of storage, hence why USB's are so fast :)

 

 

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one could lose data frequently if he has this problem in general, or it is only a possibility?

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Of course it is possible to lose data with both drives, although since the SSD is completely electrical, power failure could be more devastating. It isn't a guarantee that a SSD will lose more data than a HDD, it's just in some situations, it's proven to be the case.

 

 

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UPS if they don't have laptops (with its battery) because of this higher risk?

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Yes but in some cases power to the drive itself may be lost while the rest of the components are still running (although it is not at all common) and again this could cause memory loss, although, this is just as likely with a HDD :)

[EaglePrince 230]

Thanks, Mathew! I have heard about SSD and HDD before - here and at other places, but now my understanding is a bit more complete. :)

[EaglePrince 230]

Could someone say something about power banks, or as they are also knows as - portable chargers?

 

I have bought one for my new phone but I got feeling that it overheats the phone while charging. Is it normal for them to warm up the phone while charging it? It is not the case with my original "normal" charger. Also, are those bad for the battery? With previous phone I used to have two batteries to switch them if needed one of them used to be 100% charged in case I need it, and I carried both of them with me. :)

 

Also. If my origins charger has 550mA output, wouldn't it be bad for the battery to charge it by portable charger with 1A output?

 

The thing is that the guy in the store was politely explaining me that I have no reason to worry and that heating while charging the phone with a power bank with more amperage is no big deal, but I am unsure whether he was telling me this only so I would be satisfied and so I wouldn't want to return it to him asking for money back or something else. In my opinion I would have right for that as I said "I need a power bank for Lumia 532 DS", and he said "this one is good for all smartphones", thus possibly misinforming me.

 

Thanks in advance, guys, and I hope it is a good thing to ask this in this tread. :)

 

ADDITION: I'm charging it again now from the power bank, it seems to be fine now. Maybe I had this issue yesterday before I was charging it AND I may had several applications running such as Viber (which I dislike pretty much :| ), Internet Explorer, etc... while having wifi on too. But the question still stands: how good or bad is it for battery life if it has higher amperage than the original charger? :)

Edited July 23, 2015 by EaglePrince