Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Some useful run commands in windows xp:

Compmgmt.msc - Computer management

Devmgmt.ms - Device Manager

Main.cpl - mouse properties

Gpedit - Group policy editor

Regedit - Registry editor

Msconfig - System configuration utility

Dxdiag - Directx diagonostic tool

Fsqirt - Bluetooth transfer wizard

Drwatson - Dr Watson, an inbuilt utility which reecognises if there is any application that is not working properly.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Google's most queried search terms of the year

The most queried items are..

  • 1. iphone
  • 2. Webkinz
  • 3. tmz
  • 4. Transformers
  • 5. YouTube
  • 6. Club Penguin
  • 7. MySpace
  • 8. Heroes
  • 9. Facebook
  • 10. Anna Nicole Smith

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Yahoo, Adobe team on PDF ads

Yahoo and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe's Portable Document Format so that publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content.

The text advertisements appear in a panel to the right of the content in the PDF and are subject matter matched using keywords and analysis of associated concepts. The ads are dynamic, meaning different ads can pop up at different times and clicking on an ad takes you to the advertiser Web site.

Publishers upload their PDF content into Yahoo's ad serving system and then monitor the performance through Yahoo's system. Publishers take a cut of the revenue from each click on the ads and Yahoo will split its share of the revenue per click with Adobe.

The service gives PDF publishers access to Yahoo's network of advertisers and allows them to make money off the content without having their own sales force or having to do the ad insertion themselves, says Josh Jacobs, vice president of publisher solutions at Yahoo.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Intelligent Software Helps Build Perfect Robotic Hand

Scientists in Portsmouth and Shanghai are working on intelligent software that will take them a step closer to building the perfect robotic hand.
Using artificial intelligence, they are creating software which will learn and copy human hand movements.

They hope to replicate this in a robotic device which will be able to perform the dexterous actions only capable today by the human hand.

Dr Honghai Liu, senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Industrial Research, and Professor Xiangyang Zhu from the Robotics Institute at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, were awarded a Royal Society grant to further their research.

The technology has the potential to revolutionise the manufacturing industry and medicine and scientists hope that in the future it could be used to produce the perfect artificial limb.

“A robotic hand which can perform tasks with the dexterity of a human hand is one of the holy grails of science,” said Dr Honghai Liu, who lectures artificial intelligence at the University’s Institute of Industrial Research. The Institute specialises in artificial intelligence including intelligent robotics, image processing and intelligent data analysis.

He said: “We are talking about having super high level control of a robotic device.

Nothing which exists today even comes close.”

Dr Liu used a cyberglove covered in tiny sensors to capture data about how the human hand moves. It was filmed in a motion capture suite by eight high-resolution CCD cameras with infrared illumination and measurement accuracy up to a few millimetres.

Professor Xiangyang Zhu from The Robotics Institute at the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, which is recognised as one of the world-class research institutions on robotics, said that the research partnership would strengthen the interface between artificial intelligence techniques and robotics and pave the way for a new chapter in robotics technology.

“Humans move efficiently and effectively in a continuous flowing motion, something we have perfected over generations of evolution and which we all learn to do as babies. Developments in science mean we will teach robots to move in the same way.”