Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Mainframes

Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as big iron) are huge and expensive computers used mainly by government institutions and large companies for mission critical applications, usually bulk data processing such as censuses, industry/consumer statistics, ERP, and financial transaction processing.
The term originated during the early 1970s with the introduction of smaller, fewer complex computers such as the DEC PDP-8 and PDP-11 series, which became known as minicomputers or just minis. The industry/users then coined the term "mainframe" to describe bigger, earlier types (previously known simply as "computers").

Monday, August 13, 2007

Lighthouse of Alexandria

The Pharos of Alexandria was a big tower built in the 3rd century BC (between 285 and 247 BC) on the island of Pharos in Alexandria, Egypt to give out as that port's landmark, and later, its lighthouse.

With a height variously estimated at between 115 and 150 meters (383 - 450 ft) it was among the tallest man-made structures on Earth for many centuries, and was recognized as one of the Seven Wonders of the World by Antipater of Sidon. It was the third tallest building after the two Great Pyramids (of Khufu and Khafra) for its whole life. Some scientists approximate a much taller height exceeding 180 metres that would make the tower the tallest building up to the 14th century.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Traffic light

A traffic light or traffic signal is a signalling device positioned at a road junction or pedestrian crossing to indicate when it is safe to drive, ride or walk, using a universal color code.Traffic lights for usual vehicles or pedestrians always have two main lights, a red one that means stop and a green one that means go. Generally, the red light contains some orange in its hue, and the green light contains some blue, to provide some support for people with red-green color blindness. In most countries there is also a yellow (or amber) light, which when on and not flashing means stop if able to do so securely. In some systems, a flashing amber means that a motorist may go in advance with care if the road is clear, giving way to pedestrians and to other road vehicles that may have precedence. A flashing red effectively means the same as a regular stop sign. There may be additional lights (usually a green arrow or "filter") to allow turns (called a lead light in the U.S., because it is usually leading the main green light).

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Vegetable

Vegetable is a culinary term which usually refers to an edible part of a plant. The definition is traditional rather than scientific and is somewhat capricious and subjective. All parts of herbaceous plants eaten as food by humans, entire or in part, are normally considered vegetables. Mushrooms, though belonging to the biological realm fungi, are also commonly considered vegetables. In general, vegetables are thought of as being savory, and not sweet, even though there are many exceptions. Nuts, grains, herbs, spices and culinary fruits (see below) are usually not considered vegetables.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Asia

Asia is the world's biggest and most populous continent. It covers 8.6% of the Earth's total surface area (or 29.4% of its land area) and, with almost 4 billion people, it contains more than 60% of the world's present human population.

Chiefly in the eastern and northern hemispheres, Asia is conventionally defined as part of the landmass of Africa-Eurasia – with the western portion of the latter occupied by Europe – lying east of the Suez Canal, east of the Ural Mountains, and south of the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian and Black Seas. It is surrounded to the east by the Pacific Ocean, to the south by the Indian Ocean, and to the north by the Arctic Ocean.

Given its size and diversity, Asia – a toponym dating back to classical antiquity – is more a cultural concept incorporating a number of regions and peoples than a homogeneous, physical entity.

Monday, July 09, 2007

Management information system

Management Information Systems (MIS) is a general name for the educational discipline casing the application of people, technologies, and procedures —together called information systems — to solve business problems. MIS are distinctive from normal information systems in that they are used to evaluate other information systems applied in operational activities in the organization. Rationally, the term is commonly used to refer to the group of information management methods attached to the automation or support of human decision making, e.g. Decision Support Systems, Expert systems, and Executive information system

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Accumulator

In a computer CPU, an accumulator is a register in which intermediary arithmetic and logic results are stored. Without a register like an accumulator, it would be necessary to write the result of each calculation (addition, multiplication, shift, etc.) to main memory, possibly only to be read right back again for use in the next operation. Access to main memory is slower than access to a register like the accumulator because the technology used for the huge main memory is slower (but cheaper) than that used for a register.

The canonical example for accumulator use is adding a list of numbers. The accumulator is initially set to zero, then each number in spin is added to the value in the accumulator. Only when all numbers have been added is the result seized in the accumulator written to main memory or to another, non-accumulator, CPU register.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Shark

Sharks are fish with a full cartilaginous skeleton and a streamlined body. They respire with the use of five to seven gill slits. Sharks have a covering of dermal denticles to protect their skin from injure and parasites and to improve fluid dynamics; they also have replaceable teeth.Sharks include species ranging from the hand-sized pygmy shark, Euprotomicrus bispinatus, a deep sea class of only 22 centimetres (9 in) in length, to the whale shark, Rhincodon typus, the largest fish, which grows to a length of about 12 metres (39 ft) and which, like the great whales, feeds only on plankton through filter feeding. The bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas, is the best known of several species to swim in both salt and fresh water and in deltas.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Superscalar

A superscalar CPU architecture implements a form of parallelism called Instruction-level parallelism within a solitary processor. It thereby allows faster CPU throughput than would otherwise be possible at the same clock rate. A superscalar architecture executes more than one instruction during a single pipeline stage by pre-fetching several instructions and at the same time dispatching them to redundant functional units on the processor.

History

Seymour Cray's CDC 6600 from 1965 is often mentioned as the first superscalar plan. The Intel i960CA and the AMD 29000-series 29050 microprocessors were the first commercial single-chip superscalar microprocessors. RISC CPUs like these brought the superscalar idea to micro computers because the RISC design results in a simple core, allowing straightforward instruction send off and the inclusion of multiple functional units on a single CPU in the inhibited design rules of the time. This was the reason that RISC designs were faster than CISC designs through the 1980s and into the 1990s.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Neem oil

Neem oil is a vegetable oil pressed from the fruits and seeds of Neem, an evergreen tree which is endemic to the Indian sub-continent and has been introduced to many other areas in the tropics. It is perhaps the most significant of the commercially available products of neem.
Neem oil is typically light to dark brown, bitter and has a rather strong odour that is said to join the odours of peanut and garlic. It comprises mainly triglycerides and large amounts of triterpenoid compounds, which are in charge for the bitter taste. It is hydrophobic in nature and in order to emulisify it in water for application purposes, it must be formulated with suitable surfactants.
Neem oil also contains steroids and a plethora of triterpenoids of which Azadirachtin is the most well known and studied. The Azadirachtin content of Neem Oil varies from 300ppm to over 2000ppm depending on the quality of the neem seeds compressed.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Swan

Swans are large water birds of the family Anatidae, which also includes geese and ducks. Swans are grouped with the intimately related geese in the subfamily Anserinae where they form the tribe Cygnini. Sometimes, they are considered a distinct subfamily, Cygninae.

Swans typically mate for life, though "divorce" does sometimes occur, mainly following nesting failure. The number of eggs in each clutch is between 3–8.
The word is derived from Old English swan, akin to German Schwan, in turn derived from Indo-European root *swen (to sound, to sing), whence Latin derives sonus (sound). Young swans are known as cygnets, from the Latin word for swan, cygnus. An adult male is a cob, from Middle English cobbe; an adult female is a pen .

Friday, June 15, 2007

Tide

Tides are the cyclic rising and falling of Earth's ocean surface caused by the tidal forces of the Moon and the sun acting on the oceans. Tides cause changes in the depth of the marine and estuarine water bodies and produce oscillating currents known as tidal streams, making prediction of tides important for coastal navigation. The strip of seashore that is submerged at high tide and exposed at low tide, the intertidal zone, is an important ecological product of ocean tides The changing tide produced at a given location is the result of the changing positions of the Moon and Sun relative to the Earth coupled with the effects of Earth rotation and the local bathymetry.Sea level measured by coastal tide gauges may also be strongly affected by wind. More generally, tidal phenomena can occur in other systems besides the ocean, whenever a gravitational field that varies in time and space is present

Monday, June 11, 2007

Shrimp fishery

A shrimp fishery is a fishery directed toward harvesting either shrimp or prawns. Fisheries do not usually differentiate between the two taxa, and the terms are used interchangeably. This article therefore refers to the catching of either shrimp or prawns.

A number of the larger species, including the Atlantic white shrimp (Penaeus setiferus), are caught commercially and used for food. Recipes utilizing shrimp form part of the cuisine of many cultures: examples include jambalaya, okonomiyaki, poon choi, bagoong, Kerala and scampi.
Preparing shrimp for consumption usually involves removing the shell, tail, and "sand vein". As with other seafood, shrimp is high in calcium, protein and low in food energy.
Shrimp and prawns are versatile ingredients, and are often used as an accompaniment to fried rice. Common methods of preparation comprise baking, boiling and frying. As stated in the movie Forrest Gump

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Rose

A rose is a flowering shrub of the genus Rosa, and the flower of this shrub. There are more than a hundred classes of wild roses, all from the northern hemisphere and typically from temperate regions. The species form a group of normally prickly shrubs or climbers, and sometimes trailing plants, reaching 2–5 m tall, hardly ever reaching as high as 20 m by climbing over other plants.
Rose hips are sometimes eaten, mostly for their vitamin C content. They are typically pressed and filtered to make rose-hip syrup, as the fine hairs surrounding the seeds are unpleasant to eat. They can also be used to create herbal tea, jam, jelly and marmalade.

Friday, June 01, 2007

Industrial metal

Industrial metal is a musical genre which draws elements from industrial music and heavy metal music. Industrial metal music is typically centered around metal guitar riffs and industrial synthesizer/sequencer lines, heavily distorted, very low pitched guitars, as well as harsh vocals, but in some instances can have clean vocals. This term is used quite loosely, telling everything from industrial bands sampling metal riffs to heavy metal groups augmented with sequencers. Industrial metal encompasses industrial subgenres such as aggro-industrial and coldwave and often overlaps some elements of nu-metal and post-punk.

It is difficult to distinguish many industrial metal artists and industrial rock because both genres leave much room for ingenuity and creativity. By convention, all industrial metal artists may be more vaguely described as industrial rock as well, but not all industrial rock artists are properly described as industrial metal. The general rule of thumb is the speed and "crunchiness" of the guitars. If the guitars are fast and heavily distorted, it is likely industrial metal.

Monday, May 28, 2007

Genetics

Genetics is the science of heredity and variation in living organisms.Knowledge that desired characteristics were present at birth has been implicitly used since prehistoric times for improving crop plants and animals through selective breeding. However, the modern science of genetics, which seeks to understand the mechanisms of inheritance, only began with the work of Gregor Mendel in the mid-1800s.

Mendel observed that inheritance is basically a discrete process with specific traits that are inherited in an independant manner. These basic units of inheritance is now known as "genes". In the cells of organisms, genes exist actually in the structure of the molecule DNA and the information genes contain is used to create and control the components of cells. Although genetics plays a large role in determining the appearance and behavior of organisms, it is the interaction of genetics with the environment an organism experiences that determines the ultimate outcome. For example, while genes play a role in determining a person's height, the nutrition and health that person experiences in childhood also have a large effect.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Mental health

Mental health is a idea that refers to a human individual's emotional and psychological well-being. Merriam-Webster defines mental health as "A state of emotional and psychological well-being in which an individual is able to use his or her cognitive and emotional capabilities, function in society, and meet the ordinary demands of everyday life."

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there is no one "official" definition of mental health. Cultural differences, subjective assessments, and competing professional theories all affect how "mental health" is defined. In general, most experts agree that "mental health" and "mental illness" are not opposites. In other words, the absence of a recognized mental disorder is not of necessity an indicator of mental health.
One way to think about mental health is by looking at how efficiently and successfully a person functions. Feeling capable and competent; being able to handle normal levels of stress, preserve satisfying relationships, and lead an independent life; and being able to "bounce back," or recover from difficult situations, are all signs of mental health.
Encompassing your emotional, social, and—most importantly—your mental well-being; All these aspects—emotional, physical, and social—must function jointly to achieve overall health.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Refrigerator

A typical refrigerator with its door open refrigerator is a cooling machine comprising a thermally insulated compartment and a mechanism to transfer heat from it to the outside environment, cooling the contents to a temperature below ambient. Refrigerators are widely used to store foods which deteriorate at ambient temperatures; spoilage due to bacterial growth and other processes is much slower at low temperatures. Devices described as "refrigerators" maintain a temperature a few degrees above the freezing point of water; similar devices which maintain temperatures below the freezing point of water are called "freezers". The refrigerator is a relatively modern creation amongst kitchen appliances. It replaced the common icebox which had been a household item for almost a century and a half prior, and is sometimes still called by the original name "icebox".

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Color Television

100 Most television researchers respected the value of color image transmission, with an early patent application in Russia in 1889 for a mechanically-scanned color system showing how early the import of color was realized. John Logie Baird established the world's first color transmission on July 3, 1928, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with filters of a different primary color; and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commentator to exchange their illumination.

Color television in the United States had a prolonged history due to incompatible technical systems vying for approval by the Federal Communications Commission for commercial use. Mechanically scanned color television was established by Bell Laboratories in June 1929 using three complete systems of photoelectric cells, amplifiers, glow-tubes, and color filters, with a series of mirrors to place over the red, green, and blue images into one full color image.

In the electronically scanned era, the first color television exhibition was on February 5, 1940, when RCA privately showed to members of the FCC at the RCA plant in Camden, New Jersey, a television receiver producing images in color by electronic and optical means without moving device. CBS began non-broadcast color experiments using film as early as August 28, 1940, and live cameras by November 12. The CBS "field sequential" color system was partly mechanical, with a disc made of red, blue, and green filters revolving inside the television camera at 1,200 rpm, and a similar disc spinning in synchronization in front of the cathode ray tube inside the receiver set. The RCA "dot sequential" color system had no moving parts, using a series of diachronic mirrors to separate and direct red, green, and blue light from the subject through three separate lenses into three scanning tubes, and electronic switching that allowed the tubes to send their signals in rotation, dot by dot. These signals were sorted by a second switching device in the receiver set and sent to red, green, and blue picture tubes, and combined by a second set of diachronic mirrors into a full color image.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Key

A key is a device which is used to open a lock. It typically consists of a specially-shaped piece of flat metal, with cut notches (forming teeth), and/or milled grooves which fit the shape of the lock and can open the properly combinated lock by (usually) being turned in the lock housing. This portion of the key is referred to as the blade. The wider grip, referred to as the bow, is establish at the top of the key to facilitate turning. regularly, there are only a small number of keys which can work a certain lock. In some residential locks, all of the keys for a lock are given to the purchaser of the lock. Duplicates of the key can usually be made by anyone with the correct key blank and key machine. Some manufacturers assign an identification number to each lock and key combination. Knowing the identification number of such a lock allows a duplicate key to be made at certain places. Many residential keys are recognized by the key cuts stamped on the key bow.
Most people in modern society use keys on a daily basis, to secure their home, their vehicle, or to access their workplace, among other uses. Those that use a number of keys will typically place them on a ring or key chain, often with other items such as key fobs.