Sayan’s BlogWorld

Geo-Quiz:
Try this Geography Quiz which I made. Answers at the end.

1. This island has the unique distinction of producing the largest fruits vegetables in the world due to its unique volcanic nature. Name the island.

2. Name the only country/place in the world where you can find monkeys in snow bound regions.

3. This volcanic island erupted in 1883 and threw so much smoke in the atmosphere that Europe missed its summer in the ensuring year. (It also resulted in the only recorded time when the Thames was frozen in London). Name this volcano

4. The Great Barrier reef in Australia has the largest reef in the world. Which country has the second largest?

5. This unique rock structure is called Urulu by the natives for thousands of years. What is it better known as?

6. What is the remotest place on earth? (Farthest from any other inhabited place)

7. Some more monkey business… A popular legend says that if monkeys become extinct from this place it will spell the end of UK. Hint: this is also the only place in Europe you can find monkeys.

Answers:

1. Sakhalin (off the east coast of Russia, little above Japan)

2. Japan (They survive the harsh Japanese winter by staying in hot water

springs)

3. Krakatoa (Indonesia, the island has been literaly blown up due to the
explosion which also caused giant tsunami which inundated habitations 1000
miles away)

4. Barrier Reef, Belize (Off the north-east corner of South America)

5. Ayer’s Rock, Australia

6. Tristan Da Cunha
( Google says:
Tristan da Cunha, is the remotest inhabited island in the world.
Itsnearest neighbour is St. Helena 2,334 kms to the North while Cape Town
is 2,778 kms to the East. Tristan is an Overseas Territory of the United
Kingdom. It is under the authority of the Governor of St. Helena but
powers are delegated to a resident Administrator. There is only one
inhabited area. This is Edinburgh of the Seven Seas on Tristan. It is a
small village of just under 300 people, the total population of Tristan da
Cunha. It was named in 1867 after Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh

)

7. Gibraltar (Even more interesting is how the name Gibraltar is derived)

The mobile CPU market is getting a little too crowded these days. Samsung is the latest to enter the fray. They have just launched S3C2440 and claim that it is the fastest PDA CPU.

Oracle it seems is being blamed for every evil in the world. So what has everyone’s whipping boy, whipped up this time?
Read this article on how Oracle brought down Orbitz (one of the the largest travel and travel booking site in world).

Heat is enemy number one when it comes to designing newer, faster, smaller processors. An average processor today generates upwards of 70watts in a tiny 10mmx10mm area. (Imagine an area smaller than your thumbnail as hot as a light bulb to get the idea.) The key to drawing the heat and maintaining optimal working temperature is not a fancy heatsink but thermal paste. This critical component is required to provide a good thermal contact between the processor and the heatsink. Good thermal contact is a notoriously difficult goal, and the best solution untill now was solder, which is pretty useless for processors because your processor doesn’k like molten metal. The next option is to use fancy expensive mixtures of carbon-nanotubes, silver and the like. But this may soon be history as this article indicates, the humble carbon black can offer us a cheaper and better solution (it bests even the solder).

Can drinking too much water kill? Read this story on the chances of a thirsty/ watery end. This may of be interest to the readers who are into physical sports and think while playing one should keep on drinling water. This research comes close on the heels of the recent discovery of the fact that the ‘8 glasses of water a day’ rule is highly flawed.

IBM buying AMD? The pros and cons of such a deal are throughly looked into this article. On a personal note, this would bring a much needed breath of fresh air into the IT hardware market and give a breather to battered AMD. Most of the people who know about AMD can’t help sympathizing with the courage of this company which, time after time has been releasing great products at great prices and managed to survive the onslaught of Intel’s financial and marketing might.

If this rumour were to come through it would be a win-win case for both IBM and AMD. IBM would get access to some of the brightest minds in the computer industry; get a chance to put Intel back to its place and AMD would get a much needed muscle to penetrate the market with innovative products. The article in Inquirer has more details. In the end its the common consumer who stands to gain. (I have been wanting to write on this for quite sometime but giving an unbiased opinion is difficult given that I’m a die-hard AMD fan and work in IBM. So, when I came across the Inquirer article it had to be blogged)

Read remarks of the outgoing US ambassdor to India on the ‘outsourcing to India’ rage.

Microsoft’s safest operating system has a deadly bug. Yeah, I know you will say whats’ new? But apparently this can be exploited on all the safe Microsoft operating systems from Windows NT to Windows Server 2003. Read on here. Note the article’s stuble contradiction in saying that it may afflict millions of PCs but they don’t how users may be affected.

Garry Kasparov has been on the forefront of the man- machine conflict. He was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue in a famed chess fight a few years ago. Read his perspective as he prepares to go to battle again this year.

Shareholders today demand the highest level of business ethics and this has been reflected in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Check out this site to see that this act holds a bounty for tech companies, almost to the tune of the Year 2000 (Y2K) boom.

Discover the strange phenomenon of empty galaxies at BBC and ABC. I wonder whether this has any connection with the so called dark matter in the universe?

How to use your webcam to generate cryptographic strength random numbers? Sounds intriguing? Check it out here. The article explains from a laymans’ viewpoint the need for random numbers and how your webcam can come in handy. To top it off this will be opensource as well. (Something like “Random Numbers for free available here”)

More news from the human-machine interface frontier. Its not sci-fi any more read about the bionic eye here.

AOLs’ jettisoning of the Mozilla browser (which had financial and technical support from AOL-Netscape) brings to an end one chapter in the erstwhile Netscape- Explorer browser wars. But even in its death, Netscape spawned a new generation open-source browser- Mozilla. AOL has put the Mozilla project firmly in the open-source arena by putting the Mozilla Foundation in charge. The news here.

The future of the semiconductor industry according Gordon Moore (of Moore’s Law fame) is here. He was speaking on the occasion of Intel’s 35th anniversary.