Single Board Computers

     Ever since Raspberry Pi was made the board computers have become a rage with many such board computers coming into the market the latest being Parallela the $99 supercomputer that promises to change the way computing is done the single board computers are much cheaper powerful and will get more powerful in course of time as the processing power increases

The cheapest of them being Raspberry PI priced only at $35 and $25 is an open source hardware that runs on Linux operating system the aim of designing the Raspberry Pi was to teach programming to kids however enthusiasts are coming out with new uses of the pi its as powerful as a full fledged computer 10 years ago and does all the things of a that a full fledged computer does for an ordinary user. Thus this little computer can be an excellent computer for kids across the world especially in developing nations its an opensource hardware so can be copied and improved on . The two RPis consume 3.5 and 2.5 watts of electricity.

Raspberry PI

A Korean company HardKernal has come out with this little board computer Odroid U3 .  It is quite powerful and runs on a quadcore 1.7 Ghz Exynos processor and has 2 Gb of RAM the great plus point is it cost $59 and consumes very little electricity. Its quite powerful and small.

Odroid U3

The real power of computing when it comes to SOCs is brought by the Parallella board

Parallella has two Zynq-7000 series Dual core ARM A-9 CPU along with 16 or a 64 core Epiphany Multicore Accelarator  with 1Gb of RAM the most amazing thing about the small single board computer is that the 66 core version can actually deliver a processing power of 90GigaFLOPS consuming around 5 Watts of power . Now that's the performance of a very powerful computer that would cost someone thousands of dollars.


                So the above three are the examples of things that are going to come in the world of technology computers will be cheaper much faster and more affordable to everyone . This being Free Hardware would help engineers study, copy , modify and build better single board computers anywhere in the world.

           Also in all three computers the processors that are used are ARM RISC processors which consume far lesser electricity and are much cheaper than x86 processors made by Intel or AMD.

       These computers being cheaper will make computing a reality in many parts of world like South Asia,Africa and parts of South America.

Energy from underwater winds

Tidal energy using underwater kites to harness the energy of the ocean tides can be great solution to world energy problems when the issues of cost and effect of salty water on underground kites are effectively addressed. The video link below shows an example of how tidal energy works.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qCDRj8TE9Y

     

                   Water being far more denser than air the tides in sea and ocean would produce lot more energy per square meter as compared to wind . Also the scope of the utilization of this energy source can be huge as  most of the earth is all ocean ,however this energy would be generated only upto a few hundread kilometer distance from land and going too far away from the land would add to costs. Looking at this it makes us think why in hell we are burning coal, natural gases etc when there is immense energy available from the sun, wind,hydel and tidal energy why didn't we tap these sources of energy first.

        Here in this video you will find another example of how tidal power can be used for producing energy and mind you 100% clean energy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9jGis5V5LE

      The unique feature of tidal energy is that it is the only source of energy that does not depend on the solar radiation for producing electricity. The tides in the ocean are produced by the gravitational effects of the sun and moon. This energy is enough to produce billions of watts of energy across the world.

         India would be highly benifitted by this source of energy since it has a very long costline and when we do have an honest and transparent govenrment  in place we can focus on R&D in this field and be totally free from using fossil fuels for energy needs, This would also save us from the pollution that may be produced when we use natural gas or coal for fuel.

     

Technology for humanity

    We say we are intelligent living beings the highest living organisms in the world and indeed that is true. From 0 knowledge a few thousand years ago man has come up today and the knowledge of humankind is virtually infinite as compared to other animals we send rockets to space ,send probes that go to study various planets,the sun and comets of our solar system. We keep an eye of what's happening in the universe with powerful telescopes and study the objects that existed thousands of years ago since the light from these objects has taken thousands of years to reach us here on earth. We know how our bodies are formed how we were concieved our bodies developed in the womb of our mothers. From making one or two claculations per minute we built computers to do billions and trillions of calculations per second.

           And inspite of such high advances we are still fighting with each other there are wars and we use our highly intelligent brains to manufacture weapons that can efficiently kill millions at one go ,we make machines that does the work of thousands of men so inspite of us saying that there is development there is hunger poverty economic inequality hatred and violence in the world. The two world wars saw the best minds in the world building weapons to kill lots of people at one go the reasult deaths of millions total destruction of many nations.

                      Knowledge and technology when it leads to economic inequality is useless technology should be such that it erases the economic boundaries , it should make poverty history and more importantly brings peace ,happiness and wisdom in the world.

            

                   

          

3D printing

Although 3D printing has been around for quite a long time it is now becoming a buzzword the social networking sites and Internet are abuzz of stuff being 3D printed. Here is an example of what 3D printing can lead to.

The video above shows a 3D printed prefabricated house ,we can print mementos,sculptures ,plates ,dishes using a 3D printer.

There are 3D printers that are being developed that are printing metal objects so we will have some or many of our kitchen utensils made out of 3d printers.

The real exiting stuff about 3d printing is that scientists are now planning to make human tissue cells out of 3d printers and NASA  is now embarking on a project to 3D print food for astronauts in space and make the technology cost effective enough to 3D print food for people where there is scarcity of food. If successful this will change the way we live imagine having a 3D printer where as raw materials you put in the basic ingredients put the choice of your dish and  the flavour ,calorie content and nutritional value  and the 3D printer will print the dish as per order .

The advantages of 3D printing will be many fold first of all people would be able to print out whatever they want at their homes rather that  go shopping for that product. In time 3D printers will get cheaper and will be affordable to more and more people.

One can visit Youtube and see videos of various kinds of 3D printing done there are people who want to 3d print homes also  shoes are being 3d printed.

3D printing is process in which a computer model of a desired object is printed layer by layer in many cases the raw materials is plastic or fine steel powder.

This is one technology about which we will hear and see more and more as time rolls on and it is very much possible that it may have a considerable impact in the way we live and do things.
Do check the video below.

3D printing metallic objects

      

     

Visual Perception

    There are events in nature that are very fast ,there are events that are very slow while there are others that can be perceived as neither too fast or too slow what we call in common terms normal pace.


         While we have 5 senses to perceive things and events around us viz. touch, see,hear,taste and smell there is also one more sense known as the sixth sense that let us know things that may happen it is used highly but in scientific terms very little is known about it. However this post will focus on visual perception.


         For our eye to see some event in continuous motion on a video screen it has to have at least 24 frames displayed one after another at continuous time intervals ,now there are events that are too fast to see like in sports a ball hitting a bat or what happens when a boxer lands a punch on his opponents face. With the help of high speed cameras this problem is solved however the term high speed may confuse people. Actually High Speed cameras are nothing but cameras that can record a very high number of frames per second in order of 2000 fps. Once this recording is done the video can be played back at normal 24 fps thus a one second video would now be played in 83.33 seconds so an event that occurred at 1/100th of a second can be seen easily and this has lead to many new findings in the field of sport.


        In cricket it can be seen that when a ball hits the bat at high velocity the bat moves at the point of impact for a very short span of time this fact was totally unknown to everyone before the advent of high speed cameras. In the same sport there was a rule that if at the point of delivery a bowler's hand straightens  by a certain angle that particular delivery would be considered illegal and the bowler would be warned for chucking. It was 5 degrees for spinners,10 degrees for medium pacers and 15 degrees for fast bowlers. When biomechanics study was done with the help of modern high speed cameras it was found that almost every bowler subconsciously ends up straightening  his arm at the point of delivery there was a famous chucking incident involving ace Sri Lankan spinner Muttaiah Muralidharan where he was called by the umpire for chucking. Thankfully his team-mates,his captain  and board backed him and when video analysis were done on all bowlers it showed that Murali straightened the arm as much as other bowlers did although at normal pace the videos tell a different story even a bowler with copybook action like Glenn McGrath was found to be straightening his arm by more than 15 degrees at times. Had it not been for high speed cameras the racist umpire could have ended up ending Murali's carrear right there and after that Muralidharan went on to become a great bowler picking up 800 wickets in his entire carrear.


          Also high speed cameras are used to by various authorities to ascertain whether a person is speaking the truth or not while questioning him/her taking the high speed images of their subconscious facial reactions and then watching it at normal speed.


          Now talking about events that are slow in nature like the growth of a tree in that case a normal camera may be used and programmed and installed in such a way that it would take 1 photograph an hour and stay in the very same position focused on a plant now after a certain point of time when the plant has grown to a certain extent the images and then taken and played at normal 24 fps the view of the video one would get is that as if he is able to see the plant grow slowly in a matter of minutes. Such cameras are also installed at construction site the rate of taking photographs maybe varied as per necessity but again when the video is played one can see how the construction of a building or stadium is done in a matter of minutes without any focus on unnecessary parts.

Rakesh

GNU (GNU is Not Unix)

       As the title of these blog suggests the full form of GNU is GNU is Not Unix.The father of Free Software Movement Richard Stallman started the Free Software Foundation in 1983. There is an interesting description he gives as to why he started the Free Software Foundation , while working at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s he says they lived in an Free Software Enviroment there were lots of operating systems and other software with source codes available alongwith freedom to modify and distribute them in the community  but by the 1980s things changed and free software kept disappearing and the enviroment changed to more of proprietry software which Stallman felt was ugly , morally ugly.

           So Richard Stallman started the Free Software Foundation in 1983 with a goal to make it possible to use software and have freedom. For that to be practicle they needed an Operating System that was Free the only free OS at that time was PDP 10 which was obsolete in 1980s and so was many of the software that they had previously written.

         So they decided to build an operating system that was UNIX like and was totally FREE. For this the GNU project was started to build the GNU operating system.The following question was asked to Richard Stallman regarding the journey of  building the GNU OS (it is followed by the detailed answer given by RMS)

What was the journey to develop GNU/Linux like?

We had to start from a point that was just a little more than zero, and work our way up to freedom. There were a few free programs in 1983 when I started GNU, but those were in no way near a whole OS. There was a lot of work to do, and during the 1980s, we did it. There are hundreds of components that you need to have a UNIX-like OS, even at the most basic level. A few components we found with somebody else, who wrote them for different reasons, but were free software. But the other components we had to develop.

So I wrote some of them, and recruited people to write others, and in some cases, convinced people to develop free programs — for instance, the CSRG (Computer Systems Research Group) at Berkeley. They had written a lot of code to change UNIX, but their code was mixed in AT&T’s code, and so was proprietary. I met them in 1984 and requested them to separate their software and release it as free, which they subsequently did. I wanted to use that code in the GNU system.

By 1992, we had almost the complete GNU system, but one essential component was missing: the kernel. We started developing one in 1990. I chose an advanced design, which gave it somewhat the character of a research project, and it took six years to get a test version. Unfortunately, nobody succeeds every time. But we didn’t have to wait, because in February 1992, Linus Torvalds, who had a proprietary kernel called Linux, decided to make it free. The combination of the Linux kernel with the rest of the GNU system made a complete OS, which was basically GNU, but also contained Linux. So calling it only the Linux OS is wrong; it is the GNU/Linux OS.

 So you see what we call today LINUX  is actually GNU+LINUX it should be described as GNU/LINUX people are of the misconception that it was LINUS Trovalds who started it off Linus provided the Kernel to the GNU project and and GNU/LINUX  came into existence being free is was constantly developed and improved upon  to our present day Fedora,Debian,Android,Ubuntu,Mint and thousands of other distributions of GNU/LINUX .           

          

Solar Power very soon

       In the last few years the price of solar panels has come down drastically at the same time the price of coal and petroleum has shot up even natural gas prices are high and in the coming years they may get even more expensive since petroleum is a limited natural resource non recycle able. As in the previous blog I pointed out whether its wood,coal or petroleum all the sources of energy that we use has come from the energy of the sun so why not tap the original source of energy directly. It has been many decades since solar cells have come into existence these solar cells were till recently very expensive but now the prices have come down to an extent that it is cheaper to have electricity from solar panels than diesel electric generators not only that as the production increases and production processes improve along with improved technology the solar panels will not only be even cheaper but also will be more efficient than the ones today.

There are still huge number of people in developing countries who are devoid of electricity even if electricity is there the quality of electricity is very poor. Solar panels and inverters will end this problem since harnessing solar electricity won't entail laying of power cables all one needs is a solar panel and an inverter to avail the benefits of solar electricity. With solar electricity a certain amount of transmission quality will always be guaranteed. In a country like India which is blessed with lots of sunlight for the entire year where a large section of the population has access to a very bad quality of electricity or no electricity at all this would be a blessing.

The present solar power prices in India are between Rs 7.90 to Rs 10 which are likely to come down to Rs 5-7 in the coming years same as gird electricity charges and just at that point there would be an avalanche of people converting to solar electricity , the world would be vastly benefited from solar energy since it would save millions of tonnes of unrecycleable and pollution producing coal. Solar energy would cause no pollution at all its totally green electricity there is lot of research that is being done in producing cars that runs on electricity those electric cars would be fed by the power generated by solar cells. India has to import hundreds and thousands of tonnes of coal and petroleum this bills would come down with solar power. Also being green the atmosphere of the cities would be much less polluted thus our cities would be far more live able than today should every car , every truck be run totally or partially from electricity harnessed from the sun.

Lets hope the sun be the everlasting solution to our never ending energy problems.