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Today I will show you the miracles of Modern technologies Uninterruptible Power Supplies and Diesel Generators.

Uninterruptible power supplies

UPS systems provide power protection for uninterruptible power supply.

A quality UPS provides redundancy and therefore offers greater protection of any critical equipment.
UPSes are great when you are working on something really important and there is a short power surge or brownout, and in case of a long lasting blackout you can get the machine to suspend, hibernateor shut down when batteries are low.

Of course the UPS can only provide power for a while, typically a few minutes, but that is often enough to ride out power company glitches or short outages. Most UPS units claim a transfer time to battery of about 4ms.

UPS Systems can be custom designed to suit your individual requirements, with long autonomy periods for very stringent specifications required by railway networks, communications systems TV stations, banks, building societies, data centers, hospitals, schools.

UPS traditionally can perform the following functions: absorb relatively small power surges. In addition, some UPS or UPS/software combinations provide the following functions: automatic shutdown of equipment during long power outages.

While the electronics in a UPS are likely to last for quite a while, the batteries will periodically need to be replaced. Batteries in a UPS are not meant to be drained, and when power is restored they normally take a few hours to restore full charge.

Diesel generators

A diesel generator is the combination of a diesel engine with an electrical generator (often called an alternator) to generate electric energy. (wikipedia)

Why buy a diesel generator?

• A diesel generator has a longer life span than other types of fuel (natural gas, propane or gasoline).
• A diesel generator will have a lower acquisition cost as compared to natural gas.
• Maintenance is substantially less than gasoline or natural gas.
• The safety aspect of a diesel generator is also substantial.
• The diesel used in a diesel generator set is not flammable as it must be compressed in order to ignite.
• Diesel Generators are more reliable since they operate by using compression ignition and natural gas generators require spark ignition.

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Force Dynamics has tweaked their 301 Driving Simulator to cater for Super Mario Kart, allowing the chair to let the driver experience what it feels like when making one’s way through the wacky and imaginative world of all the courses in the SNES hit. Heck, even when your character makes a jump, the 301 chair itself will even leap up accordingly, so make sure you do not take anything heavy before having a go at this. Granted, the graphics are worlds apart compared to Mario Kart Wii, but this is more immersive and fun compared to holding the Wii Wheel, right?

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Every Grand Theft Auto IV review is heaping a lot of praise on the game, and I hope that I can find out what the big deal is. I’m about two hours into the game, and I just wanted to share some first impressions, before everyone goes out and makes their inevitable purchase. Not to say that you shouldn’t probably buy it, but read on if you want to hear some negatives.

Graphically, the game is a cut above every other GTA title. This is to be expected, since it’s the first time the title has appeared on current-gen systems. As a lifelong New Yorker, it’s quite impressive to drive through neighborhoods you recognize. I also liked being able to identify major landmarks and somewhat navigate using them. I think most people would be happy to just play the past GTA plots with a graphical re-tread; those folks will be happy with this aspect.

Character’s faces aren’t life-like, but given the animation, it’s quite something that their voices are synced up with their lips.

Driving around is much better than before, in the sense that you now can navigate by GPS. It seemed like more than half the time the route would be automatically plotted out for you. But you can also go into the map and set up a waypoint for yourself. Either way, a computer voice will keep you on the right track, kind of like in real-life. That eliminates one of my biggest issues with the ever-expanding cityscapes. Now, it’s actually possible to maneuver through this massive world.

The game’s taken advantage of some more of the trappings of modern life. You’ll use a mobile phone practically from the get-go, TV and radio stations reference the War on Terror, and you’ll see a character using the Internet. I can only imagine there will be more things that are immediately recognizable.

Given that this is set up as an epic experience, two hours is clearly just scratching the surface, and I’m going to reserve judgment until I get much further in the title. But there were some things that really frustrated me, which I hope will be fixed. Or, perhaps I’ll just grow to accept this game’s limitations.

The characters aren’t a stereotype we’re used to embracing, and it’s going to take me a while to get used to. The Cold War is a long way’s off now, but it’s still much easier for me to think of Russians as enemies. Although the accent is probably done by an actual Russian-American or Russian who speaks English, it sounds like anyone could do it. And while it’s not exactly grating, it also isn’t an accent that I thought, “Great. I’ll become this person for 50 hours.” I’d rather be part of a more common crime syndicate. Probably because the Italian mob has been so well portrayed in movies, I’ve always stood by GTA: Vice City.

The music is also rather annoying. I think most gamers have gotten used to recognizing most of the music in GTA, and moving to modern-day music (I guess) has left me out in the cold. I’d like the default to be no music. Or perhaps just the talk radio/ads, because they retain the classic GTA charm.

Two hours in, I’m not sold yet. As I said earlier, I’m really hoping that GTA IV will be every bit as good as other reviewers have made it out to be. But in a movie length’s worth of work, this experience doesn’t have the same stranglehold that even the PSP versions of GTA had.

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Five LEDs indicate the degree of breath danger, from kissable to deadly!

Kissme measures the hydrogen sulfide level in your breath and the 5 LEDs light up depending on the level.

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Security vendors are more than a little upset over a new contest being introduced to the Defcon hacker conference this year. The contest is called The Race to Zero and the following is an excerpt explaining what the contestants have to do, taken from the Race to Zero website:

The event involves contestants being given a sample set of viruses and malcode to modify and upload through the contest portal. The portal passes the modified samples through a number of antivirus engines and determines if the sample is a known threat. The first team or individual to pass their sample past all antivirus engines undetected wins that round. Each round increases in complexity as the contest progresses.

The contest page also clearly states that the aim is not to create new viruses and that nothing will be released outside of the bounds of the contest. Instead they are just hoping the contest is “fun” for participants.

Security companies, such as Trend Micro, do not agree with the existence of the contest and see it as encouragement to hackers as well as a teaching exercise to improve their skills. Paul Ferguson, researcher at TrendMicro commented:

It will do more harm than good … Responsible disclosure is one thing, but now actually encouraging people to do this as a contest is a little over the top.

Roger Thompson, chief research officer at AVG Technologies also commented, saying:

It’s hard to see an upside for encouraging people to write more viruses … It’s a dumb idea.

Defcon 16 is set to run between August 8-10 at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas.

Read more at PCWorld.com

Matthew’s Opinion

I think there are 2 ways of looking at a contest like this. Ultimately you are allowing a group of people to use and improve their abilities to hack and create software that can bypass security.

On the one hand this is not to be encouraged because it creates new viruses, which the security vendors then have to deal with. On the other hand, these people may end up being the employees at the security vendors, ensuring the protection can prevent the viruses from succeeding in their quest to infect.

I think it’s less about the contest itself and more about how the people taking part are treated and educated. If the contest is clearly highlighting the threats and encouraging the contestants to use their knowledge in a White Hat capacity, then it may serve a future purpose for the careers of the winners at least. If instead it’s just a contest where you are rewarding virus creation, then the security vendors have every reason to be upset.

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I’m a huge, huge Flip camera fan, but if I had money to spend and a really serendipitous life where there was good stuff to record more often than not, I’d invest in Sony’s Handycam camcorder, HDR-TG1. This hot little device will be available on May 30, 2008, in time for summer fun, the wedding season, vacations, and all your sun-filled adventures.

The HDR-TG1 is a small and slim titanium encased camcorder that delivers full HD 1920 x 1080 resolution video recording. In spite of this device being enormously sexy, expensive, and seemingly fragile, it’s actually built for taking everywhere and for the fumble fingers in all of us. The titanium body is protected with Premium Hard Coating to provide resistance to even the smallest scratches.

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Here we are with the DXG-569V HD camcorder which won’t break the bank with its $169 price tag. While it won’t do full HD, it is still capable of recording HD video up to 1,280 x 720 at 30 fps for crystal clear memories, although the 32MB of internal memory will fill up faster than you can get a decent clip in. Thankfully, they have included an SD/SDHC memory card slot which ought to go a long way in helping you preserve memories in HD. Other features are as follows :-

• 3″ TFT display
• 5 megapixel CMOS sensor for still image shooting
• Digital voice recorder
• Mass storage device capability
• TV-out
• 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios

The color choice isn’t too exciting though, with only silver or black at your disposal. I wonder what the battery life is like, since writing/reading memory cards can be pretty power intensive (from my experience so far).

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The Samsung MyShot offers a 1.3 Megapixel Camera as well as the following features:

* operates on 1.7/2.1GHz CDMA Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum
* advanced voice recognition
* speakerphone
* Bluetooth
* downloadable content
* WAP enabled
* Display: 65k CSTN, 96 X 96 pixels
* Main Display: 128 x 160 pixels, 262k CSTN, 1.9″
* External Display: 96 x 96 pixels, 65k CSTN, 1.0″

Via MobileBurn.

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by Darren Murph, posted Apr 28th 2008 at 8:20AM
What’s a flagging microprocessor company to do after an absolutely tumultuous 2007 (and start to 2008)? Why, dish out its own desktop family, of course! At least that’s what AMD is reckoning judging by the abrupt introduction of the Business Class desktop. Obviously the firm’s very first computer brand, the series is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, but it’s noted that even the “biggest corporate clients” can find something to love. The company is planning to move the units via Acer, HP, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and Lenovo, and they’ll be available with Athlon X2 dual-core, Phenom X3 triple-core and Phenom X4 quad-core CPUs. Oh, and if you’re own outfit is totally over these “desktops,” AMD is looking to unveil Business Class laptops during the second half of 2008.

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