Saturday, October 29, 2011

RAINFOREST


Hi friends today i like to share details about rain forest.

These amazing places cover only 6 % of the Earth's surface but yet they contain MORE THAN 1/2 of the world's plant and animal species!

RAINFOREST name came because of the high amount of rainfall it gets per year. Rainforest is famous for tall and dense jungle.Rainforests are found in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Central and South America. The largest rainforest in the world is the Amazon rainforest in South America.

Tropical rainforests have been called the "jewels of the Earth" and the "world's largest pharmacy". Rainforests are also responsible for 28% of the world's oxygen turnover, sometimes misnamed oxygen production. The undergrowth in a rainforest is restricted in many areas by the poor penetration of sunlight to ground level. There are two types of rainforest, tropical rainforest and temperate rainforest.

Tropical rainforest are associated with the location of the monsoon trough,found in the equatorial zone (between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn). Tropical rainforest is present in Southeast Asia (from Myanmar (Burma) to Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and northeastern Australia), Sri Lanka, sub-Saharan Africa from Cameroon to the Congo (Congo Rainforest), South America (e.g. the Amazon Rainforest), Central America (e.g. Bosawás, southern Yucatán Peninsula-El Peten-Belize-Calakmul), and on many of the Pacific Islands (such as Hawaiʻi). Tropical rainforests have been called the "Earth's lungs".
Temperate rainforest are rainforests in temperate regions. They occur in North America (in the Pacific Northwest, the British Columbia Coast and in the inland rainforest of the Rocky Mountain Trench east of Prince George), in Europe (parts of the British Isles such as the coastal areas of Ireland and Scotland, southern Norway, parts of the western Balkans along the Adriatic coast, as well as in the North West of Spain and coastal areas of the eastern Black Sea, including Georgia and coastal Turkey), in East Asia (in southern China, Taiwan, much of Japan and Korea, and on Sakhalin Island and the adjacent Russian Far East coast), in South America (southern Chile) and also in Australia and New Zealand.

A tropical rainforest is typically divided into four main layers, they are
Emergent layer, Canopy layer, Understorey layer, Forest floor.

The emergent layer contains a small number of very large trees called emergents, towering as much as 200 feet above the forest floor, a few species will grow to 70–80 m tall.They need to be able to withstand the hot temperatures and strong winds that occur above the canopy in some areas. Eagles, butterflies, bats and certain monkeys inhabit this layer.

The canopy layer contains the majority of the largest trees.This is the primary layer of the forest and forms a roof over the two remaining layers. Most canopy trees have smooth, oval leaves that come to a point. It's a maze of leaves and branches.  Many animals live in this area since food is abundant.

The understorey layer lies between the canopy and the forest floor. The understorey (or understory) is home to a number of birds, snakes and lizards, as well as predators such as jaguars, boa constrictors and leopards. The leaves are much larger at this level. Insect life is also abundant. Many seedlings that will grow to the canopy level are present in the understorey. Only about 5% of the sunlight shining on the rainforest canopy reaches the understorey.

The forest floor, the bottom-most layer, receives only 2% of the sunlight. Only plants adapted to low light can grow in this region. Away from riverbanks, swamps and clearings, where dense undergrowth is found, the forest floor is relatively clear of vegetation because of the low sunlight penetration. It also contains decaying plant and animal matter, which disappears quickly, because the warm, humid conditions promote rapid decay. Many forms of fungi growing here help decay the animal and plant waste.

Friday, October 21, 2011

VENICE


Hi friends, today i want to share information about Venice.

Venice is one of the most lovely places in the world. Venice city is situated on the bank of canal in Italy. Venice is famous all over the world for the canals.The most famous is the area comprising the 118 islands in the main districts that are called "Sestieri" and they are: Cannaregio, Castello, Dorsoduro, San Polo, Santa Croce and San Marco, where the main monuments and sights are located. They used to transportation by canals. Gondola is the classical venetian boat which was used as a major source of transport in the olden days. Venice being a place on water. The bridges in the city takes an important place in every visitor's list, such as the Bridge of sighs.The place gets it name from the sighs of the prisoner who were taken to the prison cell from the doge's palace. This bridge connects the doge's palace to the prison cell.


Foundations

The buildings of Venice are constructed on closely spaced wooden piles. Most of these piles are still intact after centuries of submersion. The foundations rest on the piles, and buildings of brick or stone sit above these footings. The piles penetrate a softer layer of sand and mud until they reach a much harder layer of compressed clay.

Submerged by water, in oxygen-poor conditions, wood does not decay as rapidly as on the surface. It is petrified as a result of the constant flow of mineral-rich water around and through it, so that it becomes a stone-like structure.[citation needed]



History of Venetian Masks

In 1162 Doge Vitale Michieli triumphed over Ulrich II of Treven and an annual celebration to commemorate the occasion was commenced. The first documented usage of Venetian masks in conjunction with the annual celebration was in 1268.

As Venice grew in popularity as a tourist destination through the middle ages the city became known as a pleasure palace. During this period the popularity of masks grew as prominent social figures dawned disguises to conceal their identities as they performed unscrupulous and immoral acts in pursuit of carnal pleasures.

During the 16th through 18th century Venetian Masks became the signature of the Commedia Dell'arte. The Commedia Dell'arte were popular plays in the form of improvisational theater that were performed by theater companies that traveled the Italian peninsula producing comedies involving the topics of adultery, jealousy, and love.

Several of Venice's  popular mask forms such as the Capitano, the Paglianccio(clown), the Pulcinella (the mascot of Naples), and Zanni (the threadbare old servant of Venice) were shaped in character in the traveling road show known as the Commedia dell'arte.

On October 17, 1797 Venice became part of the Kingdom of the Lombardy-Venetia (Austria). When the Austrians took control of the city masked celebrations were outlawed.  :-(  Venetian masks faded into obscurity.

The tradition of mask making was not rekindled until 1979 when some undergraduate art students revived the tradition in an effort to profit from the tourism trade in the city. And a successful endeavor it turned out to be. In less than 30 years the artisan profession has flourished and now masks and Venice are synonymous.

The history of the Venetian Mask is nearly as colorful as the masks themselves.

Friday, October 14, 2011

HYUNDAI EON STARTING AT RS. 2.69 LAKH


Hi Friends Hyundai Launched EON that has been developed specifically for the Indian market, at an introductory price of between Rs 2.69 lakh and Rs 3.71 lakh.The Eon, which will compete with Maruti Suzuki India's best selling model Alto, is powered by a 814 Cc petrol engine.

In Hyundai EON exterior and the dimensions are concerned, the Hyundai EON is taller and wider than Maruti Alto. With its latest technology and supreme styling EON is expected to grab the market

Hyundai claims that EON will set a new benchmark in the Indian market with regard to styling, performance, safety and convenience. The car has been conceived, designed and developed over four years, keeping the Indian consumer's preferences in mind.

The Hyundai Eon is a small car that has been specially designed as a low cost car. According to reports the Hyundai Eon will be costing just over Rs.2 lakhs. The price will be distinctly higher than the Tata Nano, a car that has lost its image primarily for its low price.

To save costs and to keep the price competitive, some parts from the Santro and i10 have been carried over into the Eon. Hyundai has also decided to offer a variant with a driver's airbag and a front passenger airbag will also be available, though that might be offered later. Its size and the new 800cc engine that it will sport position it bang-on with the competition in the ‘A' and entry ‘B' segment cars. The new engine is a 814cc, 3-cylinder, SOHC unit that has been tuned to provide a combination of peppy performance and frugal habits.

Generating a peak power of 56PS at 5,500 rpm and a peak torque of 7.65 KgM at 4,000 rpm, the Eon's engine manages to beat the current benchmark – Alto – convincingly. The Alto's 800cc engine manages 47 PS of peak power at 6,200 rpm and a peak torque of 6.3 KgM at 3,000 rpm. For a 3-cylinder unit, the Eon's engine manages to be fairly refined under steady acceleration and gets a bit gruffy and audible only at high revs. I felt minor levels of vibration at the steering wheel and door panels. It is a fairly rev-happy engine and there are a number of tech bits in it to keep weight low and improve performance. Components like a plastic intake manifold, roller rockers arms, low friction coated piston and rings, and a plastic head cover have been chosen for improving the engine's efficiency.

Compared to the Alto's claimed 19.73 kmpl, Hyundai engineers claim that the Eon's engine will be capable of delivering a fuel efficiency of 21.1 kmpl.

The engine is paired to the same gearbox from the Santro Xing. Gear shifts are quick, but the shift quality was a bit rubbery. Ratios seemed to have been set largely for urban driving conditions, but I would have liked a bit more of low-end torque in each gear slot.

Friday, October 7, 2011

STEVE JOBS SPEECH AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY


This is often labelled as one of the most inspirational speeches given by corporate CEOs. This speech was delivered by Steve Jobs at Stanford University in 2005. May his soul rest in peace.

I am honoured to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?"  They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumour on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumour. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.


Thursday, October 6, 2011

WAVES AND INFORMATION TRANSFER


There are waves all around us. There’s elec­tro­mag­netic waves, mechan­i­cal waves, and var­i­ous other types of waves. They trans­fer information/energy all over the planet. You don’t nec­es­sar­ily see them, but they’re there. There’s light waves, sound waves, radio waves, microwaves, etc. They trans­fer infor­ma­tion from one piece of mat­ter to the next. As the “Cir­cle of Life” goes through its motion, infor­ma­tion is trans­ferred in every pos­si­ble direc­tion. This infor­ma­tion (or energy) trans­fer is fueled at its core by the “Cre­ation and Destruc­tion Prin­ci­ple”. This infor­ma­tion (or energy) is the basis for com­pe­ti­tion.  It’s the basis of Evo­lu­tion. We get a lot of this energy/information from the light waves com­ing to Earth from the Sun.

Have you ever heard of the “But­tle­fly Effect”? This states that the small­est move­ment of a but­ter­fly can be felt across the world. This is often spo­ken about in regards to Chaos The­ory. What this really means is that the small­est move­ment made by any piece of mat­ter will trans­fer pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive energy to another piece of mat­ter. This has a cas­cad­ing affect as it then trans­fers from every other piece of mat­ter. Even air is mat­ter. When you move, you’re trans­fer­ring kinetic energy into the air. The wind that you make is your energy being trans­ferred against the air.

Have you ever been in a pool and got splashed? The per­son who splashed you either trans­fered their stored energy by jump­ing in,  or they used their kinetic energy to move their arm to splash the water, which then trans­ferred it to you.  Energy is trans­ferred and absorbed by every­thing it comes into con­tact with.

When you trans­fer your energy, you are send­ing infor­ma­tion. You are either send­ing pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive energy (pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive infor­ma­tion). The inter­est­ing thing about pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive energy is that pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive is inter­preted dif­fer­ently by each piece of mat­ter that receives that energy.

Your def­i­n­i­tion of pos­i­tive is based on your per­cep­tion. Some­one else may inter­pret pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive dif­fer­ently than you. If you emit pos­i­tive energy and some­one receives it as pos­i­tive, you are left with pos­i­tive energy.  You both record a pos­i­tive thought in your mind. If you emit neg­a­tiv­ity, you’ll prob­a­bly get neg­a­tiv­ity back and that neg­a­tive mem­ory is stored in both of your minds.

You can see this in math.

    * 2+2=4 (Two pos­i­tives equal a pos­i­tive. This is creation).
    * 2 + (-2) = 0 (If  equal, a pos­i­tive and a neg­a­tive cre­ates bal­ance, or no growth, or no loss).
    * (-2) + (-2) = –4 (Two neg­a­tives equal a neg­a­tive. This is destruction).

When you speak, you’re send­ing sound waves. When you lis­ten, you’re receiv­ing sound waves. This form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion was one of the key fac­tors for our evo­lu­tion­ary growth. When you see, you’re see­ing light waves. All of these waves are car­ry­ing infor­ma­tion to you. This infor­ma­tion get’s processed, and stored as a mem­ory in your sub­con­scious.  This infor­ma­tion is stored in your brain matter.

You have a spi­ral wave that runs through you.  It’s gen­er­ated by your heart.  Your heart cre­ates an oscil­lat­ing pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive charge that rep­re­sents your heart­beat.  This heart­beat is an elec­tro­mag­netic wave.  This cre­ates a large elec­tro­mag­netic field around you. Whether or not you real­ize it, you’re emit­ting a pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive wave at all times. The Sci­ence of the Heart can be read about more at http://www.heartmath.org.

Have you ever seen what hap­pens when two waves col­lide? They cre­ate a larger wave.  That larger wave can be pos­i­tively charged or it can be neg­a­tively charged. This is why we’re com­pelled to com­pete for a com­pet­i­tive mate or part­ner.  You want to end up with two pos­i­tive waves. We don’t like fight­ing because we end up with a larger neg­a­tively charged wave. Do you notice the way a surfer is rid­ing with the wave? They’re going in the same direc­tion. Do you notice that when peo­ple fight they’re fight­ing in oppo­site direc­tions? These are two forms of mat­ter that emit elec­tro­mag­netic waves, either pos­i­tively (same direc­tion) or neg­a­tively (opposing).

We’re dri­ven by the “Cre­ation and Destruc­tion Prin­ci­ple” to com­pete and pro­duce the best infor­ma­tion.  That’s why we want our mate suc­cess­ful, good look­ing, smart, in shape, etc, etc.  All of these pos­i­tive traits may be val­ued by each per­son dif­fer­ently, but they all pro­vide value in the com­pe­ti­tion of life. That “drive” you see in some­one is their sur­vival instinct.  This is their will to live. It’s the cre­ative side of the Cre­ation and Destruc­tion Prin­ci­ple.  This comes from the elec­tro­mag­netic energy gen­er­ated by your heart.

Bio­log­i­cally, we get mar­ried, find a part­ner, have fam­i­lies, look for strong com­pa­nies to work for, etc.  We’re look­ing for pos­i­tive waves (based on our per­cep­tion) to help us com­pete in the “Cir­cle of Life”.  There have even been stud­ies that show that two peo­ple in happy con­ver­sa­tion would syn­chro­nize their heart­beat and brain­waves.  These peo­ple even syn­chro­nize not only their own heart­beat and brain­waves, but also each other’s. This allows us to be “in-tune” and happy (2 pos­i­tives equal a positive).

Under­stand­ing the “Cre­ation and Destruc­tion Prin­ci­ple” allows you to under­stand how to be in-tune with every­thing around you.  The world is fluid, not sta­tic. If you start look­ing at the world as mat­ter with vary­ing lev­els of con­scious­ness, that emit pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive energy, while fight­ing the com­pe­ti­tion called the “Cir­cle of Life”,  you’ll see what I see. If you see all mat­ter (rocks, trees, ani­mals, peo­ple) as refrac­tions of a larger con­scious­ness, then you’ll see the world as I do.

If you’ve ever won­dered why you nat­u­rally like music and danc­ing, this is why.  You’re try­ing to become in tune with the “Cre­ation and Destruc­tion” force.  That’s why the hairs on your arm or neck raise when you sense some­thing pos­i­tive.  This is why you’ve heard some­one prac­tic­ing Yoga say “OMMMM”.

This prin­ci­ple is the foun­da­tion of mar­tial arts too. You see this in Aikido and other mar­tial arts that use an opponent’s energy against them. This is why we like watch­ing com­pe­ti­tion. We seek this bal­ance in oth­ers. We find beauty, are impressed with, and pre­fer to see that bal­ance emit­ted from that life form phys­i­cally, men­tally, vocally, etc.

Do you notice we don’t like cheaters, quit­ters, and unsports­man­like con­duct. We don’t pre­fer the destruc­tive side. But what we don’t real­ize is, the destruc­tive side is nec­es­sary.  It’s not always bad. In fact “over cre­ation” is bad. You can’t have a win­ner with­out a loser. You can’t have a loser with­out a winner.

You’re seek­ing bal­ance, but do you notice you would rather be happy? You would rather laugh than cry. Bio­log­i­cally, you are pro­grammed to seek the pos­i­tive side of the “Cre­ation And Destruc­tion Prin­ci­ple”. You are seek­ing the pos­i­tive side of that wave. This leads to you orga­niz­ing more and more infor­ma­tion, by trans­fer­ring energy to other mat­ter, which leads to com­pe­ti­tion, which leads to the “Cir­cle of Life”, which leads to Evo­lu­tion.  This force has been around as long as the Uni­verse has.

In my next post I’ll dis­cuss why part­ner­ing is impor­tant if you wish to com­pete in the “Cir­cle of Life”. I’ll show you how other life forms accom­plish part­ner­ing as well.

- Trevor Kagin

STEVE JOBS DEATH

Hi friends

The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Steve Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage.

The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage.

Mr. Jobs had waged a long and public struggle with cancer, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.

He underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple's chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company's affairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier.

"I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's C.E.O., I would be the first to let you know," Mr. Jobs said in a letter released by the company. "Unfortunately, that day has come."

By then, having mastered digital technology and capitalized on his intuitive marketing sense, Mr. Jobs had largely come to define the personal computer industry and an array of digital consumer and entertainment businesses centered on the Internet. He had also become a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion.

Eight years after founding Apple, Mr. Jobs led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making personal computers easier to use. After a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling-out with his chief executive, John Sculley, he returned in 1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after another - the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. These transformed not only product categories like music players and cellphones but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.

During his years outside Apple, he bought a tiny computer graphics spinoff from the director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and animators that became Pixar Animation Studios.

Starting with "Toy Story" in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit movies, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form enjoyed by children and adults worldwide.

Mr. Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.

It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.

"He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force without parallel," wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book "Insanely Great," which chronicles the creation of the Mac. "Tom Sawyer could have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs."

"Toy Story," for example, took four years to make while Pixar struggled, yet Mr. Jobs never let up on his colleagues. "'You need a lot more than vision - you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course," said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar. "In Steve's case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward."

Mr. Jobs was the ultimate arbiter of Apple products, and his standards were exacting. Over the course of a year he tossed out two iPhone prototypes, for example, before approving the third, and began shipping it in June 2007.

To his understanding of technology he brought an immersion in popular culture. In his 20s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30th birthday party. His worldview was shaped by the '60s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up, the adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When he graduated from high school in Los Altos in 1972, he said, "the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there."

After dropping out of Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Ore., in 1972, Mr. Jobs led a countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics - even people who knew him well, including his wife - could never understand.

Decades later he flew around the world in his own corporate jet, but he maintained emotional ties to the period in which he grew up. He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When discussing the Silicon Valley's lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned in the same breath the invention of the microchip and "The Whole Earth Catalog," a 1960s counterculture publication.

Apple's very name reflected his unconventionality. In an era when engineers and hobbyists tended to describe their machines with model numbers, he chose the name of a fruit, supposedly because of his dietary habits at the time.

Coming on the scene just as computing began to move beyond the walls of research laboratories and corporations in the 1970s, Mr. Jobs saw that computing was becoming personal - that it could do more than crunch numbers and solve scientific and business problems - and that it could even be a force for social and economic change. And at a time when hobbyist computers were boxy wooden affairs with metal chassis, he designed the Apple II as a sleek, low-slung plastic package intended for the den or the kitchen. He was offering not just products but a digital lifestyle.

He put much stock in the notion of "taste," a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of "trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing."

Regis McKenna, a longtime Silicon Valley marketing executive to whom Mr. Jobs turned in the late 1970s to help shape the Apple brand, said Mr. Jobs's genius lay in his ability to simplify complex, highly engineered products, "to strip away the excess layers of business, design and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained."

Mr. Jobs's own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want."

Early Interests
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 1955, and put up for adoption by his biological parents, Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, a graduate student from Syria who became a political science professor. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs.

The elder Mr. Jobs, who worked in finance and real estate before returning to his original trade as a machinist, moved his family down the San Francisco Peninsula to Mountain View and then to Los Altos in the 1960s.

Mr. Jobs developed an early interest in electronics. He was mentored by a neighbor, an electronics hobbyist, who built Heathkit do-it-yourself electronics projects. He was brash from an early age. As an eighth grader, after discovering that a crucial part was missing from a frequency counter he was assembling, he telephoned William Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Mr. Hewlett spoke with the boy for 20 minutes, prepared a bag of parts for him to pick up and offered him a job as a summer intern.

Mr. Jobs met Mr. Wozniak while attending Homestead High School in neighboring Cupertino. The two took an introductory electronics class there.

The spark that ignited their partnership was provided by Mr. Wozniak's mother. Mr. Wozniak had graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, when she sent him an article from the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine. The article, "Secrets of the Little Blue Box," by Ron Rosenbaum, detailed an underground hobbyist culture of young men known as phone phreaks who were illicitly exploring the nation's phone system.

Mr. Wozniak shared the article with Mr. Jobs, and the two set out to track down an elusive figure identified in the article as Captain Crunch. The man had taken the name from his discovery that a whistle that came in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal was tuned to a frequency that made it possible to make free long-distance calls simply by blowing the whistle next to a phone handset.

Captain Crunch was John Draper, a former Air Force electronic technician, and finding him took several weeks. Learning that the two young hobbyists were searching for him, Mr. Draper appeared one day in Mr. Wozniak's Berkeley dormitory room. Mr. Jobs, who was still in high school, had traveled to Berkeley for the meeting. When Mr. Draper arrived, he entered the room saying simply, "It is I!"

Based on information they gleaned from Mr. Draper, Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs later collaborated on building and selling blue boxes, devices that were widely used for making free - and illegal - phone calls. They raised a total of $6,000 from the effort.

After enrolling at Reed College in 1972, Mr. Jobs left after one semester, but remained in Portland for another 18 months auditing classes. In a commencement address given at Stanford in 2005, he said he had decided to leave college because it was consuming all of his parents' savings.

Leaving school, however, also freed his curiosity to follow his interests. "I didn't have a dorm room," he said in his Stanford speech, "so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on."

He returned to Silicon Valley in 1974 and took a job there as a technician at Atari, the video game manufacturer. Still searching for his calling, he left after several months and traveled to India with a college friend, Daniel Kottke, who would later become an early Apple employee. Mr. Jobs returned to Atari that fall. In 1975, he and Mr. Wozniak, then working as an engineer at H.P., began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, Calif. Personal computing had been pioneered at research laboratories adjacent to Stanford, and it was spreading to the outside world.

"What I remember is how intense he looked," said Lee Felsenstein, a computer designer who was a Homebrew member. "He was everywhere, and he seemed to be trying to hear everything people had to say."

Mr. Wozniak designed the original Apple I computer simply to show it off to his friends at the Homebrew. It was Mr. Jobs who had the inspiration that it could be a commercial product.

In early 1976, he and Mr. Wozniak, using their own money, began Apple with an initial investment of $1,300; they later gained the backing of a former Intel executive, A. C. Markkula, who lent them $250,000. Mr. Wozniak would be the technical half and Mr. Jobs the marketing half of the original Apple I Computer. Starting out in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, they moved the company to a small office in Cupertino shortly thereafter.

In April 1977, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak introduced Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It created a sensation. Faced with a gaggle of small and large competitors in the emerging computer market, Apple, with its Apple II, had figured out a way to straddle the business and consumer markets by building a computer that could be customized for specific applications.

Sales skyrocketed, from $2 million in 1977 to $600 million in 1981, the year the company went public. By 1983 Apple was in the Fortune 500. No company had ever joined the list so quickly.

The Apple III, introduced in May 1980, was intended to dominate the desktop computer market. I.B.M. would not introduce its original personal computer until 1981. But the Apple III had a host of technical problems, and Mr. Jobs shifted his focus to a new and ultimately short-lived project, an office workstation computer code-named Lisa.

An Apocalyptic Moment
By then Mr. Jobs had made his much-chronicled 1979 visit to Xerox's research center in Palo Alto, where he saw the Alto, an experimental personal computer system that foreshadowed modern desktop computing. The Alto, controlled by a mouse pointing device, was one of the first computers to employ a graphical video display, which presented the user with a view of documents and programs, adopting the metaphor of an office desktop.

"It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments," Mr. Jobs said of his visit in a 1995 oral history interview for the Smithsonian Institution. "I remember within 10 minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way someday. It was so obvious once you saw it. It didn't require tremendous intellect. It was so clear."

In 1981 he joined a small group of Apple engineers pursuing a separate project, a lower-cost system code-named Macintosh. The machine was introduced in January 1984 and trumpeted during the Super Bowl telecast by a 60-second commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, that linked I.B.M., by then the dominant PC maker, with Orwell's Big Brother.

A year earlier Mr. Jobs had lured Mr. Sculley to Apple to be its chief executive. A former Pepsi-Cola chief executive, Mr. Sculley was impressed by Mr. Jobs's pitch: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"

He went on to help Mr. Jobs introduce a number of new computer models, including an advanced version of the Apple II and later the Lisa and Macintosh desktop computers. Through them Mr. Jobs popularized the graphical user interface, which, based on a mouse pointing device, would become the standard way to control computers.

But when the Lisa failed commercially and early Macintosh sales proved disappointing, the two men became estranged and a power struggle ensued, and Mr. Jobs lost control of the Lisa project. The board ultimately stripped him of his operational role, taking control of the Lisa project away from, and 1,200 Apple employees were laid off. He left Apple in 1985.

"I don't wear the right kind of pants to run this company," he told a small gathering of Apple employees before he left, according to a member of the original Macintosh development team. He was barefoot as he spoke, and wearing blue jeans.

That September he announced a new venture, NeXT Inc. The aim was to build a workstation computer for the higher-education market. The next year, the Texas industrialist H. Ross Perot invested $20 million in the effort. But it did not achieve Mr. Jobs's goals.

Mr. Jobs also established a personal philanthropic foundation after leaving Apple but soon had a change of heart, deciding instead to spend much of his fortune - $10 million - on acquiring Pixar, a struggling graphics supercomputing company owned by the filmmaker George Lucas.

The purchase was a significant gamble; there was little market at the time for computer-animated movies. But that changed in 1995, when the company, with Walt Disney Pictures, released "Toy Story." That film's box-office receipts ultimately reached $362 million, and when Pixar went public in a record-breaking offering, Mr. Jobs emerged a billionaire. In 2006, the Walt Disney Company agreed to purchase Pixar for $7.4 billion. The sale made Mr. Jobs Disney's largest single shareholder, with about 7 percent of the company's stock.

His personal life also became more public. He had a number of well-publicized romantic relationships, including one with the folk singer Joan Baez, before marrying Laurene Powell. In 1996, a sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, threw a spotlight on her relationship with Mr. Jobs in the novel "A Regular Guy." The two did not meet until they were adults. The novel centered on a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bore a close resemblance to Mr. Jobs. It was not an entirely flattering portrait. Mr. Jobs said about a quarter of it was accurate.

"We're family," he said of Ms. Simpson in an interview with The New York Times Magazine. "She's one of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her every couple of days."

His wife and Ms. Simpson survive him, as do his three children with Ms. Powell, his daughters Eve Jobs and Erin Sienna Jobs and a son, Reed; another daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from a relationship with Chrisann Brennan; and another sister, Patti Jobs.

Return to Apple
Beginning in 1986, Mr. Jobs refocused NeXT from the education to the business market and dropped the hardware part of the company, deciding to sell just an operating system. Although NeXT never became a significant computer industry player, it had a huge impact: a young programmer, Tim Berners-Lee, used a NeXT machine to develop the first version of the World Wide Web at the Swiss physics research center CERN in 1990.

In 1996, after unsuccessful efforts to develop next-generation operating systems, Apple, with Gilbert Amelio now in command, acquired NeXT for $430 million. The next year, Mr. Jobs returned to Apple as an adviser. He became chief executive again in 2000.

Shortly after returning, Mr. Jobs publicly ended Apple's long feud with its archival Microsoft, which agreed to continue developing its Office software for the Macintosh and invested $150 million in Apple.

Once in control of Apple again, Mr. Jobs set out to reshape the consumer electronics industry. He pushed the company into the digital music business, introducing first iTunes and then the iPod MP3 player. The music arm grew rapidly, reaching almost 50 percent of the company's revenue by June 2008.

In 2005, Mr. Jobs announced that he would end Apple's business relationship with I.B.M. and Motorola and build Macintosh computers based on Intel microprocessors.

By then his fight with cancer was publicly known. Apple had announced in 2004 that Mr. Jobs had a rare but curable form of pancreatic cancer and that he had undergone successful surgery. Four years later, questions about his health returned when he appeared at a company event looking gaunt. Afterward, he said he had suffered from a "common bug." Privately, he said his cancer surgery had created digestive problems but insisted they were not life-threatening.

Apple began selling the iPhone in June 2007. Mr. Jobs's goal was to sell 10 million of the handsets in 2008, equivalent to 1 percent of the global cellphone market. The company sold 11.6 million.

Although smartphones were already commonplace, the iPhone dispensed with a stylus and pioneered a touch-screen interface that quickly set the standard for the mobile computing market. Rolled out with much anticipation and fanfare, iPhone rocketed to popularity; by end of 2010 the company had sold almost 90 million units.

Although Mr. Jobs took just a nominal $1 salary when he returned to Apple, his compensation became the source of a Silicon Valley scandal in 2006 over the backdating of millions of shares of stock options. But after a company investigation and one by the Securities and Exchange Commission, he was found not to have benefited financially from the backdating and no charges were brought.

The episode did little to taint Mr. Jobs's standing in the business and technology world. As the gravity of his illness became known, and particularly after he announced he was stepping down, he was increasingly hailed for his genius and true achievement: his ability to blend product design and business market innovation by integrating consumer-oriented software, microelectronic components, industrial design and new business strategies in a way that has not been matched.

If he had a motto, it may have come from "The Whole Earth Catalog," which he said had deeply influenced him as a young man. The book, he said in his commencement address at Stanford in 2005, ends with the admonition "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

"I have always wished that for myself," he said.

 - NDTV News

Monday, October 3, 2011

INDIAN BUREAUCRACY / DEMOCRACY


I remember on how as a school student I used to know "The Preamble" of the Indian constitution by heart and on how as an answer to every question posed about my Country, I would go on to say, India is a Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic! I remember on how parents and teachers explained with immense joy and pride the meaning of each of these terms so that we grow up falling in love with every aspect of this country. As citizens, we are highly educated about the democracy and secularism of the country and we hold our heads high while telling a friend from an other Nation on how "India" stands out, and on how we are run by the people, for the people and are allowed to follow the religion of our choice and on how republic the country is.

Rich or poor, educated or uneducated, young or old, forward caste or scheduled tribe, male or female, high powered industrialist or one amongst the many in the slums - there is just one commitment from the Nation that has bound all the people of the country who are otherwise divided on a few aspects - Democracy.

If it is this Democracy that gives the citizens a choice to choose their professions, contribute ideas to the society they live in, choose their partners, elect the leaders and design their lives, it is the same Democracy that lets a criminal record holder contest and win an election, let a politician's son rape at ease, project that the power of a densely populated candle march or a silent protest is almost nil, the system of reservation being made a joke or lends no ears to the views of its citizens.

Whilst it is with immense pride that Indians carry the tag of being one of the most diverse and multi-cultural people on the planet, this diversity has in store its set of problems that takes the country backwards. Today, what we see in the country is politics of identity. Politicians are no longer leaders. Communal and regional sentiments are what are being used as a key by the ruthless politicians to run their states. This is creating more rifts between the diverse groups. Racism and castes are surprisingly still prevalent in some societies. People say, the Youth of tomorrow can only redefine the current state in the country. There is a firm belief that Young Guns can gun down the bad and the evil and create a friendly and happiness and knowledge enriched Nation.

Every article cribs about "Youth for Democracy". From the time films like Rang De Basanti released, from the time IIM and IIT Graduates showed their face in Politics, from the time Vihrat Kohli lead Indian U-19 team to a World cup Win, from the time Sania Mirza acclaimed world fame in spite of criticism from her Community for her breach of Muslim Sentiments or from the time she bravely stood up to marry a Pakistani to show the power of love and unity over politics and wars, the citizens have continued saying, "Youth" has the powers of changing India's tomorrow!! Every Youth in the country says, "I need change". From the Anna Hazare Movement, more voices can be heard form the youth. However, sadly, what the youth needs to realize is that, this is no time that will embrace "I need change”, rather this is the time for only those who raise their voice and shout “I will be the change".

So what? if we are set with nasty examples by a bunch of uncouth politicians. We love our Country from the time we knew what Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic meant! What if the people who taught us the meaning of these words have forgotten the meaning themselves? We know it! We can tell our parents and teachers, that we are no longer in a Country where society defines our lives. We can tell them with all the love and belief that we live for ourselves and not for others! This simple yet realistic thought is certainly one trump card that is bound to design the India we dream of!

Rise Up!!! Join Hands! Lets be the Change!!!
Jai Hind!!!


Article By,
Arun Karuppanchetty R M