IPAD

The best way to exerience the web, email, photos, and video. Hands down

All of the built-in apps on iPad were designed from the ground up to take advantage of the large Multi-Touch screen and advanced capabilities of iPad. And they work in any orientation. So you can do things with these apps that you can’t do on any other device

Ipod

See more of your music.

The big, beautiful iPad display lets you browse your music collection by song, artist, album, genre, or composer with the touch of a finger. See your music as full-size album art. Flip through all your albums and tap to choose what you want to hear. It’s as natural as flipping through CDs.

Safari

Get the whole story.

The Safari web browser on iPad puts the Internet in your hands — literally. View whole web pages in portrait or landscape on the large Multi-Touch screen with vibrant color and sharp text at a size that’s actually readable. When you rotate iPad to landscape, the page you’re viewing rotates, too, then expands to fit the display.

Photos

Tap, pinch, and flick through your photos.

With the built-in Photos app on iPad, you can see and touch your photos in intuitive new ways. Your photo albums appear as tidy little stacks you can pinch to preview. Tap a stack, and the whole album opens up. From there you can scroll through thumbnails. Tap to view full screen. Or flip through photos one at a time.

Your own personal big screen.

A beautiful 9.7-inch high-resolution display makes iPad perfect for watching any kind of video: from HD movies and TV shows to podcasts and music videos. Since iPad is essentially one big screen — with no distracting keypad or buttons — you feel completely immersed in whatever you’re watching. And you can keep watching for up to 10 hours, thanks to the lithium-polymer battery in iPad.*

You Tube

Watch more.

The YouTube app is designed specifically to take advantage of all the capabilities of iPad. The high-resolution screen makes YouTube videos look amazing, especially those in HD. Content is organized in a new way, so it’s easy to navigate and watch. Tap what you want to see, and the video automatically appears full screen. Use your fingers to play, pause, and advance through a video. Turn iPad sideways and it plays in widescreen.

ITunes

Instant music, movie, and TV show gratification.You’re in a coffee shop and you hear a song you just have to have. Or you’re in an airport, wishing you had a good movie to watch. With Wi-Fi access and one tap of the iTunes icon, you can discover new music, movies to buy or rent, TV shows, and podcasts. Then download it all wirelessly, right to your iPad. Wherever you happen to be.

How to Increase Your Internet Speed without Changing Your ISP

Noticed that your Internet connection has been slow lately? Not sure what the matter is? Here are a few action steps you could put to use before calling your Internet Service Provider or switching to a new one.

Test Your Internet Connection with a Speedometer

Are you getting the speed you’re being promised? There are many Internet connection speedometer sites to help you determine this. Test with a few speedometers. If the test shows your connection speed way below your subscribed level, you should consider contacting your ISP.

But before that you should check the ISP website to find out whether any maintenance work is going on. If there is, then you should just wait for connection to be restored to the normal level.

You can also check with friends who use the same ISP whether they are experiencing the same problem.  

How to Install a DSL Modem

Installing a DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) modem is easy. You need only order DSL service through your local phone company, and then install your modem by connecting a few cables and installing its software. DSL high-speed internet service uses the same copper wires as, and simultaneously with, POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). However, you need not have standard (phone company, land line) phone service before you order DSL because it requires only a physical connection to an external phone line. The exact DSL plan you can select varies according to your particular phone company. For more information, see DSL With or Without Phone Service.

After you order DSL and install its modem, you can probably save money by connecting your phone through a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) phone service, and then eliminating your standard phone service. VOIP providers include ITP and Vonage. Although standard phone service rates seem reasonable, the actual rates are higher because they usually include per-minute local charges, and always add many ridiculous taxes and fees. In contrast, VOIP providers currently add only state sales taxes to their rates.

DSL provides neither broadcast nor premium TV programming. If you want phone, internet, and TV through the same service, you must order either cable or fiber-optic service. For more information, see Comparing Verizon FIOS and Comcast Cable.

Free Software

In only a few decades, due to advancing computer technologies, writing tools have evolved from soft-lead pencils to software programs, many of which are free. As detailed in sections below, free software for writers includes information organizers and word processors.

In the early 20th century, typewriters were not really a great advance. A typewriter was much more noisy than any pen or pencil. It consumed more trees because you needed to retype many pages. It demanded intense concentration and precise dexterity. It was user hostile and very unforgiving; if you made an error, you could not fix it neatly. If you wanted to move a paragraph from one page to another, you needed to cut and paste the paragraph physically, using scissors and glue. All remaining typewriters are imprisoned where they belong, in museums.

What is 3Dnow!

In late May, AMD released their new K6-2 processor. One of the main advances that AMD made with the K6-2 was the addition of the 3Dnow! instruction set. Many people have asked, how big a performance difference can an instruction set really have? Well, AMD believes that 3Dnow! is all the K6-2 needs, whereas the K6-2 without 3Dnow! is almost identical in performance to the older K6. But 3Dnow! is very powerful and performance increases have been measured at up to 87% so far. For those wondering exactly what 3Dnow! is, this months column is a basic primer on 3Dnow! and the K6-2.

3Dnow! is a set of extra instructions similar to MMX, but instead of integer acceleration, 3Dnow! is designed to accelerate 3D graphics, through faster FPU performance. However, 3Dnow! is much more beneficial than MMX and it's hardly fair to compare the two. Let's face it, MMX was a joke. It's as if Intel wanted to test their marketing division. When it was released, MMX had almost no support. Only now is it beginning to offer meager performance gains through more widespread support, because of the fact that all new processors include MMX instructions.

3Dnow! gains much of its performance increase due to the use of SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) floating point instructions. Basically the use of SIMD allows multiple operations to be performed at once. Because of this, the K6-2 can perform 4 floating point operations per clock cycle as opposed to 1 per clock cycle with a Pentium-II. Now this doesn't translate directly into games running 4 times faster, as you won't be seeing Quake 2 running at 200fps anytime soon. Just because the K6-2 can perform 4 floating point operations per clock cycle, doesn't mean it always does. Looking at a simple example, any given game sends all its FPU calculations through one data pipe. The K6-2 adds three additional pipes, greatly increasing the bandwidth. But unless the game is programmed to recognize the extra 3 pipes, performance will be the same. However, once the game is optimized to make use of the extra bandwidth of the K6-2, it can use the increased bandwidth for either a performance increase or for creating much more detailed and complex environments, while still running at the same frame rate.

So, unless a game is fully optimized from the start, the full capability of 3Dnow! is not always used. With the requirement of 3Dnow! optimized software to see any real performance gains, are we going to see yet another MMX support fiasco? Not so.
The copyright of the article What is 3Dnow! in Computer Hardware is owned by Michael Christopher Brinton. Permission to republish What is 3Dnow! in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

High-Speed Internet Options

Recently, I attended the finals for the Professional Gamers League. The league has an online competition, and the top eight players in each category are flown to the finals. At the finals, there was a 100-megabyte-per-second LAN setup (thanks to 3M), so there were no latency worries. However, some of the players who had competed over the Internet with a modem, not a T1 connection, had a little trouble getting used to playing on a superfast LAN. However, as more high-speed Internet connections are installed in residential homes, I think that the Professional Gamers League will become a success.


In the upcoming year, more high-speed Internet connections will be available in the home. In the past, home-users were limited to a slow modem connection or, if they wanted more speed, an ISDN connection. However, ISDN was not practical for the majority of home users because of the high-priced phone lines, service and ISDN modems. Two new technologies that are coming into the home in the near future are DSL connections and cable modems.


Cable modems offer 1.5- to three-megabytes-per-second download rates on average, and about 700-kilobyte upload speed. The connection is through a cable television adaptor. It requires a special cable modem box (rented in service) and an Ethernet card. One cable modem provider, @Home, offers its cable modem service for $29.95 to $49.95 a month depending on the local cable provider. One of the main advantages aside from the speed is that cable modems are always on (i.e. you don't need to connect as you would with an ordinary modem) and therefore don't take up a phone line. However, there are a few cable modem providers that only offer downstream service. The local provider in my area will provide only downstream service and it requires that I connect over a phone line. I'm not too happy about this, but I'll still get it for the extra speed once it is available.


The other high-speed Internet option is that of DSL modems. A DSL modem works over the phone lines at a very high pitch that allows for fast data transfer rates of up to eight megabytes per second downstream and 800 kilobytes upstream. Like cable modem service, DSL is always on and, even though it works over the phone line, the phone line will still function like normal without any restrictions. Like cable-modem service, DSL will also require an Ethernet card (as will any high-speed service) and a special modem.

The copyright of the article High-Speed Internet Options in Computer Hardware is owned by Michael Christopher Brinton. Permission to republish High-Speed Internet Options in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Personal computer hardware

A personal computer is made up of multiple physical components of computer hardware, upon which can be installed an operating system and a multitude of software to perform the operator's desired functions.



Hardware of a modern Personal Computer.
1. Monitor
2. Motherboard
3. CPU
4. RAM Memory
5. Expansion card
6. Power supply
7. Optical disc drive
8. Hard Disk
9. Keyboard
10. Mouse

Inside a custom computer.

Though a PC comes in many different forms, a typical personal computer consists of a case or chassis in a tower shape (desktop) and the following parts:


The motherboard is the main component inside the case. It is a large rectangular board with integrated circuitry that connects the rest of the parts of the computer including the CPU, the RAM, the disk drives (CD, DVD, hard disk, or any others) as well as any peripherals connected via the ports or the expansion slots. Computer Hardware course is very important for the future because they are now essential in business.

Is Now the Right Time?

With LCD flat panel prices dropping and the growing concern for the environment, is now the right time to replace those old energy hungry CRT monitors?

3 years ago, an LCD flat panel would have set you back at least £250. Now you can get a good quality 17” panel for under £100. However, price is not the only reason why so many businesses are upgrading to LCD panels. Some of the other compelling reasons are:-

Power Consumption - On average, LCD panels use 60% less energy than the traditional CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitors. In a recent study, it was estimated that if every business in the UK was to upgrade to an LCD flat panel, it would save 3 billion kWh of power consumption which is the equivalent of the total power consumption of 1 million households or the power production of about 3 nuclear power plants.

Personal Health & Comfort - The main benefit that LCDs have when it comes to comfort is the reduced strain on your eyes. The reduced glare on the screen's surface, and the elimination of a typical CRT's "refresh", can prevent your eyes from getting tired from extended use. A CRT monitor redraws the image on the entire screen as it refreshes, whereas an LCD monitor only changes the necessary pixels during a refresh.

Increased Viewing Area - With an LCD panel the whole screen area is active and viewable so there is no image loss at the boundaries, whereas the viewable screen area of a CRT is smaller than the monitor face. Consequently a 15” LCD can give the equivalent area of a 17” CRT, and a 17” LCD the equivalent of a 19” CRT.

Reduced Radiation - There may also be the unquantifiable effect of reduced electromagnetic emissions on LCD monitors. The exact impact of electromagnetic emissions may not be fully understood, but in general LCD monitors produce significantly less emissions than the old style CRT monitors.

Size - One reason that LCDs have gained in popularity is because of their small foot print. The overall size and weight of CRT monitors far exceeds that of LCD monitors. CRTs share the same image processing technology with tube televisions, and therefore share the same bulky style of housing. Desktop real estate is precious, and an LCD will require only a small fraction of the depth that a CRT would require. And if there isn't even enough room on your desk for a slim LCD monitor, the low weight makes them perfectly adaptable to be hung on the wall, or from a radial arm mount.