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From aerospace to banking, from medical imaging to the railroad industry, wire protection techniques are an essential part of every piece of mechanical and electronic equipment.

Both electrical and mechanical cables - sometimes miles of them - are part of every vehicle, every computer, every piece of telecommunications equipment. Fasteners like specialized grommets and other protective materials protect against wire damage due to chafing and other wear, and find use in applications ranging from military aircraft to food processing equipment.

Chafing and stress fatigue can result from unexpected sources. Even when bundles of cables are wrapped together, presumably to be fixed in one, immovable position, the vibration created by the operation of machinery can still cause chafing and wear, resulting in the failure or malfunction of the affected cables. Materials in protective components have to withstand not only friction and vibration, but also heat and cold, remaining intact in what can be an enormous range of conditions.

The failure of wire protection technology in electrical cables can cause dangerous arcing, which can result not only in equipment failure but in an electrocution hazard for anyone in close proximity to the equipment. Other protective components protect not from wear or electrical shorts, but from heat. Delicate electronic computer components, in food processing equipment, for instance, can be adversely affected by excessive heat from food vats; spacing components to prevent heat damage have to themselves be able to resist the heat and vibrational wear resulting from operation of the equipment.

Every new equipment design has to take into account the conditions under which the equipment will operate, and the internal dynamics of the equipment which can itself result in potential damage - from friction among moveable parts, from heat or cold, and from internal vibration. Failing to take the complex dynamics of the operation of a piece of equipment can have expensive and sometimes disastrous results.

Tag: TechnologyTechnology

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Is there life on Moon? Yes and No.

No. Because we landed there and found that it was made up of nothing but a bunch of rocks. Yes. Because it affects us directly. The gravity of moon is responsible for tides. The moon also reflects sunlight and serves as a torch in the night. On a new moon night, we have to resort to artificial lighting as the starlight is not bright enough. The moon influences the mind. This is well known. In fact in Palmistry, it is said that if your line of head dips into the mount of Luna, most probably you’ll go insane.

Now let us zoom out into the microcosm. All cells have life. Viruses and some form of borderline crystals also have life. So what is life all about? Is it a DNA strand? Some viruses don’t have DNA, just RNA. Here’s my definition: Life is that which is in motion - outside or inside. Change is life. Replication is life. Achieving something by change - knowingly or unknowingly is life. And most important - survival is life.

Our body is not live. It is the changes or the movement inside the body that is life. All cells, tissues, organs etc. are nothing but made up of constituents like water, wastes and chemicals which are inert. When matter is positioned in a certain fashion, it leads to life. We are nothing but life aggregated into a higher plane.

Hardware does not change. If you have a Pentium machine, it is the same processor or the DMA chip that is present every time you switch it on. It does not change. Inside the chip is the instruction set or like the base pairs of a DNA made up of only 4 nucleotides viz. Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytocine. Note that these can be considered as four instructions in a DNA molecule.

Now comes the living part. Software. Say you are loading the OS. It will go and sit in the same portion of memory or if you expand the memory it may go and sit in another place. But if you notice there is motion. There is a distinct change. The voltage levels are fluctuating. And software turns on. This software uses say ‘x’ number of instructions. Another OS may use ‘y’ number of instructions. It’s like the difference between the code of an ant and a grasshopper. The closer they are genetically, the more the instructions inside them match. Like a 32 bit AMD and Intel Microprocessor.

If you look at instructions deep down, a ‘MUL’ or multiply is nothing but a repetitive ‘ADD’. And so we can say that there are some fundamental instructions equivalent to the DNA nucleotides, like for instance an ADD instruction, a CMP (Compare) instruction or a MOV (Move) instruction. These form the core. But wait for some more. The chips are made of gates and there are not many. The simplest is a ‘NOT’ gate, and then we have a AND and OR gates. Further to that are abstractions or aggregations. WE can go further to a level of transistors, but I think we are losing focus.

Coming back to software, an accounting software has a different set of instructions than a computer game. But they are both live when they get control. Control of what? The CPU, of course. For the moment that the instructions get executed, or whenever the current flows, life manifests. Like there are so many ants, there are so many copies of say your browser sessions (tabbed or windowed). And like the ants die, the browser dies when you close the window. In fact ‘Close’ should be called ‘Die’.

As programs have more and more layers, the programs are also evolving into aggregations like ourselves. Nowadays there are so many layers of instructions, that the uppermost layers are quite sophisticated.

Consider for a moment a Lisp interpreter running on a Unix OS on a Sun Fire machine, communicating with a Windows machine using sockets over the internet. Sounds complex. This is communication, like between two human beings or cells. An exchange of information happens and the state of the machine most likely changes. In the same way, we may get altered after every tete-a-tete, although we do not consciously know it.

Like the moon, the computer has life. It is the software existing inside it. Life has given birth to life. And the soul that created is nothing but that of a human. The creation is not perfect like an Ostrich that has wings but still cannot fly. But like evolution, we are on our way making more usable programs and then probably the Ostrich wont need a wing or probably we’ll fit artificial ones so that it can claim it’s lost glory - the flight of being a bird.

Best,

guru30 (Rajesh Menon)

Tags: computers, Nature, science, Soul, Spirituality, Technologycomputers, Nature, science, Soul, Spirituality, Technology

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2005 literally took the world by storm. The tragedies of the Asian Tsunami, the Hurricanes that blew through the US Gulf Coast and the earthquakes that swallowed parts of Pakistan have left an indelible mark on 2005. While mother nature cast a shadow on 2005, it was technology that delivered the impact that resulted in a huge outpouring of donations. The world was touched by the human element seen real-time in pictures and videos. Today’s technology was able to deliver the graphical grittiness that portrayed the nightmares occurring half a world away.

Technology is usually thought of as impersonal, but something needs to be recognized; without technology the personal elements of the 2005 tragedies would not likely have been conveyed to the extent and timeliness they were. Reflecting on 2005 and looking forward to 2006, technology will undoubtedly continue play a significant role in the future both on a personal and impersonal level.

In 2005 Blogs gave birth to splogs, where senseless web scrapers generated massive amounts of senseless content. Spam reached a whole new level, right along side the ethical debate of content scraping. Copyrights have been stepped on and I foresee a new host of tools that will emerge to protect content.

SPAM and phishing scams were easier to recognize, but to their credit, spammers showed off their creativity, finding additional channels to inundate. From splogs to forum spam, 2005 tech users saw spam as one of life’s continued annoyances. Looking into a crystal ball, I fear that social bookmarking will become the spam vehicle of 2006, weakening the value of a collective voice.

Sadly the blog saturation has resulted in web clutter. Due to increased competition and vast quantities of blogs on free hosted blog networks services, bloggers competing for audiences and web traffic will result in significant abandoned content, cluttering the web with useless ramblings. The ease of blogging that resulted in saturation will be its downfall. Credibility will again become important. Journalist, who have suffered from the blogosphere in 2005, will have a reprieve as credibility becomes an issue for bloggers. In 2006 web surfers are going to look for multiple sources to confirm facts, and rely on reliable respected sources, community content, and collaboration like Wikipedia is going to suffer and become less relevant in 2006. While Wikipedia scores well in search, it does not perform as well with accuracy. The Wikipedia community is haunted by spam and like DMOZ, it’s success will be its downfall. The relevance of successful community wiki’s will fade in 2006.

Cell phones have become personal homing devices, and it is near impossible to locate a cellular phone that is not capable of manipulating or taking photos, videos, graphics and text messages in addition to the traditional voice calls. It is likely the PDA will become extinct in 2006, as travelers move to a single multifunction device. In 2007 MP3 players will likely be a common feature of cell phones.

Wireless growth is still worth noting, as it has moved from hotspots, to hot zones, to hot cities. Philadelphia and San Francisco are leading the way as wireless cities in 2006.

What is in store for 2006? Privacy is a hot topic that is not going to disappear. Google and the US Government are battling a Big Brother image. Data mining has made the collection of data meaningful. Anti-Google sentiment is growing. Google has fallen from grace, while Google has made friends on Wall Street, it has disappointed surfers who have turned to Yahoo and MSN in growing numbers. 2006 will likely result heat up the search engine war with MSN and Yahoo scrambling for marketshare and Google walking a tightrope with privacy advocates on one end and monopoly theorists on the other end.

Google wants to make money, and like it or not data, is a commodity. Google will likely use the data from their various ventures to develop new technologies and personalize content. Conspiracy theorists believe that the Google’s aggregate data will also be used to optimize the fees charged for pay-per-click, influence organic ranking, or worse yet, sold.

Google’s growth will continue to motivate privacy advocates and those in the technology field behind the Attention Truste movement, to work together, to improve how personal information and subscription information is used online. I expect we will see a lot of energy and effort in this area.

Personalized content will be a buzz word for 2006. Whether it is users selecting Podcasts, iTunes, or purchasing Amazon recommendations the web is learning how to cater content based on user selections and choices. Web surfers see personalized content as regaining control of what they want to watch, see, or listen to. From Tivo to podcasting, users are taking back control. Yet when the web serves content that is based on past surfing habits, who is really in control?

In 2005, marketers were told in no uncertain terms, if they are not using syndication and RSS, they will not survive. Well, they have one more chance to get it right. In 2006, marketers must use RSS as an alternative communication channel. It will no longer be cutting edge, it will be a must to survive. Web surfers no longer expect to provide personal information (an email address) for marketing materials, they expect to have a choice about how they wish to receive the content.

Vendors selling through affiliate programs lost ground in 2005. Publishers found the easy money of pay-per-click advertising not fraught with the inherent problems of affiliate tracking and cookie-killers. The increase in click-fraud and content scraping on AdSense sites will even the playing field and make affiliate programs more attractive in 2006.

The world is getting smaller, and technological advancements has not only brought us tragedy, but also has opened doors and the global market is now a viable option for small businesses. I believe the globalization trend will continue in 2006.

Top 10 Winners Predicted for 2006:

Cyber Security

VOIP

Attention Data

RSS/Syndication

Copyprotection

Credibility

Privacy

Alternative Energy (reusable fuel, clean energy)

Content Filtering

VideoTunes (iTunes with Video)

Tags: computers, Technology, technology developmentscomputers, Technology, technology developments

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