Definition
Laptops are becoming as common as your cellular phone, and now they share the hardware industry as that of desktop computers with a number of configurable options. The features, the price, the build quality, the weight and dimensions, the display, battery uptime or that matter, the ease of the trackball. Earlier, there were hardly any configurable options available but today, we have a variety of laptops n different configurations with the process and just about anything you want.
Companies such as Intel, AMD, Transmeta and nViad, to name only a few, are making laptops a hype and reality. Intel and AMD have brought out technologies such as speed step to preserve battery power in laptops.
If you are on the move all the time, you probably need a laptop that can do all the things that you will not be able to do all the things that you will not only able you to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations, but also send and receive e-mail, access the web and may be even play music CDs or watch a DVD movie to get that much deserved break. You need laptop that is also study enough to take the bumps and joints in its stride while you are on the move.
If on other hand, you want a laptop for basic tasks and primarily for the mobility so that your work does not get held up on the occasions that you need to travel, then you would not necessarily need the best in terms of the choice and power of its individual sub systems. There fore, if the CD-ROM drive, floppy drive is not integrated into the main unit, but it supplied as an additional peripheral, the frequent traveler would not only mind, because the overall weight of the laptop would be significantly lesser and would be easier on your shoulder after a long day commuting.
History
Alan Kay of Xerox Palio Alto Research Center originated the idea of a portable computer in the 1970's. Kay envisioned a notebook sized portable computer called the Dynabook that everyone could own and that could handle all of the user's informational needs. Kay also envisioned the Dynabook with wireless network capabilities. Arguably, the first laptop computer was designed in 1979 by laptop computer was designed in 1979 by William Moggvidge of Gvid systems Corp. It had 340 kilo bytes of bubble memory, a die cast magnesium case and a folding electroluminescent graphics display a screen. In 1983 Gavilan Computer produced a laptop computer with the following features.
" 64 kilobytes (expandable to 128 kilobytes)
of Random Access Memory
" Gavilan operating system (also van MS-DOS)
" 8088 microprocessor
" Touchpad mouse
" Portable printer
" Weighed 9 lb(4kg) alone or 14 lb (6.4 kg) with printer
The Gavilan computer had a floppy drive that was not compatible with other computers and it primarily used its own operating system. The company failed. in 1984, Apple lle was a notebook sized computer but not a true laptop. It had a 65602 microprocessor, 128KB of memory, an internal 5.25 inch floppy drive two serial ports, a mouse port, modem card, external power supply and a soldering handle.
Definition
For some time now, both small and large companies have been building robust applications for personal computers that continue to be ever more powerful and available at increasingly lower costs. While these applications are being used by millions of users each day, new forces are having a profound effect on the way software developers build applications today and the platform in which they develop and deploy their application.
The increased presence of Internet technologies is enabling global sharing of information-not only from small and large businesses, but individuals as well. The Internet has sparked a new creativity in many, resulting in many new businesses popping up overnight, running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Competition and the increased pace of change are putting ever-increasing demands for an application platform that enables application developers to build and rapidly deploy highly adaptive applications in order to gain strategic advantage.
It is possible to think of these new Internet applications needing to handle literally millions of users-a scale difficult to imagine a just a few short years ago. As a result, applications need to deal with user volumes of this scale, reliable to operate 24 hours a day and flexible to meet changing business needs. The application platform that underlies these types of applications must also provide a coherent application model along with a set of infrastructure and prebuilt services for enabling development and management of these new applications.
Introducing Windows DNA: Framework for a New Generation of Computing Solutions
Today, the convergence of Internet and Windows computing technologies promises exciting new opportunities for savvy businesses: to create a new generation of computing solutions that dramatically improve the responsiveness of the organization, to more effectively use the Internet and the Web to reach customers directly, and to better connect people to information any time or any place. When a technology system delivers these results, it is called a Digital Nervous System. A Digital Nervous System relies on connected PCs and integrated software to make the flow of information rapid and accurate. It helps everyone act faster and make more informed decisions. It prepares companies to react to unplanned events. It allows people focus on business, not technology.
Creating a true Digital Nervous System takes commitment, time, and imagination. It is not something every company will have the determination to do. But those who do will have a distinct advantage over those who don't. In creating a Digital Nervous System, organizations face many challenges: How can they take advantage of new Internet technologies while preserving existing investments in people, applications, and data? How can they build modern, scalable computing solutions that are dynamic and flexible to change? How can they lower the overall cost of computing while making complex computing environments work?
Introduction
Amorphous computing consists of a multitude of interacting computers with modest computing power and memory, and modules for intercommunication. These collections of devices are known as swarms. The desired coherent global behaviour of the computer is achieved from the local interactions between the individual agents. The global behaviour of these vast numbers of unreliable agents is resilient to a small fraction of misbehaving agents and noisy and intimidating environment. This makes them highly useful for sensor networks, MEMS, internet nodes, etc. Presently, of the 8 billion computational units existing worldwide, only 2% of them are stand-alone computers. This proportion is projected to further decrease with the paradigm shift to the biologically inspired amorphous computing model. An insight into amorphous and swarm computing will be given in this paper.
The ideas for amorphous computing have been derived from swarm behaviour of social organisms like the ants, bees and bacteria. Recently, biologists and computer scientists studying artificial life have modelled biological swarms to understand how such social animals interact, achieve goals and evolve. A certain level of intelligence,exceeding those of the individual agents, results from the swarm behaviour. Amorphous Computing is a established with a collection of computing particles -with modest memory and computing power- spread out over a geographical space and running identical programs. Swarm Intelligence may be derived from the randomness, repulsion and unpredictability of the agents, thereby resulting in diverse solutions to the problem. There are no known criteria to evaluate swarm intelligence performance.
Inspiration
The development of swarm computing has been instilled by some of the natural phenomenon.
The most complex of the activities, like optimal path finding, have been executed by simple organisms. Lately MEMS research has paved the way for manufacturing the swarm agents with low costs and high efficiency.
The biological world
In case of the ant colonies, the worker ants have decentralised control and a robust mechanism for some of the complex activities like foraging, finding the shortest path to food source and back home, build and protect nests and finding the richest food source in the locality. The ants communicate by using pheromones. Trails of pheromone are laid down by a given ant, which can be followed by other ants. Depending on the species, ants lay trails travelling from the nest, to the nest or possibly in both directions. Pheromones evaporate over time. Pheromones also accumulate with multiple ants using the same path. As the ants forage, the optimal path to food is likely to have the highest deposition of pheromones, as more number of ants follow this path and deposit pheromones. The longer paths are less likely to be travelled and therefore have only a smaller concentration of pheromones. With time, most of the ants follow the optimal path. When the food sources deplete, the pheromones evaporate and new trails can be discovered. This optimal path finding approach has a highly dynamic and robust nature.
Similar organization and behaviour are also present in the flocks of bird. For a bird to participate in a flock, it only adjusts its movements to coordinate with the movements of its flock mates, typically its neighbours that are close to it in the flock. A bird in a flock simply tries to stay close to its neighbours, but avoid collisions with them. Each bird does not take commands from any leader bird since there is no lead bird. Any bird can °y in the front, center and back of the swarm. Swarm behaviour helps birds take advantage of several things including protection from predators (especially for birds in the middle of the flock), and searching for food (essentially each bird is exploiting the eyes of every other bird). Even complex biological entities like brain are a swarm of interacting simple agents like the neurons. Each neuron does not have the holistic picture, but processes simple elements through its interaction with few other neurons and paves way for the thinking process.
