Iconic media player Winamp to shut shop in December

Winamp, an iconic media player from the nineties, will cease to exist from December 20, with its owner AOL deciding to shut down the service. 

AOL, which runs the popular media player, has announced that it will shut down Winamp.com and its associated web services. 

"Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download," a note on the Winamp.com website said. 

Its last version (Winamp 5.66) was released yesterday. "Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years," the note added. 

Once synonymous for playing music for PC users in the '90s, Winamp was developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev in 1997 as a freeware. 

The music streaming services once boasted of a user base of over 50 million. 

Frankel named his software company, Nullsoft, and continued development on the player. It was later turned into shareware with new features and functionality added to the player. Nullsoft was acquired by AOL in 1999. 

Winamp's popularity grew with the growing trend of MP3 file sharing. It supports music playback using MP3, MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1 audio layers 1 and 2, AAC, M4A, FLAC, WAV and WMA. Winamp was one of the first common music players on Windows. 

Initially developed for Windows, Winamp now offers betas for Android and Mac OS X and an alpha version for Linux as well.

Samsung unveils faster, power-efficient 5G memory chips

Samsung Electronics has reportedly unveiled its fifth-generation (5G) high-efficiency green memory chips which consume less energy and enhance performance simultaneously. 

The South Korean tech giant said that the advanced memory solutions were optimized for next generation data centres that use cloud computing based on a big data platform. 

Samsung said that the new green DDR4 chips will take more physical space but save more power. 

The chips are expected to raise the server data transfer speed to 2,133Mbps from the older DDR3's performance limit of 1,866Mbps, while consuming 24% less energy. 

The company said that it plans to mass produce DDR4 with a data transfer speed of 3,200Mbps in the future. 

According to Xinhua, the Green PCIe solid state drive (SSD) can offer a data transfer speed of four GBps, six times faster than the SATA SSD's 600MBps and reducing the delay in data transfer by 67% and enhance energy efficiency around 2.6 times. 

Executive vice president of Samsung's memory sales and marketing, Jun Young-hyun said that with the introduction of the innovative memory solutions that maximize IT investment efficiency, the company has set the stage for sharply strengthening the value of advanced memory.

Happy Durga Puja

3D Printer

What is 3D printing?

In the press today the 3D printing topic is HOT!

The 3D printing technology made its way to the technological world in the year 1986, but not gain importance until 1990. It was not that popular outside the world of engineering, architecture and manufacturing.

3D printing is also known as desktop fabrication, it can form any material that can be obtained as a powder. For creating an object you need a digital 3D-model. You can scan a set of 3D images, or draw it using computer-assisted design or CAD software. You can also download them from internet. The digital 3D-model is usually saved in STL format and then sent to the printer. The process of "printing" a three-dimensional object layer-by-layer with equipment, which is quite similar with ink-jet printers.

One of the most important applications of 3D printing is in the medical industry. With 3D printing, surgeons can produce mockups of parts of their patient's body which needs to be operated upon.

3D printing make it possible to make a part from scratch in just hours. It allows designers and developers to go from flat screen to exact part.

Nowadays almost everything from aerospace components to toys are getting built with the help of 3D printers.

3D printing can provide great savings on assembly costs because it can print already assembled products. With 3D printing, companies can now experiment with new ideas and numerous design iterations with no extensive time or tooling expense. They can decide if product concepts are worth to allocate additional resources. 3D printing could even challenge mass production method in the future.

3D printing is going to impact so many industries, such as automotive, medical, business & industrial equipment, education, architecture, and consumer-product industries.

Check out video below.

or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFpSxX0SzgY&feature=player_detailpage

Google celebrates its 15th birthday with animated pinata doodle

Wish Google a Happy Birthday! Google is celebrating its 15th birth anniversary with an animated and interactive doodle on its home page. 

Google, the search engine giant, was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students of Stanford University. Although the company was founded a few weeks earlier but September 27 is celebrated as its birthday. 

Remember what it was like to search in 1998? You’d sit down and boot up your bulky computer, dial up on your squawky modem, type in some keywords, and get 10 blue links to websites that had those words. It seemed like magic (and it was way way faster than card catalogs and microfiche!). 

Today Google has also announced that it had updated its search engine algorithm named Humming Bird with the aim to deliver better search results to its users.

Google Doogle

The Google Doodle is an artistic styled version of the Google logo. In 1998, Google used the first Google Doodle of the Burning Man Festival, designed by Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, posted on google.com notifying users of their absence in case Google's servers crashed.

First Doodle

Google Birthday Doogle

Software to track West Bengal's court cases

The state government has often lost out on court cases because of the lack of representation. Instances of departments misplacing important legal files have also been heard. In a bid to do away with such situations, the government will use a software-based system to monitor high court cases and dispose the pending cases at the earliest. National Informatics Centre (NIC) has been roped in to help the state in implementing this system.

The state government is going to start a software based high court case monitoring system so that the state government can properly handle the legal cases that are filed against the state government. Moreover it will help to quickly dispose the pending cases and for that the state government is taking help of the National Informatics Centre (NIC).

Sources in the government said departmental heads were often clueless about cases in the court because of which no lawyer was appointed to represent them. This had often led to the state being on the losing end.

A senior officer said that files of court cases were also intentionally lost from the department so that the state government is unable to defend its stand. But these problems may soon be passe. The NIC has started processing a new monitoring system and has given a demonstration to judicial secretary Tapas Mukherjee and legal remembrancer (LR) Ishan Chandra Das.

Earlier, former KYS Manhas, a former judicial secretary, had filed a report to the chief secretary in which he had mentioned that there was lack of coordination among the different departments for which court cases were not properly followed up. Often, departmental heads were not informed about cases pending in the high court. They came to know only after losing the case, Manhas had stated in his report.

A senior officer said that besides lack of representation, quality laware needed. Once a case is filed, the notice is served to the departmental secretary, it is then sent to the law officer of the department and ultimately a lawyer is appointed through the LR.

"But in preparing the case file, the relevant papers are not available and statement of facts cannot be submitted. This acts as a hindrance in fighting the case in the high court," he added. The absence of relevant papers results in the court passing an interim order in favour of the petitioner. "Being at an advantage, the petitioner does not appear before the court or does not pursue it," the officer said. Only in policy-related matters or serious cases does the advocate general appear on the state's behalf, he added.

The new system will definitely help in doing away with such problems, felt the officer.

The user officers will keep track of the litigation pending at the high court. The system through web services will upgrade the status of the cases and automatically the user officers can see the hearing dates in a chronological format.

Another senior official said that once a case is filed at the high court, a message will be sent to the departmental head concerned and the law officer. They will be informed about the dates when the cases will be heard. The system will also generate SMS alerts to the officials concerned so that the government can take necessary steps and prevent itself from paying penalty after losing cases.

Google brings world's constitutions online

Internet giant Google launched an archive of the world's constitutions on Monday in a new online initiative designed to help countries emerging from conflicts or political crises.

Launching the new site ---www.constituteproject.org --- in New York, Google officials said the aim was to help people drafting constitutions to see what other countries have done in the past.

"We wanted to take the physical constitutions and we wanted to have them organised online, make them universally available online and make them useful for all the different governments going through a constitutional process," Google Ideas director Jared Cohen said.

"These constitutions and government documents represent an important opportunity for these countries," he added.

The site was drawn up with the assistance of academics associated with the Comparative Constitutions Project(CCP).

They formulated the idea for the site in 2008 after observing constitutional reform in Iraq and Afghanistan and realizing that there was no central resource detailing basic constitutional provisions.

"A common result ... is a haphazard and accidental cobbling together of constitutional elements from other countries," the CCP said.

Cohen said between five and seven constitutions were drafted each year in different parts of the world.

Tunisia's President Moncef Marzouki, who was present at the launch, said the new site would be vital for countries such as his own which is struggling to agree a constitution and electoral law following a 2011 revolution.

"I'm very fascinated by this project and I think it will be extremely useful," he said.

The site allows users to search for different constitutions by country or by year, and is subdivided into themes such as citizenship, foreign policy or judicial autonomy and power.

"Our aim is to arm drafters with a better tool for constitution design and writing," Google Ideas project manager Sara Sinclair Brody said in a blog post.

"We also hope citizens will use Constitute to learn more about their own constitutions, and those of countries around the world."