The New Nation - Internet Edition

Prolog BD to make laptop affordable to all students

Mahbubur Rahman Khan

Prolog BD, the sister concern of Prolog US, is going to offer attractive laptop of Intel Core2 Duo Processor series at cheaper rate for the students of the country soon in an attempt to ensure each and every student of Bangladesh having own laptop by the year of 2020.

A lot of brilliant Bangladeshi scientists and engineers are working in reputed companies in abroad who think a lot about the country and are always eager to give something back to the nation. A living example of such an attempt is Prolog BD, a new IT venture in Bangladesh.

The main aim of Prolog was to contribute in the academic sector of Bangladesh and help students gain access to the latest available technologies. As a result it came up with a mission- to make sure that each and every student of Bangladesh owns a laptop by the year 2020- named "Vision- 2020".

As a part of the vision the engineers of Prolog decided to manufacture Prolog Laptop- targeting the students of Bangladesh. Initially, Prolog US engineers came up with the design that is tailored to meet the need of a student. They manufactured three laptops- Afford Top, Standard and Performance.

Afford Top is made up by exclusively with the combination of Intel Celeron Duo 1.73GHz microprocessors and Mobile Intel 965GM motherboard. Prolog named it Afford Top which also consists of 1 GB DDR 2, 667MHz RAM, 80 GB SATA Hard Disc, Optical DVD R/W Drive, 14.1" WXGA LCD Display, 56K Dial Up Modem, 10/100 MB ONBOARD Ethernet, 10/100 MB ONBOARD Wireless, 1.3 Mega Pixels Webcam, 6 Cells intelligent Li Battery, On Board Sound System, Built-in microphone, Sound Volume control by keyboard hot keys 3xUSB 2.0, 1xRJ 45,4 in 1 Card Reader, 1×Express card Type 34/54mm, 1xMic-in, 1xHeadphone-out/SPDIF, 1xDC in, 2×SO-DIMM DDR2, 1xS-video and 1×IEEE 1394 port.

Prolog US engineers have designed two other laptops-Standard and Performance- using the Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz processor with 2 GB DDR 2, 667MHz RAM, 120 GB SATA Hard Disc and the Intel Core2Duo 1.83 GHz processor with 160 GB SATA Hard Disc respectively for corporate executives and of course the students who can afford to pay more than their requirement. The motherboards and other hardware parts and ports of the Standard and Performance are remained same as Afford Top.

The biggest catch of Prolog branded laptops lies in its hardware compatibility. Most of the hardware inside a Prolog laptop is of from Intel, which ensures optimum compatibility among the hardware components.

They import other parts from the US to Hong Kong and have the Hong Kong Prolog team assemble the laptops. As mentioned before, keeping student's needs in mind Prolog decided to introduce the Intel Celeron Duo processor for the first time and exclusively in Bangladesh. This processor makes a perfect balance between a student's requirement and affordability. Officials of Prolog informed that the price of the laptops would be cheaper than that of any other companies of Bangladesh.

Dr. Shaestagir Chowdhury, former lecturer of BUET who is now working at Intel Corporation, said that with the advent of new wireless technologies like WiMax, every student would have Internet access once they have a laptop with them. They can even access their university servers from their home and obtain all the academic materials while at home.

At the same time a laptop integrated with WiMax technology would provide a tremendous boost to the yet untapped potential of distance learning he added. Referring to the most of the reputed universities in India and all in the where purchasing a laptop before admission is mandatory for a student Chowdhury mentioned that students of Bangladesh should have access to laptops for academic purposes; and the only hindrance for them is the high price and the quality of laptops, which Prolog intends to shatter.

Microsoft rolls out publishing and research tools for academics

Saying it wants to help scholars and publishers write, edit, and publish academic articles, this week Microsoft Corporation rolled out a set of new software tools to perform those tasks, as well as to navigate thorny copyright issues and find and share scholarly data.

The tools are add-ons to popular programs such as Microsoft Office Word. The move is clearly designed to extend the company's reach into new forms of academic publishing, and Microsoft made its announcement here at the ninth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, which was attended by about 400 researchers and technology officials from research universities.

For example, the Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 enables authors to structure and annotate their documents according to formats that publishers and digital archives require. The articles can then be converted easily to formats that facilitate their digital storage and preservation. The company is offering the new software free to licensed users of Word and other Microsoft products.The tool allows users to create documents in the widely used format developed by the National Library of Medicine's free digital archive of peer-reviewed biomedical and life-sciences journal literature, PubMed Central. But users will also be able to shape the software to suit other formats because the code for the tool is openly accessible and freely adaptable. The products, initially aimed at scientists, also seek to make it easier for authors and editors to electronically embed into papers details about the research process and its results, such as bibliographies and key phrases. The goal, Microsoft officials said, is to help readers who conduct searches in electronic databases find relevant articles more easily.

The new tools will enable a more dynamic way of discovering and exploring links within enormous and hard-to-search bodies of research, the officials said.

"We've never before addressed what we could put around Office, Excel, SharePoint, and our other programs to make them more useful for science," said Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft's external-research division. "For example, Word was not tailored for scientific papers. But we decided to see, Can we make it more useful in that way?"

He said the company is also responding to the demand for researchers to provide greater access to their findings, and even their research data. Already the National Institutes of Health requires that any publications from research it finances be placed in PubMed Central within one year of publication. The National Science Foundation has a similar requirement, as do Harvard University's faculties of law and of arts and sciences.

Intel unveils smaller chips

Michael Singer

Intel on Tuesday unveiled two silicon wafers built using 45- and 32-nanometer scale technology that are expected to produce smaller and more efficient chips for the next generation of servers and PCs.

Intel chief executive Paul Otellini heralded the innovations as a chance for Intel to push the envelope of performance in microprocessors, memory, and graphics chips.

Intel said it will move forward with its plans to introduce 15 new 45-nm processors -- code-named Penryn -- on Nov. 12 and another 20 -- code-named Nehalem -- in the first quarter of 2008. Intel said its 32-nm process technology is on track to begin production in 2009.

To make his point, Otellini held up a wafer of SRAM memory chips made with 32-nm process technology containing more than 1.9 billion transistors. He subsequently held up a 45-nanometer processed wafer packed with more than 731 million transistors on it.

"It starts to give us the know-how to build mainstream microprocessors two years from today," Otellini said during the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco.

The technology is expected to be immediately adopted by hardware manufacturers who build rack servers, blade servers, workstation PCs, and laptops. The smaller footprint allows for nearly quadruple the number of chips per square inch as the original Pentium. The improved designs also allow for more powerful handheld devices the size of a digital camera.

"As our advanced technology reaches consumers and businesses in the next couple of years, the amount of computing power they'll be able to harness will help them become even more productive, creative, and innovative," Otellini said.

Intel also is using its manufacturing advancements to reduce the size and increase the capacity of other semiconductors. Intel's chipsets and graphics are primarily produced using 90-nm production techniques.

Intel said it plans to shrink the processes down to 65-nm and 45-nm in 2008 and 2009, respectively. Chipset and graphics chips based on 32-nm technology are expected in 2010.

Intel is moving aggressively toward smaller process designs and has unveiled production-level advancements every two years since 2001. Intel said it's latest 45-nm rollout plans will be helped with its two existing manufacturing labs in Oregon and Arizona as well as two more fabrication plants coming online next year in Israel and New Mexico.

New IP solutons for VoIP

Global IP Solutions, a company well recognized for its media-processing expertise in IP communications, announced on Monday its SDK, which enables Voice over IP applications to be made for Apple's iPhone.

This means that developers can now use GIPS' VoiceEngine Mobile, to create real-time VoIP applications, such as games, social-networking applications, and, of course, applications for making calls to regular phone lines over the Internet.

Soon enough, you will be able to use instant messenger to voice chat with friends on the iPhone, just like you've been doing on your computer for ages now.

Though this is exciting news indeed, GIPS VoiceEngine Mobile will only work with iPhone's Wi-Fi connection and will not take advantage of the new iPhone's 3G connection. This is because Apple has always blocked the use of VoIP on the carriers' data connection; and AT&T, understandably, wouldn't be too happy about supporting something that potentially costs them long distance phone business.

We can only hope this will change in the future. For now, in my experience, AT&T's 3G coverage is still too patchy and unreliable to be a platform for VoIP calls, anyway.

Being the inventors of the popular iLBC codec standard (which got approved by IETF in late 2004 and is currently implemented in the iPhone), GIPS' decision today seems a natural move, considering the popularity of the iPhone.

According to Apple, more than one million iPhone 3Gs were purchased over the launch weekend; and exactly one month later--today--you can still find people waiting in line outside some Apple stores for the device.

So far, GIPS claims that its voice engines have been downloaded and used more widely than any other voice engine worldwide.

GIPS' voice engines enable consumers and businesses to enjoy affordable, high-quality, IP-based communications, even under adverse network conditions.

BT injects life into its network

Insights from artificial life could soon be helping run BT's networks.

The telecommunications firm wants to give its networks life-like abilities so they can self-regulate, recover from injury and respond to changing demands.

BT is keen to use these techniques to make wireless networks more reliable and adaptable and help distribute net-based services.

It unveiled its research at the Artificial Life XI conference taking place in Winchester this week.

At the ALife conference biologists, computer scientists, roboticists, and philosophers are debating ways to borrow ideas from life to either mimic it in hardware or software or create it from scratch.

"If we look at the biological world, there is a huge amount of change, complexity, and adaptation," said former biologist Paul Marrow who works in BT's Broadband Applications Research Centre.

"These artificial life ideas are a very useful source of inspiration as the products and services we provide become increasingly complex and demanding in terms of resources.

One parallel is in the division of labour. The graphical interface users see on their computers is the result of many different kinds of tasks which may include processing, memory storage, encryption, or multimedia content.

In the telecommunications industry, cleanly dividing these different tasks and distributing them across different parts of a network is called "encapsulating" and is analogous to the tasks allocated to different parts of a living cell.

Nokia 5610 links with T-Mobile

Internet

Expanding the popular XpressMusic product line, the all-new Nokia 5610 XpressMusic and Nokia 5310 XpressMusic, in a new black finish with silver accents, are available today exclusively in the U.S. from T-Mobile USA. Similar to the Nokia 5310 music features, the Nokia 5610 is outfitted with the most wanted, music-friendly features including easy-to-use external music controls, packaged in a new, compact slider design.

The Nokia 5610 XpressMusic comes ready to rock with an included wired stereo headset, a USB cable for side-loading music and a 2 GB memory card. Its unique music slider key makes accessing music easy with just a flick of the thumb. Aluminum side panels accent the high gloss finish and large 2.2-inch, 16 million color display. Customers can choose from two color options: black with red accents and white with silver side accents.

In addition, the Nokia 5610 XpressMusic delivers crystal clear sound quality, up to 22 hours of music playback and a memory capacity for up to 3,000 songs on an optional 4GB microSD card*. More than just a phone and music player, the Nokia 5610 also features a high-quality 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and dual LED flash. Adding to the colorful palette of Nokia 5310 XpressMusic options, the device is now also available in a cool black finish with silver accents. The thin and lightweight Nokia 5310 in silver has all the familiar features of the original device including a music player with dedicated external music controls, stereo Bluetooth connectivity, 2.0 megapixel camera, up to 18 hours of music playback and a memory capacity for up to 3,000 songs* on an optional 4GB microSD card. The new black and silver model joins the line of Nokia 5310 XpressMusic phones already available in three color combinations exclusively from T-Mobile: black/red, black/purple and black/orange.

"Music is one of many entertainment experiences Nokia offers consumers who enjoy the ease of having a multifunctional device with them wherever they go," said Frank Vium, Vice President of Sales, Nokia USA. "Now with the addition of the Nokia 5610 XpressMusic phone and the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic phone in black/silver, music lovers across the United States have even more choice -- great colors and compelling forms in a sleek package."