Edunology - Saumya Aggarwal

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A researcher at North Carolina State University is warning of an Android 2.3 security vulnerability that gives attackers access to your personal information, further proof that Gingerbread isn't all sugar and spice (to be fair, that SMS issue has since been remedied). According to Xuxian Jiang, the bug allows malicious websites to access and upload the contents of a user's microSD card, including voicemails, photos, and online banking information to a remote server. The flaw apparently resembles a similar bug in previous version of Android, thought to have been addressed with Gingerbread. However, as Jiang points out, that fix is easily bypassed. Apart from removing the microSD card, disabling JavaScript, or switching to a third-party browser, Android 2.3 users have little recourse in squashing the bug. The folks at eWeek reported that Google is working on a solution to the problem, but there's no word on when we can expect to see an update.

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The UN's International Telecommunication Union predicted last fall that the number of internet users worldwide would hit two billion by the end of 2010, and it's now issued its full report that confirms just that -- 2.08 billion, to be specific. As the ITU's Hamadoun Toure notes, that number represents a huge leap from the mere 250 million internet users that existed a decade ago, and it means that roughly one third of the world's population now has internet access of some sort -- of those, 555 million have a fixed broadband subscription, and 950 million have mobile broadband. Just as impressive as that (if not moreso), are the number of cellphone subscriptions worldwide, which has now crossed the five billion mark. That's up from 500 million at the beginning of the year 2000, although the agency notes that it's only accounted for "subscriptions," and not individual users. Any way you slice it, however, that's quite a record of growth for the first decade of the 21st century.

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Mountain View has selected Wednesday, February 2nd for an event that'll include "an in-depth look at Honeycomb, Android ecosystem news and hands-on demos," so by all accounts this seems to be more than a mere wrap-up of everything they've announced in the past few weeks. We need to check out the event for some latest news, may be Google is up for something big this time.

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Today I was a guest speaker at Microsoft Gurgaon Office for Windows Phone 7 Day. The event rocked all across web with hashtag #wp7day. The event started with my session and had pretty large audience. Whats more the event was live streamed across the globe.

You can checkout my slides at:

Windows Phone 7_Saumya Aggarwal

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Recently, I was interviewed to share my journey as Microsoft Student Partner at Microsoft Feed.

Catch the whole interview at:

http://microsoftfeed.com/2011/meet-saumya-aggarwal-msp-from-international-management-institute-india/

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So what's this all about? Oh, just the BlackBerry Dakota which we heard about back in July, and which definitely seems to be real. This one, pictured above in a photo procured by BGR, looks like it's going to boast that up top 2.8-inch (VGA resolution) capacitive touchscreen we'd heard about, with the BlackBerry Bold-style keyboard you've come to know and love below.

Yes, this 'Berry is quite attractive in the looks department, and spec-wise, it's a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE device with tri-band UMTS. It also packs a 5 megapixel cam with HD video recording, 4GB of storage, plus 768MB of RAM. The phone will also have WiFi and be 3G hotspot-enabled, and it'll run BlackBerry OS 6.1. Like we said, from the looks of it, this thing is legit, but there's no word on pricing or availability as of yet.

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Daily deals major GroupOn has acquired SoSasta.com, and Ananya Bubna, co-founder and CEO of SoSasta.com has taken on a new role as Managing Director, Groupon India, reports Alootechie.


Groupon did approach other Indian daily deals sites for an acquisition or an investment. SoSasta (translates as So Affordable) is among the many GroupOn inspired daily deal sites in India, and has been founded by two former Google employees. It had operations in Hyderabad, Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune, as of October 2010.

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The LCD television is a flat-panel television which utilizes a Liquid Crystal Display technology. It has two layers of glass which are polarized and stuck together. The liquid crystals are held in one of the layers. These liquid crystals pass, or block the light, to produce images on the screen when the electric current passes through it.

However, the crystals do not produce their own light. The light comes from the series of fluorescent lamps at the back of the screen. There are millions of shutters arranged in a grid, which open and close to release and trap some of the light that is not needed to create images. Then each shutter is paired with a colored filter which produces a sub-pixel. These are so small, that when they combine, they create a single pixel, which appears to be a single spot of color on the screen. With the help of the fluorescent lamps, the images created by the liquid crystals become visible to the viewer.

LCD television produces high image quality. They can be made very thin, which makes them less space-consuming, and the user can hang them anywhere. This makes them appealing to buyers.

LED TV’s are actually very much like LCD TV’s. They also have a flat-screen which utilizes Liquid Crystal Display technology. The only difference is their source of light, which is at the back of the screen. The LCD TV uses fluorescent lamps, and the LED TV uses LED (Light Emitting Diodes).

There are two types of LED backlighting. One is referred to as Edge lighting, and the other is called Full-Array lighting. With the Edge lighting, the series of diodes are arranged along the outside edges of the screen. When there is power, the light is distributed across the screen. Alternatively, in Full-Array lighting, there are several rows of diodes behind the entire surface of the screen. They provide more control over brightness and dimming, because the diodes can be turned on and off independently.

LED TV’s are LCD TV’s with a new backlight system. They are newly developed for LCD’s, because Light Emitting Diodes are said to give more balance in color saturation, and use less power than the fluorescent lamps. LED TV’s are the newest version, and that’s why they are currently more expensive than the standard LCD TV’s.

Summary:

LED TV’s are still LCD TV’s. They are just considered to be the newer LCD TV version because of the new backlight system used. The LED TV uses Light Emitting Diodes, while the standard LCD TV uses fluorescent lamps. Although they both still use Liquid Crystal Display technology. The main difference is the part behind their screen, which is the backlight.

Source

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Samsung, apart from being a consumer electronics giant is also one of the premier computer component manufacturers in the world, and in fact, invented DDR RAM in 1997, following it up with DDR2 in 2001, and DDR3 in 2005. Cementing its position, Samsung has announced it has completed the development of the industry’s first DDR4 DRAM module, using 30nm class process technology.

Achieving unheard of data transfer speeds (2.133Gbps) at a super low voltage (1.2V), the DDR4 module has been given unbuffered dual in-line memory modules (UDIMM) to a controller maker for final testing.

Compared to 30nm class process 1.5V DDR3 DRAM, the new DDR4 DRAM module apparently offers reduced power consumption to the tune of nearly 40%. This power efficiency is in no small part due to the Pseudo Open Drain (POD) technology Samsung has developed, which takes up about 50% of the electrical current of DDR3 RAM for read/write processes. The new circuit architecture also allows for massive speed boosts, allowing DDR4 to run at speeds from 1.6Gbps to 3.2Gbps, nearly twice as fast when compared to today’s typical speeds of 1.6Gbps for DDR3 RAM and 800Mbps for DDR2 RAM.

The latest RAM modules would only be arriving by the second half of the year, after JEDEC standardization of DDR4 technologies. The president of Samsung’s memory division, Dong Soo Jun, said in a statement:

"Samsung has been actively supporting the IT industry with our green memory initiative by coming up with eco-friendly, innovative memory products providing higher performance and power efficiency every year. The new DDR4 DRAM will build even greater confidence in our cutting-edge green memory, particularly when we introduce four-gigabit DDR4-based products using next generation process technology for mainstream application."

via ThinkDigit

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Wish you all a very Happy New Year 2011!

Lets set the ball rolling for 2011, few of the new year resolutions can be:
Wish one you picking?