Music Takes Effect for Fun Brain

According to a study published in January by Valorie Salimpoor neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute, music can activate the same brain circuitry as when we enjoy food and sex.

Participants listened to the songs of their choice in PET scanners, which detect the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine comfortable feeling, and also performed in the fMRI scanner, which measures brain activity. 

The scans showed that prior to a pleasant feeling in response to music, the listener suffered a surprise near the striatum frontal dopamine, a brain region in anticipation of stimulation, followed by a flood of dopamine in the striatum back, where the brain's pleasure center. "It's like you are addicted," said Salimpoor. 

That the cycle of desire is what meyebabkab addiction and feelings of pleasure.

Of course not all music is created equal, biologist Nick Hudson from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia wondered what differentiates the ordinary songs with a timeless song. He proposes that one key difference may be found through lossless compression, which exploits repetition in music to encode audio data in fewer bits without losing content. When Hudson comparing contemporary and classic hits that have been compressed, he found that the pop, rock, and techno is compressed to 60 or 70 percent of its original size, while classics such as Beethoven's Third Symphony, only 40 percent.

He suspects that the appeal of the classics' may originate from a hidden simplicity. Composers who want to create their immortal works, might do well to create a work that sounds complicated but is actually built on a simple pattern.

Read More

Chinese Astronomer Proposes Ways Save the Planet

This method is an effort to prevent asteroid collisions with Earth in the year 2036.

A group of Chinese astronomers, led by Shengping Falun from Tsinghua University in Beijing, suggested the deployment of small spacecraft with a solar sail into orbit retrograde in order to change the trajectory of the asteroid.

Mentioned, this method is an attempt to prevent the Apophis asteroid collision with Earth in the coming year 2036.

For information, asteroid 270 meters in diameter weighing 46 million tons of it will approach the Earth with a distance of 37 to 38 thousand kilometers in the next 2029 years. He then will return on 13 April 2036, but this time it will hit Earth.

According to the astronomers of China, if we put a small spacecraft, retrograde orbit would bring the collision speed to 90 kilometers per second and if done the right way, will prevent Apophis to come back and hit the Earth.

Excerpted from Technology Review, August 23, 2011, scientists say, the possibility of collisions in the year 2036 is very large and the asteroid will likely be broken into smaller sections. Fragments of the asteroid could hit Earth again in subsequent years.

However, project delivery spacecraft to intercept the asteroid is difficult to achieve because the solar wind can make the plane fly off the beaten track that should be a collision with an asteroid.

For information, asteroid, discovered in 2004 was touted as the biggest threat to our planet. However, NASA scientists predict, the asteroid likely to present a danger to the planet Earth is not possible.

Read More

Helicopters Controlled by iPhone ?

You want to use your iPhone for something more than just phone calls and enjoy multimedia? You can use your Apple phone into a remote control for the helicopter.

Griffin Technology, a developer of innovative accessories for computers and digital media has a solution. Quoted from Geeky Gadgets, August 23, 2011, they bring Griffin TC RC helicopter Helo.

For control, the iPhone will be fitted with extra accessories ie transmitter adapter and special applications. The helicopter itself uses twin rotors are mounted to the aluminum frame and polycarbonate with a black body. The battery can be recharged via USB connection.

For communication, the iPhone will use an infrared transmitter to control the RC helicopter. The transmitter adapter to connect to the iPhone via headphone jack.

Transmitter to be placed on the iPhone itself using the power from 2 AA batteries. Users who want to fly a helicopter could use the applications installed, or using the iPhone's internal accelerometer.

As if the 3.7V 180mAh battery that dipasng the helicopter is fully charged, users can fly for about 8 minutes.

Read More

Dynamic DNS (Domain Name System)

Every computer on the Internet require at least an IP address to be able to communicate with others. But the number of IP addresses is limited and the amount the longer wane quickly. IPv6 is designed to solve this problem but is still not commonly used. So, the ISP currently considers IP addresses as the invaluable resources and should be used with the thrifty possible. To make use of IP addresses with efficient, ISPS use dynamic IP address on the dial-up customers. That means every time a customer connect, he or she will get a different IP address. Usually this is not a problem on the activity as a client, but the entire application server may not work properly. It is similar to his situation if your phone number changes every day, your colleagues will be hard-pressed to call you.
Dynamic DNS is a method/protocol/network service that provides the capability for a networked device, such as a router or computer system using the Internet Protocol Suite, to notify a Domain Name System (DNS) name server to change, in real time, the active DNS configuration of its configured hostnames, addresses or other information.

A popular application of dynamic DNS is to provide a residential user's Internet gateway that has a variable, often changing, IP address with a well known hostname resolvable through standard DNS queries. This kind of dynamic DNS is commonly referred to as 'DynDNS', after a popular internet service of that name. It is accomplished via queries to especially formatted http/https URLs. Neither the format of these URLs nor the returned response codes is standardized. It is almost exclusively used on public networks, i.e. the internet, and does not require a user to run their own nameservers.

The standardized method of dynamically updating nameserver records is prescribed by RFC 2136, commonly known as 'Dynamic DNS Update' or 'DDNS'. Unlike the DynDNS-type updates, RFC 2136 is a protocol in its own right, with its own security mechanisms, and for use with managed nameservers. While RFC 2136 supports all DNS record types (including zone and user), it is most commonly used for dynamic hosts. In this form it is used primarily as an extension of the DHCP system, and in which the authorized DHCP servers register the clients' records with the nameservers (Windows servers are an exception: by default, Windows servers only register 'A' records and the DHCP clients are expected to register the reverse pointers). This form of support for RFC 2136 is provided by a plethora of client and server software, including those that are components of most current operating systems. Support for RFC 2136 is also an integral part of many directory services, including LDAP and Windows' Active Directory domains.

Solution

Dynamic DNS will direct a static hostname (eg: domainname.com) even if his IP address changes. All it takes is you have to install an email program that verify a fake POP3 email address periodically. It is necessary to inform an IP address when the DNS server dynamic service.

Application

So, how dynamic DNS can be useful? There are many applications that can make use of static IP addresses.

The File Transfer

Transfer files over the Internet is not always a simple thing, especially if the file is very large. Smaller-sized files of 10 MB is hardly likely to be sent via email, almost the entire email server will reject an email that its size is too large. There is also no efficient way, the file will swell in size if sent via email. Upload the file to your hosting account is sometimes not possible because of limited disk space, and it also will take twice as much of the course.

With dynamic DNS you can transfer those files directly from the two dial-up account without the need for a static IP address. Call a host by using the dynamic DNS and other hosts download or upload a file is by using FTP.

The Administration Remotely :

Give the address of the dynamic DNS to your home computer and the remote administration software installing. If you leave your computer on and connected to the Internet, then you will be able to control it from your workplace, Internet cafes, or anywhere with Internet access.

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

If the Office you are still using dial-up accounts, usually it is hard to do because you don't know the VPN IP address. With dynamic DNS you and your employees can connect remotely to your office network, even if the IP address of the Internet is changing.

Audio and Visual Communication

With software such as Microsoft ® Windows ® NetMeeting ® or other software that is compatible, you can receive audio or video call. With dynamic DNS your friends will be able to call you by using an address such as you.example.com

Webcam and Surveillance of the Home

With a webcam and a web server software, you can publish the pictures live to the Internet. With dynamic DNS you can easily announce the address to your colleagues. This way you can also use the webcam as your home surveillance system, so you can monitor the home, family, and others while you are in the Office.

In the initial stages of the Internet addressing of hosts on the network was achieved by static translation tables that mapped hostnames to IP addresses. The tables were maintained manually in form of the hosts file. The Domain Name System brought a method of distributing the same address information automatically online through recursive queries to remote databases configured for each network, or domain. Even this DNS facility still used static lookup tables at each participating node. IP addresses, once assigned to a particular host, rarely changed and the mechanism was initially sufficient.
However, the rapid growth of the Internet and the proliferation of personal computers in the workplace and in homes created the substantial burden for administrators of keeping track of assigned IP addresses and managing their address space. The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) allowed enterprises and Internet service providers (ISPs) to assign addresses to computers automatically as they powered up. In addition, this helped conserve the address space available, since not all devices might be actively used at all times and addresses could be assigned as needed.
This feature required that DNS servers be kept current automatically as well. The first implementations of dynamic DNS fulfilled this purpose: Host computers gained the feature to notify their respective DNS server of the address they had received from a DHCP server or through self-configuration.

Some examples are complex and may require experts.

image source: supporteasydns.com

Read More

Cluster Computing

A computer cluster is a group of linked computers, working together closely thus in many respects forming a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area networks. Clusters are usually deployed to improve performance and availability over that of a single computer, while typically being much more cost-effective than single computers of comparable speed or availability.

High-availability clusters (also known as failover clusters) are implemented primarily for the purpose of improving the availability of services that the cluster provides. They operate by having redundant nodes, which are then used to provide service when system components fail. The most common size for an HA cluster is two nodes, which is the minimum requirement to provide redundancy. HA cluster implementations attempt to use redundancy of cluster components to eliminate single points of failure.

Load-balancing clusters

Load-balancing is when multiple computers are linked together to share computational workload or function as a single virtual computer. Logically, from the user side, they are multiple machines, but function as a single virtual machine. Requests initiated from the user are managed by, and distributed among, all the standalone computers to form a cluster. This results in balanced computational work among different machines, improving the performance of the cluster systems.

Often clusters are used primarily for computational purposes, rather than handling IO-oriented operations such as web service or databases. For instance, a cluster might support computational simulations of weather or vehicle crashes. The primary distinction within computer clusters is how tightly-coupled the individual nodes are. For instance, a single computer job may require frequent communication among nodes: this implies that the cluster shares a dedicated network, is densely located, and probably has homogenous nodes. This cluster design is usually referred to as Beowulf Cluster. The other extreme is where a computer job uses one or few nodes, and needs little or no inter-node communication. This latter category is sometimes called "Grid" computing. Tightly-coupled compute clusters are designed for work that might traditionally have been called "supercomputing". Middleware such as MPI (Message Passing Interface) or PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) permits compute clustering programs to be portable to a wide variety of clusters.

There are commercial implementations of High-Availability clusters for many operating systems. The Linux-HA project is one commonly used free software HA package for the Linux operating system. The LanderCluster from Lander Software can run on Windows, Linux, and UNIX platforms.

Clustering can provide significant performance benefits versus price. The System X supercomputer at Virginia Tech, the 28th most powerful supercomputer on Earth as of June 2006, is a 12.25 TFlops computer cluster of 1100 Apple XServe G5 2.3 GHz dual-processor machines (4 GB RAM, 80 GB SATA HD) running Mac OS X and using InfiniBand interconnect. The cluster initially consisted of Power Mac G5s; the rack-mountable XServes are denser than desktop Macs, reducing the aggregate size of the cluster. The total cost of the previous Power Mac system was $5.2 million, a tenth of the cost of slower mainframe computer supercomputers. (The Power Mac G5s were sold off.)

The central concept of a Beowulf cluster is the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) computers to produce a cost-effective alternative to a traditional supercomputer. One project that took this to an extreme was the Stone Soupercomputer.

However it is worth noting that Flops (floating point operations per second), aren't always the best metric for supercomputer speed. Clusters can have very high Flops, but they cannot access all data in the cluster as a whole at once. Therefore clusters are excellent for parallel computation, but much poorer than traditional supercomputers at non-parallel computation.

JavaSpaces is a specification from Sun Microsystems that enables clustering computers via a distributed shared memory.

Due to the increasing computing power of each generation of game consoles, a novel use has emerged where they are repurposed into High-performance computing(HPC) clusters. Some examples of game console clusters are Sony PlayStation clusters and Microsoft Xbox clusters. It has been suggested on a news website that countries which are restricted from buying supercomputing technologies may be obtaining game systems to build computer clusters for military use.

The first commercial clustering product was ARCnet, developed by Datapoint in 1977. ARCnet was not a commercial success and clustering per se did not really take off until Digital Equipment Corporation released their VAXcluster product in 1984 for the VAX/VMS operating system. The ARCnet and VAXcluster products not only supported parallel computing, but also shared file systems and peripheral devices. The idea was to provide the advantages of parallel processing, while maintaining data reliability and uniqueness. VAXcluster, now VMScluster, is still available on OpenVMS systems from HP running on Alpha and Itanium systems.

The GNU/Linux world supports various cluster software; for application clustering, there is Beowulf, distcc, and MPICH. Linux Virtual Server, Linux-HA - director-based clusters that allow incoming requests for services to be distributed across multiple cluster nodes. MOSIX, openMosix, Kerrighed, OpenSSI are full-blown clusters integrated into the kernel that provide for automatic process migration among homogeneous nodes. OpenSSI, openMosix and Kerrighed are single-system image implementations.

Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 based on the Windows Server platform provides pieces for High Performance Computing like the Job Scheduler, MSMPI library and management tools. NCSA's recently installed Lincoln is a cluster of 450 Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers running Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.This cluster debuted at #130 on the Top500 list in June 2006.

Another example of consumer game products being added to high-performance computing is the Nvidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer workstation, which gets its processing power by harnessing the power of multiple graphics accelerator processor chips.

Algorithmic skeletons are a high-level parallel programming model for parallel and distributed computing which take advantage of common programming patterns to hide the complexity of parallel and distributed applications. Starting from a basic set of patterns (skeletons), more complex patterns can be built by combining the basic ones.

Read More