Update on Sony software upgrades, including uplift to Jelly Bean Android 4.1 for 2012 Xperia™ smartphones

Sony like to bring you up-to-speed with the latest in our Android 4.1 rollout scheduling.

First up, the upgrade plans* for Xperia T, Xperia TX and Xperia V are progressing as planned – these smartphones will start to receive Jelly Bean during February and March.

Next up, Xperia P, Xperia J and Xperia go will be upgraded from the end of March. Then Xperia S, Xperia SL, Xperia ion and Xperia acro S will follow in the subsequent weeks.

Particularly excited about the Sony Xperia Jelly Bean features and functionality – Sony look forward to bringing you more information on this in the New Year.

The decision has been taken not to upgrade Xperia U, Xperia miro, Xperia tipo, and Xperia sola beyond Android 4.0.

Feel free to drop a comment below, and keep your eyes on the blog as we'll be sharing more detailed news/updates as soon as we can.

*Availability and rollout timing will vary by market and customer variants.

Courtest: Sony

Sony Xperia P, Sola and U Receives 6.1.1.B.1.54 Update

This update fixes the lag issues found in the previous build. We have tested this firmware on Sony Xperia U which was already updated to the build number 6.1.1.B.1.10 and after upgrading to the build number 6.1.1.B.1.54. We have seen some noticeable changes. Firstly the phone is very fast and smooth now and is very stable. The WALKMAN volume level has been increased does making the sound a little high and more clearer.

The camera is now better and shooting indoor pictures with flash without making them dark anymore and the camera performs better in saturation. The games are running more stable and smoother than they were on the previous build. If you got the update and installed it then tested and if you found any bugs then feel free to comment below.

Kamals Viswaroopam to premiere in Tata Sky DTH on Jan 10

Vishwaroopam will premiere on TV at 9 PM on January 10 via Tata Sky's DTH, eight hours prior to the release in theatres, if things go as expected. The Price for the package is expected to be around Rs 1000 for a family of 4.

Kamal had paused his DTH(direct to home) plans after theatre-owners, who came to know of Kamal's 'unique' idea, decided in unison to impose a permanent ban in taking up the release of Kamal Haasan's films in future in case he didn't' relent on his decision.

Soon After Kamal had called upon the Producers and Chamber official to explain his case and his revenue generating model (Direct to Home Premiere plan through DTH operators), which would be benefiting not only him, but all film producers in the coming days. A plan that takes movies right to your home, thereby bringing down the video piracy concern to a greater factor, also the DTH video being telecasted would be encrypted so it is not recordable.  Since it is only one time premier which concentres majorly on non theatre going crowd, the theatre screening revenue would also not hit by large.

The producers are now supporting Kamals decission  and have decided to stand up with Kamal , leaving theater owners puzzled as to whether protest the decision or go with it.

With Tata Sky coming forward to take Kamal viswaroopam DTH rights with plans to expand in the industry, the field leader SUN Direct not wanting to loose their customer base is now trying to buy studio green's Alex Pandian Tamil and Telugu DTH rights for 20 Crores.

courtesy: Kollytalk

The Power of the Human Spirit

The Power of the Human Spirit is Shown at its Mightiest by this one little girl. We Salute Her.
Qian HongYan lost her legs in an accident.Her family in China are poor and couldn't afford prosthetic legs, so she uses a basketball to help
her move. - Qian uses two wooden props to drag herself, and never complains, even though she has worn out six basketballs. - She attends her class- She always smiles, always being cheerful
YouTube : Qian HongYan use basketball to walk

Gmail Down?

We found issue in connecting with Gmail Server. also can't load gmail via browser. Is it down for few mins. today (4th Dec-2012 @1:50PM IST).

Thanksgiving 2012 Myths and Facts

Before the big dinner, debunk the myths—for starters, the first "real" U.S. Thanksgiving wasn't until the 1800s—and get to the roots of Thanksgiving 2012.

Thanksgiving Dinner: Recipe for Food Coma?

Key to any Thanksgiving Day menu are a fat turkey and cranberry sauce.

An estimated 254 million turkeys will be raised for slaughter in the U.S. during 2012, up 2 percent from 2011's total, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service. Last year's birds were worth about five billion dollars.

About 46 million turkeys ended up on U.S. dinner tables last Thanksgiving—or about 736 million pounds (334 million kilograms) of turkey meat, according to estimates from the National Turkey Federation.

Minnesota is the United States' top turkey-producing state, followed by North Carolina, Arkansas, Missouri, Virginia, and Indiana.

These "big six" states produce two of every three U.S.-raised birds, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

U.S. farmers will also produce 768 million pounds (348 million kilograms) of cranberries in 2012, which, like turkeys, are native to the Americas. The top producers are Wisconsin and Massachusetts.

The U.S. will also grow 2.7 billion pounds (1.22 billion kilograms) of sweet potatoes—many in North Carolina, Mississippi, California, and Louisiana—and will produce more than 1.1 billion pounds (499 million kilograms) of pumpkins.

Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, and Ohio grow the most U.S. pumpkins.

But if you overeat at Thanksgiving dinner, there's a price to be paid for all this plenty: the Thanksgiving "food coma." The post-meal fatigue may be real, but the condition is giving turkeys a bad rap.

Contrary to myth, the amount of the organic amino acid tryptophan in most turkeys isn't responsible for drowsiness.

Instead, scientists blame booze, the sheer caloric size of an average feast, or just plain-old relaxing after stressful work schedules. 

First Thanksgiving Not a True Thanksgiving?

Long before the first Thanksgiving, American Indian peoples, Europeans, and other cultures around the world had often celebrated the harvest season with feasts to offer thanks to higher powers for their sustenance and survival.

In 1541 Spaniard Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his troops celebrated a "Thanksgiving" while searching for New World gold in what is now the Texas Panhandle.

Later such feasts were held by French Huguenot colonists in present-day Jacksonville, Florida (1564), by English colonists and Abnaki Indians at Maine's Kennebec River (1607), and in Jamestown, Virginia (1610), when the arrival of a food-laden ship ended a brutal famine. 

Courtesy: NGC

Math Can Be Truly Painful, Brain Study Shows

Actually doing math, as is this girl in Cambodia, seems to be less painful than contemplating it.

Does the thought of 1+1=ouch?

If you hate math, it might—literally. According to a new study, the mere prospect of a math problem causes pain centers to light up in number-phobic brains.

Researchers at the University of Chicago measured the neural activity of 28 adults—14 who'd been identified with high math anxiety and 14 with low math anxiety. Each subject was given a series of word and math questions (some of which are below) while his or her brain was scanned.

Result: When those in the high-anxiety group saw a math task was coming, their dorso-posterior insulas and mid-cingulate cortexes—the parts of the brain that perceive pain and bodily threats—reacted as if the subject's hand had been burned on a hot stove. Those in the low-anxiety group showed no such response.

What's more, said study co-author Ian Lyons, "the anxiety occurred only during anticipation. When they actually did the math problems, they didn't seem to experience pain. That suggests it's not the math itself that hurts; it's the thought of it that's painful."

Previous studies have shown that psychologically stressful events—like the end of a romantic relationship—can cause physical discomfort. This study, published last week by Lyons and co-author Sian Beilock in the journal PLOS ONE, may be the first to show that anticipation alone can register in the brain as pain. 

"It's purely a psychological interpretation," said Lyons, and X at Y. "Math is just numbers on a page—there's no way that they can actually hurt you."

Still, he says, "People who have high math anxiety typically do badly at math, on everything from SAT scores to laboratory tasks. And they tend to avoid math-related career paths."

Could some of us have evolved that way?

"We don't think so," Lyons said. "Math is a relatively recent cultural invention—it's just a few thousand years old. So this response seems to be driven by a person's direct experiences. But if those experiences have been bad, the person interprets the notion of math as being threatening, and in this case, even painful."

Lyons thinks his team's findings might apply to things beyond math. "We would not at all be surprised to see this generalized to other phobias—fear of heights, for instance—or other types or testing anxiety."

Can anything quell a math hater's brain pain?

"The initial step is to get over the anxiety," Lyons said. And this is one case where practice doesn't make perfect: "Doing piles of math homework isn't a good idea. But finding a way to be more comfortable with the idea of math is."

Does fear of math hurt your head?

Take this quiz and see. (Note: In the actual experiment, problems were presented one at a time. Each one had to be solved in five seconds. And participants couldn't use scratch paper—they had to solve everything in their heads.)

1) Does 8×9-16=56?

2) Does 7×8-19=37?

3) Does 5×9-16=27?

4) Does 8×5-19=23?

5) Does 6×7-17=27?

6) Does 9×4-17=19?

Scroll for answers.

Answers

1. yes
2. yes
3. no
4. no
5. no
6. yes

Courtesy: NGC

Pratibha Cauvery Drifted to the shores of Marina Beach

An Indian flag vessel, Pratibha Cauvery, with 37 members on board and carrying bunker oil, drifted to the shores of Marina beach  from the Chennai port’s outer anchorage in the strong winds and ran aground.

The 28,741 dead weight tonne Pratibha Cauvery, which belongs to the Mumbai-based Pratibha Shipping, was in the Chennai port’s outer anchorage since yesterday afternoon, but drifted ashore at 2. 21 p.m. following heavy winds of nearly 100 kmph. The ship is currently sighted at Besant Nagar beach in South Chennai, and is lying 3.50 nautical miles south off the port.

The ship was carrying two tonnes of light diesel oil and 355 tonnes of furnace oil. About 20 crew members jumped into the water to take the life boat. However, the boat capsized and the crew members tried to swim ashore.

Google's Doodle for Halloween

Google Doodle for Halloween Celebration. US is hit by sandy during Halloween celebration. Google's Doodle animation looks cool.

The Happy Halloween doodle features a haunted mansion numbered 13 with scary and bizarre creatures around it. A crow is seen hopping from one end to another over the roof of the haunted house. And to make the doodle more frightening, creepy music is played in the background.

Each character of GOOGLE is shown on each door in different ghost. When you click on each door it will shown up.

Halloween or Hallowe'en (a contraction of "All Hallows' Evening"), also known as All Hallows' Eve, is a yearly celebration observed in a number of countries on October 31, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows (or All Saints). According to many scholars, it was originally influenced by western European harvest festivals and festivals of the dead with possiblepagan roots, particularly the Celtic Samhain. Others maintain that it originated independently of Samhain and has Christian roots.

World's Fastest Supercomputer, U.S. Lab Deploys a Titan

The power of Titan, a supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is akin to each of the world's 7 billion people being able to carry out 3 million calculations per second.

In a breakthrough that harnesses video-game technology for solving science's most complex mysteries, a U.S. government laboratory today deployed Titan—the fastest, most powerful, and most energy-efficient of a new generation of supercomputers that breach the bounds of "central processing unit" computing.
The Titan system at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is a leading contender to top the industry's official list of the world's fastest supercomputers, to be announced next month in Salt Lake City. It can handle 20,000 trillion calculations each second—a speed of 20 petaflops, which puts it neck-and-neck with the U.S. government computer in California that has led the closely watched TOP500 list since June.
It would take 60,000 years for 1,000 people working at a rate of one calculation per second to complete the number of calculations that Titan can process in a single second. Think of Titan's power as akin to each of the world's 7 billion people solving 3 million math problems per second.
But Titan's signature achievement is how little energy it burns while blazing through those computations.
Titan's predecessor supercomputer at Oak Ridge, the 2.3-petaflop Jaguar machine, drew 7 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to power a small town. Titan needs just about 30 percent more electricity, 9 MW, while delivering ninefold greater computing power.
"We're able to achieve an order of magnitude increase in our scientific computing capabilities, which is what we need for our challenges, but to do so at essentially the same energy budget," says Jack Wells, director of science at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. "Titan puts us on a different curve with respect to the energy consumption for increased computing power."
Video-Gaming Efficiency
Titan's energy-saving secret is a "hybrid" architecture that boosts the power of central processing units (CPUs) by marrying them to high-performance, energy-efficient graphical processing units (GPUs)—the technology that propels and animates today's most popular video games. A few dozen supercomputers around the world have used GPU and CPU processing in tandem since the first hybrid machine, the one-petaflop Roadrunner, at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 2008. Titan is the largest, by far.
To update pixels rapidly enough to bring angry birds, soldiers, and athletes to life on game consoles and handheld devices, GPUs have to handle large amounts of data at the same time, in parallel fashion. "This is exactly what we need for the future in order to enable progress and manage the energy [in supercomputing]," Wells says. If Titan had relied only on CPUs, which are optimized to do just one task at a time rapidly and flexibly (serial processing), Oak Ridge estimates the electricity requirements would have been about 30 MW, or more than three times greater than the system now demands.
Titan's approach is not the only path to energy-efficient supercomputing. IBM's "Sequoia" BlueGene/Q supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, the reigning leader of the official Top500 list, is part of a family of supercomputers that have been leaders in low-power design. The Sequoia can boast energy efficiency similar to Titan's (it uses 8 MW, and its peak performance is 20 petaflops computing power) through a design using many small, low-power embedded chips, connected through specialized networks inside the system. Four of the current top ten fastest supercomputers are BlueGene/Q machines, but the design does not use widely available commodity processors.
But Oak Ridge and its machine designer, Seattle-based Cray, have built Titan with processors made by the same companies that make the processors in consumer personal computing and gaming products. The upgrade from the Jaguar system to the Titan Cray XK7 system, which cost about $100 million, relies on AMD Opteron CPUs (299,008 CPU cores in all) and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. It's an approach that has allowed Oak Ridge to take advantage of advances in the broader information technology market—including the highly efficient processing needed for video games—to drive energy efficiency.
"There's an economic model here that really enables this to work," says Steve Scott, chief technology officer for NVIDIA, based in Santa Clara, California. "The high-performance computing industry has great demand but it's not a very large market. But we're able to leverage this very broad consumer technology and use that to enable power-efficiency breakthroughs and make this high-performance computational tool possible. (See "Supercomputing Power Could Pave the Way to Energy-Efficient Engines")
"So when you go out and download and play the latest video game," Scott says, "you actually are helping to advance science."
From Motors to Skin
Because Titan marks an achievement in energy efficiency, it is perhaps appropriate that one of its primary uses will be to advance science on the future of energy. Titan will be put to work on research into systems for more fuel-efficient automobiles, for safer nuclear power reactors with improved power output, and on advanced magnets that could drive future electric motors and generators. It also will be used in research to model more accurately the impact of climate change.
These projects were among 61 science and engineering projects awarded time on Titan and another U.S. supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago, the DOE announced today. Scientists in fields from molecular biology to materials science vie for time on the machine at Oak Ridge and other U.S. government facilities, in a competitive process in which projects are picked for "high potential for accelerating discovery and innovation." The deployment of Titan makes it the largest open science supercomputer in operation in the world today. (In contrast, Sequoia is dedicated to classified work on maintenance of the U.S. government's nuclear weapons stockpile.)

Courtesy: NGC

Flying Wind Turbines Reach for High-Altitude Power

Turbines Ready for Takeoff

Like the wing of a propeller plane without a cockpit, a Makani Airborne Wind Turbine stirs the air in a California field where it is being tested to capture high-altitude wind power.

Anyone who has climbed a mountain, a tower, or even a tall tree knows that winds get stronger at greater heights. There's less drag resistance from objects on the ground. That's why wind energy prospectors typically weld their expensive turbines to high towers, because the most important factor in power production is how fast the wind blows past the blades.

But what if turbines could reel in the power whirling above the reach of those tall towers?

Airborne wind energy pioneers, from North America to Italy and Australia, aim to find out. The technology is still in its infancy, although Makani's system—pictured above—has received notable backing from Google's philanthropic arm and the U.S. government. The concept also gained support in a new study published September 9 in the journal Nature Climate Change, which focused on the steady, fast high-altitude currents, and concluded that there's enough power in Earth's winds to be a primary source of near-zero-emission electric power as the global economy continues to grow through the 21st century.

Resembling a drone aircraft on a string, the Makani Airborne Wind Turbine takes flight at its test site, the decommissioned U.S. Navy air station at  Alameda on San Francisco Bay.

By eliminating 90 percent of the material associated with a conventional wind turbine-largely by getting rid of the tower—the designers say they hope to reduce cost while accessing stronger winds.

The winged device is tethered to the ground and flies in large vertical circles at altitudes between 800 and 1,950 feet (250 and 600 meters). Its four wind turbines rotate as the craft moves. According to Makani Power, the speed of the craft increases along with wind speed.

Makani Power's website says the company is developing a 600-kilowatt (kW) prototype. That's considered the size of a medium commercial wind turbine; for comparison, a 600 kW land-based turbine installed in 2009 at University of Maine at Presque Isle generated 680,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity in its first year, enough to power about 60 average U.S. homes. But an airborne wind turbine might deliver more or less power, depending on the boost of stronger, more consistent winds or the cost of trickier operation.

Makani was founded in 2006 and received $10 million in initial start-up capital from Google's foundation, plus support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

One of Makani's three co-founders, Corwin Hardham, has told reporters he was inspired by his hobby of kite-surfing. It's not a coincidence that Alameda has a beach that is popular with Bay Area kite-surfers. It also isn't far from Google headquarters; the company's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are known to be avid kite-surfers.

Courtesy: NGC

Who Want to live here

Location :     Visovac Monastery, Croatia

The Visovac Monastery (Croatian: Samostan Visovac) is a Catholic (Roman Rite) monastery on the island of Visovac in the Krka National Park, Croatia. Visovac was settled byAugustinian monks, who established a small monastery and church dedicated to the Apostle Paul in the 14th century. In 1445 the Augustinian monastery was enlarged and adapted by the Franciscans who settled here having withdrawn from parts of Bosnia with other, ordinary people, when the Turks had taken over there. A new monastery was built in the 18th century. The rich monastery library includes particularly rare incunabula of Aesop's fables (Brescia 1487) printed by the Lastovo printer Dobrić Dobričević (s. Lastovo), a collection of documents (the sultan'sedicts) and a sabre belonging to Vuk Mandušić, one of the best-loved heroes of Serbian epic poetry.

Courtesy: Wiki

Sony unveils 84-inch 4K television with 4 times the quality of full-HD

High-definition TVs roughly quadrupled the resolution of the sets that came before them. Now, the industry is poised to do it again.

By December, U.S. stores will sell a TV set with four times the resolution of today's best HDTVs, Sony Corp. said Wednesday. The set will measure 84 inches on the diagonal, making the screen area four times as large as the common 42-inch set.

Executives said Sony will reveal the price of the set next week.

There is, for now, very little video content available that can take advantage of the higher resolution. With some work and know-how, a computer connected to the set can display video in the ultra-HD "4K" resolution. The set will also do its best to "upscale" TV, DVD and Blu-ray movies, so they look better.

Phil Molyneux, chief operating officer of Sony Electronics, said the situation was no different from the launch of the cassette tape, the CD or the DVD.

"We always get this question when we launch beautiful new technology: Where's the content?" Molyneux told journalists at an event in New York. "Did we bring the content to market? Yes, we did."

The exact resolution of the set is 3,840 by 2,160 pixels. It's known as "4K" because it has nearly 4,000 pixels on the horizontal edge. That compares with 1,920 by 1,080 pixels in "1080p" sets. More pixels allow TV makers to make bigger screens without compromising sharpness.

Sony makes digital projectors operating at 4K resolution for movie theaters.

The TV industry has been looking for a technology that will get consumers to upgrade their HDTV sets. Sales are slumping after an initial wave of upgrades from standard-definition sets, and 3-D sets attract only a small number of consumers.

Apple Inc. has slowly been quadrupling the resolution of its devices, starting with the iPhone 4 two years ago. This year, it released iPads and MacBooks with ultra-high-resolution screens.

Fortune Global 500 - Fortune 2012 list

The rankings, which have been released by the magazine at its website, appear in the July 23, 2012, issue of the magazine.

The following is the list of top 10 companies, as published on 9 July 2012. It is based on the companies' fiscal year ended on or before 31 March 2012.^[2]

Rank	Company	Country	Industry
1	Royal Dutch Shell	Netherlands†	Petroleum
2	Exxon Mobil	United States	Petroleum
3	Wal-Mart Stores	United States	Retail
4	BP	United Kingdom	Petroleum
5	Sinopec	China	Petroleum
6	China National Petroleum	China	Petroleum
7	State Grid	China	Power
8	Chevron	United States	Petroleum
9	ConocoPhillips	United States	Petroleum
10	Toyota Motor	Japan	Automobiles

^† While Fortune lists Shell as a Dutch company, the company itself asserts that it is both Dutch and British.^[3]

[edit]Breakdown by country

This is the list of the top 17 countries, with the most Global 500 companies.^[4]

Rank	Country	Companies
1	United States	132
2	China	73
3	Japan	68
4	France	32
4	Germany	32
6	United Kingdom	26
7	Switzerland	15
8	South Korea	13
9	Netherlands	12
10	Canada	11
11	Italy	9
11	Australia	9
13	Brazil	8
13	India	8
13	Spain	8
16	Russia	7
17	Taiwan	6

148 companies are located in the European Union.

[edit]Profitability

This is the list of top 10 most profitable corporations in the world as published on 9 July 2012. It is based on the companies' fiscal year ended on or before 31 March 2012.^[5]

Rank	Company	Country	2011 profit in USD
1	Gazprom	Russia	$44.4 billion
2	Exxon Mobil	United States	$41.6 billion
3	Industrial and Commercial Bank of China	China	$41.6 billion
4	Royal Dutch Shell	Netherlands†	$30.9 billion
5	Chevron	United States	$26.9 billion
6	China Construction Bank	China	$26.1 billion
7	Apple	United States	$25.9 billion
8	BP	United Kingdom	$25.7 billion
9	BHP Billiton	Australia ††	$23.6 billion
10	Microsoft	United States	$23.2 billion

^† While Fortune lists Shell as a Dutch company, the company itself asserts that it is both Dutch and British.

^†† While Fortune lists BHP Billiton as an Australian company, the company is a Dual Listed Company (DLC) comprising BHP Billiton Limited and BHP Billiton Plc. BHP Billiton was created through the DLC merger of BHP Limited (now BHP Billiton Limited) and Billiton Plc (now BHP Billiton Plc), which was concluded on 29 June 2001. The headquarters of BHP Billiton Limited, and the global headquarters of the combined BHP Billiton Group, are located in Melbourne, Australia. BHP Billiton Plc is located in London, United Kingdom. Both companies have identical Boards of Directors and are run by a single management team. Shareholders in each company have equivalent economic and voting rights in both companies. Hence, it has been referred to as an Anglo-Australian company in many places.

Courtesy: Wiki