Trail cameras are popular for its much new functionality. One such feature is the time lapse function. In this we just need to place the camera in a position and program it to take pictures in some time intervals. This feature is widely used nowadays in many wild life channels which show various stages of growth of animals or even for plants. This feature is used based on the imagination of the user. The normal video where this technology is used is to capture a pupa becoming a butterfly. This shows the users talent and creative ability. Digital rangefinder cameras work on digital imaging technology. This technology was applied for range finder cameras in 2004. Epson RD1 is the first digital rangefinder camera, which is actually collaboration between Epson and Casino. Most of the digital rangefinder cameras have the same interchangeable lens used on their film or non digital counterparts. Most of the digital rangefinder cameras are expensive when compared to SLRS. There are some advantages and disadvantages of digital rangefinder cameras over SLR cameras. There is no moving mirror in the Digital rangefinder cameras so the momentary black out are avoided making it more prominent in the film industry.
Archive for December, 2008
Special Functionalities - Trail camera & Digital rangefinder
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008Making home attractable
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008It is a wish of every single person to keep his home tidy and creative to his most, to show his dignity to others. He mainly concentrated on his doors and windows, which could be easily and effectively made attractable. Usually people who dwell in apartments will use outdoor planters, they also make use of window boxes which is a container placed in a brackets kept outside the window facing the sun. It is a container which is used to grow flowers and small herbs which are useful to man for various purpose. Thus the window boxes make the plants to be visible from both inside and outside .The outdoor planters are comparatively large plants such creeper plants and other small herbs to make their portico or balcony beautiful since those plants require only small amount of water and sunlight. Another important structure which makes home bright is exterior window shutters. They protect us from water and dust entering our home. They can be beautifully furnished by making use of teak and cedar and various artistic and paintings done on them still increase their attractiveness. The use of cedar and teak make the shutters to come for long years. Thus all these elements serve as a tip for the ones who are in search of tips for keeping their home attractable and clean.
Heat Shields and Avionics
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008Aviation tools are exclusively designed tools ideal for carrying on the maintenance works for the aircrafts, choppers and RVs. The tools and equipments are also used for enhancing the efficiency of the airborne machines and increasing their longevity. Some of the common aviation tools include riveting kits, sheet metal tools, portable plug and jump, Rivet set mix, ATS economy spark plug gapping kit, Sealant Gun Retainer and many more.
A space vehicle is prone to very high heat temperatures on its entry into the earth’s atmosphere. A heat resistant shield therefore, protects space vehicles from the pressure and heat during the interplanetary movements. Aeroshell is a powerful heat shield used in the Apollo mission to moon in the 1960s and 1970s, Mars pathfinder mission, the Viking mission and many more. Plenty of design innovations are being carried out at space research institutes to come up with new aeroshell shapes and designs. This would eventually serve as the key factor in the developing future space missions.
Telex is an old and well-acclaimed communication equipment manufacturer, which has brought into life equipments like the Telex Headset, audio system, wireless system, aircraft communication system, etc. The headsets manufactured by telex are widely used in security, construction, surveillance, restaurant, military recce and other ground operations.
Global meltdown catches IT firms off-guard
Monday, December 29th, 2008After nearly a decade of uninterrupted boom, the Indian information technology industry finds the road ahead bumpy as 2008 draws to a close, with the global meltdown and financial turmoil in the US and other rich countries catching the otherwise resilient sector off-guard.
With no signs of early revival, even the top firms - TCS, Infosys and Wipro - are bracing for hard times in the year ahead.
A reality check of the industry by leading IT industry-specific publication Dataquest of Cyber Media shows that the Indian software services sector is set for a lower growth this fiscal due to declining IT spends by enterprises worldwide and a volatile currency market.
‘The global economic slowdown is impacting the Indian software services sector as never before. With the US, Europe and Japan slipping into recession, demand for outsourcing and offshoring IT services will slacken over the next three-four quarters,’ Dataquest warned.
Though the software industry body Nasscom projected 21-24 percent revenue growth rate for this fiscal as against 28 percent in 2007-08, analysts fear the annual growth could decline to 15 percent by the end of the fiscal - the lowest in a decade.
Nasscom president Som Mittal said the growth rate target would now be reviewed in January, as the member-companies were in the process of furnishing fresh data to the representative body.
‘We wanted to review the forecast in mid-December but could not do so as export and domestic firms are still assessing the situation. We will re-visit the numbers and give a revised forecast next month,’ Mittal told IANS.
A performance review of the top 20 Indian IT firms shows the projected growth rate of 28 percent may not be met.
‘The slowdown is likely to last 12-15 months. New application development is expected to be affected the most. Smaller companies looking for funding are equally affected by the tight credit market, while the large outsourcing firms/IT bellwethers are sitting pretty on cash on their balance sheets,’ Dataquest said.
According to global technology and market research firm Forrester, slowdown in the technology sector will continue till the third quarter of 2009, while outsourcing growth will remain moderate till 2010.
‘Slowdown will force companies to turn to vendors to help cut costs. Growth in IT outsourcing revenues will remain moderate due to the use of lower-cost offshore resources and smaller-scale outsourcing deals,’ Forrester said in its report ‘Outlook for the global IT industry’.
‘Unlike in the first two quarters (April-September), clients have put discretionary projects on hold in the third quarter. Decisions on new projects have been postponed to next year, as clients are busy grappling with the ongoing crisis,’ the report said.
Bearish sentiment in the US and British markets, which account for about 80 percent of the Indian IT export revenues, are compelling vendors to tap emerging markets.
According to Dataquest, the meltdown also impacted projects in the banking, financial services and insurance sectors, which contribute about 40 percent of software sector revenues.
‘Coupled with recession, the prevailing negative sentiment is also affecting new projects in manufacturing and retail verticals, which account for 15 percent and eight percent of the total revenues,’ it added.
To sustain the growth momentum, albeit more slowly, Indian IT vendors are shifting to fixed price model from time-and-material billing model. Infosys, Wipro and HCL are moving away from billing customers by the hour to entire projects or in parts to maintain their profitability, as fixed price contracts give flexibility to drive productivity and protect margins.
In the second quarter (July-September), fixed price contracts accounted for 34 percent of the combined business of Infosys, Wipro and HCL, as against 29 percent in the same quarter the previous fiscal. TCS has been sustaining on fixed price contracts, which accounted for 44 percent in the last quarter.
The currency volatility has also compounded the woes of the Indian IT sector.
If a rising rupee in the last fiscal had dented export earnings, the steady rise of the US dollar against the rupee, British pound and Euro during the second quarter (July-September), impacted revenue realisation in dollar terms since 30 percent of the billing is done in these currencies.
‘The sharp and sudden appreciation of the US dollar against the rupee by 5.5 percent, euro (13 percent) and pound (13.8 percent) in the second quarter had adversely impacted the revenue of Indian IT firms in dollar terms,’ Dataquest noted.
As a result of over-hedging in forward contracts, benefits of a weak rupee were limited. For instance, Infosys posted a market-to-market loss of $28 million (Rs.1.35 billion) on hedging $932 million for the entire fiscal.
Similarly, Wipro suffered a forex loss of Rs.280 million in the second quarter on hedging $2.1 billion, while HCL took a hit of Rs.970 million.
On the other hand, multinational companies proved to be resilient.
‘Having consolidated their presence in the hardware segment, thanks to a liberalised import regime and lowered tariffs, global brands such as Dell and Lenovo have outperformed their Indian counterparts even in these times of slowdown,’ the Dataquest report said.
Similarly, in the software segment, global majors like Microsoft and SAP registered revenue growth of 29 percent and 104 percent respectively last fiscal, and continue to grow despite the slowdown.
Wedding favor boxes
Sunday, December 28th, 2008A wedding is the occasion where two souls become one. A lot of preparation is done to make this day memorable for the bride and groom. A wedding is the occasion where two souls become one. A lot of preparation is done to make this day memorable for the bride and groom.
Wedding souvenirs can serve as delightful mementoes for those special guests of yours who have not spared a single effort to make your D-day special. What else can be as interesting as wedding favor boxes to be an expressive return gift packed with immense love and affection.
A wedding favor is also used to allocate seating arrangements for the invitees. These favors are available in various varieties, colors and shapes especially designed for such occasions. In general they are used as reservation cards and takeaway gifts. There are many varieties of favors that are available for formal as well as informal occasions. These are used to show your guests and invitees where to sit; in shot they are actually used as an item to show that the particular space is reserved for a particular person. In regards to a favor, they are available in various varieties, colors and shapes especially designed for such occasions.
Send clear expectations:
Sunday, December 28th, 2008Team building is a term often less understood, rather misunderstood. The primary objective of all team building events is to create the broader sense or meaning, or macro meaning of a team. The broader aim, the broader structure and the broader mind set is too critical for anyone who is a part of a team and these should certainly be in the curriculum of team building events.
Team building consultants often emphasize on certain facts which need to be noted for building a very good team or to achieve something good through a team activity. Primary thing is the act of conveying clear expectations to the team members by the authority. Clear expectations means that the team members should be very well educated about what is expected from them functioning as a team or what possible outcomes should be there at the end of the day.
Apart from that, someone should make the team members understand the reason why a team of such kind was created, why he or she is a part and parcel of that team. The team members should be made convinced that the necessary resources required by them are supplied by the concerned authorities to fulfill the aim.
How to Guide on Filing your Tax Online
Saturday, December 27th, 2008Not many know that you get yourself free online taxes filed without the need for any other intervention and can do it yourself pretty easily. This is because of the fact that many think that free tax filing online is only a myth and not true. But in reality it is actually a fact that you can actually file your taxes for free online. All you need is a PC and an internet connection along with the tax details to be submitted.
Besides this if you really want to file your tax using the conventional way of filing it manually and submit them yourself using the paperwork to the tax department, then there are various different voluntary organizations and services which does the tax preparation services for free. There are institutions promoted by the Department of Treasury to help the eligible candidates to help them file the tax and get their tax preparation services for free.
You also don’t need to have any specialized knowledge to file your free online taxes but only need to understand the basic concept explained in an easy to understand manner and follow it accordingly.
Free tax filing online was made possible due to the technological advancement that we have witnessed.
As Phishing Evolves, Criminals Switch to Malware
Friday, December 19th, 2008The scammers began to see serious problems with their phishing scams sometime around April.
That’s when they started realizing that more and more of their phoney “phishing” e-mails were being blocked. Security researchers had spent the previous year closely studying botnet networks of infected computers and they were getting pretty good at blocking many of the fraudulent e-mail messages that were being sent from these systems.
This was creating a problem for phishers — online fraudsters who set up fake Web sites and try to trick victims into visiting them and giving up their user names and passwords. With fewer of their messages getting through, they had to send out more and more spam to work their scams.
By August phishing gangs homed in on a new way to make a buck.
Instead of asking people to visit a fake Web site, more and more phishers began asking victims to install browser plug-ins or other types of software. To pull this off, they’d send e-mail that comes with malicious software that’s supposed to be a security update from a bank. Sometimes they’d simply purchase time on infected botnet computers and install code that steals banking credentials from machines that had already been hacked.
Attacks that install malicious software are easier to launch than they’ve ever been and are clearly on the rise, said Mickey Boodaei, CEO of Trusteer, a security company that makes desktop security software used by banks. “We’re seeing a clear shift from phishing attacks.”
Not that anyone thinks that phishing is going away. Attack numbers are still steadily climbing, but e-mail that includes phishing scams has tripled in the past year as phishers have become more technically sophisticated with their attacks, said Dave Jevans, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group. “These are not things that just steal your passwords,” he said. “These add you to botnets.”
Some of this malware is pretty nasty. The phishers take advantage of their knowledge of banking Web sites to build custom code that runs inside the browser, silently stealing your online credentials, Boodai said. “They’re trying to inject HTML pages into sessions with these banks to steal information,” he said.
Earlier this month, Trusteer introduced a search tool so that banks and Web site operators can search through this malicious code to see if their domains are being targeted in these attacks.
Major financial brands such as Lloyds, Citibank, PayPal and Bank of America still account for the majority of phishing attacks, but phishers have been steering toward smaller financial institutions whose users may not be as prepared for a fake e-mail. They’ve also been going after victims outside the U.S. “With the European banks, it’s been the worst year they’ve ever had,” Jevans said.
And phishers aren’t stopping at malware. They are constantly looking for new areas to hit.
In the past two months Jevans has also seen phishers spoof companies like FedEx and United Parcel Service with attacks that are designed to install malicious software on computers. And, in a worrying development, phishers have also targeted domain name registrars, hoping to steal credentials that could allow them to redirect entire Internet domains to their malicious servers.
Some security experts believe that such a phishing attack may have given criminals access to the CheckFree online payment service’s Internet domain earlier this month. In that incident, which came about a month after customers of domain name registrars were hit by phishers, CheckFree customers were redirected to a Web site that tried to install malicious software.
Social-networking sites were also a prime target several months ago, although those attacks have dropped “dramatically,” as Web sites responded to the problem, according to John Scarrow, general manager of safety services at Microsoft. “There’s really an ebb and flow,” to the attacks, he said.
Though the move toward malware has made phishing more complicated for some, there are plenty of newcomers too, according to Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence with SecureWorks. “There’s no shortage of education, support, and helping each other in terms of setting up the scams.”
Take Mr. Brain. Believed to be a Moroccan hacker, he develops free phishing kits for newbies so they can quickly get into the business. By all accounts, he does a great job, building slick phishing kits for banks that haven’t yet been attacked. “He’s the premier provider of these free phishing kits,” Jackson said. “They’re free and they’re actually fairly accessible.”
While his phishing kits are free, unbeknownst to the amateur criminals who download them, they come with a catch. All of the phishing data logged by these fake Web sites is automatically sent to Mr. Brain too. So the greenhorn phishers end up getting phished themselves.
But that doesn’t stop them. The profits are too good, and because phishers can hit victims in faraway countries, many of them operate as if they are outside of the law. And with phishing toolkits and buyers for the stolen credentials easy to find, phishing continues to draw a new generation of criminals.
For them, phishing is easier than ever before, said Sean Brady, senior manager with RSA Security. “If I could call it anything, I’d call it a commodity crime.”
Powerful individuals are less compassionate, says study
Thursday, December 18th, 2008Does power diminishes an individual’s tendency to help others? Well, according to researchers from University of Amsterdam and University of California, Berkeley, the answer is “yes”.
The study led by psychologist Gerben A. van Kleef from University of Amsterdam has found that power has a significant impact on an individual’s emotional reactions to people in distress.
During the research, a group of undergraduates completed questionnaires about their personal sense of power, which identified them to the researchers as either being high-power or low-power.
The students were then randomly paired up and had to tell their partner about an event which had caused them emotional suffering and pain. Their partners then rated their emotions after hearing the story.
The researchers were interested in seeing if there were physical differences in the way high-power people and low-power people responded to others’ suffering; specifically they wanted to test if high-powered individuals would exhibit greater autonomic emotion regulation [or respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity].
When we are faced with psychological stress, our RSA reactivity increases, resulting in a lower heart rate and a calmed, relaxed feeling.
They found that individuals with a higher sense of power experienced less compassion and distress when confronted with another’s suffering, compared to low-power individuals.
Moreover, high-power individuals’ RSA reactivity increased (indicated by lower heart rate) as they listened to the painful stories; that is, high power participants showed more autonomic emotion regulation, which buffered against their partner’s distress.
The study also found that high-power individuals reported a weaker desire to get to know and establish a friendship with their partner.
In other words, powerful people were not motivated to establish a relationship with distressed individuals.
The authors suggest that powerful people’s tendency to show less compassion and distress towards others reinforces their social power.
Colorectal Cancer Racial Gap Still Growing
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008Despite major progress reducing overall colorectal cancer incidence and death rates in the United States, black men and women are still 45 percent more likely than whites to die of the disease.
That finding was contained in a report released Monday by the American Cancer Society.
The Colorectal Cancer Facts & Figures 2008-2010 report — the second edition of a report first issued in 2005 found that colorectal cancer incidence and deaths continue to decrease among both blacks and whites, but rates remain higher and declines have been slower among blacks. In fact, the gap between blacks and whites has actually increased over the past few years, the report said.
For example, the previous report found the colorectal cancer incidence rate was 63.1 per 100,000 among white men and 72.9 per 100,000 among black men, a difference of 9.8. The new report said the incidence rate is now 58.9 per 100,000 among white men and 71.2 per 100,000 among black men, a difference of 12.3.
However, the report also found many signs of overall progress. Since the last report was released, 10 more states have enacted legislation ensuring coverage for the full range of colorectal cancer screening tests, bringing the total to 26 states plus Washington, D.C.
Among other advances: the proportion of colorectal cancers diagnosed at a localized stage has increased among most racial and ethnic groups; and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a new targeted monocolonal antibody therapy (panitumumab) to treat metastatic colorectal cancer, the report said.
“We’ve made remarkable progress in reducing death and suffering from colorectal cancer,” Elizabeth T.H. Fontham, of Louisiana State University and national volunteer president of the American Cancer Society, said in a new release. “Tests we have right now allow doctors to detect this killer at its earliest, most treatable stage, or even prevent it altogether. But as this report shows, there’s more work to be done to ensure all Americans have access to these lifesaving tests, and that those who do have access to the tests use them.”
In 2008, an estimated 148,800 people in the United States will be diagnosed with colorectal cancer and about 49,000 will die of the disease, which is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer and the third leading cause of cancer death in the country, according to the American Cancer Society.
Many of those cancers and deaths could be prevented through more widespread use of cancer prevention methods and by increasing access to screening tests.