This is how it works!!!!!!

1. Dial *#06# from your mobile.
2. Your mobile shows a unique 15 digit .
3. Note down this no anywhere but except your mobile as this is the no which will help trace your mobile in case of a theft.
4. Once stolen you just have to mail this 15 digit IMEI no. to cop@vsnl.net
5. No need to go to police.
6. Your Mobile will be traced within next 24 hrs via a complex system of GPRS and internet.
7. You will find where your hand set is being operated even in case your no is being changed.

PASS ON THIS VERY IMP MESSAGE TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND RELATIVES.

If u lost your mobile, send an e-mail to cop@vsnl.netwith the following info.
Your name:
Address:
Phone model:
Make:
Last used No.:
E-mail for communication:
Missed date:
IMEI No.:

- Paras Doshi

Reasons for writing this post:

• I feel I have not done enough to become a good computer engineer. May be I did not have someone who could guide me properly. We were only the second batch of Computer Engineering at Nirma Institute of Technology, Ahmedabad, so we had no mentors in the industry.
• Second reason, may be we were not mature enough.
• Third reason, 3 Idiots was not released at that time.
• So this post is dedicated to all the fellow computer engineering students (especially in India) who are still having a good time by bunking the classes but not doing good enough to become a world class computer engineer otherwise.

But what can I do?

1. Have the right infrastructure

• Get yourself a decent laptop. (I prefer Mac but any decent Dell laptop is also ok)
• Get yourself a nice internet connection with highest speed available. (Take a cut from your pocket money if you have to but this is a must)
• Get yourself an iPhone (I know it is expensive in India but you will have to use world class gadgets to become world class engineer)
• Make your home or hostel room WiFi enabled. (This is not expensive. You will get a decent router in 2-3k.)
• If you are not able to do any or all of the above things, don’t worry you can still become a good computer engineer. So hang on and keep reading.

2. Learn to use Google Reader

• Google reader will become the best companion of yours for lifetime if you use it properly.
• It is nothing but a cool RSS reader from Google using which you can subscribe to blogs to get latest updates and posts. So if you have a gmail account you are ready to go. What? You do not have a gmail account yet!! Go get one right now. Stop reading. Open a gmail account now and come back. I am waiting.
• I am still waiting.
• Ok great, so you have a gmail account now, good. Watch this video . It explains in plain english how to use google reader.
• Software, Web Search Strategies, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Blogs, Podcasting and Cloud computing on http://www.commoncraft.com/ (Now you understand why I told you get the fastest internet connection available?). You don’t have to see them all at once but do check them all and understand.
• Done? Ok so you are ready to become a world class computer engineer now.
• Now you understand Google Reader, so it’s time to subscribe to interesting blogs. Subscribe to following blogs.
  • Techcrunch.com (King of Technology Blogs)
  • Gigaom.com (Michale Arrington of Techcrunch considers Om as his Guru)
  • ReadWriteWeb.com
  • Pluggd.in (Indian Techcrunch)
  • JoelOnSoftware.com (a must read for programmers)
  • CodingHorror.com (another must read for programmers)
• There are many such blogs but to start with these are ok. You will keep finding other interesting blogs as and when you will come across some.
• Getting used to read on computer takes time and patience so just keep reading it.
• So I guess we are done with Google Reader part here. This means you have to open up Google Reader as soon you bunk the classes or as soon as you get the time to check your mails.

3. Academic Earth

• Do you want to see how professors teach in Harvard and Stanford? Do you want to see how their lectures are conducted? You can now, we were not able to do that in our time.
• Go to www.academicearth.org and you will see videos of actual lectures and courses of Harvard, Yale, Stanford. Now you know whose lectures to watch after bunking the classes or after getting back to home.
• You do not want to miss the chance of studying in these universities without going to US to giving them millions in fees right? and guess what? Attendance is not compulsory here

4. Learn any web language quickly and start building

• I would suggest PHP or Ruby. ASP.NET C# is also fine if you already know something about it.
• And start building something on it. It can be anything. But start programming on web now. Most of you are never going to write a program C, C++ or COBOL in your lifetime. I would not advise against learning them though.
• After you know something about web programming, read “Getting Real” from 37Signals.
• Now again build something using whatever you learned from the above book.

5. Assume you are in Sillicon Valley

• I know this sounds little weird but that’s the way it is.
• The best of the minds in the world are there and you do not want to miss out on that right?
• Thousands of things happen everyday in Sillicon Valley and you can remain updated by reading above blogs I mentioned.
• So start feeling the air

6. Start asking why?

• When you are attending a lecture or reading anything, have a habit of asking why?
• For e.g. Why we have to study “Strength of Materials” when most of us are going to write web applications in PHP or ASP.NET?
• When you ask why often, you start understanding the logic, the reason behind doing anything.
• Same as they have said in 3 Idiots, don’t learn to get marks but learn to know something, to achieve the excellence. When you start asking why, you start on the right path.

7. Understand computer hardware

• Most people thinks this is boring and unnecessary.
• May be it is, but it will certainly make you better programmer, even if you will never touch the inside of the computer again.
• Basic understanding of hardware is necessary to understand how computer works.
• You have to understand following 100% without any doubt in your mind.
  • How your high level programming code becomes 0s and 1s and execute?
  • The text which you are reading now is also consisting of 0s and 1s only then how come you are reading the alphabets here?
  • FYI I am still not 100% clear on this. But I will be one day. Till then I am not a good computer engineer.

I guess I have get you started here.

By following any or all of the above steps you are destined to become world class computer engineer. By no means I am asking you to stop whatever you are doing right now in your college.

These are additional things you have to do. It takes hard work to become world class right?

You are always on your own to achieve the path of excellence. Friends and Tutors can only guide you, they can not make you one.

I would request my fellow classmates to add points in this post. I believe our batch 99CE in Nirma Institue of Technology had one of the best and brightest minds in the world. Do you have any doubt? Well this guy is one of them. 99CE people are in MIT, Google, Apple, Barclays, Bank of America to name a few. They are spread across the world and are on their way to become future leaders.

I would also request people who have read this post and feel they can add something here to help students of computer engineering. My aim is to have great people coming out of Indian Engineering Colleges.

Last words, by no means above list is exhaustive and complete. There are “n” number of ways to achieve excellence. These are my personal views and I have learned them long and hard way. I hope to make your journey little easier by this post.

The post was written by abhishek desai. Link to this post is :
Abhishek Desai

Kinect was officially unveiled at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2010, known as E3 2010, which is an annual trade show for the computer and video games industry. The myspace Xbox page lists November as a possible release date.

Rumors are now circulating through the web that a Slim Xbox 360 will be unveiled soon since an ad for a 360 Xbox slim model appeared at an Italian website. It is expected that Kinect would be priced at around $ 150.

To know more about Microsoft Kinect (Formally Project Natal) you check the following sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect

http://www.redmondpie.com/microsoft-kinect-for-xbox-360/

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/13/microsoft-kinect-gets-official

- paras

1. Website Spark : It’s for small IT enterprises. Microsoft provides them the tools needed for Designing and development for FREE!. There is no upfront cost for first 3 years. Terms and conditions do apply, but they seem to be obvious For eg : You need to deploy a website before 6 months, renew your subscription after few months, etc. Above all, it is for all budding webmasters!

2. Biz Spark : To me, bizspark.com is extension of websitespark.com. Fundamentally it is for Tech startup’s that need support and visibility. This one is meant for all techno-preneurs!

3. Dream Spark : FREE software’s ( like Visual Studio professional! ) for students. If you need a key you can write to me at paras@parasdoshi.in.

4. Microsoft Student to Business : To bridge the gap between Industry requirements and Student’s knowledge. The website has list of Job and Internship openings of various tech firms. it’s for all those who dream to be corporate czars!. if you register on s2bprogram,com, my referral code is : paras.

Keep sharing!

And above all it’s Free to use!!

check it out: Microsoft’s web platform

Author : Paras Doshi

Google never seems to just be satisfied with the status quo, and when they run out of fields to compete in they create their own! Google’s new “Go” programming language is one of their newest ventures, a language which is an amalgamation of Python and C++.

The Go language, in development since September 2007, has been unveiled by Google along with the release of a free and open source compiler. In fact, Google has released both a stand-along compiler implementation with cryptic names such as 6g (amd64 compiler), 8g (x86 compiler), and 5g (ARM compiler) and one which is a front-end for GCC (gccgo).

Born out of frustration with existing system languages, Go attempts to bring something new to the table, and mix the ease of dynamically typed and interpreted languages with the efficiency of compiled languages.

So why make a new programming language?

Google believes that the current languages have run their course. The prominent languages in use today (C/C++, Java, C#) are all based around a similar syntax, and updating and adding new features in these language consists of piling on libraries, with little or no upgrade to the core of the language itself. What Google intends to do requires more than just the addition of a new library.

The landscape of computing has changed a lot since C, and as Google notes “Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster.” Languages have had to morph quite a bit to take on support concepts such as parallel processing, and garbage collection.

Quick Overview

Go, on the other hand has been designed by Google from the ground up as “a concurrent, garbage-collected language with fast compilation”.

In order to not alienate the majority of developers though, its syntax is quite similar to C, and would not take much time for a developer to catch on to.

Go has accomplished some impressive feats. The language is designed to compile fast and Go can compile a “large” program in a few seconds on a single computer. It is designed to simplify the creation of application which can better utilize today’s multi-core processors. The language supports concurrent execution andcommunication between concurrent processes natively, and is fully-garbage collected.

Goroutines are Google’s answer to threading in Go, and any function call which is preceded by the go statement runs in a different goroutine concurrently. A feature called channels allows for easy communication and synchronization between such routines.

Unlike other object oriented languages, Go has a much “simplified” type structure, which disallows sub-classing! Go offers a different flavour of object oriented programming using interfaces, which Google believes will simplify use.

By using interfaces, explicit type hierarchies need not be defined, instead, a type will satisfy all interfaces which are subsets of its methods. The relationships between types and interfaces need not be defined explicity! This can have some interesting implications as people can add interfaces to connect unrelated types even later in the development of an application.

Go seems inspired by Python as well. Python has been one of Google’s favoured languages and was the sole language supported on Google’s AppEngine when it launched. Like Python, Go supports “slices”, which allow you to refer to parts of arrays using a simple syntax. Thus for an array “a” with 100 elements, a[23,42] will result in an array with elements 23 through 42 of a. Go also tracks the length of arrays internally, further simplifying array usage. Additionally, Maps in Go allow you to create “arrays” with custom index types, and are a native feature of the language.

Conclusion

One consistent point in the features of Go is that it is better to have one excellent implementation of commonly used features such as garbage collection, strings, maps etc. rather than have them rethought and re-implemented in each program.

As nearly all Google products, Go is “beta” and not yet suitable for production use. By releasing it early Google hopes to garner a community around it and hopes that enough people will be interested in it to justify continued development.

This post was written by Paras. Visit his blog

The short-term future of mobile phones seems to be quite interesting. We are bound to see mobile phones evolve into indispensable multi-utility devices. Your mobile cell phone’s functionality will soon go beyond the PDA, digital camera or music player roles that it serves today. In the future, it will also become your wallet, credit card, car key, home doorway key, or a personal remote control for multiple appliances. It could well be your personal identity as well.

However, the long-term future of mobile phones is even more interesting. Eventually, there will be no mobile phones. Allow me to explain with this story.

Saturation Point

With the current silicon-based manufacturing technology for microprocessors, manufacturers seem to have reached a saturation point in terms of pure clock speed. Take Intel for example—they had promised to deliver the 4 GHz Pentium 4. But after having developed a 3.8 GHz one, they could neither stuff more transistors into the available space nor increase the transistors’ switch-cycles to attain 4 GHz, because of heating issues. To achieve better performance, they decided to put two cores on a single die, and thus the onslaught of dual-core processors began.

A time will come when it will not be feasible to put more cores on a single die. By then, the current silicon-based manufacturing technology will have reached its limits.

Replacement technology

Research is already underway for using lasers to transmit data within a processor, instead of silicon circuits. Of greater interest is research in the field of quantum computing; here the spin of an electron (a sub-atomic particle) is used to store binary information. Presently binary information is represented by switching a transistor on or off (or a flip-flop for a processor) to denote the binary numbers 1 or 0. With quantum computing, unbelievably large reserves of information can be stored in very small spaces.
Another research area is biological computing. Scientists in Japan have already succeeded in encoding 100 bits of information onto a bacterium. All this clearly means that we are constantly moving towards more efficient forms of technology.

Cybernetics

Leaving these aside for a minute, let us look at another area of research in today’s scenario which is undoubtedly regarded as the most dangerous game mankind is playing with itself: Cybernetics. A cyborg, or cybernetic organism, is a living being whose perception and interaction with its surroundings has been significantly changed (read improved) due to some implant(s) in his/her body. Bizarre as it may appear to one’s wildest imagination, the future will inevitably be a world inhabited with cyborgs.

If you Google information on Kevin Warwick, you’ll know. You’ll also discover, in case you still didn’t know, that cyborgs are not just found in science fiction.. They’re an existing reality—living and enjoying it; excited about the future. Professor Kevin Warwick, the world’s first cyborg, has controlled a robotic arm on another continent by moving his own, because of a chip implanted in his arm.

With the advent of Cybernetics, it might be possible that in the future, everybody will be a cyborg. Like millions of computers connected to the Internet today, people will then be interconnected through a worldwide network. They will be computers themselves!

Implants in your body will identify you on this network with your personal details and help you recognize yourself as the citizen of a country. Your birth certificate will only exist in soft form within you; no hard copy document. You will be able to carry out mathematical operations like a computer. You could download information to yourself from the web and upload your experiences onto in. You could save what you physically see and hear as video files. Your bodily implants will protect you from the harsh elements of nature. Your eyes will be able to zoom into faraway objects. You will be able to hear the sounds out of the normal human hearing range. There will be no need to physically move your hands, or to shut your ears to cut out an irritating noise, just mentally switch off your sense of hearing. Your car’s door will open automatically when you approach it.

You could operate appliances without getting up from your chair. When you shake hands with someone, introductions will automatically be exchanged. In fact, one will not have to use ones mouth at all to communicate; more efficient alternatives will be the obvious choice.

This will be beneficial not only because communication will be at the speed of thought (instead of having to verbally speak out long sentences to communicate a small message) but also because you could make others see precisely what you imagine! And of course, if you were good at unethical hacking, you could download and install someone else’s skills in some activity in your own body and become as good as him!

This is enough to declare that there will not be any mobile phones in the distant future. Whatever you will be able to do with a mobile phone even two decades from now, you will be able to do yourself in the long-term future as a cyborg.
You may argue that the very set of implants in your body that will help you communicate can be considered your personal mobile phone; even if there is no physical handset and that the ten-digit numbers might be replaced by names or some unique ”IP addresses”. But I shall now counter-argue that too.

Programmable bodies

Artists create ugly-looking pictures of cyborgs with cables and wires hanging all around their heads and bodies; one eye replaced by a weird-looking camera, a ear replaced with a weird-looking aerial, a whole arm replaced by a robotic one that houses all kinds of screwdrivers and drill-machines. In fact, the whole person looks like the rear panel of an average desktop cabinet.

It is here that the imagination of our present-day seers goes wrong. Recall the replacement technologies discussed earlier in this article. By the time cybernetics and cyborgs are expected to become common, research in quantum and biological computing will have evolved to a stage where companies will start using electrons and biological cells for storing information. This means people might not necessarily have to be implanted with ugly electronic and mechanical devices after all; they might just need to be ”programmed”! Yes, you read that right. The human body has large amounts of both quantum and biological storage and there is a sufficiently powerful electrical field within it. So theoretically the human body can be “programmed” into utilizing it, or processing data with it.

Haven’t computers become more appealing and more physically optimized than they were earlier? The thought of ugly machine-like cyborgs is in sharp contrast to the human body itself. Programming will gradually become so sophisticated that maintaining records of people will be a very easy task for the government. An already-programmed pregnant mother will deliver a biologically pre-programmed baby whose birth details will be automatically recorded into the government’s database upon being born; through the worldwide network of human beings.

This does not mean that there will not be any physical implants at all. Implants can help one withstand extreme temperatures, for instance. After all, no matter how powerful laptops become, we can never get rid of desktops. Neither can desktops replace huge supercomputers. Each has its own applications. So in the future, cyborgs will never replace computers. But the point here is that in the cyborg-inhabited future, one will not need any physical implants just to be able to communicate or identify oneself or to compute numbers like a calculator. Simple biological programming would be sufficient. There will be alternative advancements to avoid physical implants. So no physical cellular device would be required.

Strange and unbelievable as it may seem, the ultimate future of mobile phones is indeed that they will not exist in the long-term future.