[ Tutorial ] Nandroid Backup and CWM (ClockWorkMod) Recovery for S2 i9100

This tutorial is for starters who are looking to dig deep into their android devices.
Well Nandroid is a safe bet, as if something goes wrong one can restore the state at which they created a backup (just like restore point in windows).

So the problem arrives when we reboot our system into recovery (because every where it is written that we can create our backup (nandroid backup) in recovery mod). Stock recovery does not provide the options of backup and restore.

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[ Tutorial ] Rooting S2 i9100 (int). Simple, Fast and shortest method.

It has been a little less than a year since I got my first android device and it is still in warranty, and I have started experimenting on it (did nandroid backup of stock incase anything goes wrong).

Well this post is about rooting the i9100 device without increasing Flash counter and showing Yellow Triangle and I did a lot of research before doing it (as 1st time is the scariest). But thanks to XDA community, it was made easier for me. It provided me many ways to root the Samsung's 1st famous android device.

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Tech Mahindra Buys India's Scandal Tainted Information Technology Company

India's scandal-tainted Information Technology company, Satyam Computer Services, has been bought by a telecommunication firm, Tech Mahindra. The sale is expected to restore confidence in India's I-T services sector.

Three months after Satyam Computer Services was hit by a massive accounting fraud, Tech Mahindra won an auction for a controlling stake in the high tech giant.

On Monday, Tech Mahindra agreed to buy a 31 percent stake in Satyam for $351 million, edging out other bidders. The bid has to be approved by the government.

In January, Satyam's founder, B. Ramalinga Raju, shocked investors by admitting the company's profits had been overstated by more than $1 billion. The fraud had been going on for years, and it raised doubts about the survival of the I.T. giant, at that time India's fourth largest outsourcing company.

The country was rocked by its biggest corporate scandal, and the government moved quickly to protect the image of its booming Information Technology sector. It sacked the board of directors and appointed a new one, which set out to find a customer for the company.

Satyam Chairman, Kiran Karnik says the sale signals a new stage, and will restore customer confidence in the outsourcing company.

"We are very pleased," he said. "We think it is a very valuable company, we view this as a very successful event today."

The Satyam scandal has also raised questions whether accounting standards and corporate governance are adequate in India.

After Satyam's sale was announced, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave assurances that a similar scandal will not be repeated.

"I am confident that our regulatory system has the resilience and the strength to ensure that no such "Satyam" will ever take place," he said.

Satyam has about 53,000 employees and operates in nearly 70 countries. Its clients include some of the world's largest corporations like U.S.-based General Electric. Satyam is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and faces several lawsuits in the United States.

In recent months, India's I.T. sector has been reassuring customers that Satyam represents a "stand-alone" case. The $50 billion I.T. industry has grown massively in the last two decades.

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3D is coming to a living room near you

Three-dimensional TV is coming to a living room near you. But will the technology spur a consumer spending spree like digital and high-definition TV did before it? Or will 3D end up being the next big flop?

One thing is clear, TV manufacturers need something new to get people buying TVs. Over the last couple of years, TV manufacturers have experienced a sales boom as consumers upgrade to digital TVs in anticipation of the government's mandated switch to digital TV broadcasts in February 2009.

Eager shoppers have also been upgrading to high-definition TVs as movie studios, cable and satellite operators, and TV broadcasters have begun offering more programming in HD.

But as the economy worsens, the forecast for the TV market is looking grim. The LCD TV market is only expected to grow about 17 percent in terms of units shipped in 2009, according to research firm DisplaySearch. This is down from growth of about 29 percent in 2008.

Plasma TV growth is also expected to suffer with the market only expected to grow by about 5 percent in 2009 compared with a 24 percent rise in 2008, DisplaySearch said.

As a result, TV makers are looking for the next hot thing to attract new consumers. And some are hoping 3D TVs could be it.

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, four of the top selling TV manufacturers - Samsung Electronics, Sony, LG Electronics and Panasonic - showed off their latest versions of 3D TVs.

Panasonic set up a mini-home theater where its 103-inch, plasma 3D screen showed clips from New Line Cinema's Journey to the Center of the Earth and Walt Disney Pictures' animated film Bolt. They also showed high-definition 3D footage from NBC's broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

While some manufacturers, such as Mitsubishi, Phillips, Samsung, and Sharp, have already begun selling 3D-ready TVs, the top four manufacturers plan to have new, advanced 3D TVs on sale toward the end of 2009 and into 2010.

But the big question is whether consumers, particularly American consumers, will be willing to upgrade to a new TV just because it has 3D. Pricing for today's 3D ready TVs is comparable to other flat screen HDTVs. Samsung and Mitsubishi currently sell their 3D-ready TVs for between $1,000 and $2,800, depending on functionality. These prices are in line with average prices for HDTVs that don't offer 3D readiness.

Keisuke Suetsugi, a manager for the audio visual center at Panasonic, believes that even the newer, more advanced 3D TVs will not cost much more than TVs without 3D. So for consumers already in the market for a TV, adding 3D readiness might not add much cost. But will 3D be enough to compel cutting edge consumers to replace their two or three year old TVs? That's what TV manufactures are hoping.

Three-dimensional movies have been around since the 1950s. And for most of its lifespan the technology has been seen more as a gimmick than something that truly enhances the movie-going experience. But newer technology and advanced special effects are helping 3D movies break into the mainstream.

TV makers believe that much of the demand for 3D will come from Hollywood, which is pushing 3D in a big way. Last year, DreamWorks announced that all its films will be produced for 3D production beginning in 2009. The company has partnered with chipmaker Intel to build processors that will help make 3D in the home a reality.

Sports leagues have also been experimenting with 3D technology. Both the National Basketball Association and the National Football League have broadcast events and games in 3D to movie theaters.

From a technical standpoint, the technology is available and mature enough today to make 3D TVs available at a reasonable cost to consumers. But there are still a few drawbacks that could prevent 3D TV from becoming the next big thing in home entertainment.

For one, to get the really cool, immersive 3D experience without getting a massive head-ache, consumers will have to wear special glasses when they're watching TV in 3D. The glasses are needed because 3D imaging requires sending a different image to each eye. And the glasses help merge the images in the mind and trick the brain into thinking that it's seeing a single 3D image.

I checked out Panasonic's home theater in 3D. I must admit, the experience was phenomenal. I felt like I was on the floor at the Olympics opening ceremonies in Beijing right along side the hundreds of dancers and drummers. But without the glasses, the image looked fuzzy.

Panasonic's Suetsugi admits that in a perfect world, consumers should be able to have the immersive 3D experience without wearing glasses. But he said that it will be at least 10 years before the technology is advanced enough to provide a similarly robust 3D experience without glasses.

"Glassless 3D would be ideal," he said. "But it's just not possible to do that now and get the same quality experience. You would need at least 50 times more pixels to get a display to provide the same 3D experience that we provide with our TV. We are still 10 years away from that kind of technology."

Taesoo Park, a chief research engineer at LG, which makes 3D display monitors for advertising and digital signage, agrees. LG plans to start selling its 3D TVs, which require glasses, late in 2009 or in the beginning of 2010. It's glassless digital signs were also on display at CES.

"Glassless 3D is available today for digital signage and advertising," Park explained. "But the technology is not ready for TVs, because it would hurt people's eyes or give them a headache to look at today's 3D displays for any length of time. It will be at least a decade before we can get the technology to make glassless TV a reality."

That said, some manufacturers claim they have developed technology that doesn't require glasses. Phillips uses a technology it calls WOWvx. 3M and Toshiba also showed off glassless 3D screens at CES. 3M has created a thin film technology that can be used to beam light selectively to the viewer's right and left eyes.

But glasses aren't the only thing that could hold back 3D adoption. Currently, there's no standard way to get 3D footage from the movie studios or from a live broadcasts to the home. Companies, such as Panasonic, are already working on developing a standard. But industry watchers fear that competing standards could emerge and spur another "format" war like the one that pits HD DVD and Blu-ray against each other.

Panasonic's Suetsugi said he is hopeful that a common standard for 3D Blu-ray hardware, software and TVs will emerge sometime this year, paving the way for 3D TV sales to pick up in 2010.

In addition to the standards issue, another hurdle for 3D TV has to do with the high production cost of shooting movies and events in 3D, as well as, the high cost of transporting the video across networks. Three-dimensional video requires multiple cameras for shooting. And it also requires multiple high-definition streams for transporting the video over carrier networks.

Regular standard definition television broadcasts consume more bandwidth capacity than other types of traffic like audio or text. High-definition video eats up even more. And it would likely take at least two full high-definition channels to broadcast live just one game in 3D.

This means that service providers, such as cable or satellite operators, would have to upgrade their infrastructure to handle the high bandwidth demands. Verizon, which is deploying fiber directly to consumers' homes for its Fios service, is already in good shape. But others such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable, are already finding it difficult to carve out enough bandwidth to regular HD video as well as Internet video on their networks.

"Transporting live high-definition 3D streams is very expensive," said Steve Hellmuth, executive vice president of technology and operations for the NBA. "So there has to be sufficient demand and a pool of content before satellite and cable operators will devote resources to delivering it. I really think that Hollywood will initially drive adoption of 3D in the home."

source: cnn.com

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Scientists Create Titanium-Based Structural Metallic-Glass Composites

Pasadena, CA -- Scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a range of structural metallic-glass composites, based in titanium, that are lighter and less expensive than any the group had previously created, while still maintaining their toughness and ductility--the ability to be deformed without breaking.

A paper describing these breakthrough metallic-glass alloys is now online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Early Edition in advance of an upcoming print publication.

Earlier this year, the same Caltech group had published a paper in the journal Nature, describing new strategies for creating the liquid-metal composites. This research resulted in "alloys with unrivaled strength and toughness," notes Douglas Hofmann, visiting scientist and lead author on the PNAS paper that, along with the Nature paper, describes work he did while a graduate student at Caltech. "They are among the toughest engineering materials that currently exist."

Still, there were shortcomings to the alloys presented in Nature. Because they were created for use in the aerospace industry--among other structural applications--they needed to have very low densities. Ideally, the alloys would have had densities in or around those of crystalline titanium alloys, which fall between 4.5 and 5 grams per cubic centimeter (g/cc). The original alloys, made predominantly of zirconium, fell between 5.6 and 6.4 g/cc, putting them "in a no-man's-land of densities for aerospace structures," says Hofmann.

And so Hofmann and his colleagues--including William Johnson, Caltech's Ruben F. and Donna Mettler Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, and a pioneer in the creation of metallic glass--began tweaking the components in their composites, eventually coming up with a group of alloys with a high percentage of titanium, but which maintained the properties of the previously created zirconium alloys.

"Despite being based in titanium," Hofmann notes, "these alloys exhibit the same impressive properties as the zirconium alloys. They are still tough--in other words, they resist cracking--and they are still ductile. In fact, they are even more ductile than the alloys we'd created in the past."

This decrease in density also resulted in a reduction in cost, adds Hofmann, since zirconium is a more expensive metal than is titanium.

source: California Institute of Technology
credits: embeddedtechnology

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