Daily Archives: June 6, 2007

Tech Quotient


Last year, Tech Quotient 2006 was organized as an intra-school quiz by Exun. This year, it’s going international.

Before the quizzing season begins in New Delhi, Madras Gin is organizing Tech Quotient, online. The idea is to host a complete quiz online via Skype and allow people to listen to it as a podcast.
The quiz will have 5 participants per episode and 5 rounds in each episode. The winner of each round progresses and one man/woman will eventually be declared the Official Tech Quotient Nerd.
The quiz master will be Gursartaj Singh Nijjar, Chairman of Madras Gin. On the show, he’ll be known by the moniker “Quizmaster G”.

As far as we know, this is World’s first completely online Quiz show. Even if it’s not, it’ll still be fun to organize, participate and hear. Anyone can take part in this quiz. If you’re interested, write an email to [email protected] or signup using the form on www.techquotient.com

Spread the word.

Virus Hates Firefox, Youtube & Orkut

W32.USBWorm spreads through USB drive. It prevents use of Youtube, Orkut, Firefox. Whenever you open Mozilla, it says “I DNT HATE MOZILLA BUT USE IE OR ELSE…”.

Cure:

  • Open Task Manager by holding Ctrl + Alt + Del and click on the process tab.
  • Ignore the warning messages and stop the SVC.Host for the system’s user name.
  • Navigate to C:/Heap41a and delete the contents of the folder.

Also, immediately format your USB drive containing the virus.

Surfing with the Surface


Microsoft Surface is actually a Windows PC inside a black table base with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame and is powered by Windows new Operating System Vista. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen and users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it. Surface also has Bluetooth 2.0, wired Ethernet 10/100 and wireless 802.11 b/g for connectivity.

The technology behind Surface is called Multi-touch. It has at least a 25-year history, beginning in 1982, with pioneering work being done at the University of Toronto (multi-touch tablets) and Bell Labs (multi-touch screens). The product idea for Surface was initially conceptualized in 2001 by Steven Bathiche of Microsoft Hardware and Andy Wilson of Microsoft Research. In October 2001, a virtual team was formed with Bathiche and Wilson as key members, to bring the idea to the next stage of development.

A version of the device was used in the 2005 Science Fiction movie The Island, which was used by Sean Bean’s character “Merrick”. Surface was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 29, 2007 at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California. Surface Computing is part of Microsoft’s Productivity and Extended Consumer Experiences Group, which is within the Entertainment & Devices division.

Prices will reportedly be $5,000 to $10,000 per unit. However Microsoft said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in 3 to 5 years.

Here’s a link to a demo video of Surface on Youtube:-
http://youtube.com/watch?v=6VfpVYYQzHs

Source: Wikipedia,