Technology News

The Most Wanted Software in the World

What do You People think of the most wanted software in the world at present.You may think suddenly the name of ICQ or MSN Messanger or Yahoo Messanger.But Damn they are not.Then what else it may be???

It is called KaZaA the most demanded software in the world.KaZaA is really a file-sharing software popular in the world for music sharing.KaZaA is so-called peer-to-peer (P-to-P) software that allows users to search each other's hard drives for files they want and to download those. KaZaA doesn't require a central server to work, unlike Napster, which was shut down when it installed filters on its servers after a legal battle in the United States.

Previously ICQ occupied the position of KAZZA and has recorded a download of 229,363,307 whch was breaked by KaZzaa.You can download it from Here.http://download.kazaa.com/kazaa_setup.exe

One Number That Will Ring All Your Phones

If you have only one telephone with one phone number, this column won’t be of any interest to you. Skip to another article, you eccentric you.

Too Many Phone Numbers?

But first, count your blessings. Millions of people have more than one phone number these days — home, work, cellular, hotel room, vacation home, yacht — and with great complexity comes great hassle. You have to check multiple answering machines. You miss calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). You send around e-mail messages at work that say, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.”

And when you switch your job, cellphone carrier or home city, you have to notify everyone you know that you have new phone numbers.

A new service called GrandCentral, now in its final weeks of public beta testing, solves all of these problems. It’s a rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet.

Its motto, “One number for life,” pretty much says it all. At GrandCentral.com, you choose a new, single, unified phone number (more on this in a moment). You hand it out to everyone you know, instructing them to delete all your old numbers from their Rolodexes.

From now on, whenever somebody dials your new uninumber, all of your phones ring simultaneously, like something out of “The Lawnmower Man.”

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

As a bonus, all messages now land in a single voice mail box. You can listen to them in any of three ways. First, you can dial in from any phone (a text message arrives on your cellphone to let you know when you have voice mail). If you call in from your cellphone, you don’t even have to enter your password first.

You can also play your messages on the Web, at GrandCentral.com, and download them as audio files to preserve for posterity. You can even ask to be notified by e-mail; a link in the e-mail message takes you online to play the voice mail.

All of this, incredibly, is free if you have only two phone numbers to consolidate. A premium plan, at $15 a month, offers more of everything: up to six phone numbers unified, voice messages preserved forever instead of for 30 days, and so on, along with a Web site free of ads.

There are only two substantial downsides to becoming involved with GrandCentral. First, GrandCentral offers you a choice of about 20 uninumbers, but it doesn’t yet offer phone numbers in every area code, so your next-door neighbor may wind up having to dial an out-of-town number to reach you. In 14 central states, in fact, GrandCentral offers no numbers at all. (You can see what’s available at GrandCentral.com.) GrandCentral plans to offer specific vanity phone numbers for an annual fee.

Second, while you’re publicizing your new number, there will be an awkward period when some people are still dialing your old numbers. You’ll have to check all your old voice mail boxes as well as your new GrandCentral one.

Otherwise, this unification of all your phones and answering machines truly makes life less complicated.

Be warned, however: GrandCentral offers a huge list of additional features that aren’t so simple. If you’re not careful, GrandCentral can turn into a full-blown hobby. For example:

CALLER NAMING Every GrandCentral caller is announced by name when you answer the phone. (“Call from Ethel Murgatroid.”)

How does it know the name? Sometimes Caller ID supplies it. GrandCentral also knows every name in your online address book, which can import your contacts from Yahoo, Gmail or your e-mail program.

Callers not in these categories are asked to state their names the first time they call. On subsequent calls, GrandCentral recognizes them.

LISTEN IN For what may be the first time in cellphone history, you can listen to a message someone is leaving, just as you can on a home answering machine.

Your phone rings and displays the usual Caller ID information. You answer it. But before you can even say “Hello,” GrandCentral’s recording lady tells you the caller’s name, and then offers four ways to handle the call: “Press 1 to accept, 2 to send to voice mail, 3 to listen in on voice mail, or 4 to accept and record the call.” Your callers have no clue that all this is going on; they hear only the usual ringing sound.

If you press 3, the call goes directly to voice mail — but you get to listen in. If you feel that the caller deserves your immediate attention, you can press * to pick up the call.

This subtle feature can save you time, cellular minutes and, in certain cases of conflict-avoidance, emotional distress.

Materials That Reflect No Light

Solar cells, camera lenses, and LEDs could benefit from new antireflection coatings.

Seeing no reflection: Two pieces of aluminum nitride, a semiconducting material that can be used in light-emitting devices, reflect different amounts of light. The piece at the top reflects 12 percent of the light. A new antireflective coating on the lower piece reduces reflection to about 0.1 percent. The bluish tinge is because the coating allows more blue light to reflect. Such coatings could improve many optical devices.

Unwanted reflections limit the performance of light-based technologies, such as solar cells, camera lenses, and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). In solar cells, for example, reflections mean less light that can be converted into electricity. Now researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Troy, NY, and semiconductor maker Crystal IS, in Green Island, NY, have developed a new type of nanostructured coating that can virtually eliminate reflections, potentially leading to dramatic improvements in optical devices. The work is published in the current issue of Nature Photonics.

The researchers showed that they can prevent almost all reflection of a wide range of wavelengths of light by "growing" nanoscale rods projected at specific angles from a surface. In contrast, conventional antireflective coatings work best only for specific colors, which is why, for example, eyeglasses with such coatings still show faint red or green reflections. Fred Schubert, professor of physics and electrical, computer, and systems engineering at RPI and one of the authors of the study, says that the material stops reflections from nearly all the colors of the visible spectrum, as well as some infrared light, and it also reduces reflections from light coming from more directions than conventional coatings do. As a result, he says, the total reflection is 10 times less than it is with current coatings.

Applied to a solar cell, the new coating would increase the amount of light absorbed by a few percentage points and convert it into electricity, Schubert says. A more remarkable 40 percent improvement could be seen in LEDs, he says, in which a large amount of light generated by a semiconductor is typically trapped inside the device by reflections. The work is part of a growing effort among researchers to alter the properties of materials, such as their optical properties, by controlling nanoscale structures.

To make less-reflective surfaces, the RPI engineers created a multilayered, porous coating that eases the transition as light moves from air into a solid material or as light is emitted from a semiconductor in an LED. Reflectivity is related to the difference between the amount that two substances, such as air and glass, refract or bend light. Reducing the difference reduces reflection where two materials meet. In the new coating, each successive layer bends light more as light moves from air into a substrate. Likewise, as in the example of an LED, light emerging from a semiconductor is bent less in each successive layer until it reaches the air.

The theory behind this has been known for decades, says Steven Johnson, a professor of applied mathematics at MIT, but the challenge has been fabricating a structure that is both porous enough and small enough to work with the short wavelengths of visible light.