Archive for the ‘computer technology’ Category

Cell phone plans: The Best One for You

May 22nd, 2010 by admin


Cell phone has evolved to be one of the most important part of life. Most businesses require their officers to have a cell phone. Even individuals need cell phones in going about their daily lives. This is why acquiring this important gadget require intelligence to avoid inappropriate expense. Finding the most reasonable cell phone plan is one requirement in choosing cell phones intelligently. Because of the very large number of network services in this country, it may help you to research and assess their offers before deciding on a cell phone plan.

Before you decide to buy a cell phone, you may want to decide first whether you want a prepaid cell phone service or a traditional cell phone plan. If you decide on a prepaid cell phone service, then no problem, no credit check, you just need to pay outright and immediately you have your phone. Some cell phone companies even offer free cellular phone unit when you acquire a prepaid cell phone service from them. However, when you want a cell phone plan, you may need to choose from a by minute charging or by the second charging. Both charging process have positive and negative points. You need to assess your usage frequency and requirements before you decide on a cell phone plan. You may research on the performance like if they have enough towers to reach you wherever you are. There are different cell phone plans for family and national use. There are also cell phone plans for regional use. All of these have their own benefits although there are also their disadvantages. For prepaid cell phone plans, there are cell phone units that may not have the capability for this connection.

Other cell phone plans like family plans, this is advantageous for family use and small businesses. There is free access for emergencies. In addition, for family plans, it is cheaper to call the other cell phones included in one billing. There are also discounts for the airtime usage of family members using this cell phone plan. For national plans, this cell phone plan includes free long-distance charges. There are no roaming charges for this cell phone plan and it is another advantage. For regional use, this cell phone plan may require you to pay long-distance charges but the airtime rates may be cheaper.

Cell phone plans may be beneficial is you can acquire the once that have the benefits you need. The manner of usage is an essential requirement, if you do not need it as much and just for emergencies, prepaid cell phone plan could suit you well than traditional plans where you need to sign a contract with the service provider.

Prepaid cell phone plans are often preferred; however, for travelers the traditional plan with no roaming charges and no long-distance charges might be best.

All of this notwithstanding, in order to make full and effective use of your cell phone, you may want to set some guidelines in your usage. If you want your cell phone for your business, you may need to make sure you turn it off when you need privacy. Being available every time may not do well for you. Reserve sometime for yourself and never allow people to disturb you during this time. If your business partners know they could reach you even late at night and on weekends, they will be annoyed if you suddenly change this behavior. Having a cell phone and being available all the time may not be healthy, thus, you have to be wary not to allow people disturb you when you need to be alone with or without your cell phone.

History of Motion Capture for Computer Character Animation

March 9th, 2010 by admin


History of Motion Capture for Computer Character Animation

The use of motion capture for computer character animation is relatively new, having begun in the late 1970’s, and only now beginning to become widespread. Motion capture is the recording of human body movement (or other movement) for immediate or delayed analysis and playback. Motion capture for computer character animation involves the mapping of human motion onto the motion of a computer character. To get convincing motion for the human characters, Disney studios traced animation over film footage of live actors playing out the scenes. This method, called rotoscoping, has been successfully used for human characters ever since.The rotoscoping was invented by max fleischer in 1915.The first cartoon character has to be rotoscope was “koko the clown”.He want to use koko to convinced the big studio in the new process for the project.Walt Disney use the rotoscoping technique in 1937 to create motion of human characteristic in snow white.The decision of using rotoscoping technique is realistic human motion. In 1970’s it began to be feasible to animate characters by computer, animators adapted traditional techniques,includingrotoscoping.There is several name in the motion capture history;

Pioneers of Motion Capture

Eadweard Muybridge (1830 – 1904) – pioneer photographer of the moving image

Étienne-Jules Marey – First person to analyze human and animal motion with video

Harold E. “Doc” Edgerton (1903-1990) -High Speed stroboscopic photography

Max Fleischer (1915) – Rotoscoping

Lee Harrison III (1960’s) – Scanimation

Walt Disney – Multiplane Camera

The motion capture problems

The goal of motion capture is to record the movement of a performer (typically,but not always,human) in a compact and usable manner.Computer graphics and computer vision usually abstract the body into a small number of rigid segments that rotate relative to one another.The motion capture problem we consider therefore must have the following form: given a single stream of video observations of a performer, compute a 3D skeletal representation of the motion of sufficient quality to be useful for animation.

The specific challenges of animation make the problem even tougher.

- Unlike applications such as recognition and surveillance, animation does care about small details.

- Jitter and wobbles often come from uncertainty in computations,

- The importance of high frequencies means that filtering is not a viable tool for noise removal at video sampling rates.

- The unpredictability and unusual motions that we need to capture limit the strength of the models we can apply.

Learn About Latest Computer Viruses

January 22nd, 2010 by admin


Each and every day a number of sophisticated computer viruses, Trojan horses, worms and other types malwares are created to infect computers. This infection spreads rapidly from one PC to another all over the world via internet, hard disk drive, CD or DVD. In the pre internet era diskettes were the only way of spreading infection. At that point of time infection used to spread in a very slow way. But now as we cannot spend a moment without IM, email or social network the virus now spread within a few moments.

The newest computer viruses are in many ways similar to their biological counter parts. This happens only because of the habits of the creators. They want to reverse and modify the process of making the new viruses to serve their own purpose. These similarities help the antivirus software to detect the presence of unknown and new treats. Antivirus companies generally store known viruses in their database. They use it to compare the substance of memory and files when you scan your system. It helps to detect the presence of a new kind of viruses in a computer.

Once your PC gets infected with malicious viruses it will show certain symptoms that may help you to indicate the presence of viruses or other malicious software. For example if you see certain applications or files which should not be there in your system or notice applications or websites randomly popping up whenever you startup without opening the browser. Once you notice such features on your PC then you definitely have got virus infection and try to remove it as soon as possible. But if your antivirus cannot remove or fix the virus infection then it will be better for you to contact with the technicians who provided you the antivirus software or you may seek help from online PC support technician. An online PC support technician may be able to go through the problem and probably include the latest virus or malware in their list.

As a PC user it may not be possible for you to check every single piece of software installed in your system to get the trace of computer virus. This job will be performed automatically by your antivirus software. If you suspect that your PC have infected with a newest virus and your antivirus does not have it in its database and therefore, cannot fix the problem you can observe for some odd behaviors. For example you may see a number of applications are running as you open the computer task manager. There are some viruses that enter into your computer under the disguise of different application names.

Once you get the trace of any malicious software in your system you should try to remove it as soon as possible to keep your computer safe. Virus infection and removing the infection may cost a lot of money, time and necessary data. To prevent such situation antivirus companies offer frequent updates that are downloaded automatically by the software which is already installed in the computer. Software publishers such as Apple and Microsoft release security patches on regular basis. It protects vulnerabilities inherent in their systems to keep it safe from virus attacks.