It can be time consuming to shop for all the ingredients of recipes but by going to the above site one can order online and have them delivered along with bulky groceries in a convenient 2 hour time slot to the home .
Terrabeam
Terrabeam technology using a small dish outside the house which recieves laser signals from a 60 degree angle-line of sight , has been succesfully demonstarted in California and promised 2 gigabyte links to the home without digging up streets . The dish cost is minimal .
www.leapingsalmon.com will deliver all the ingredients of meals in cold containers , so consumers can cook it at home without all the shopping and preparation.
Dec 99
Cornell University have managed to make chips with a 1000fold increase in memory density using materials where the magnetic pole can be flipped with elec current .
Sep 99
One useful trick to capture and print images and text eg from the Urdu or Hindi lessons is to go the lesson press the PRINT SCREEN key , this copies the whole image to the clipboard and then paste it into a paint program like paintshop pro or thumbs plus . When you type print the whole page will be printed .
April 99
Flat TV monitors
Not LCD but proper bright flat picture tubes 17 and 19 inch called Syncmasters by Samsung and for less than $700 .
The Fuji MX 2700 for less than $1000 is the first over 2m pixel digital camera 1800x1200 dpi -good enough to compete with standard 35mm picures .The 32 MB card can store 250 pictures . This will make storage of documents , pictures fast and easy.
Telepathic control
Electrodes placed over the motor cortex can pick up sensitive background cortical potential signals . Patients who are paralyzed and cant communicate can then learn to increase the negative or positive component moving the cursor on the computer up or down to choose the letter of an alphabet. After training they have been able to achieve an 80% hit rate (New Scientist Jan 16 99) and tell the computer the command to carry out .
December 98
25 Gbyte disc
From IBM releasing for PCs this month . Full motion video storage should become a reality.
HDTV card
A card for digital satellite TV and HD decoding should go on sale in January.
November 98
Cheap calls
ATand T has started offering cheap local rate calls all over America. The calls are routed over the Internet a much more efficient way of using the existing lines. Asian countries could similarly greatly increase efficient use of phone lines.
Sep 27 98
The most recent November 98 issue of PC Advisor has the excellent 1997 World Book Medical Encyclopaedia free on its cover . It comes on 2 CDs and can be updated to the 1999 edition for £25 ( $40). Please note ukindia cannot help in getting this magazine.More details on http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk
Cheap Internet calls
Deltathree are offering cheap international calls from any phone. When you phone it connects to a deltathree phone which sends the call to other countries via their own leased lines on the Internet . It then phones the person at the other end. Quality is said to be as good as normal phone calls.
July 26 98
New web browser
From netscape allows one to type just key words such as 'ukindia' into the web browser address space and it will automatically use the search engines to find the site for you or present alternatives . There is no need to type the exact words . A favourite site should of course be saved as a bookmark.
July 5 98
Car Talk
Compressed audio files can now be downloaded from the Internet -an hour in under 3 minutes to a special gadget consisting of solid state chips . This is then listened in the car using an adaptor for the tape slot. So one can listen to the favorite newspapers or other info in the car on the way to work. More details on Cnet.com . The August issue of PC direct has a free Urdu desktop program with Farsi , Lahori and Arabic fonts , but size is limited to 25 points.
Sending and receiving email and post to India
An interesting concept at http://www.youngindia.com/epost.htm allows people in the West to send an email to the company in India . This is then printed out in India and sent by registered post anywhere in India for Rs 25 ( 50 cents) by registered post paybale on receipt. Senders from India can send a postcard to an address there and the message is then keyed in and forwarded as email at no charge.
May 17 98
Intranet for learning
Studies have shown that Internet use in schools tends to exacerbate social differences as white middle class males tend to dominate , appropriate information is hard to find and many parents are afraid of their children stumbling on to smut sites. Most of these problems can be overcome by not connecting the main school computer to the outside world . The other computers then just connect to this main server and the teachers put on the web pages of all their lessons with pictures , sounds and movies some downloaded from outside sources. With high speed ethernet links the download time to each computer is almost instantaneous . Children who have missed some lessons or were not paying attention can take these lessons home for their parents to help them
Cover CDs
Some interesting free cover CDs on this months magazines. Computer shopper has the Microsoft Encarta on free 30 day trial with great satellite pictures of all parts of the Earth . PC advisor has hundreds of phrases in 7 languages and PC Home has 10,000 clip arts .
Amazon bookshop
The World's largest bookshop has arrived in Britain and is selling books over the Internet at a discount Amazon UK
DVD rom drives have fallen below $200 and will lead to an explosion of movies and educational programs for the PC. DVD writers will go on sale next month. A rewritabale DVD RAM is set to cost less than $600 with the discs less than $30 for 2.6 Gybtes of data storage -enough to pack all the text in books in a small library.
Long distance transcription
A company is setting up a $300m transcription center in Chandigarh India. Satellite links will mean that letters voice dictated by Doctors and Lawyers in USA and the West can be transcribed within hours and sent back to be typed on printers. Many of the more routine clerical operations are being similarly shifted to third world countries.
Internet by electric wires
Nortel has licensed the technology to transmit Internet information over the electric mains wires to many countries including Singapore and customers in these countries will in the next few months have access at 1Mbit per second , 50 times faster than 28k modems! and good enough to give audio and video on demand ie they can have access to any radio or TV station in the world. From the mains a box will connect via ethernet or USB to the PC ,at lower costs than current technology and there will no need to dial in as the connection will always be on and it doesnt need a phone line. More details on April 1 edition of Times Times Wed April 1 and Nortel .It should give cheap internet access to homes in all parts of the world.
PC in every home
Britain has accumulated so much money from its national lottery that there is a proposal to give every household in the country -all 24m of them - a free computer as prices have fallen to less than $1500 for Internet linked computers. It would save a lot of valuable time and energy in email , shopping etc. The May issue of PC Advisor has a free copy of the excellent Dr Schueller's Medical Advisor CD Rom
This month's PC Guide has the excellent CD Rom Dr. Scheuller's Medial Adviser -UK edition -free as the cover CD. This has thousands of still pictures, video clips of procedures and operations and a glossary of drug names. Highly recommended.
SparQ
This new drive from Syquest costing less than $250 with cartridges less than $50 can store more than 1 Gigabyte on each with transfer rates near that of the hard drive ! The day when people will just take a cartridge to the video store and get their movie transferred and never have to return it is not far away.The jazz disk costs three times as much. SparQ also have a 4.7 Gbyte cartridge ready for a higher price
The journal of Architecture has become the first magazine to have a DVD edition. It consists of articles , full screen video clips and more and two issues are available for a price of $15.Other cinema related magazines on DVD are also out. The reason they are cheap to subscribe is that postage costs are very low. More info from www.dvdmags.com
Great free Urdu Software
From this site Free Urdu software http://leb.net/compcorp/pagecom3.zip can be downloaded. It has true Urdu looking characters rather than the Arabic ones current fonts use. And as one types a word the inital and middle letters are changed automatically in shape and joined to the next letter. If anybody is able to print posters using this software please let us know.
The February 98 edition of PC Format has a free cover Redshift 2 CD Rom. It has ten video tutorials on astronomical topics including the birth of the Universe from being smaller than an atom to 15 billion light years across , structure of galaxies , how to read a star chart and much more. Also video clips from the moon voyages and thousands of photographs of the earth , planets , moons and the Universe. One can also see the night sky from any position of the planet for any time or day. It is a really superb CD Rom and illustrates the way children will learn rapidly in the future . More details from PC Format - Issue 79 , Cary Court , Somerset , UK , TA11 6BR or the web site http://www.futurenet.com/pcnet/pcformat/pcformat.html or write to subs@futurenet.com . Please note ukindia cannot help in getting these disks. The Feb 98 ( Issue 78) edition of PC Review has a free CD Rom on Space Travel with over 90 minutes of NASA video also from futurenet.
First educational DVD Rom
A new era in multimedia education has begun with the imminent release of the first educational DVD from Doris Kindersely. Called the 'Eyewitness World Atlas ' it has a 3D map representation of the whole world at a detailed 1km per pixel . One can therefore fly from any point in the world to any other point seeing the mountains , lakes and cities below at a very high resolution. It also has 30 full screen videos at MPEG 2 -better than laser quality . It has huge database of facts and maps on all countries and thousands of web links. DVD's are cheaper to make than VHS and have a much higher quality and if South Asian movie producers can take advantage of it , it could open up a huge market for them.
Web TV boxes
One from Phillips can now display the internet on a TV so that one can surf the net wihtout having to go to the computer. It costs less than $300. More details on www.cnet.com
A CD Rom on Indian food
Called Khana Khazana is on sale by www.zeetelevision.com by its famous chef. Prices is £22 from Zee TV po box N139 , ub55ut. It has videos demonstrating cooking techniques and color pictures.
Email kids
By the end of this year Britain plans to give all schoolchildren their own email address which they will keep for life for free. Since email is so much cheaper than ordinary mail this could lead to an interconnected society.
Mini Disc web recording
Sharp has made the mini disc able to record directly from the net so that downloaded audio clips which can take up a huge amount of space can be stored directly on these 74min discs . www.liquidaudio.com
Super audio CD
Phillips and Sony have brought out a new DVD player which can store extra frequencies normally not heard by the human ear but which nevertheless contribute to the overall appreciation of music and so sound much better. These discs will play in existing CD machines as well but the quality will only be as good as normal CD.
Carnatic CD Rom
A CD Rom of South Indian Classical music presenting the basic structure , principles and history of Carnatic music has been made by Sowmya and Shashikiran. It covers the entire domain of instrumental and classical music, and the mythology of its origins (asianage.com Dec 12)
Super Floppy
Sony have developed a super floppy disk which can store 200MB and read normal floppies . It can transfer at 3.6mbs fast enough for high quality video to be shown in real time . Camcorders will allow high quality movies to be made on the computer.
Note taking cut by 90%
A family doctor has written a new program which can cut the time it takes to write notes after a consultation from one minute to less than five seconds. Called EXTREMIS it consists of macros for 400 common conditions so that with just the touch of a keyboard the doctor can enter all the data. For eg if a chest infection the computer would automatically enter lungs sound clear , afebrile , amoxycillin 500 tds etc with the stroke of one key. The doctor can of course modify any of these . The program is availaible from Dr Irvine at Box No. 10 Letchworth . It is availaible only for those who use Emis and a stamped envelope must be sent.
Live Internet
The world's streets are becoming safer by inexpesive cameras which take a still picture every few seconds and transmit them over the internet . Soon most of the streets in the West could be monitored by people in the third world watching these sites. A family in New Mexico who monitored one English city sit - http://www.actual.co.uk/streetcam.html- over months was so impressed that it was so quite and nothing happened that they shifted home to England . They said they were fed up with the sunshine and sand of New Mexico and quite liked the greenery and drizzle of England. These cameras costing less than $200 could be a cheap way for factories etc. to monitor their sites.