ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

'Ice Bucket Challenge' is a challenge to dump a bucket of ice water on one's head, generally in conjunction with donating to the ALS Association in the United States.It started in New Zealand on 4 July 2014, throughout social media, where the challenge was to either dump a bucket of ice water on one's head or to donate to a charity of the participant's choice

It  may seem like a silly social media meme, but it’s making a difference.

The challenge required nominated participants to have a bucket of icy water thrown over their head. They have 24-hours to complete the mission from the time they are nominated and if they don't complete the dare they have to donate $100 to charity. If you complete the challenge then you only have to donate $10.

Currently, there is only one drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat ALS, which modestly extend survival by two to three months. The disease involves losing control of voluntary muscle movement, including the ability to eat, speak, walk and eventually breathe. It is 100% fatal.

Dignitaries are getting in on the action. Have a look:

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge by CEO of Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon

THIS is HOW GOOGLE search WORKS??

How Search Works?

The google index is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes, and they have spent over one million computing hours to build it. Learn more about the basics in this short video.

Finding information by crawling

A software known as “web crawlers” is used to discover publicly available webpages. The most well-known crawler is called “Googlebot.” Crawlers look at webpages and follow links on those pages, much like you would if you were browsing content on the web. They go from link to link and bring data about those webpages back to Google’s servers.

The crawl process begins with a list of web addresses from past crawls and sitemaps provided by website owners. As crawlers visit these websites, they look for links for other pages to visit. The software pays special attention to new sites, changes to existing sites and dead links.

Computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently for our web search results. They care more about having the best possible results  because in the long run that’s what’s best for users and, therefore, their business.

Choice for website owners

Most websites don’t need to set up restrictions for crawling, indexing or serving, so their pages are eligible to appear in search results without having to do any extra work. That said, site owners have many choices about how Google crawls and indexes their sites through Webmaster Tools and a file called “robots.txt”. With the robots.txt file, site owners can choose not to be crawled by Googlebot, or they can provide more specific instructions about how to process pages on their sites.

Site owners have granular choices and can choose how content is indexed on a page-by-page basis. For example, they can opt to have their pages appear without a snippet (the summary of the page shown below the title in search results) or a cached version (an alternate version stored on Google’s servers in case the live page is unavailable). Webmasters can also choose to integrate search into their own pages with Custom Search.

Organizing information by indexing

The web is like an ever-growing public library with billions of books and no central filing system. Google essentially gathers the pages during the crawl process and then creates an index, so they know exactly how to look things up. Much like the index in the back of a book, the Google index includes information about words and their locations. When you search, at the most basic level, our algorithms look up your search terms in the index to find the appropriate pages.

The search process gets much more complex from there. When you search for “dogs” you don’t want a page with the word “dogs” on it hundreds of times. You probably want pictures, videos or a list of breeds. Google’s indexing systems note many different aspects of pages, such as when they were published, whether they contain pictures and videos, and much more. With the Knowledge Graph, we’re continuing to go beyond keyword matching to better understand the people, places and things you care about.

How to disable Android Notifications?

Instructions:

1.  Pull down the notification bar.
2.  Long press the notification until a box appears.
3.  Tap on the option  that says, “App Info.”
4.  Uncheck the box saying  “Show Notifications.”
5.  You can re-enable notifications by re-checking the box.

Alternate:

1.  Open your Settings menu from the homescreen.
2.  Under “Device” head to “Manage Apps.”
3.  From here, you can manage any app’s notifications without the first set of instructions.

VIRTUAL KEYBOARD

What is Virtual Keyboard?

The Virtual Keyboard is an onscreen keyboard which provides a mouse based alternative, for keying in your username and password, instead of using the actual physical keyboard.

What are the advantages of using a Virtual Keyboard?

The virtual keyboard is an additional precautionary measure and protects you against malicious key logger programs which might have infected your computer.

A key logger program can capture the keystrokes you enter in the physical keyboard to login. Such a program may be accessing your PC without your knowledge or permission.

A virtual keyboard prevents your username or password from being stolen, especially while using public computers, such as those available in Internet cafes. Also, the sequence in which the keys appear will change everytime the page is refreshed It is an additional safety measure protecting from viruses, Trojan and malwares  that might be present in the computer waiting for you to type in your password or credit card number(keylogger).

   How to use the Virtual Keyboard?

To get the virtual keyboard:

1. Press the combination of Windows icon + R

2. Type osk

3. Press enter.

Use the mouse to enter the alphabets and numbers in your username and password by clicking on the keys of the Virtual Keyboard.

Caps Lock On : Use this button to change case when entering the lower and upper case letters in your username and password. You can "switch on" or "switch off" this button. 

Since Internet Banking usernames and passwords are case-sensitive, please ensure that you are aware of this "difference" when entering your password.

Clear : Use this button to clear a field if you have entered characters incorrectly.

 You can use the normal keyboard or the combination of both normal and virtual keyboard also.

Is it not secure to use the regular keyboard?

 Please ensure that no other person is glancing, peeping at your computer screen while you are keying in your username and password through the virtual keyboard.

To know more about it click on the link  www.virtual-key.com

#virtualkeyboard

Time to say "Bye" to ORKUT!

Though every kid is equally important to a mother, but that doesn't seem to be the same with Orkut. Google+ has just turned 3 and Google on Monday said it plans to shut down its 10-year-old Orkut social network at the end of September. Orkut, Google's first social networking site, will cease to exist after September, with the Internet giant deciding to shut down the service.

Google said it will shut down Orkut, which is very popular in India and Brazil, on September 30. The service, however, did not do so well in other parts of the world and lost sheen to rivals like Facebook.Orkut, which popularised posts or "scraps" between friends, did not disclose the number of users on the website.

However, according to its website about 50.6 per cent of its users were from Brazil. Another 20.44 per cent came from India, while the US and Pakistan accounted for 17.78 per cent and 0.86 per cent, respectively.

"Over the past decade, Youtube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth, we've decided to bid Orkut farewell," Google said in a post on the Orkut blog.

Google plans to shut down Orkut on Sept. 30 and maintain profile data, community posts, and photos until September 2016. Golgher suggests Orkut users might want to export their data using Google Takeout, a service Google provides to ensure data portability.
The orkut users are still able to access the social networking site but new users can't make a new account.

#Goodbye_orkut

Minimal Requirements to begin Android Development

The minimum requirements in terms of hardware, software, and programming skills to begin Android development are not very demanding. 

 

Hardware Requirements:

Android development tools run on all flavors of computers of relatively recent vintage: Linux, Mac OS, or Microsoft Windows. An Android device such as a smartphone or tablet is useful (and of course the ultimate target for development), but is in fact not essential to getting started since the software contains virtual device emulators that allow you to develop and test. 

Software Requirements:

The software required for Android development is free and readily available on the Web:

1. The Java Development Kit (JDK).


2. The Eclipse IDE (Java Developers version) with the Android plugin is not technically essential since everything it does can be done using the command line, but it simplifies so many things that we will consider it to be essential.The Eclipse IDE can be downloaded from:

 https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

    3. The Android SDK and add-ons such as the Google Maps SDK.

The materials present on the following link can be used to facilitate  app design and implementation.

http://developer.android.com/design/downloads/index.html

Programmer Requirements:

Android is typically programmed using a combination of Java and XML). Thus some background in these languages will be extremely useful.. Therefore, anyone with some programming experience should be able to use the code as a starting point to learn how to program Java and XML within the Android environment.

 

ANDROID

History:

 Android is a Linux kernel based operating system  with an interactive interface, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices, with variants for televisions,cars and watches. The operating system uses touch inputs that loosely correspond to real-world actions, like swiping, tapping, pinching, and reverse pinching to manipulate on-screen objects, and a virtual keyboard.Despite being primarily designed for touchscreen input, it also has been used in television,games,consoles.digital cameras and other electronics.

Android, Inc. was founded in Palo Alto.California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin , Rich Miner (co-founder of Wildfire Communications, Inc.),Nick Sears, and Chris White (headed design and interface development at WebTV), Rubin wanted "smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's location and preferences".The early intentions of these people were to design an OS for cameras but on frealising that it has a little scope in market, they shifted on to smartphone Operating System.

 But midway,Rubin ran out of money. Steve Perlman, a close friend of Rubin, brought him $10,000 in cash in an envelope and refused a stake in the company. Then Google acquired Android Inc. on August 17, 2005; key employees of Android Inc., including Rubin, Miner, and White, stayed at the company after the acquisition. Not much was known about Android Inc. at the time, but many assumed that Google was planning to enter the mobile phone market with this move and that was pretty true.

Android Logo:

The green Android logo was designed  to create a universally identifiable icon with the specific inclusion of a robot in the final design. After numerous design developments based on science-fiction and space movies, the team eventually sought inspiration from the human symbol on restroom doors and modified the figure into a robot shape.

Android Versions:

All the android versions have a confectionery themed code name, and that follows in alphabetical order:

1. Alpha "Apple Pie" (1.0)

1. Beta "Petit Four" (1.1)

1. Cupcake (1.5)

1. Doughnut (1.6)

1. Eclair (2.0–2.1)

1. Froyo (2.2–2.2.3)

1. Gingerbread (2.3–2.3.7)

1. Honeycomb (3.0–3.2.6)

1. Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0–4.0.4)

1. Jelly Bean (4.1–4.3.1)

1. KitKat (4.4–4.4.4)

1. "L" (5)