Time Management Quadrant

Time Management Quadrant

The Time Management Matrix - Proposed by Dr. Stephen R. Covey

Important activities have an outcome that leads to the achievement of your goals, whether these are professional or personal.

Urgent activities demand immediate attention, and are often associated with the achievement of someone else's goals.

Urgent and Important

There are two distinct types of urgent and important activities: Ones that you could not foresee, and others that you've left to the last minute.

You can avoid last-minute activities by planning ahead and avoiding procrastination.

Issues and crises, on the other hand, cannot always be foreseen or avoided. Here, the best approach is to leave some time in your schedule to handle unexpected issues and unplanned important activities. (If a major crisis arises, then you'll need to reschedule other events.)

Urgent and Not Important

Urgent but not important activities are things that stop you achieving your goals, and prevent you from completing your work. Ask yourself whether these tasks can be rescheduled, or whether you can delegate them.

A common source of such interruptions is from other people in your office. Sometimes it's appropriate to say "No" to people politely, or to encourage them to solve the problem themselves Alternatively, try scheduling time when you are available, so that people know that they can interrupt you at these times 

Not Urgent, but Important

These are the activities that help you achieve your personal and professional goals, and complete important work. Make sure that you have plenty of time to do these things properly, so that they do not become urgent. And remember to leave enough time in your schedule to deal with unforeseen problems. This will maximize your chances of keeping on schedule, and help you avoid the stress of work becoming more urgent than necessary.

Not Urgent and Not Important

These activities are just a distraction, and should be avoided if possible. Some can simply be ignored or cancelled. Others are activities that other people may want you to do, but they do not contribute to your own desired outcomes. Again, say "No" politely, if you can.

If people see you are clear about your objectives and boundaries, they will often not ask you to do "not important" activities in the future.

Source: Covey's 7 Habits of highly effective people & Mindtools

Hyper Loop - The Future Transport

Hyperloop

A Hyperloop is a theoretical mode of high-speed transportation sketched out by serial entrepreneur elon Musk. Musk envisions the system as a 'fifth mode' of transportation: an alternative to Boats,aircrafts,automobiles and trains. Musk, who has expressed his intent to develop a prototype hyperloop, stated that it "could revolutionize travel", but the technological and economic feasibility of the idea has not been independently studied.

A hyperloop would be, according to Musk, "an elevated, reduced-pressure tube that contains pressurized capsules driven within the tube by a number of linear electric Motors

Musk and a small group of Telsa and SpaceX engineers released an alpha-level design in August 2013. The alpha design calls for a capsule that would ride on a cushion of air forced through multiple openings on the capsule's bottom. The design proposes "a combination of active and passive means to reduce the negative effects of choked airfolw

According to the initial alpha design, released on August 12, 2013, a hyperloop would enable travel from the Los angles region to the San Francisco Bay Area in 35 minutes, meaning that passengers would traverse the proposed 354-mile (570 km) route at an average speed of just under 598 mph (962 km/h), and a top speed of 760 mph (1,220 km/h). 

If it is in India, It would take approx. three hours to travel from Extreme north to Extreme south( Kanyakumary). Ofcourse non-stop :P Hope this comes true. 

[Source: Wiki]

UEFI

UEFI

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. UEFI is a more secure replacement for the older BIOS firmware interface, present in all IBM PC-compatible personal computers, which is vulnerable to bootkit malware.

The original EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) specification was developed by Intel. In 2005, development of the EFI specification ceased in favour of UEFI, which had evolved from EFI 1.10. The UEFI specification is being developed by the industry-wide organization Unified EFI Forum. UEFI is not restricted to any specific processor architecture and can run on top of, or instead of, older BIOS implementations. UEFI is a community effort by many companies in the personal-computer industry to modernize the booting process. UEFI capable systems are already shipping, and many more are in preparation. During the transition to UEFI, most platform firmware will continue to support legacy (BIOS) booting as well, to accommodate legacy-only operating systems.

               The UEFI specification defines a new model for the interface between personal-computer operating systems and platform firmware. The interface consists of data tables that contain platform-related information, plus boot and runtime service calls that are available to the operating system and its loader. Together, these provide a standard environment for booting an operating system and running pre-boot applications. 

Extensible Firmware Interface's position in the software stack

It all has begun when Intel decided to develop 64-bit CPU. They made decision which was very good logically, but unfortunately not as good market-wise: to get rid of all ancient x86 features, drop entire x86 backward portability, and create completely new CPU architecture, named Itanium (IA64). That also meant that old BIOSes won't be running on it, and so opportunity opened for new standard interface between OS and hardware/firmware. This is how first steps took place in the half of 90s, to replace BIOS by new standard, called Extended Firmware Interface (EFI).

Later, AMD created its own 64-bit architecture called AMD64, which unlike Itanium was backward compatible with x86. Intel called it EM64T or IA32e, later Intel 64, Microsoft calls it x64, usually it is called x86-64. Support for this architecture was included in UEFI 2.0 standard. In April 2008, ARM joined Unified EFI Forum, so we expect support these CPUs coming too. latest version of standard is UEFI 2.1, which has few minor changes and features compared to UEFI 2.0. But overall, all versions of standard are very backwards compatible, so software and drivers written for very first version of EFI still run on latest boards.

UEFI Specifications Update

The interface defined by the EFI specification includes data tables that contain platform information, and boot and runtime services that are available to the OS loader and OS. UEFI firmware provides several technical advantages:

·         Ability to boot from large disks (over 2 TiB)

·         Faster boot-up

·         CPU-independent architecture

·         CPU-independent drivers

·         Flexible pre-OS environment, including network capability

·         Modular design

Some existing enhancements to PC BIOS, such as the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) and System Management BIOS (SMBIOS), are also present in EFI, as they do not rely on a 16-bit runtime interface. The Unified EFI Forum is a non-profit collaborative trade organization formed to promote and manage the UEFI standard. As an evolving standard, the UEFI specification is driven by contributions and support from member companies of the UEFI Forum.

The UEFI Forum board of directors include representatives from the following eleven leading companies:

·         AMD ·         American Megatrends Inc. ·         Apple Computer, Inc. ·         Dell ·         Hewlett Packard ·         IBM

·         Insyde ·         Intel ·         Lenovo ·         Microsoft ·         Phoenix Technologies

Disclaimer

Disclaimer
The information and resources of this site are only for the education purpose.Not a replacement of any technical/medical/psychological treatment.I aim to present the most accurate info possible. Some contents of these postings might be copy protected and owned by respective website's owners. Viewers are strongly advised not to reproduce such content without any legal permission/acceptance.

Thanks for your cooperation and understanding.Enjoy Reading.

HTPC

Present day consumers use their PCs for multimedia intensive tasks such as HD video playback. These HTPC tasks are not very power efficient when done using the x86 processor alone. Gamers have remained the main focus of the GPU developers. However, the GPU architecture (coupled with a dedicated video decoder on the same silicon) is quite useful for video playback and post processing also. Home Theater PCs (HTPCs) are becoming more and more popular due to a number of reasons. The desire of consumers to watch and enjoy their media, be it Blu-rays/DVDs or broadcast content, in an independent manner (i.e. not limited by DRM restrictions such as with Tivo recordings or even just optical media) has enabled the HTPC industry to gain a lot of relevance, as opposed to getting tied down with non-upgradeable consumer electronics equipment. All three major vendors (Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA) pay quite a bit of attention to the HTPC market in their products, but it is universally agreed that AMD represents some of the most economical HTPC building blocks targeted towards budget system builders, so that's our focus for today.

A Home Theater PC (HTPC) or Media Center appliance is a convergence device that combines some or all the capabilities of a personal computer with a software application that supports video, photo, music playback, and sometimes video recording functionality. Although computers with some of these capabilities were available from the late 1980s, the "Home Theater PC" term first appeared in mainstream press in 1996. In recent years, other types of consumer electronics, including gaming systems and dedicated media devices have crossed over to manage video and music content. The term "media center" also refers to specialized application software designed to run on standard personal computers.

Intel used to integrate the GPU into the chipset till the GMA X4500. AMD acquired ATI, a processor with AMD's x86 CPU and ATI's GPU on the same die was hotly expected. The Lynx integrates a number of AMD Stars cores and also an updated Redwood class GPU (called Sumo) into the same die

HTPC options exist for each of the major operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The software is sometimes called "Media Center Software".

GNU/Linux

A number of mediacentre solution exist for Linux, MythTV is a fully fledged integrated suite of software which incorporates TV recording, video library, video game library, image/picture gallery, information portal and music collection playback among other capabilities

Windows

For Microsoft Windows, a common approach is to install a version that contains the Windows Media Center (Home Premium, Professional or Ultimate for Windows 7, Home Premium or Ultimate for Windows Vista, or the older Windows XP Media Center Edition). Alternative HTPC software may be built with the addition of a third party software PVR to a Windows PC. SageTV and GB-PVR have integrated placeshifting comparable to the Slingbox, allowing client PCs and the Hauppauge MediaMVP to be connected to the server over the network.

Mac OS X

Beyond the operating system itself, add-on hardware-plus-software combinations (for adding more full-featured HTPC abilities to any Mac) include Elgato's EYETV series PVRs, AMD's “ATI Wonder" external USB 2.0 TV-tuners, and various individual devices from third-party manufacturers

It has now been almost a year since the Llano lineup was launched; by integrating a CPU and GPU into the same die and bringing along AMD's expertise in the GPU arena for HTPCs, these APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) offer a lot to the budget HTPC builders.

The purpose of a HTPC system is to enable one or more of the following activities:

·         Media playback: The media could be either stored locally (on a hard drive, NAS, Blu-ray, or DVD) or be streamed from the Internet (from sites such as Netflix or Hulu). Media files include pictures and music files in addition to videos.

·         Optical disc backup creation: This involves the archiving of Blu-ray and DVD movies onto a physical disk (such as a hard drive or a NAS) after removing the DRM protection. This enables consumers to enjoy the content on their purchased discs without the annoying trailers and advertisements, or the need for a Blu-ray drive (e.g. on tablets or smaller HTPCs).

·         Recording and/or editing video files: This involves using a TV tuner to capture broadcast content and record it onto a physical drive. The recorded content could then be edited to remove commercials or for any other purpose before being stored away. Sometimes, it might be necessary to transcode the video files as well (say, converting from one H.264 profile to another). This is much more computationally intensive compared to splitting/joining media streams with similar characteristics.

Some users might also want to use their HTPC for activities such as:

·         Gaming: This is, by far, the most common extension of a HTPC outside its original application area. Thanks to the powerful integrated GPU, we have seen that the Llano APUs are quite good with almost all games at mainstream quality settings. If a budget gaming+HTPC build is on your radar, you can't go wrong with the Llanos--provided you understand that high quality settings and 1080p gaming are likely too much for the iGPU.

·         Network DVR/IP Camera recording: This is quite uncommon, but some users might like to have IP camera feeds viewable/recordable through their HTPCs.

·         General PC Tasks: These include basic web browsing, downloading and other similar tasks (which almost all HTPCs are bound to be good with)

AMD's Llano lineup includes a range of processors with TDP ratings from 65W to 100W. Note that simple playback tasks are going to be quite power-efficient, thanks to integrated hardware decoding, so the relatively high TDPs shouldn't put one off. There are also plenty of FM1 socket motherboards based on the A55/A75 FCHs (Fusion Controller Hubs). The choice of the Llano APU, motherboard form factor, and other components should be made depending on the desired usage scenario