Hello all,nice to meet u again,well...I must tell u somethings about korean actress and singer.In my life,I had not meet this woman as cute as this actress before.I think I would be overwhelmed in my dream about girl,isn't it? :P,but,I attach her thumbnail for you...this is Sung Yu Ri,Fin K.L. member....and she is cutiest in her group..I love u so much Sung Yu Ri...:)
TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Masaya Igarashi wants $200 headphones for his new iPod Touch, and he's torn between Nintendo's Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3 game consoles. When he has saved up again, he plans to splurge on a digital camera or flat-screen TV.
There's one conspicuous omission from the college student's shopping list: a new computer.
The PC's role in Japanese homes is diminishing, as its once-awesome monopoly on processing power is encroached by gadgets such as smart phones that act like pocket-size computers, advanced Internet-connected game consoles, and digital video recorders with terabytes of memory.
"A new PC just isn't high on my priority list right now," said Igarashi, who was shopping at a Bic Camera electronics shop in central Tokyo, and said his three-year-old desktop was "good for now."
"For the cost, I'd rather buy something else," he said.
Japan's PC market is already shrinking, leading analysts to wonder whether Japan will become the first major market to see a decline in personal computer use some 25 years after it revolutionized household electronics -- and whether this could be the picture of things to come in other countries.
"The household PC market is losing momentum to other electronics like flat-panel TVs and mobile phones," said Masahiro Katayama, research group head at market survey firm IDC.
Overall PC shipments in Japan have fallen for five consecutive quarters, the first ever drawn-out decline in PC sales in a key market, according to IDC. The trend shows no signs of letting up: In the second quarter of 2007, desktops fell 4.8 percent and laptops 3.1 percent.
NEC's and Sony's sales have been falling since 2006 in Japan. Hitachi said October 22 it will pull out of the household-computer business entirely in an effort to refocus its sprawling operations.
"Consumers aren't impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors. That's not as exciting as a bigger TV," Katayama said. "And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn't bright."
PC makers beg to differ, and they're aggressively marketing their products in the countries where they're seeing the most sales growth -- places where residents have never had a PC. The industry is responding in two other ways: reminding detractors that computers are still essential in linking the digital universe and releasing several laptops priced below $300 this holiday shopping season.
And, though sales in the U.S. are slowing too, booming demand in the industrializing world is expected to buoy worldwide PC shipments 11 percent to an all-time high of 286 million in 2007. And, outside Japan, Asia is a key growth area, with second-quarter sales jumping 21.9 percent this year.
Hitachi had already stopped making PCs for individual consumers since releasing this year's summer models, although the Tokyo-based manufacturer will keep making some computers for corporate clients. Personal computers already accounted for less than 1 percent of Hitachi's annual sales.
It's clear why consumers are shunning PCs.
Millions download music directly to their mobiles, and many more use their handsets for online shopping and to play games. Digital cameras connect directly to printers and high-definition TVs for viewing photos, bypassing PCs altogether. Movies now download straight to TVs.
More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely.
The fastest-growing social-networking site here, Mobagay Town, is designed exclusively for cell phones. Other networking sites such as mixi, Facebook and MySpace can all be accessed and updated from handsets, as can the video-sharing site YouTube.
And while a lot of the decline is in household PCs, businesses are also waiting longer to replace their computers, partly because recent advances in PC technology are only incremental, analysts say.
At a consumer electronics event in Tokyo in October, the mostly unpopular stalls showcasing new PCs contrasted sharply with the crowded displays of flat-panel TVs.
"There's no denying PCs are losing their spunk in Japanese consumers' eyes," said Hiroyuki Ishii, a sales official at Japan's top PC maker, NEC Corp. "There seems to be less and less things only a PC can do," Ishii said. "The PC's value will fade unless the PC can offer some breakthrough functions."
The slide has made PC manufacturers desperate to maintain their presence in Japanese homes. Recent desktop PCs look more like audiovisual equipment -- or even colorful art objects -- than computers.
Sony's desktop computers have folded up to become clocks, and its latest version even hangs on the wall. Laptops in a new Sony line are adorned with illustrations from hip designers like ZAnPon. NEC is trying to make its PCs' cooling fans quieter -- to address a common complaint from customers, it says.
Still, sluggish sales weigh on manufacturers.
NEC's annual PC shipments in Japan shrank 6.2 percent to 2.72 million units in 2006, though overall earnings have been buoyed by mobile phone and networking solutions operations. The trend continued in the first quarter of fiscal 2007 then there was a 14 percent decline from a year earlier.
Sony's PC shipments for Japan shrank 10 percent in 2006 from a year earlier. But it isn't about to throw in the towel -- yet.
"We feel we've reached a new stage in PC development, where consumers are looking for user-friendly machines to complement other electronics," said Hiroko Nakamura, a Sony official in Tokyo.
Sony's latest PCs, for example, come with a powerful program that can take photos and video clips and automatically edit them into a slideshow set to music.
Even Cupertino, California-based Apple, whose computer sales and market share are surging in the U.S., has seen Macintosh unit sales in Japan slip 5 percent year-on-year in the first nine months of 2007.
There are other reasons Japan is the first market to see PCs shrink, some analysts say.
"We think of Japanese as workaholics, but many don't take work home," said Damian Thong, a technology analyst at Macquarie Bank in Japan. "Once they leave the office, they're often content with tapping e-mails or downloading music on their phones," he said.
As Hitachi's shuttering of its household PC business demonstrates, making PCs has become less attractive. IBM Corp. also left the PC business in 2005, selling its computer unit to China's Lenovo Group.
A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) and are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts.
As of September 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 106 million blogs
ScienceDaily (Dec. 25, 2003) — As notebook computers become thinner and lighter, the ever-present bulky power adapters used for line current approach the weight of the laptops, but smaller and lighter adapters may be on the way, thanks to piezoelectric technology, according to a Penn State electrical engineer.
"Electromagnetic transformers are shrinking slightly, but there are theoretical limitations in reducing the general size," says Dr. Kenji Uchino, professor of electrical engineering. "A piezoelectric motor and transformer can be much smaller and lighter."
Transformers are needed to convert the 115-volt, 60-cycle power available from a standard U.S. wall receptacle to the 13 to 14 volts direct current used by laptops.
"Eventually we would like to make it the size of a pen, but that is far away," says Uchino. "When we can do that, the adapter will be a component of the laptop, not attached to the cord as a separate piece. Right now, we can reduce the adapters to one-fourth of their current size."
Uchino notes that while his group targets the laptop or notebook computer market, these smaller adapters are suitable for any appliance that requires an ac to dc converter and transformer.
Reporting in The Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Materials, Uchino, who heads the International Center for Actuators and Transducers at Penn State; T. Ezaki, Taiheiyo Cement Corporation, Japan; and A. Vazquez Carazo, Face Electronics, described their piezoelectric transformer.
Piezoelectric material moves when under an electric voltage, and, when displaced by outside pressure, these materials produce an electric voltage.
Transformers are made from piezoelectric materials by applying a chopped electric voltage to one side of a piezoelectric wafer. This on and off voltage creates a vibration in the material, which is converted to an ac voltage on the other side of the wafer. The amount of increase or decrease in the voltage transformed is dependent on the gap between the electrodes.
Most laptops require about 15 volts direct current with less than one amp of current and about 12 watts of power. By manipulating the length and width of the piezoelectric chip, the researchers can convert 115 volts to 15 volts. A rectifier then converts the alternating current to direct current.
The original piezoelectric devices were rectangular, but they could not produce sufficient power, so the researchers switched to a circular configuration.
"Smaller, less complex piezoelectric devices are already in use as step up transformers in some laptops to light the monitors which can take 700 volts to turn on and 50 to 150 volts to continue their operations," says Uchino.
One advantage of piezoelectric PC power adapters is that they do not produce the heat that conventional electromagnetic transformers produce. Electromagnetic power adapters not only produce heat, but also noise and interference. Piezoelectric power adapters operate in the ultrasonic range so humans cannot hear any sound produced and they do not produce electromagnetic interference.
"These power adapters were developed for the American and Japanese market where the line voltage is 100 to 125volts and 50 to 60 cycles," says Uchino. "Eventually, we also developed power adapters that convert 220 volts and 50 cycles so they can be used in the European market."
Other devices that could use these smaller, lighter power converters include printers, CD and DVD players, tape recorders and other appliances that operate on both battery and wall plugs.
The piezoelectric PC power adapter was developed at Penn State in collaboration with Face Electronics of Virginia and Taiheiyo Cement Corporation, Japan. Taiheiyo is planning to mass-produce the devices in 2004.
ScienceDaily (Oct. 24, 2007) — Arizona State University's Center for Applied Nanoionics (CANi) has a new take on old memory, one that promises to boost the performance, capacity and battery life of consumer electronics from digital cameras to laptops. Best of all, it is cheap, made from common materials and compatible with just about anything currently on the market.
"In using readily available materials, we've provided a way for this memory to be made at essentially zero extra cost, because the materials you need are already used in the chips -- all you have to do is mix them in a slightly different way," said Michael Kozicki, director of CANi.
For some time now, conventional computer memory has been heading toward a crunch -- a physical limit of how much storage can be crammed into a given space. Traditional electronics begins to break down at the nanoscale -- the scale of individual molecules -- because pushing electronics closer together creates more heat and greater power dissipation. As consumer electronics such as MP3 players and digital cameras shrink, the need for more memory in a smaller space grows.
Researchers have been approaching the problem from two directions, either trying to leapfrog to the next generation of memory, or refining current memory. CANi took both approaches, amping up performance via special materials while also switching from charge-based storage to resistance-based storage.
"We've developed a new type of old memory, but really it is the perfect memory for what's going to be required in future generations," Kozicki said. "It's very low-energy. You can scale it down to the nanoscale. You can pack a lot of it into a small space."
CANi was also able to overcome the limitations of conventional electronics by using nanoionics, a technique for moving tiny bits of matter around on a chip. Instead moving electrons among charged particles, called ions, as in traditional electronics, nanoionics moves the ions themselves.
"We've actually been able to move something the size of a virus between electrodes to switch them from a high resistance to a low resistance, which is great for memory," Kozicki said.
Most memory today stores information as charge; in the binary language of computers, this means that an abundance of charge at a particular site on a chip translated as a "one," and a lack of charge is translated as a "zero." The problem with such memory is that the smaller its physical size, the less charge it can reliably store.
Resistance-based memory, on the other hand, does not suffer from this problem and can even store multiple bits on one site. Moreover, once the resistance is set, it does not change, even when the power is switched off.
CANi's previous high-performance resistance-change memory has been licensed to three companies, including Micron Technology and Qimonda, and has attracted the attention of Samsung, Sony and IBM. However, it used some materials, specifically silver and germanium sulfide, previously unused by industry and therefore required new processes to be developed.
The real advancement of CANi's newest memory is that researchers discovered a way to use materials already common in chip manufacturing. Although "doping" -- mixing silicon with small amounts of conductive materials such as boron, arsenic or phosphorus -- has been common practice for years, copper in silicon dioxide was largely unheard of. In fact, it was strictly avoided.
"People have actually gone to great lengths to keep the silicon oxide and the copper apart," Kozicki said. "But in our case, we are very interested in mixing the copper with the oxide -- basically, so that it would become mobile and move around in the material."
"Because it can move in there, we can make a sort of nanoscale switch," he added. "This very, very small switch can be used in memory applications, storing information via a range of resistance values."
Industry has already shown interest in the new memory and, if all goes well, consumers could see it on the market within a few years.
"What it means is we could replace all of the memory in all sorts of applications -- from laptops to iPods to cell phones to whatever -- with this one type of memory," Kozicki said. "Because it is so low energy, we can pack a lot of memory and not drain battery power; and it's not volatile -- you can switch everything off and retain information. What makes this significant is that we are using materials that are already in use in the semiconductor industry to create a component that's never been thought of before."
The research was conducted in collaboration with Research Center Jülich in Germany. It was published in the October 2007 issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices in the article "Bipolar and Unipolar Resistive Switching in Cu-doped SiO2." The team included Christina Schindler, on loan from Germany to CANi, Sarath Chandran Puthen Thermadam of CANi, Kozicki, and Rainer Waser of the Institute for Solid State Research and Center for Nanoelectronics Systems and Information Technology in Jülich.
Adapted from materials provided by Arizona State University.
