After slipping in recent years, the U.S. is regaining its dominance as a repository of wealth. Americans account for 44% of the money and 45% of the list’s slots, up seven and three percentage points from last year, respectively. Bill Gates lost $18 billion but regained his title as the world’s richest man. Warren Buffett, last year’s No. 1, saw his fortune decline $25 billion as shares of Berkshire Hathaway fell nearly 50% in 12 months. Mexican telecom titan Carlos Slim Helú maintains his spot in the top three but lost $25 billion.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) has offered to acquire Yahoo (YHOO) in a cash and stock deal valued at $44.6 billion.

The deal, which, at $31 a share represents a 62% premium on Yahoo shares, is an unsolicited offer, coming a year after Yahoo rejected a similar combination.
t would be one of the largest technology acquisitions ever, and certainly the largest for Microsoft, dwarfing the company’s $6 billion deal for aQuantive last year.

The offer comes as older, more established tech giants like Microsoft and Yahoo struggle to meet the newer threats posed by Google (GOOG: 421.8, 0.21, 0.05%), which dominates the online-search landscape.
“Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft in a press release announcing the offer. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.”

Under terms of the offer, Yahoo shareholders would receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with Yahoo shareholders getting one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock.

For its part, Yahoo said its board would “carefully and promptly” evaluate the offer.

As for Google, the company isn’t nervous about the potential combination. In an interview on FOX Business Network’s Money for Breakfast, Tim Armstrong, president of North American advertising and sales at Google, said the company is “more nervous about making sure we stay focused ourselves than what the competition is.”

He also noted that, while Google competes with Microsoft and Yahoo, they also partner on some business initiatives. “So we’ll be as interested as anybody about what the outcomes are,” he said.

New photos of Michael rehearsing for the 02 Arena “This Is It Tour” are released. He looked in good health.

Randy Philips, boss of AEG LIVE has spoken about Michael’s last days and stated that he was in good form. They have said all tickets will be fully refunded, including all related transaction charges. They have given the option for ticket holders to keep there tickets. These tickets are amazing, an idea of Michaels and personally approved by him. He wanted a video like effect on the ticket, I assume like a Hologram. There’s at least 8 different designs.

Randy has also stated that people must see this show, it was amazing and very technologically advanced. As fans we know Michael always wanted to do the best possible. Randy wants the Jackson family and other artists to possibly do the show in the future.

Preparing the basics
You already have a computer; what you need is a good microphone to
complement it. Recording into the microphone is not as easy as it seems,
as ambient noises, thuds caused by bumping your hand on the desk, or
breathing into the mic, will all make your podcast sound amateurish. So
practise before you record the show. It’s a good technique to record the
show in several parts because it isn’t likely to go live immediately after
all—you can always stitch it together later

Recording your podcast
What do you do after you have recorded your podcast? Simple;
it’s time to spin it in post-production. There are two stages: the first
one is to clean up audio and remove any inconsistencies that may
have cropped up, plus any mistakes that you may have made; and
the other is to add music, jingles or little audio clips. Naturally, you
will be careful enough not to use copyrighted music without permis-
sion. If your podcasts are merely voice-based, remember to use a
lower bitrate setting such as 64 Kbps and mono-recording, as this
will save a lot of storage space and also shorten download time for
listeners. However, if you’ve used music, 128 Kbps and stereo are
recommended

Posting podcasts on a Web site
After all the recording and touch-up work, it’s time
to create a RSS feed and post your podcast on a Web site.
The choice of site is up to you, as there are literally thou-
sands of Web sites available on the Internet. In fact, you
don’t need to add your radio show to a podcast site spe-
cifically, you can always post it in your blog or your own
Web site as an MP3 file for listeners to download. But
dedicated podcast sites have the advantage that they often
give you quite a lot of publicity — which private Web sites
may not offer. Also pay attention to the genre that you are
posting your podcast under; any mistakes here, and you
are likely to lose listeners faster than you acquire them!
RSS (which is an abbreviation for Really Simple
Syndication) is a format for providing news feeds;
in our case music feeds. You need to upload not
only the actual music file but also the RSS feed
which can be easily made through free software
such as ListGarden. Some podcasting Web sites
provide the facility to make feeds online.

Listening to a Podcast
Listening to podcasts is easy. It’s like downloading any other file from the Internet. However, depending on the Web site,
you will most probably be downloading the file or streaming it directly. Streaming files can’t usually be saved easily, so
don’t think of putting them on your MP3 player—it may well be out of the question!

searching for podcasts
Listeners can tune into specific pod-
casting Web sites, or go through search
engines. Those who like to hear category-
specific music are likely to search only
through interest-related categories.
downloading podcasts
Most users may use RSS feeds to
receive new updates, which automatically
start to stream/download. Listeners can
directly download podcasts to their PCs,
or load it on their MP3 players and listen
to music on the move.

www.podcasting.com
www.podcast.net
www.podfeeder.com
podcasts.yahoo.com
www.blogger.com
Sites to post podcasts

The complete network over the city is
divided into cells. Each cell is typically
sized at about 10 square miles (26 square
kilometers). Cells are normally thought of
as hexagons on a big hexagonal grid.

The mobile phone user, while present
in a particular cell, makes a call to a
landline. The call made is then routed
to the subscriber’s current cell phone
base station.

Base station
Every base station consists of a tower
and a small building containing the
radio equipment. The Base station
makes a check on the available resourc-
es through the network.

Fixed Network
The base station establishes a connec-
tion between the mobile and the fixed
network only after all the resources
required to have a proper connection
are available. Only after which the data
exchange takes place.

GSM phones use a Subscriber Identity Module
(SIM) card which is a removable chip inside a phone
with information such as the user’s phone number,
phone book and some other information related to the
subscriber.

If the mobile phone user is about to cross from one cell to another, the base station the cell user is leaving registers a diminishing strength
of the signal. Similarly the cell’s base station which the user is approaching registers the increasing signal strength. On cross over, the two
co-ordinate with each other and finally the hand-over occurs and the user is switched to a new cell. Hence, the communication link does not
break.

The Emotion Engine
chip was made famous by Sony
when they launched it in the PlayStation
2. It was the main processor of the PS2
and was power ful enough to be used in
missi le launching control systems (or so
Sony said). The name Emotion Engine
was a misnomer though; the name
evoked the idea that it was powerful
enough to generate facial meshes that
could display human-like emotions. It
did nothing of the sor t. In the PS3, the
EE is relegated to a secondary role; it
enables backwards compatibility
for PS2 games on the PS3,
which means that PS2
games on the PS3 won’t have
bet ter graphics as some might
expect. The Emotion Engine
(this chip is also used in the
slim PS2) was however removed
from all units manufactured
after September last year. These
were the 80 GB versions of the
PS3 and the removal of the EE was
done (ostensibly) for cost reasons.
However, backwards compatibility
has improved with software updates
from Sony.
The IO Bridge is a
chip, which is not found on the
PS3’s closest competitor—the Xbox 360.
It controls the Input/Output functions
within the console. This includes
controlling the USB 2.0 interface in the
PS3 and reading or writing data using
the multi card reader which can read SD/
MMC, CompactFlash, Microdrives, and
Memory Stick/PRO/Duo
RSX: The graphics chipset
of the PS3 is cal led the
“Real ity Synthesizer”. The RSX chip
is the graphics core of the PS3. It ’s
responsible for pumping out al l those
mouthwatering graphics that have
become the hal lmark of the PlayStation
series. Manufactured by Nvidia, it runs
at a speed of 550 MHz
and is par t of
Nvidia’s 7800 GPU family,
which runs at 500 MHz. Bui lt using the
vaunted G70 architecture, the RSX is
manufactured using the 90-nanometer
process. This graphics processor
can crunch pixels in a wide range of
resolutions: from 480i/576i
SD up to 1080p HD.
cell processor
The most famous component
of the PS3, the Cell processor was
developed by IBM and is capable
of running at speeds of over 4.5
GHz—the Cell has nine cores! This is
astonishing since even today, quad-
core processors are something which
most people have only heard of. Most
of the processors which are available
for home use run around fve times
slower. Out of the nine cores, one
core is a 64-bit PowerPC core and the
rest are separate processing cores.

Multicore processors are the next big
thing in processor technology today
because of their capability to perform
several threads of data processing
together. Single core processors can
do the same thing, but they have to
run faster and faster. This implies
that the core speed of the single core
processor has to be increased to
such an extent that without plenty
of cooling, it runs the risk of melting!
In fact, so powerful is the processing
power of the PS3, Stanford University
released a downloadable application
which can be used to help study the
process of folding of proteins. The
data processed could then be sent
back to the University and used to
study diseases such as Alzheimer’s
and Parkinson’s disease. Of course, a
processor as powerful as this requires
proper cooling. The PS3 has a massive
heat sink and fan assembly, mounted
over the entire mainboard. The heat
sink has a series of interconnected heat
pipes which help direct heat away from
the chips.

RAm
The PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of XDR (eXtreme
Data Rate) main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3
video memory for the RSX. XDR RAM runs amazingly
fast—at a frequency of 3.2 GHz. This is one of the
advantages of the PS3 over the Xbox 360. While the
Xbox has 512 MB of RAM, it runs far slower than the
PS3’s RAM. Also, the Xbox 360’s RAM is shared—
which places additional load on its processor.

Blu-ray drive
The PS3 uses a Blu-ray drive
to run game CDs/DVDs and movies.
The PS3’s read-only Blu-ray drive is a
slot loading drive. With data transfer
speeds of around 30MBits/sec it needs
to be spun at speeds equivalent to a 3x
DVD ROM drive.

ALL OF THIS DATA HAS BEEN COLLECTED FROM GENUINE RESOURCES.