Looking for a pilgrim spot in South India that is located in mother nature that could give you peace of mind through awakening the divinity in you. One could opt you only Tirumala Tirupati of Andhra Pradesh as a destination for your need where the Kaliyuga Daivam Lord Venkateshwara Swami has resided.
Standing still at an height of 2799 feet above the sea level this temple is visited daily by half a million to a million pilgrims Every day and this number increases gradually at the time of “Brahmostavas” and other Occasions. On a average 30 to 40 million devotees visit the temple to have a glimpse of the Idol of the “Swamy”. Having been visited by this many pilgrims, donations and Offerings made have put this Seven Hills Temple of Venkateshwara Swamy as one of the richest temples in the world.
After the Advancements in technology the layout of Tirumala have changed dramatically. But if you wish to see how Tirumala Tirupati looked some decades ago will definitely surprise you. Here are some of such black and white photos that resembles the past of this ultimate destination of devotion.
Pilgrims who go choose foot way to climb to the temple need to start here, yes this is an actual image of Alipiri Mandapam of Tirumala where your journey starts after the Security check in..
I've known ZDNet columnist Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols going on 16 years
now. Along with Mary Jo Foley, who I've known for the same amount of
time, he's a writer I have utmost respect for, particuarly when it comes
to writing about Open Source and Networking technologies.
In many instances, we agree about a lot of things. But over the years
Steven has become shall we say... not particularly enamored with
Microsoft. He's focused a lot of his writing in recent years about
Linux, and he's the closest thing we have here on ZDNet to being a pure
Open Source evangelist.
This is not a bad thing, this is just simply stating what he is.
Saying that Steven is an Open Source evangelist and dislikes and
distrusts Microsoft is like saying that Seals, which subsist on a diet
of fish and crustaceans, have developed an extreme dislike for Great
White Sharks.
Sorry, I spent most of my free time watching the Discovery Channel this weekend.
So when Steven tells you that Windows 8 "belongs on older PCs like a fish needs a bicycle" you should regard this as coming from a position of extreme prejudice.
Be it as it may I also am a Linux advocate. I wrote about it exclusively in print for ten years.
However, I also make my living integrating large scale multi-vendor
systems for the largest IT services company in the world, so I can't
afford to hate Microsoft. It's not a position I would enjoy being in
anyway.
And despite the fact I have been known to throw a couple of grenades at Redmond from time to time, I actually enjoy using their products.
So the question remains -- does Windows 8 belong on older PCs? It
really depends on what you define as "Old" and what lengths you are
willing to go through to gain the benefits from the new operating
system.
I want to first discard the notion that the new Windows 8 user
interface (that we just got used to calling "Metro" but apparently we
can't call it that anymore) is bad. It isn't bad, it's just different.
And yes, it requires a considerable amount of user adjustment in
order to be productive with it, even for a veteran PC user like myself. Whether the new UI will succeed in its current form
and what Microsoft may have to do if it doesn't is another discussion
entirely. But let's just take that off the table for a moment and return
to the subject if upgrading to the new OS is appropriate for an older PC.
So in addition to catching up with Shark Week on my DVR, I decided to install Windows 8 on several older PCs this weekend.
My victims were a 12" Lenovo X200 Centrino 2 ultralight laptop, my primary circa-2009 dual quad-Opteron "Frankenputer" workstation,
my wife's Dell Studio 17" laptop (a Vista-certified system that was
purchased just prior to Windows 7's release) and a Dell Precision 530
desktop with an Intel Core 2 Quad which I originally purchased from
Costco for the express purposes oftesting Windows Vista four years ago.
None of these machines are current or state of the art. In fact I
would say they are a decent representative sample of the type and
vintage of Windows PC that most people actually own.
Every single one of these machines installed Windows 8's release code
without a hitch -- all the devices on the machines were recognized with
the exception of two external peripherals -- an Epson wireless MFD
Printer/Scanner that needed the usual 3rd-party Windows 7 drivers and a
portable Lenovo USB Displaylink 2nd monitor for my laptop which actually
had beta drivers avaliable on the Displaylink.org web site.
Even the on-board Authentec fingerprint scanner for biometric login on my Lenovo X200 was automatically recognized.
On every single one of these systems, the performance improvement
over Windows 7 is noticeable. Boot up is much, much faster as well as
general application and network responsiveness, particularly with the
new Internet Explorer 10 browser. And all of my Windows 7-compatible application software is working perfectly.
A Fish with bicycle wheels? Hell, this upgrade is automatic, it's systematic, it's hydromatic. It will turn your old PC into Greased Lightning.
The amount of work that has gone into improving core components and
introducing new technology and features with this release is
considerable, and Microsoft should be commended for their work, issues
with the Metro UI notwithstanding.
IE 10, the new cloud integration and the fully integrated
anti-malware suite in the new Windows Defender which completely
eliminates the need for 3rd-party antivirus and antispyware programs are
worth the price of admission alone.
Now, the one thing that all of these systems I installed the software
on had in common is that they had (at least) 4GB of RAM. I've heard of
people using Windows 8 systems with less, but if you are going to bite
the bullet on the upgrade -- which is a whole $40 regardless of whether
you own a license of XP, any variant of Vista or Windows 7 -- you might
as well boost your RAM to as much as you can reasonably afford and your
system will permit.
Most 4GB DDR2 upgrade kits sell for about $60, so with the $40 for
the Windows 8 software, you're looking at about $100 to supercharge your
older PC. If you want to take advantage of the multi-touch stuff in the
new UI, you'll also want to pick up a mouse that supports the new touch gestures.
Now, as to whether end-users will do this upgrade in the volumes that
Microsoft wants and if the challanges of user acceptance actually has a
negative impact on the OS's adoption rate I really have no idea. But
this has no bearing whatsoever on "appropriateness" to the target
hardware.
Clearly, they've made the upgrade attractively inexpensive, which is a
far cry from Vista, which was actually prohibitive in my opinion
because not only was the software not cheap, but a great deal of legacy
hardware compatibility got left behind and most PCs just weren't
powerful enough to run them.
That's just not the case with Windows 8. Four year-old machines are running on it swimmingly.
If you've got a Vista or newer-era machine with 4GB of RAM, by all
means, do this upgrade, particularly if you consider yourself in the
class of "enthusiast" and want to inject new life into your PC, and you
want to take advantage of the new software technology Microsoft is
introducing and are willing to undertake the UI adaptation process.
On the other hand, if you or have friends and family members that are
perfectly happy with their Windows 7 machine, and you'd rather not take
all sorts of calls when they freak out about the new Start menu and the
new UI, then leave their PC alone.
Have you undertaken the Windows 8 upgrade process yet? Talk Back and Let Me Know.
London: Your smartphone may soon be able to tell you when you are most
stressed, with the help of a new software that can identify stress from
the patterns in your voice.
The app called 'StressSense' is first trained to recognise a person's unstressed voice.
For that, users must relax and read a 3-minute passage from a book into their phones.
The
system then compares this recording to its pre-programmed knowledge of
the physiological changes that stress induces like speaking at a faster
rate and a clipped frequency spectrum.
The application then takes note of any instances of stress it detects in the voice.
"Our
stress model also adapts to different background noise environments,"
New Scientist quoted Hong Lu of Intel in Santa Clara, California, who
developed the system, as saying.
In tests that included putting
volunteers through mock job interviews, the researchers found their
prototype's stress-recognition accuracy to be 81 percent indoors and 76
percent outdoors, where sound quality wasn't as good.
The team
plans to make the system a plug-in to an Android application called
BeWell, which uses a phone's accelerometers and Global Positioning
System (GPS) sensors to record users' activity and sleep levels.
Smartphone
users will be able to set StressSense to either listen to their voice
throughout the day, or only to activate when they are having a phone
conversation.
The app will be presented at the Ubicomp conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, next month.
