Technical Bank

Go is a new systems programming language launched by Google, and has received wide attention in the programming community. This article gives you an overview of this language, with some specific examples to help understand its features. Go was announced just a few months back, but is already being touted as the next C language. Why? The ‘C’ language itself evolved from a language known as ‘B’. C was created in the 1970s, and still continues to be widely used; however, the language has mostly stopped evolving, and there is a dire need for a new language that could replace C. There are many languages that have been named ‘D’ (the most popular being the one by Walter Bright), or those that want to be the ‘D’ language. Still, nothing has made the cut, so far. Go might well become the next C language—or it may be ‘Gone’ in a few years! Is there substance behind the hype and buzz around Go? Yes, a lot! Most systems programmers (like me) find it very good after trying it out and writi

Google. It is unquestionably one of the most well-known companies in the world. It has empowered everyday people with information and given online businesses reasons to exist. Most importantly, it has proven that free can be profitable. But all this has to make you wonder — what would have become of the world if Google didn’t exist? There are so many potential questions that could be asked. Could Microsoft have actually ended up in a worse position than it is today? Would Apple have gone bankrupt? Perhaps Yahoo! could have ended up as the most powerful company in the world? Would the Internet be anything like it is today? Yahoo! Without Google You can’t go through this scenario without considering Yahoo, previously one of Google’s biggest competitors, which is now hardly a blip on the radar anymore. Yahoo had it all: the money, the user-base, the functionality. And all it really needed was a vision and the leadership to act upon it to reach success. If Googl

If you were just fed up of the plain white Google home page and had lately developed some liking for Microsoft’s search engine Bing because of its colorful pictures in the background, Google wont’t let you go so easily. Bringing the customization option to its home page, Google has once again proved that the company is always striving to achieve its goals of innovation and customer satisfaction. Enabling adding a little more personal feel to your Google home page, Google now allows its users to add their favorite images to the background. Whether the pictures are loaded on your Picasa web album, in the hard drive of your system or public gallery hosted by Picasa, you may now add any of your favorite images for a personalized experience. But the sad part is that you use the colorful Google logo that is replaced with a white one instead. Those of you who are happy with the clean and simple interface can stick to it as long as you want. Also if at any time you wish to sw

ony on Wednesday unveiled a flexible OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display so thin it can wrap around a 4mm cylinder--roughly the diameter of the average pen or pencil. The 80 micrometers-thick OLED display (about the width of a human hair) can continuously display moving images even while being rolled up, as Sony demonstrated in a video below. The working flexibility is possible because engineers have managed to lose the rigid driver IC chips usually used in the substrate of a screen in exchange for a gate-driver circuit with OTFTs (organic thin-film transistors), according to Sony. The 4.1-inch display, which has a resolution of 432x240 pixels (121 pixels per inch), is not for sale. It's simply a research prototype Sony said it hopes to one day incorporate into products such as screens in mobile devices. Full demonstrations of the screen will be given this week at the SID (Society for Information Display) 2010 International Symposium in Seattle. The

Despite its incredibly low density, aerogel is one of the most powerful materials on the planet. It can support thousands of times its own weight, block out intense heat, cold and sound – yet it is 1,000 times less dense than glass, nearly as transparent and is composed of %99.8 air. The lowest-density silica-based aerogels are even lighter than air. Despite its fragility in certain regards and its incredible lack of density, aerogel has amazing thermal, acoustical  and electrical insulation properties as illustrated by the images here. A single one-pound block can also support half a ton of weight. NASA continues to find new space-based applications for this incredible material. An aerogel window one inch thick has the effective insulative capacity of a ten-inch thick glass window system. While it is still expensive and has other limitations, this material – originally developed nearly a century ago but still undergoing experimentation – could prove to be o