Showing Colour And Movement With Computer Animation

November 19, 2008 · Filed Under Computer Software · Comment 

With all of the technological advances in computers, or more specifically in computer animations and graphics, it can be difficult to decide what type of computer animation software is best for you. Naturally, a great deal depends on whether you plan on using it for personal or business reasons. Are you interested in something like cartoon animations or do you want to create animations for something specific?

computer animation
Animation has come a long way from Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie cartoon animations in the 1920’s. Just take a look at films, such as Toy Story and Jurassic Park; even television shows like Babylon 5, where classic animation has jumped to new animations at warp speed by using one major tool - the computer.

The computer can speed up both the creative process of animating characters as well as the time it takes to get a film or TV show to the screen. Even Julie Andrews came out with the quote “Movie animation has come a long way since we frolicked with cartoon penguins, sheep and carousel ponies in Mary Poppins” when she was doing voice work on Shrek 2.

graphics animations
Computer animation has been compared to a healthy marriage between art and science and that seems to fit it perfectly. Computer animation software will help teach the skills necessary to create successful animations on the computer. As a computer is just a tool and needs a skilled individual to run it, the artist needs proven solutions and programs in order to create those skilled images, so the software is an essential tool as well.

One of the largest and fastest growing areas within the computer graphics and animation field is in the area of computer games. Computer pictures animations programs and software are constantly being improved to keep up with the animations and graphics that are becoming more complex, even as the technology in the hardware simplifies.

Also, since computers have become almost as common as blackboards, crayons and pencils in classrooms, including preschools and kindergartens, various creators of software applications have designed numerous programs for young children.

computer animations
They can learn to create images animations, as well as several other skills specifically designed for their level. Many of the features of educational computer programs, such as interactivity, are completely in-line with educational principals, which is a huge advantage for everyone.

You may not be aware of it but schools, even at the preschool level, have computer animation programs in use. If you want to give your child a head start, then you may want to consider checking out some computer animation programs that are intended for children. It teaches them the basics that they will need through fun games, vocabulary sections and animated tutorials.

Components For Ip Networks

November 18, 2008 · Filed Under Computer Hardware · Comment 

The major components of VOIP networks are very similar in functionality to that of a circuit-switched network. There are three major pieces to VOIP networks.

-VOIP networks
-media gateways
-media gateways/signalling controllers

Media gateways are responsible for call origination, call detection, analog-to-digital conversion of voice, and creation of voice packets (CODEC functions).

Media gateways exist in several forms. For example, media gateways could be a dedicated telecommunication equipment chassis, or even generic PC running IP software.Their features and services can include some or all of the following.
-Trunking gateways that interface between the telephone network and a IP network.
-Residential gateways that provide a traditional analog interface to a IP network.
-Business media gateways that provide a traditional digital PBX interface or an integrated soft PBX interface to a IP network.
-Access media gateways that provide a traditional analog or digital PBX interface to a IP network.
-Discreet IP telephones units.
-Network access servers that can attach a modem to a telephone circuit and provide data access to the Internet.

-Trunking gateways that interface between the telephone network and a IP network.
-Residential gateways that provide a traditional analog interface to a IP network.
-Business media gateways that provide a traditional digital PBX interface or an integrated soft PBX interface to a IP network.
-Access media gateways that provide a traditional analog or digital PBX interface to a IP network.
-Discreet IP telephones units.
-Network access servers that can attach a modem to a telephone circuit and provide data access to the Internet.
Media Gateway Controllers
Media gateway controllers house the signaling and control services that coordinate the media gateway functions. The media gateway controller has the responsibility for some or all of the call signaling coordination, phone number translations, host lookup, resource management, and signaling gateway services to the PSTN (SS7 gateway). Media gateway controllers could be considered similar to that of H.323 gatekeepers.The amount of functionality is based on the particular IP enabling products used.

For calls that originate and terminate within the domain of the IP network, only a media gateway controller might be needed to complete calls. In a scalable IP network, you can breakup the role of a controller into signaling gateway controller and media gateway controller. You could use a signaling gateway controller to directly connect to the SS7 network, while also interfacing to VOIP networks elements.

Knowing the details of how the devices use their suite of protocols is important to designing the IP backbone that is to service the IP elements. The services of these devices are defined by the protocols and software they are running. There are several protocols and implementations that any number of vendors could deploy.

You can view VOIP networks as one logical switch. However, this logical switch is a distributed system, rather than that of a single switch entity; the IP backbone provides the connectivity among the distributed elements.Depending on the IP protocols used, this system as a whole is sometimes referred to as a softswitch architecture.

Jim Francisto
business voip provider

The Goddard Space Flight Center Expands Understanding

November 18, 2008 · Filed Under Tech News · Comment 

Since travel outside the atmosphere became possible, unmanned missions have provided some of the greatest insights into the nature of our planet, our solar system and our universe. The Goddard Space Flight Center is the place where many of these missions were conceived, designed and where the equipment that made them possible was built.

Divided into an east and west campus, the sprawling facility is home to theoretical physicists, some of the world’s best engineers and designers and others who work in the related fields. Their work has been a part of projects that have studied the sun, observed the universe in x-rays, greatly expanded our understanding of our planet and is frequently called upon to enable better predictions and understanding of Earth’s weather patterns. It is from the Goddard Space Flight Center that the operations of the Hubble Space Telescope are managed.

The facility has a visitor center that provides a wealth of educational materials for those who choose to visit. Admission to the visitor center is free. The center works with large groups, as well, who are recommended to call in advance to set up a time to visit.

Plesk Web Space Back Office For Setting Up Your Web Space

November 17, 2008 · Filed Under Computer Services · Comment 

The Plesk Web Space Back Office for Linux server based web hosting accounts is a competitor to the popular Cpanel. Both of these are software programs which run on the hosting server and provide all the back-office type services that web hosts and web masters need to upload, run, and maintain their web sites.

Plesk is described by its proponents as the most preferred website control panel. Most importantly, it is said to be more reliable compared to any other website control panel. However, I have not seen any proof of this, and unless proven, I would probably advise placing little credence on such a claim.

The fact that, Plesk is compatible with the renowned Windows operating system gives it more a certain lead on any other control panel which does not.

Plesk has the facility for users to pay low cost bulk user licenses, so it is presumably as a result of this that it has become, reportedly, the best solution for keeping down the long term software-related business expenses of hosting. Like Cpanel, Plesk has the ability to manage shell (reseller) accounts.

Plesk is said by users to be the control panel software most powerful and easy to use. Many clients have the option of managing their own services be them dedicated servers, VPS (Virtual Private Servers) or shared hosting. Plesk is the recommended software to use in conjunction with these. It’s license for 100 websites has been reported to cost just $15.95/month with Host Color.

So, although not offered with UK web hosting packages understandably for the web hosting community Plesk has become a recommended software. However, those web hosts who don’t have a budget to purchase Plesk or cPanel can use NextColor.

Plesk was the first of many groups to realize that it would benefit from standardizing on Virtuozzo rather then developing its own virtualization technology. With SWsoft continuing to add new features to Virtuozzo and rapidly improving the technology, Plesk viewed this as an exceptional opportunity to standardize and provide its customers with the leading solution.

Plesk is described as the leading multi-platform control panel designed to provide a simple, convenient way to manage your web services. Using Plesk’s intuitive, browser-based interface you can instantly create mail accounts, configure your domain settings, manage your web files, install a site application, create a database, manage your FTP access, and much more.

However, should you find you don’t like Plesk and want to consider an alternative you should see bluehost hosting review.

Tape Imaging Software,

November 16, 2008 · Filed Under Servers & Storage · Comment 

When you have backed up every single night for the last five years, then you find that the only time you require to restore the backup, you discover the tape wont load because of a tape error.

So what can you do. There are several software options for backup data recovery, but most of these only work on backup files, so how do you recover data from a tape?

Data Recovery Engineering Software Limited write software mainly for data recovery companies, and one of their titles is a very cost effective tape dumping tool.

The software reads the tape and creates a file dump to hard disk. Now you are able access the data on the tape and recover it with your backup recovery software.

Another use for the software is when someone has created a backup set that you need to access, but it is password protected (not encrypted) and the user cant remember the password or left the company. Or a forensics engineer needs to examine the data stored on the tape but does not have access to the software used to make the tape.

Making a Tape Dump

Voip Bandwidth And Voice Networks

November 16, 2008 · Filed Under Computer Hardware · Comment 

You can determine how much voip bandwidth to set aside for voice traffic using simple math. However, in a converged voice and data network, you have to make decisions on how much voip bandwidth to give each service. These decisions are based on careful consideration of your priorities and the available voip bandwidth you can afford. If you allocate too little voip bandwidth for voice service, there might be unacceptable quality issues.
Another consideration is that voice services are less tolerant to voip bandwidth depletion than that of Internet traffic. Therefore, voip bandwidth for voice services and associated signaling must take a priority over that of best-effort Internet traffic.
If a network were to use the same prevailing encoding (CODEC) scheme as the current PSTN system, voip bandwidth requirements for Voip networks would tend to be larger than that of a circuit-switched voice network of similar capacity. The reason is the overhead in the protocols used to deliver the voice service.
Typically, you would need speeds of OC-12c/STM-4 and higher to support thousands of call sessions. However, Voip networks that employ compression and silence suppression could actually use less voip bandwidth than a similar circuit-switched network. The reason is because of the greater granularity in voip bandwidth usage that a packet-based network has in comparison to a fixed, channel size TDM network.

Allocations of network voip bandwidth are based on projected numbers of calls at peak hours. Any over-subscription of voice voip bandwidth can cause a reduction in voice quality. Also, you must set aside adequate voip bandwidth for signaling to ensure that calls are complete and to reduce service interruptions. The formula for calculating total voip bandwidth needed for voice traffic is relatively straightforward. The formula to calculate RTP bearer voice voip bandwidth usage for a given number of phone calls is as follows:

Bits per sec = packet creation rates per sec x packet size x number of calls x 8 bits per sec

Where samples per sec = 1,000 ms / packet creation rate

Example: 2,000 full-duplex G.711 encoded voice channels that have a packet creation

Rate of 20 ms, with a packet size of 200 bytes (40 byte IP header + 160 byte payload)

50 samples per second = 1,000 ms / 20 ms

160 Mbps = 50 x 200 x 2,000 x 8

Note that this number is a raw measure of Voice over IP traffic and does not take in account the overhead used by the transporting media (links between the routers) and data-link layer protocols. Add this raw IP value to that of the overhead to determine the link speeds needed to support this number of calls. Note this value represents only the bearer (voice) content. Signaling voip bandwidth requirements vary depending on the rate at which the calls are generated and signaling protocol used. If a large number of calls are initiated in a relatively short period, the peak voip bandwidth needs for the signaling could be quite high. A general guideline for the maximum voip bandwidth requirement that an IP signaling protocol needs is roughly three percent of all bearer traffic. Using the previous example, signaling voip bandwidth requirements if all 2,000 calls were initiated in one second would be approximately 4.8 Mbps (3 percent of 160-megabits).

With the calculation of bearer and signaling, the total voip bandwidth needed to support two thousand G.711 encoded calls would be an approximate maximum of 164.8 MB. This voip bandwidth requirement is a theoretical maximum for this specific case. If the parameters change, such as call initiation rate, voice encoding method, packet creation rate, employment of compression, and silence suppression, the voip bandwidth requirements would change as well. With large Voip implementations requiring sizable voip bandwidth, it becomes imperative that the IP network delivers the needed service at predictably high performance.

Jim Francisto
reverse cell phone lookup service

Voice Over Ip Accelerators Requirements List

November 15, 2008 · Filed Under Computer Hardware · Comment 

Accelerator products can help enterprises a lot in addressing the performance requirements of all enterprise applications including voip. First, Accelerators change the economics of wide area networking by squeezing an average of 100% - 400% more bandwidth with peaks of 1000% depending on traffic mix. This frees up link bandwidth to support high quality voip service - and it does it without expensive WAN upgrades.

It is also worthy to note that Accelerators do not actually use lossy compression schemes that might degrade voice quality and they add less than one millisecond of latency. In fact, the Accelerator’s compression actually reduces end-to-end latency by reducing serialization delays on WAN links. For example, it takes 125 ms to serialize a 1,000 byte packet on a 64 kbps link, but if an Accelerator increases the effective bandwidth by 4X to 256 kbps, the serialization delay is reduced by a factor of four to 31 ms. The following formula can be used to calculate the serialization delay for any combination of packet size and link speed:

Packet Size (in bytes) x 8 / Speed (in kbps) = Serialization Delay (in ms)

In addition to freeing up the bandwidth normally consumed by data applications, Accelerators are able to reduce WAN bandwidth requirements for different voip codecs. In fact, tests have shown that Accelerators reduced G.711 bandwidth requirements by 20% and G.729 by 70%. As a result, WAN links can carry more simultaneous voice calls and the performance of other applications may also be improved.

Accelerators solve increased jitter and latency caused by large data packets over slow WAN links by fragmenting large data packets and injecting voip packets at regular intervals. This feature allows voip and data to co-exist even on branch office WAN links. For example, normally, a voip packet “stuck” behind a 1,500 byte packet on a 64kbps lin will be delayed by 188ms.

Using the Accelerator’s packet fragmentation will result in the data packet being reduced in size (accelerated - say from 1500 bytes to 500b bytes) and then fragmented into smaller data packets (say - 2 packets of 250 bytes each). In this case, the latency for the voip packet will go down from 188 ms to 31ms! In addition to increasing WAN capacity for both data and voip while reducing latency and jitter, Accelerators also manage WAN bandwidth to ensure that critical applications like voip get the bandwidth they need.

Accelerators include an Instant QoS feature that prioritizes application access to WAN bandwidth. Without such priorization, the additional effective bandwidth provided by Accelerators could be consumed by aggressive, non-critical applications such as file sharing. Accelerator’s AppView feature provides graphical visibility for all application traffic sharing a link. AppView can be used to monitor WAN utilization and to plan future capacity requirements.

And finally, accelerators have a set of data integrity features that are designed to stop the packet loss that can degrade voice quality. A flow control mechanism reduces packet loss caused by link congestion and a packet recovery feature ensures that any lost packets are transparently recovered at the link level before they can cause voice quality problems.

Jim Francisto

Overview Of Voip Devices

November 15, 2008 · Filed Under Computer Hardware · Comment 

Voip sends your phone call through the Internet
A Voip router is a very small device that is used by the majority of Voip users to make calls over the Internet. One of the main differences between traditional telephones and Voip is that traditional phone signals are analogue and are sent physically through wires. Voice over IP sends a digital signal and sends it as packet data through the Internet. Therefore, for a person to continue to use the same phone that they have always used for voice over IP calls, they need a device to convert their analogue signal to a digital signal. This is what the Voip router is designed to do.

Voip technology is advancing rapidly
Digital phones allow Voip users to plug directly into their Internet connection or their computer to make telephone calls, thus eliminating the need for a router. Furthermore, it will only be a matter of time before our homes are fully networked for Internet access in every room, thus making IP calls easier and the delivery of other services that will soon be provided through the Internet.

Make your move to Voip as soon as possible
Voip is the telephony of the future. This is indicated by how the large traditional phone companies have all converted over to this technology. What you can expect with a switch to Voip is much lower telephone bills and the closest communication with long-distance family members and loved ones than you have ever known. When they say that the world is getting smaller, it can now truly be seen.

Voip is easy
Although many people fear new technologies or are slow to convert over to a new way of doing things because they are so comfortable with the old, Internet phone calls is something that you should switch over to without hesitation. Of course, the Voip carrier that you choose to work with is your decision. Just understand that any switch to Voip is better than not switching. For those that hate new devices and new gadgets, a Voip router makes everything so simple and easy to use. Basically, a IP telephony router will have a socket for you to plug your phone into and another socket for you to plug your internet connection in to. Once you plug in those two things, you will never have to think about your VoIP router again. Now, that is simplicity!

Jim Francisto

Guard Your Data With Download Spyware Adware Removal Programs

November 15, 2008 · Filed Under Pc Security · Comment 

Searching for the best removal software spyware cannot intrude upon, can be time consuming. One can spend days searching for the best spyware adware removal program, but if one knows which ones are highlighted by the experts, then the time spent looking for great removal software that spyware cannot get past, will not be too labor intensive. The key is to know which software is recommended.

By finding the best removal software, spyware cannot peer through, can take time. Before finding that perfect protector, one must understand what types of anti-spyware programs are available.

removal software spyware
Basically two types exist. One can choose either real time or scanning and removal. Real time works while one is on the computer, and scanning and removal is done when the computer boots up. No matter what program one chooses, the fact that one is trying to protect their computer and data is the key.

A few of the best download spyware adware removal programs can be found on the internet. Webroot Spysweeper is the best, but it is not cheap spyware removal. One will pay to use this program. Others that can be found on the net include Ad-Aware, Spybot, and the microsoft removal spyware system known as the Defender.

Depending on what one is looking for in a remove computer spyware program, they can find it on the net with just a little research. It may not be free, but you will get the protection for which you have paid.

download remove spyware
For those searching for the best removal software spyware cannot touch, they may find that their search takes them on a meandering highway on the internet. Anyone can find protection removal spyware programs that help with spyware and adware, but a person should not skimp when it comes to protecting a huge investment like a computer.

The fact that one is being proactive in purchasing anti spyware is key to protecting their identity and computer from future attacks. No one wants to lose their identity because they did not outfit their computer with the right protection in the first place.

A Better Website With Computer Animation

November 15, 2008 · Filed Under Computer Software · Comment 

One of the key processes of the Macromedia/Adobe Flash software is “tweening,” which makes changes to the shape or position of an object. The actual definition of Flash is streaming animation for web pages. Sometimes an entire website will be comprised of flash animations or it may only be a small part of an html site. The desired result is the appearance of the first object evolving smoothly into the last object.

computer animation
What goes hand in hand with Flash animation? It would have to be Flash text. Flash text is exactly what it sounds like. On your website you can turn plain text into text that moves and is full of colors and life. Many individuals have recently added Flash text to the rest of their “cool animations” on their pages and they claim the return traffic on their websites has risen. Flash is the industry standard software to create 2D animations.

Ok, you have finally got your website up or at least somewhat up, what’s next? Modern technology has improved on so many different levels and animation, or more specifically computer animation, is one of those leading resources. You need every possible edge when trying to catch and keep internet traffic focused on your site. Whether Flash text, art animations or 3d computer animations, it is not as important as the final product. Making your site stand out in the crowd is a tall order and that is where computer animations and art animations have a chance to shine.

gif animations
At one time, networking was basically limited to who we could call or meet face to face. Beyond that was of course word of mouth, paid print and media advertising. Even then it was likely restricted to the local market, as the expense of getting a message to the next town, state or country was high.

What could you do? With the internet anything is possible, so you want your site to stand out with graphics images animations, pictures animations, Flash 2D animations and even 3D animations. Fortunately, the internet makes your business globally accessible, so you can reach out and touch millions of online viewers. These days, you can rake in dollars, yens, euros, pounds, rubles, pesos etc. because the world is the playing field.

computer animations
Having a website allows you to reach a broader audience. You may be set up in Idaho, but your site with its Flash animations can reach someone in Singapore within a matter of seconds.

Your optimized website gives you the freedom of showing off all of your work, not just the samples that fit into your portfolio or the ones that are short enough to present within the time frame you are given. There are computer animation programs that allow you to create animations at every level of expertise.

Next Page »