The Hotline Blog

A supercomputer is a computer with very high-level computational capacities compared to a general-purpose computer such as a personal desktop or laptop. When reading about supercomputing, you will also hear the term  HPC   or   High-Performance Computing . HPC is a general term that includes all the activities and components associated with supercomputers, including aspects such as software and data storage as well as the bare supercomputer hardware. Supercomputers were first introduced in the 1960s by Seymour Roger Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and have been intensively used in science and engineering ever since. To keep track of the state-of-the-art, the supercomputing community looks to the Top 500 list, which ranks the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world every six months. . Seymour Roger Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC) It may surprise you to learn that supercomputers are built with the same basic eleme...

We all know Newton's three laws of motion The first law says that an object at rest tends to stay at rest, and an object in motion tends to stay in motion, with the same direction and speed.  The second law says that the acceleration of an object produced by a net applied force is directly related to the magnitude of the force, the same direction as the force, and inversely related to the mass of the object.  The third law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But in 1999, a British inventor named Roger Shawyer made an invention that defied those laws. Newton must've shat in his pants. Of course, no one believed. Whenever any maverick inventions or discoveries happen, no one believes it. But Roger Shawyer has spent most of the last 15 years convincing people that his device actually works! In late 2016, NASA tested it for once and for all . And guess what, it does work. So what is this device exactly?  This device has the power...

   The Ordovivian Period The Ordovician period - lasting nearly 45 million years - was characterised by prolific life in the seas and limited life forms on land. From Ordovician-aged rocks, the fossil record shows a huge variety of life forms in the oceans. At this time, the vast shallow seas had a variety of invertebrates and early vertebrates. The marine life comprised many life forms that no longer exist - so it is very difficult to fully reconstruct the environment at that time. Artists impressions (like the image above) cannot be completely accurate, but they do give us some idea. Ordovician seas had vertebrates like jawless fishes and even the first fish with jaws, i.e. the jawed fish, called gnathostomes, that were the frontrunners of the vertebrate diversity that would emerge over the next 400 million years. In the oceans, there were sponge-like animals, as well as, trilobites, and early relatives of vertebrates such as conodonts. There were also p...

The source of nuclear energy was first discovered by Lise Meitner (assisted by Otto Frisch) and Otto Hahn (assisted by Fritz Stassmann). Otto’s experiment was to bombard uranium with neutrons. Hahn, a chemist, was the first to chemically isolate the product barium for which he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944. Meitner, a physicist, realised that the product of Hahn’s experiment could only be explained if some mass had been converted into energy (calculated to be 200 MeV) and extra neutrons by fission (splitting) of the uranium atom. This could be a new source of energy for the world. This concept was later turned into a reality by Enrico Fermi when he and others constructed and operated the world’s first nuclear reactor, ‘Chicago Pile number 1’, proving a sustainable controllable nuclear reaction was possible in December 1942. Meitner and Frisch’s Nature paper (Meitner and Frisch, 1939) on fission states that the nucleus can be thought of as a ‘liquid drop’: This...

Over the last few months the market is flooded with new micro-controller boards. Here are 3 best and cheap IoT boards other than Arduino. THE C.H.I.P. Its the Cheapest IoT board you can get in the market starting at just  $ 9 .It is one of the smallest yet powerful board which does some serious work like your mainframe computer. The C.H.I.P. used with Gnumeric can create AbiWord or spreadsheets to word process. It has the ability to open the Excel and Word documents that already exists.You can browse plays games and perform IoT projects which all comes from a good spec sheet. Specifications Of C.H.I.P. Built-in WiFi B/G/N, 1GHz C.H.I.P.'s R8 processor,  4GB of High-speed on board storage, 512MB of RAM, Bluetooth 4.0   it works with any display  In a nutshell the C.H.I.P. is a $9 computer which is smaller than a size of a banana. TESPA TESPA is one of the most easy to use Internet of Things (IoT) development platform. It...

On 30th March 2017, SES-10 a geostationary communications satellite was launched aboard a Falcon 9 Full Thrust. This launch marked the first time in history that a first stage was reused. Yes a first stage was reused! What's more fascinating is the thing that it landed on, an 'Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship'. Yeah fancy right! Well what's more fancier, its actual name 'Of Course I Still Love you'. It's an Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (ASDS) floating on the Atlantic Ocean near the coast of Jacksonville, Florida.  What do they do? Well as the name suggests it is an Autonomous Spaceport, it autonomously tracks the returning First stage using GPS positioning technology. Additionally it can also be operated in semi-autonomous mode using Telerobotics. It has four diesel powered Azimuth thrusters manufactured by Thrustmaster for hydraulic propulsion. Space X equipped the ASDS with various sensors to gather data of the First stage including commercial ...

Humans are such species that From the moment someone smashed a piece of rock on the surface of the earth to make the first sharp tool, to the development of  Internet, several key advancements are deemed as revolutionary. What leads to an invention? The answer to this question is the demands and interests of individuals, businesses, and societies. This article develops an understanding of the influence of technology. These are the top 4 inventions that have changed the world. 1 .The Internet The Internet, a network of computers covering the entire planet, allows people to access almost any information located anywhere in the world at any time. It effects on business, communication, economy, entertainment. In the 1960s, a team of computer scientists working for the U.S. Defense Department's ARPA built it. The Internet is a very powerful invention that will only change the world. The ability to diffuse and recombine information with such efficie...

Gadgets are the things that can surely make our lives simpler. We cannot imagine what our lives would be without the existence of gadget? Well, in this article, we will go through some of the coolest gadgets that are available right now. So, when you people are still thinking that you can live without the gadget, then you might as well live inside a cave.Here are the top 5 gadgets that are currently available on Amazon. 1 . Wireless Speaker Light Bulb This product consists of two-in-one design.The smart LED bulb with Bluetooth and speaker. It is simple to install and it saves energy as it is energy efficient.Just by Simply screwing it into a standard light socket we can enjoy up to 25,000 hours of lighting which will use 10% less energy than incandescent. The lighting can be controlled by Bluetooth with the help of free App which is Compatible on both the platforms(ios and android). Specifications: Power: LED 6W, AMP 2W Voltage: AC82-263V Frequ...

Internet of Things is one of the hottest technologies in the world. Cisco predicts that there will be around 50 billion IoT devices in the world by 2020. From simple things such as a tweeting refrigerator, to much more complex things like a Tesla car. Businesses, be it small startups or large corporations, all are flocking to create connected products that affect our lives in every way possible. But any IoT product manufacturer needs to keep these 5 essential components in mind that make up an IoT device. 1. Sensors and Actuators: ·          Sensors are devices that detect input from the physical environment and translate it into an electrical/digital signal. There are many different sensors available today to measure temperature, humidity, light, noise, pollution, pressure, torsion, tension, acceleration, position, images, magnetic fields, electric fields, etc. They used to be large, bulky and power hungry. Today they are invisibl...