Nokia brings on two Windows phones

Nokia unveiled its first two Windows Phone powered devices, the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 710, running Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, at Nokia World in London on Wednesday (Oct. 26).

The higher end Lumia 800 with its 3.7inch AMOLED display, 1.4GHz processor, 8megapixel Carl Zeiss camera and 16GB of embedded memory is targeted to compete with the likes of Apple's iPhone 4S and Samsung's Galaxy S II, while the Lumia 710 with a 5megapixel camera and 8GB of embedded memory is aimed more at the mid-tier segment. Both phones boast a 1450MAh battery.

"This is a slim and sleek, well designed phone, featuring a best in class camera and it has some strong key selling points," said IDC's Francisco Jeronimo of the Lumia 800, though he admitted the phone may have trouble competing in a market where Android and iOS still dominate.

The Lumia 710, he said, was more of a dark horse in that it had surprised the mid-tier segment with a device it wasn't expecting until the second quarter of 2012.

"This is the most affordable 1.4GHz processor device, a mid price-tier handset with high-end specs," he said.

Jeronimo said he felt Nokia had "come a long way" over the past year, noting that Stephen Elop's reign as CEO and the firm's "180-degrees" shift in strategy seemed to be paying off.

"Stephen Elop stepped in as CEO of the biggest phone maker in the world, defined a new strategy and a new paradigm for Nokia, executed it and over exceeded expectations by delivering not only one, but two new Windows devices," he said adding "Nokia seems to have now what lacked for years, speed to adjust to the market's pace."

Not all analysts were as impressed as Jeronimo, however, with Jack Gold of Gold Associates positing that Nokia had missed an opportunity at the event and was still not showing the level of revitalisation needed to turn the company around.

"I'm left with many questions after the announcements. How do the new devices fit into a diverse environment in an enterprise setting? Where are the enterprise tools to deploy, activate secure and manage them? What is the Nokia Value Add on top of plane Windows Phone? What did they do to enhance the Windows Phone platform beyond what Microsoft offers? Nokia seemed to show once again that they understand how to make appealing hardware, but fell short in service offerings that could differentiate them in the market, especially with the important business user," said Gold.

"Samsung makes a nice Windows phone, as does HTC. Why would a consumer choose a Nokia device?" he added.

Ironically, Jeronimo counters that the likes of Samsung and HTC may be just what Nokia needs to help drive sales, by raising the profile of the Windows operating system, which currently only holds 2 per cent of the smartphone market.

IDC estimates that as a result of well established brands like Samsung, HTC and LG pushing out devices with a Windows Phone operating system, Microsoft should see its mobile software grow to take a market share of 11 per cent by 2012 and possibly become the second biggest smartphone operating system by 2015, with 20 per cent market share, behind Android and ahead of iOS.

Those predictions, however, would likely hinge on Nokia delivering devices into the U.S. market. The Lumia 800 and 710 will apparently only be available in selected markets across Europe, with the firm holding off on a U.S. launch until early next year, once LTE stabilises.

Microsoft's restrictive policy on changing the operating system's user interface could also make it difficult for phone makers to differentiate their offerings based on Windows Phone, which could make it a hard sell to consumers.

"Nokia will need to leverage its hardware expertise, but the differentiation will come from their unique services that other vendors cannot easily match," said Jeronimo. Gold, however, argues that Nokia has still not shown how it adds value to the Microsoft standard OS and that launching at premium pricing level (420 euros, or about Rs.27,000 ($599) before subsidies) is risky in a market where the iPhone 4S costs the same.

"Nokia is competing against the market leaders at about the same pricing level. There is no advantage taken by Nokia in trying to get back into the marketplace at a reasonable price with a premium product," Gold said.

Indeed, Nokia has been losing significant share in the smartphone segment since 2007 and as Jeronimo notes, "It will take a lot more than just a couple of phones to bring Nokia back."

The new devices launched today, however, may be an "excellent first step" in Jeronimo's opinion and more significantly, a sign that Nokia can "change its culture, readapt and refocus on growth."

Stupid Customers..!!

Who Needs ‘Em? Real Users Don’t Appreciate Brilliant Engineering
by Jim

Sometimes customers can be the stupidest people. Why do they have such a hard time using simple products? And why are they so allergic to reading manuals, FAQs, or help screens? We’ve all heard the (likely apocryphal) story about the tech support technician who breaks the news to his customer that the CD-ROM tray isn’t really a cup holder. Are users really this dumb? Well, yes and no. A lot of tech-support lunacy is spawned because the engineers and programmers who create stuff (that’s us) don’t have the same mindset as the people who use this stuff. We’re engineers; our customers aren’t. We think differently. We’re also too close to the problem. After spending 18 months on a user-interface design, you’ll be intimately familiar with it. Perhaps too intimate. Even when our customers are engineers, they won’t have the same preconceived notions or product-history background that we do. I recall watching a hardware engineer check out a new Tektronix oscilloscope. He kept pinching the screen to enlarge the image. “No, it’s not an iPhone,” the weary Tek salesman had to tell him, and obviously not for the first time. The pinch-to-stretch gesture didn’t come from Tektronix and had nothing to do with oscilloscopes, yet the customer somehow assumed it would work. And who can blame him? Developer/user mismatches spring from a lot of different causes. Good engineering teams will employ, or at least listen to, outsiders with good customer-facing experience. Nontechnical people are sometimes your best source of tough-love feedback.

They don’t see the beauty

Consider the combination TV/DVD player. These make perfect sense technically. Everybody owns both; they’ll always be side by side; they’re permanently connected together; and putting both functions into one housing saves space, eliminates video cables and does away with one power cord. It’s elegance itself. Yet nobody ever buys them. Stupid customers apparently want to buy their TV and their DVD player separately. Maybe it’s because they like to upgrade them on different cycles, or they’re afraid if one breaks it’ll take the other down with it. Whatever. The point is, what’s neat and elegant to us isn’t always attractive to the buying public. Get over it.

They have their own expectations

Once the product is in customers’ hands, do you keep getting the same support calls? If your customers continually misuse the machine/software in the same way, it’s probably not their fault. Yes, it’s likely that they haven’t read the manual, but that’s not why they’re screwing up. Consistent misuse is a symptom of bad design, and no amount of “it’s in the manual” will fix that. If your new car came with the gas and brake pedals reversed, would a note in the owner’s handbook be enough for you to learn to drive it? Like the Tektronix oscilloscope, every product exists in a larger world, a world that has influenced users’ expectations. And, like Tektronix, you can’t do anything to control it, but you can (and should) be respectful of it and respond to it. No product exists in a vacuum, and the broader “user world” should indirectly influence your own designs.

They don’t follow the script

User manuals and help screens are useful, but they really answer only your questions, not the customer’s questions. Whoever writes the help text unconsciously guides the questions, not just the answers. We saw this same phenomenon in our survey of surveys. Help screens and pop-up responses can answer only the questions you’ve already anticipated. They can’t foresee “off the menu” questions that real users are likely to ask. No matter how thorough and well-written your help text is (and it’s probably neither), it can never predict the unpredictable. As a clue, help text should never contain tautologies like, “To save a file, click the File menu, then click Save.” That’s never helpful and certainly not what the customer is asking. Anyone caught writing that sort of help text should be tattooed with helpful directions for engaging in certain anatomically improbable acts of personal violation.

They’re visually oriented

Human-factors engineers tell us that people memorize locations, not labels. You expect the “File” menu to be near the upper-left corner on a Windows PC, and the “close” button should be in the upper-right corner. Swapping their positions guarantees confusion. If it all changed tomorrow, you’d still instinctively reach for the File menu in the wrong place for months until you’ve finally retrained yourself. That’s one reason people were slow to adopt Microsoft Office 2007: all the familiar buttons had moved. No matter how logical the new layout may be (and that’s debatable, too), the only salient point is... they moved. “Better” isn’t always better. You can’t just swap the gas pedal and the brake. We’ve all learned the old user interface.

They don’t read

More subtly, visuals count for more than text. After position, what we remember is the appearance of the thing we’re reaching for. We look for the yellow folder icon, or the green checkmark, or the red cancel button. We’re not actually reading the text; we’re pattern-matching the visuals. If a badly designed Windows application swaps the positions of the OK and Cancel buttons, we’re momentarily confused, but we still expect them to look like OK and Cancel buttons. If all the traffic lights in your town were secretly turned upside down, with the red light at the bottom and the green at the top, you might not immediately recognize quite what happened, but you’d know something was wrong. The upshot of all this is that you can’t expect your users to read. Text is third in line of succession after position and appearance. It’s there as a backup; a confirmation that this really is the File menu or the Save button. Text is never the primary indicator. To verify this, I once used a Swedish version of Windows with very little trouble, because all the menus were in the same position and sequence as the English version. Menu selection and mouse clicks all felt natural and automatic, as long as I didn’t look too closely. Even an Arabic-language version (where text runs right-to-left) wasn’t all that hard to use; I just counted over from the edge of the screen. (I found swapping the mouse to my off hand also helped.) So don’t be too quick to prejudge your customers as the illiterate louts they undoubtedly are. Your product is not the most important thing in their miserable little lives, so they’re not going to spend a lot of energy learning to use it. They’ll drag all sorts of emotional baggage and prior experience to the party: things that will randomly alter their expectations and behavior. Between their BlackBerry, the ATM at the corner bank, and those five years they spent using WordStar, they’re irretrievably tainted. Deal with it and take their money.

New electronics policy aims to create 2.8 crore jobs

Communications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal on Monday unveiled the draft National Policy on Electronics, 2011, aimed at achieving a turnover of $400 billion for the sector by 2020, which involved investment of about $100 billion, besides creating employment for 2.8 crore people. The final policy is likely to come by December this year. “At the current rate of growth, the domestic production can cater to a demand of only $100 billion in 2020 as against demand of $400 billion and the rest would have to be met by imports…a demand-supply gap of nearly $300 billion. Unless the situation is corrected, it is likely that by 2020 the electronics import may far exceed oil imports,” Mr. Sibal said after unveiling the draft. “The National Policy of Electronics-2011 envisions creating a globally competitive electronics systems design and manufacturing (ESDM) industry, including nano-electronics, to meet the country's needs and serve the international market. This is a quantum jump from production level of about $20 billion in 2009. This inter alia, includes achieving a turnover of $55 billion of chip design and embedded software industry, and $80 billion of exports,” he pointed out. Mr. Sibal also said the policy was also aimed at making India the hub of electronic manufacturing. “The policy proposes setting up of over 200 electronic manufacturing clusters (EMCs) and providing assistance for setting up of greenfield EMCs and upgradation of brownfield EMCs…I have talked to chief ministers and ministers regarding finding a place for setting up such clusters,” he added. The Minister further said another important objective of the policy was to augment post-graduate education and produce about 2,500 PhDs annually by 2020. “For this, we need tie-ups with universities and educational institutions like IITs and IIScs to promote such kind of thing,” Mr. Sibal added. Source: The Hindu

Soon, PCs to understand how you feel!

A Binghamton University researcher wants computers to understand inputs from humans that go beyond the traditional keyboard and mouse.

Lijun Yin and team have developed ways to provide information to the computer based on where a user is looking as well as through gestures or speech. Yin says the next step would be enabling the computer to recognize a user's emotional state. "Computers only understand zeroes and ones. Everything is about patterns. We want to find out how to recognize each emotion using only the most important features," said Yin. Yin is also considering use of photographs, and even three-dimensional avatars that are able to display a range of emotions. "We want not only to create a virtual-person model, we want to understand a real person's emotions and feelings. We want the computer to be able to understand how you feel, too. That's hard, even harder than my other work," said Yin. "This technology could help us to train the computer to do facial-recognition analysis in place of experts," added Yin.

Spend Rs5 lakh for engineering degree, but don’t expect a job

Despite their middle-class background, Vikas Kumar’s parents shelled out Rs5 lakh during his four years at an engineering college. His institute, however, saw just four to five firms treading in for placements last year. The companies picked only 50-60 students from a batch of 220 across streams - computer science, information science, civil, mechanical, etc. Since he graduated a few months ago, Kumar, 22, has been knocking at every possible opportunity and shelling out over Rs55,000 in the process. “I have registered on quite a few job sites for freshers, approached the placement co-ordinator of another institute, registered in the campus pool of other colleges as well as enrolled for a course in networking,” said Kumar, who did his engineering in computer science from an institute in Chickballapur, about 56 km north of Bangalore. To hone his potential, Kumar paid nearly Rs48,000 for a six-month networking course. He has also paid Rs4,000 for getting registered for placements with another college in Bangalore while simultaneously spending Rs3,500 for registering on two job sites. “Despite doing all this, there is no guarantee that I might get a decent job. My college is busy with placements for the current batch and has no time to consider ex-students,” said Kumar. Many of his classmates have also doled out similar amounts in the quest to get a job. Many are doing courses pertaining to VLSI (very large-scale integration), embedded technology, mobile communications, programming, etc, paying anywhere between Rs35,000-Rs50,000 for a duration of two to six months. Saicharan Shetty, another fresh engineering graduate who paid over Rs4.5 lakh for graduation, did a two-month networking course in August-September for Rs22,000. He plans to shell out another Rs12,000 for giving the course exam. Passing the exam will guarantee him a certificate certified by a Nasdaq-listed networking firm. “Neither the institute from where I did the course nor my college will help in my job hunt. In short, it means investing more and more effort and money for returns which are not guaranteed,” said Shetty. Experts said this trend is highly prevalent, especially with students hailing from lesser- known colleges. Estimates reveal that just 25% of engineering students get job offers by the time they graduate. “Three of four kids are jobless at the time of graduation. They need to then run from pillar to post to figure out ways to get jobs,” said Amit Bhatia, CEO of Gurgaon-based employability education firm Aspire. This happens as top recruiters visit only renowned campuses, while setting yardsticks of minimum cut-offs. “Students should score not less than 60% or 70% in their semester exams to be eligible for placements is what some firms as well as colleges stipulate. This excludes several students,” said an HR official from an IT firm. Shetty said as there was no structured guidance available on what to do post graduation, freshers end up emptying the pockets of their parents. However, in rare cases, colleges do call upon ex-students who are jobless, if they get approached by companies with a sudden requirement for talent, said Bhatia. By Priyanka Golikeri | Place: Bangalore | Agency: DNA

India's first robotic liver transplant performed in Gurgaon

In a first of its kind surgery in India, doctors at a hospital in Gurgaon have performed a robotic liver transplant surgery to save the life of a four-year-old child. The surgery was conducted at Medanta Medicity hospital in Gurgaon, the capital's suburb in Haryana, last month, doctors said here Thursday. The Da-Vinci robot was used by the doctors on Rahmatullah, 36, who donated 20 percent of his liver to his nephew Ziad. According to doctors, it is only the third robotic live donor surgery in the world. “Robotic surgery is usually performed for other operations like kidney, heart and gynaecological operations. But it's use in this liver transplant not only increased the precision, but encouraged the donor by reducing surgery related troubles,” said A.S. Soin, chairman of Medanta Liver Institute, who led the team of surgeons. Ziad was suffering from a rare genetic disorder leading to cancer in his liver. The child, who was living with his parents in Muscat, capital of Oman, suffered from tyrosinemia, a disease where the liver is unable to digest proteins. “Even when Ziad developed rickets, which is one of the symptoms for this disease, the doctors were not able to diagnose his condition,” said Neelam Mohan, director of pediatric gastroenterology. Even though Ziad developed rickets at age of two, his liver condition was detected much later. His parents, originally from Karnataka, were not able to afford the surgery in Muscat. Ziad's father Mohd. Zakir Hussain, a pharmacist, and his mother Mehe Zabinthen, then decided to come to India. An amount of about Rs15 lakh was raised through charity. But by then, Ziad had developed a cancer in his liver, and hence the whole liver had to be removed. But his parents' the blood groupdiffered from Ziad's, and so his uncle Rahmatullah came forward for the liver donation. “The donor in a liver transplant undergoes the surgery only for saving some one's life. A robotic surgery encouraged his uncle for the donation as it has greater precision and a mere three to four inches scar,” added Soin. The cost of a robotic surgery for the donor costs nearly Rs75,000 to Rs80,000 more than a normal donor surgery. Doctors, however, say the cost will come down with time as more robotic surgeries are conducted. “In another year or 18 months, the cost difference in normal and robotic surgery will come down to around Rs25,000,” said Soin. “Once the robot is started, the cost that comes is around Rs1 lakh. If three or four surgeries are conducted in a line, the cost will automatically come down,” he explained. And for Ziad, it's nothing less than a blessing. "It is another life for Ziad," a relieved Mehe Zabin said.

Robots To Replace Low-Skilled Workers

Abu Dhabi conglomerate Royal Group's robotics subsidiary has developed a life-size robot that could replace low-skilled human workers and plans to open a factory that will produce around a dozen of the robots every month, a news report has revealed. Barcelona-based company PAL Robotics, a part of Abu Dhabi conglomerate Royal Group, is a robotics company focused on the research, development and commercialisation of humanoid robots. Earlier this year, it launched REEM, a 1.65-metre tall mobile humanoid robot that can move at a speed of 5 km per hour.

Classified as a humanoid robot, REEM is equipped with an autonomous navigation system and a touch screen and PAL claims it is capable of roaming through any kind of surroundings, replacing traditionally employed low-skilled workers. It can be used as a guide or an entertainer and its functions include face tracking and recognition functions and a small platform that can be used to transport luggage and other objects. Tested at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC), the robots proved so successful that ADNEC has placed an order for 20 robots and PAL plans to open a factory next year in the emirate to manufacture REEM humanoids. "To be able to deliver these robots to ADNEC and other future clients, we are building a factory in Abu Dhabi. If all goes according to plan, the factory will be ready by the second half of 2012, producing about a dozen of the robots a month," Jorien Guijs, marketing manager at Pal Robotics, told the Arabian Business weekly magazine. "At the moment, REEM is prepared for use at exhibition centres and shopping malls. In the future, we will focus as well on the healthcare sector, airports, museums and other public spaces," Guijs added. The inbuilt lithium battery allows it to move around for up to eight hours without the need for cables. Once the robots go into production next year, Guijs estimated they will cost up to USD 269,157 each, depending on demand, the report said.

Android is the best operating system choice for many medical applications

Android stacks up well against the traditional competitors when developing medical devices.

Interest in “heavier” mainstream operating systems (OSs) such as Windows, Windows CE, and Linux for use in medical devices has grown dramatically in the past decade, and particularly in the past few years. This interest is driven by several factors. Today’s device users desire rich, sophisticated interfaces and many developers are experienced in using these OSs and related tools on desktop PCs and servers. Until recently, if one wanted to use a full-featured OS for medical embedded development, there were two typical choices: Microsoft Windows CE (and occasionally desktop Windows itself) or Linux (or other Unix variant).
Of these two, Windows CE has the advantage of being a fully integrated development platform, from device drivers all the way up through the application framework. Some developers may not be enamored of Windows CE, but few would argue against it being a fast and easy way to get a project started with minimal hassle. CE has disadvantages as well: there’s a royalty for use and the code base is controlled by Microsoft. Note that the latter carries some benefits as well.
Linux and other Unix variants have the advantage of being free and open source, but there have traditionally been significant hurdles for their use in embedded devices, particularly in devices with sophisticated user interfaces. Linux is designed as a desktop/server OS, and typical distributions contain lots of features (megabytes and CPU cycles) that are rarely if ever needed in embedded systems. Thus, starting a new embedded project in Linux has traditionally required several person-weeks of creating a lightweight software image with the desired subset of functionality, and with additions appropriate for embedded use. And while hand crafting the Linux image goes a good way towards optimizing things, the result is still not fully optimized—many important bits can’t be pared down from their desktop orientation and are inefficient in their use of memory, CPU, and/or power.
So, the choice has been to use a proprietary system that’s easy to get started with (Windows CE), or a free and open system that requires a good bit of work to get started (Linux and brethren).
Google’s Android OS is a relatively new player in the embedded space. Fundamentally, Android’s purpose is to build on the Linux OS by providing a full-featured embedded systems framework. In short, Android aims to bring to the Linux/free software world the same out-of-the-box, ease-of-use found in Windows CE.
Android was first released by Google in November 2007, as an OS targeted at smart phones. Its success has been phenomenal: in less than three years, it’s become the most popular OS for smart phones, currently shipping on almost half of these phones worldwide. Android phones are shipping at a rate of almost 100 million per year.
Developers quickly recognized that Android has much to offer in embedded applications beyond phones. Most of today’s embedded devices share several attributes with phones: small form-factor LCD/touch screens, rich GUIs, low-power processors, broad connectivity options (cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc), battery operation, etc.
Because of reliability concerns, medical device developers have traditionally lagged slightly behind in the adoption of new technologies. It often makes sense to wait for a technology to mature a bit before committing its use into an FDA-regulated device. But Android represents a hybrid: while it’s relatively new, it’s based on tried-and-true Linux technology that’s well-understood in our industry.
What is Android?
Android is an operating system and complete application framework designed for ARM-based processors. That can be clearly observed in the schematic diagram (Figure 1).

1. A schematic diagram of Android depicts its framework. This image is reproduced from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.
Android fundamentally uses Linux, but Google has updated and extended it in a number of ways to build a complete framework for rapid development:

The Android kernel supports extensions for more aggressive power management and modified inter-process communications.
Glibc library is replaced with Android’s own Bionic, which is small and fast, and supports the BSD license rather than GPL, thereby keeping the GPL out of user space.
Several libraries commonly needed for embedded use are included, such as WebKit (web page rendering), Media Framework, SQLLite, and others.
There’s a hardware abstraction layer that defines the interface needed by hardware drivers.
Android Runtime, which consists of Dalvik, a Java virtual machine optimized for embedded use, and core Java APIs for application development. While application development under Java is Android’s “dominant paradigm,” applications can be written in C and other languages and then compiled down to native ARM code using the Native Development Kit.
The Android Application Framework that’s used to implement the standard object-oriented structure of Java Android applications.

Android is open source, but a design goal was to better insulate commercial developers against the viral nature of the GPL. The Linux kernel remains under the GPL but most of the rest of Android is released under the more relaxed Apache license, which allows it to be used in both proprietary and open-source endeavors. The short story is that Android makes licensing simpler and cleaner as compared to standard Linux.
Google also produces a suite of closed-source applications, including the Android Market and GPS. These are primarily shipped with cell phones.
Can I use Android for my medical device?
To a large degree, selecting an OS for a medical device is like selecting an OS for any other device: we pick the OS that we believe will maximize the value of the device over its life cycle. That includes such considerations as:

How quickly can we get to market?
What will be the cost of development?
How does this selection affect our cost of goods sold?
What are the licensing costs?
How much will sustaining engineering cost once we’re on the market?
How confident are we of our time/cost estimates?

The hallmark of a medical project includes the following additional question:

Will this selection yield a device that presents an acceptable risk to the patient and users?

As we all recognize, medical devices are different than most other devices in that they can pose a significant risk, particularly to patients. The FDA classifies all medical devices in one of three classes, based on the risk to the patient and the degree of regulatory scrutiny it believes is warranted.
Class I devices present minimal risk and include products like tongue depressors, bandages, and basic surgical instruments. Class II devices present moderate risk and include products like electrocardiographs, x-ray units, blood gas analyzers, and infusion pumps. Class III devices pose the highest risk and include implantable defibrillators, replacement heart valves, and implanted cerebella stimulators.
Heavyweight OSs such as Android are substantially more likely to experience failures than are smaller, more testable OSs designed primarily for reliability. That’s not to say that heavyweight OSs necessarily fail often. Needing to reboot once a year to fix a software lockup may be okay for many devices, and so the inconvenience of an occasional reboot can be weighed against the benefits of a better UI, faster time-to-market, and other benefits of a heavyweight OS. But a yearly reboot for a frozen implantable defibrillator is probably a non-starter.
As a general rule of thumb, Android and similar OSs are appropriate for use in Class I and Class II devices, whereas Class III devices typically require a smaller high-reliability OS. However, every device is different. In any medical device development effort, we must thoroughly consider and understand the risks introduced by OS selection.
One method that’s employed to get “the best of both worlds” is to split processing tasks into two parts: a processor with a high-reliability OS to perform critical functions and a processor with a heavyweight OS to support less-critical tasks. An example could be an infusion pump where one processor with a high-reliability OS controls the motor during infusion, while another processor running Android runs the GUI, communications, and so forth. Note that this two-processor solution is not a straight-forward panacea, and this specific approach may not be appropriate for an infusion pump. A good deal of thought and planning are needed to ensure safety and testability.
The benefits of ubiquity
If you select Android for your embedded device, tens of millions of handsets run essentially the same Android stack that your device will run. There’s a huge pool of users finding bugs, and a large developer community dedicated to fixing them. While Android can’t match the reliability of lighter-weight purpose-built OSs, it is a thoroughly-debugged system as compared to cobbling together a Linux stack from scratch. In addition, more than 100,000 applications are currently available for Android, and many of these applications ease and speed development. That said, Android development is not overly complex and a large pool of developers can support Android.
Android is a strong contender for use in medical devices that don’t require the highest level of software reliability, and whose pricing can support the required hardware. It strikes a good balance between functionality, resource requirements, and productivity, and has the additional advantage of building on the huge and thriving Linux ecosystem.

'Do Engineering'

National Instruments (NI) along with NICE (Nurturing Innovation and Creativity in Education) Committee recently hosted the 10th Annual Educator's Day 2011-- an academic platform for science and engineering professors. The two-day event witnessed participation of around 1,000 students, professors, scholars and eminent academicians across the country. It focused on the need to 'Do Engineering', which plays a pivotal role in enabling students and teachers on the effective use of technology in education.

In the keynote, Jeff Kodosky, NI Business and Technology Fellow, co-founder and Father of LabVIEW, focused on the importance of using the graphical system design approach to solve today’s grand challenges for a sustainable future and on the relevance of LabVIEW, as one of the most intuitive programming environment available for engineers and scientists. Addressing the professors, he emphasised on the importance of teaching 'Do Engineering' to the students, which will in turn accelerate productivity, innovation and discovery.

Speaking at the event, Jayaram Pillai, managing director, IndRA (India, Russia and Arabia), National Instruments said, "Engineers should focus on core engineering, which has an immense potential for growth, like IT. With this platform, we are inspiring engineers to 'Do Engineering' rather than 'Learn Engineering'. He spoke about India's Vision 2020 and how we need engineers and scientists to be ready to solve future challenging problems. He further added, “This is only possible with the continuous support of professors to encourage students to Do Engineering and also students should stay true to their core engineering concepts and focus on higher education.”

This year, the discussions were focused around a wide range of next-generation embedded technologies including design track, green engineering, teaching embedded systems, robotics and mechatronics, nanotechnology and more to emphasise the importance of graphical system design.

The Foundation Skills

The 17 Foundation Skills are those required of all workers in the high-performance workplace of the 21st century. They were developed from several high-level government commission reports. A corporate vice president and director at Motorola, Jim Burge, wrote this,

"At my company, Motorola, the only constant is change. Jobs that were once relatively simple now require high-performance work processes and enhanced skills. Today's job skills, identified by Professor Lawrence Jones in Job Skills for the 21st Century, reflect these changing workplace realities and help students, job applicants, and employees anticipate change."

There are four groups of Foundation Skills:

Basic Skills

Reading: Identify relevant details, facts, and specification; locate information in books/manuals, from graphs; find meaning of unknown words; judge accuracy of reports; use computer to find information.

Writing: Write ideas completely and accurately in letters and reports with proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation; check, edit, and revise for accuracy and emphasis, use computer to communicate information.
Mathematics: Use numbers, fractions, and percentages to solve problems; use tables, graphs, diagrams, and charts; use computer to enter, retrieve, change, and communicate numerical information.
Speaking: Organize and communicate ideas clearly; speak clearly; select language, tone of voice, and gestures appropriate to audience.
Listening: Listen carefully to what person says, noting tone of voice, and other body language; respond in a way that shows understanding of what is said.

Thinking Skills

Creative Thinking: Use imagination freely, combining ideas or information in new ways; make connections between ideas that seem unrelated.

Problem-Solving Skills: Recognize problem; identify why it is a problem; create and implement a solution; watch to see how well solution works; revise as needed.

Decision Making Skills: Identify goal; generate alternatives and gather information about them; weigh pros and cons; choose best alternative; plan how to carry out choice.

Visualization: See a building or object by looking at a blueprint, drawing, or sketch; imagine how a system works by looking at a schematic drawing.

People Skills

Social: Show understanding, friendliness, and respect for feelings; assert oneself when appropriate; take an interest in what people say and why they think and act as they do.

Negotiation: Identify common goals among different parties in conflict; clearly present the facts and arguments of your position; listen to and understand other party's position; create possible ways to resolve conflict; make reasonable compromises.
Leadership: Communicate thoughts and feelings to justify a position; encourage or convince others; make positive use of rules or values; demonstrate ability to have others believe in and trust you because of your competence and honesty.
Teamwork: Work cooperatively with others; contribute to group with ideas and effort; do own share of work; encourage team members; resolve differences for the benefit of the team; responsibly challenge existing procedures, policies, or authorities.
Cultural Diversity: Work well with people having different ethnic, social, or educational backgrounds; understand the concerns of members of other ethnic and gender groups; base impressions on a person's behavior, not stereotypes; understand one's own culture and those of others and how they differ; respectfully help people in these groups make cultural adjustments when necessary.

Personal Qualities

Self-Esteem: Understand how beliefs affect how a person feels and acts; "listen" to and identify irrational or harmful beliefs you may have; and understand how to change these negative beliefs when they occur.

Self-Management: Assess your knowledge and skills accurately; set specific, realistic personal goals; monitor progress toward your goal.
Responsibility: Work hard to reach goals, even if task is unpleasant; do quality work; display high standard of attendance, honesty, energy, and optimism.

Engineering an Experience

The Legacy of Steve Jobs

by Kevin Morris

In 1976, when Apple Computer was launched, I was in high school. A year later, when the company launched the Apple II - my soul was drawn to the device. For me, it embodied the promise of a new future, where intelligent machines blended functionally and aesthetically into our lives, changing the very meaning of humanity itself. For me, the Apple II was not so much a device as a piece of art and inspiration - a window into the future.
That’s because I was both a hard-core nerd and a sappy teenager at the same time.
The Apple II didn’t deliver on all that, of course. It would have taken a lot of vision to make the conceptual leap from the 8-bit 6502-powered machine with a cassette tape storage device and an RF modulator sending NTSC video to the TV on Channel 3 - to the reality of what we know today with the iPhone - a pocket-sized supercomputer, connected to a global information network, that can be operated by an eight-year old - all for the price of a family dinner at an upscale restaurant.
That leap required decades of development from tens of thousands of brilliant engineers - many of whom are reading this article today. We all know the secret, right? Steve Jobs didn’t invent the iPhone.
The Apple we know is the product of two creative geniuses - Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. “Woz” has always been easy for us. Woz is the engineer’s engineer. He practices hardware design as an art, and, like any artist, he is almost inseparable from that which he creates. For engineers, Woz is easy to understand and admire. He is what the nerd-brain inside all of us aspires to - the pure essence of engineering for engineering’s sake - out-of-the-box problem solving extraordinaire. Woz’s incredible ability to find the uncommon solution to the common technical problem positions him as perhaps the greatest minimalist in history in the art of digital design. Every engineer who has passed on tales of the “Woz Machine” (a disk controller implemented as a state machine with an insanely-optimized gate count, which dramatically reduced the cost of floppy disk control) can connect directly with the genius of Woz.
For most engineers, the genius of Steve Jobs exists on an entirely different plane.
Steve Jobs embodied all that was missing in most engineers. Jobs and Woz together were the perfect storm of technology creativity. Steve Jobs was intimately connected to the way ordinary people think about machines. While legions of engineers were off reducing gate counts, perfecting firmware, attacking power consumption, and optimizing critical paths - Steve Jobs was honing his vision of the object all of that technology would become. Far beyond what we think of as “marketing”, Jobs delivered something that reached past the gathering and classification of customer requirements. He had a connection with the imagination of his customer, and he intuitively knew how to fold that imagination into the product his team was creating.
Engineers I’ve known through the years typically don’t understand the “Jobs Factor”.
“The iPod is just a disk drive with a pair of headphones. Nothing special at all.”
How, then, did so many companies - both before and after the iPod’s meteoric rise - try and fail to market successful music players? Even those that blatantly copied the most esoteric details of the iPod - before adding their own special “differentiation” - completely and utterly failed to achieve traction in the market. Others had online music stores with thousands of popular tracks. Others had smooth interfaces, simple controls, informative displays, larger storage, better sound quality, and lower prices. Others were “open.”
They did not have the magic.
As engineers, we love for things to be reducible to a formula. We know that if we lower power consumption, battery life will increase. If we increase clock speed, our device will be faster, snappier, and more responsive. A set of specifications or requirements becomes a list of problems for us to solve - engaging our engineering brains in just the way we’ve trained ourselves. Some specifications we will meet without difficulty. Others may cause us to struggle, and we may deliver slightly less than we hoped. A very few will lead to some inspiration or burst of creativity that allows us to over-deliver in a big way. These are the creations that give us a sense of pride in our work.
Steve Jobs showed us that there is no formula for creating products that inspire our customers. Some may say that Apple’s secret is industrial design, yet there are thousands of companies with world-class industrial designers on staff that fail to deliver Apple’s magic. Some say that Apple gets an unfair advantage because of legions of loyal fans who eagerly slurp up every new piece of plastic, metal, and glass to emerge from Cupertino. This, however, is the effect and not the cause.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand the genius that Steve Jobs brought to our industry is to think about movies. Like technology products, movies are massively collaborative efforts that are the product of hundreds of creative minds working together. There is no formula for a great movie. Countless times, studios will start with enormous budgets, choose great scripts, hire talented actors, grab the best wardrobe designers, cinematographers, editors, and art directors - only to produce movies that completely flop. Other times, the magic inspiration will flow from a talented director’s vision, giving us a timeless masterpiece that far transcends the sum of its parts. One could never compare and judge two movies by lining up their spec sheets. This is because movies are art.
Jobs showed us that electronic products are works of art too.
With Steve Jobs passing, an enormous hole is left in our industry. Whether we fill that hole and retain the lessons of Jobs is largely up to us as engineers. We need to learn to engineer experiences, rather than devices and systems. Like movies, Apple’s products are all experiences - carefully choreographed from the opening of the box to the initial assembly to the software environment that supports them. We must put the humanity of our customer first and strive to create experiences that they will “love” and not just “use.” We need to put our own values aside and empathize with the average person - who is our customer - because the average person does not think like an engineer.
I have high hopes and expectations for Apple without Jobs. In my experience, company culture is something that mysteriously persists - even when most of the people in the company have changed - including the leadership. If Jobs’s values are infused into the culture of Apple, the collective culture will know how to do what he did - although in a different way.
Jobs’s lasting influence will extend far beyond Apple, however. He dared us to think differently about the products we design. He raised the standard by which all of us do our work - pulling our heads out of the bits and latches and asking us to be in touch with the passions, emotions, and even weaknesses and vulnerabilities of our customers. If we all do that - even for a moment each day in our work - his legacy will never die.

C-50

These are some commonly asked question during interviews ....

What is C language ?
What does static variable mean?
What are the different storage classes in C ?
What is hashing ?
Can static variables be declared in a header file ?
Can a variable be both constant and volatile ?
Can include files be nested?
What is a null pointer ?
What is the output of printf("%d") ?
What is the difference between calloc() and malloc() ?
What is the difference between printf() and sprintf() ?
How to reduce a final size of executable ?
Can you tell me how to check whether a linked list is circular ?
Advantages of a macro over a function ?
What is the difference between strings and character arrays ?
Write down the equivalent pointer expression for referring the same element a[i][j][k][l] ?
Which bit wise operator is suitable for checking whether a particular bit is on or off ?
Which bit wise operator is suitable for turning off a particular bit in a number ?
Which bit wise operator is suitable for putting on a particular bit in a number ?
Does there exist any other function which can be used to convert an integer or a float to a string ?
Why does malloc(0) return valid memory address ? What's the use ?
Difference between const char* p and char const* p
What is the result of using Option Explicit ?
What is the benefit of using an enum rather than a #define constant ?
What is the quickest sorting method to use ?
When should the volatile modifier be used ?
When should the register modifier be used? Does it really help ?
How can you determine the size of an allocated portion of memory ?
What is page thrashing ?
When does the compiler not implicitly generate the address of the first element of an array ?
What is the benefit of using #define to declare a constant ?
How can I search for data in a linked list ?
Why should we assign NULL to the elements (pointer) after freeing them ?
What is a null pointer assignment error ? What are bus errors, memory faults, and core dumps ?
When should a type cast be used ?
What is the difference between a string copy (strcpy) and a memory copy (memcpy)? When should each be used?
How can I convert a string to a number ?
How can I convert a number to a string ?
Is it possible to execute code even after the program exits the main() function?
What is the stack ?
How do you print an address ?
Can a file other than a .h file be included with #include ?
What is Preprocessor ?
How can you restore a redirected standard stream ?
What is the purpose of realloc( ) ?
What is the heap ?
How do you use a pointer to a function ?
What is the purpose of main( ) function ?
Why n++ executes faster than n+1 ?
What will the preprocessor do for a program ?