Some Useful Laws in Basic Electronics

Revolutionary Electronic-Paper

* Revolutionary electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper.
* Simple to use: no computer, no cables, no syncing.
* Wireless connectivity enables you to shop the Kindle Store directly from your Kindle.
* Buy a book and it is auto-delivered wirelessly in less than one minute.
* More than 125,000 books available, including more than 98 of 112 current New York Times Best Sellers.
* New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise.
* Free book samples. Download and read first chapters for free before you decide to buy.
* Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
* Top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland; Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and The Irish Times—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
* More than 300 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics, including BoingBoing, Slashdot, TechCrunch, ESPN's Bill Simmons, The Onion, Michelle Malkin, and The Huffington Post—all updated wirelessly throughout the day.
* Lighter and thinner than a typical paperback; weighs only 10.3 ounces.
* Holds over 200 titles.
* Long battery life. Leave wireless on and recharge approximately every other day. Turn wireless off and read for a week or more before recharging. Fully recharges in 2 hours.
* Unlike WiFi, Kindle utilizes the same high-speed data network (EVDO) as advanced cell phones—so you never have to locate a hotspot.
* No monthly wireless bills, service plans, or commitments—we take care of the wireless delivery so you can simply click, buy, and read.
* Includes free wireless access to the planet's most exhaustive and up-to-date encyclopedia—Wikipedia.org.
* Email your Word documents and pictures (.JPG, .GIF, .BMP, .PNG) to Kindle for easy on-the-go viewing.
* Included in the box: Kindle wireless reader, Book cover, Power adapter, USB 2.0 cable

ABOUT

That topic both energized and unnerved people attending BookExpo America, the publishing and bookselling industry’s annual trade show, which ended at the convention center here.

Much of the talk was focused on the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic reader, which has gained widespread acclaim for its ease of use. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder, spent much of a packed session evangelizing about the Kindle, which he said already accounts for 6 percent of his company’s unit sales of books that are available in both paper and electronic formats.

But excitement about the Kindle, which was introduced in November, also worries some publishing executives, who fear Amazon’s still-growing power as a bookseller. Those executives note that Amazon currently sells most of its Kindle books to customers for a price well below what it pays publishers, and they anticipate that it will not be long before Amazon begins using the Kindle’s popularity as a lever to demand that publishers cut prices.

Overall, traffic at the book fair seemed lower than in past years, a reflecting perhaps that some editors did not make the long trip west from Manhattan, as well as the fact that the growth in the book business has slowed.

While authors including William Shatner, Andre Dubus III and Ty Pennington drew big crowds of booksellers seeking autographs, several books by little-known authors scheduled for publication were being pushed hard by publishers. Those include two that use witches, of a sort, as their protagonists and one whose author is in shaman training.

One, “The Heretic’s Daughter,” is a novel about Martha Carrier, the first woman to be accused, tried and hanged as a witch in Salem, Mass. The author, Kathleen Kent, is a 10th-generation descendant of Carrier (though not a witch herself, said Reagan Arthur, an editor at the book’s publisher, Little, Brown). Another, “The Lace Reader,” by Brunonia Barry, is set in modern-day Salem, where the narrator hails from a family of women who can read the future in a pattern of lace. The novel, being published by William Morrow in July, was previously self-published by the author.

Kira Salak, the author of the third novel, “The White Mary,” draws on her travels across Papua New Guinea for an account of a journalist searching for a missing reporter who is thought to have committed suicide but might still be alive. According to Sarah Knight, an editor at Henry Holt, the author has undergone shaman training in Peru.

Booksellers, who make up the other major group attending the publishing convention, are also concerned that electronic books could become more than a passing fancy for an electronically savvy subset of customers. “It certainly does feel like a threat,” said Charles Stillwagon, the events manager at the Tattered Cover Book Store, a large independent bookseller in Denver.

Nearly all publishers say their sales of electronic books are growing exponentially. Carolyn K. Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said its sales of electronic books will more than double this year compared to last year, after growing 40 percent in 2007 from 2006. David Shanks, the chief executive of Penguin Group USA, said his company sold more electronic books in the first four months of 2008 than in all of last year.

The numbers are still small, which helps to account for the rapid growth. Ms. Reidy said that electronic book sales last year totaled about $1 million, a sliver of its annual sales of roughly $1 billion. During the convention, Simon & Schuster said it would convert an additional 5,000 titles to electronic format this year, more than doubling its number of electronic books and making available many of the best-selling books on the company’s backlist of consistent sellers.

Electronic books have been available since 1968 and have gained broader attention at least since 2000, when Stephen King sold 600,000 copies of “Riding the Bullet,” an electronic-only thriller, in two days. Now, however, “we’re finally at the tipping point,” Ms. Reidy said.

Much of the expected growth in electronic books can be tied to the Kindle. When Amazon introduced the product, it sold out of the machines on the first day. The company needed months to adjust its manufacturing capacity and supply chain to be able to keep Kindles in stock, which Mr. Bezos said it has now accomplished.

Digital Picture Frame

Now people with no computer, no digital camera and even no computer skills can enjoy the same great pictures as people who do have these things. This is due to the new invention of a digital picture frame. This picture frame contains an LCD screen that displays multiple photos in a slide show format. This frame connects to the internet via a phone line so that new pictures and information are displayed on the screen. The idea behind these frames are that the person who does have a computer, a digital camera and computer skills will buy the frame, set up an account and then passes it on to family or friends.

An account will have to be set up by the person using the computer and photos are then uploaded to the Web site. The digital picture frame uses the phone line to connect to the internet and the servers each night and downloads any new pictures that are available. The new pictures automatically show up the next morning, showing up in the slide show rotation.

Not only are the photos uploaded from the website, but the settings controlling the frame are accessible here as well. Some settings available are the time the frame turns on and off, the slide show interval and the dial-up phone numbers.

The digital frame is actually a very simple computer, containing most of the same components as a desktop computer. The frame has a central processing unit or CPU that is similar to the ones used in small, headlined games. This CPU is used to download the pictures from the Web site. The frame also has ROM memory to store the operating system as well as flash memory, which contains the pictures, settings and some other operating software. No data will be lost if the frame is unplugged. The frame connects to the internet using a 33.6 Kbps modem and the display is 640 x 480 pixel liquid crystal display or LCD with a viewing area of 5x7 inches. The pictures are displayed in 12-bit color, meaning that about 4,100 different colors can be presented on the screen. The frame has two buttons used to control it. There is a black button, which adjust the brightness of the display and a white button that turns the frame on and can also be used to manually dial in. The operating system used by the frame called PSOS, is designed for devices such as PDAs and other small devices.

To create a photo gallery, the frame has to be plugged into a phone line and a power outlet. The frame will start to display the pictures originally stored on the frame after the user presses and holds the white button on the back of the frame to dial up and connect to the internet. This connection to the internet is used only to download photos and setting to the frame and nothing else. Once connected to the internet, the frame logs on to the servers then the frame compares the pictures already on the frame to the ones waiting to be sent and downloads any that are new photos as well as any new settings. When the frame is finished downloading, the phone line is hung up and the frame starts displaying the new photos one after another.

Bluetooth Earphone

Bluetooth is a wireless protocol utilizing short-range communications technology facilitating both voice and data transmissions over short distances from fixed and/or mobile devices, creating wireless personal area networks (PANs). The intent behind the development of Bluetooth was the creation of a single digital wireless protocol, capable of connecting multiple devices and overcoming issues arising from synchronization of these devices. Bluetooth provides a way to connect and exchange information between devices such as mobile phones, telephones, laptops, personal computers, printers, GPS receivers, digital cameras, and video game consoles over a secure, globally unlicensed Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) 2.4 GHz short-range radio frequency bandwidth. The Bluetooth specifications are developed and licensed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. The Bluetooth SIG consists of companies in the areas of telecommunication, computing, networking, and consumer electronics.

Vacuum Tube

In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube, thermionic valve, or just valve, is a device used to amplify, switch, otherwise modify, or create an electrical signal by controlling the movement of electrons in a low-pressure space, often tubular in form. Many devices called vacuum tubes are filled with low-pressure gas: these are so-called soft valves (or tubes); as distinct from the hard vacuum type, which have the internal gas pressure reduced as far as possible. Almost all depend on the thermal emission of electrons, hence thermionic.
Vacuum tubes were critical to the development of electronics technology, which drove the expansion and commercialization of radio broadcasting, television, radar, high-fidelity sound reproduction, large telephone networks, modern types of digital computer, and industrial process control. Some of these applications pre-dated electronics, but it was electronics that made them widespread and practical; electronics has driven mechanical computers such as slide-rules to the point of obsolescence.

For most purposes, the vacuum tube has been replaced by solid-state semiconductor devices such as transistors and solid-state diodes: for most applications, they are smaller, more efficient, more reliable, and cheaper—either as discrete devices or as integrated circuits. However, tubes are still used in specialized applications: for engineering reasons, as in high-power radio frequency transmitters; or for their aesthetic appeal, as in modern audio amplification. Cathode ray tubes are still used as display devices in television sets, video monitors, and oscilloscopes, although they are being replaced at various rates by LCDs and other flat-panel displays. A specialized form of the electron tube, the magnetron, is the source of microwave energy in microwave ovens and some radar systems.