Monday, May 28, 2007

History of Lipstick

Lipstick is known to have been used around 5000 years ago in very old Mesopotamia, when semi-precious jewels were compressed and applied to the lips and occasionally around the eyes. Women in the ancient Indus Valley Civilization applied lipstick to their lips for face beautification. Its original purpose was for Egyptian prostitutes to make their lips look like a vagina. Ancient Egyptians extracted purplish-red dye from fucus-algin, 0.01% iodine, and some bromine mannite, which resulted in serious illness. Cleopatra had her lipstick made from compressed carmine beetles, which gave a deep red pigment, and ants for a base. Lipsticks with sparkling effects were initially made using a substance found in fish scales called pearlescence. Lipstick started to gain popularity in the 16th century, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who made blood-red lips and stark white faces a fashion statement. By that time, lipstick was made from a blend of beeswax and red stains from plants.

Monday, May 21, 2007

The Extended Industry Standard Architecture

The Extended Industry Standard Architecture is a bus standard for IBM compatible computers. It was announced in late 1988 by PC clone vendors as a counter to IBM's use of its proprietary Micro Channel Architecture in its PS/2 series. EISA extends the ISA bus architecture to 32 bits and allows more than one CPU to share the bus. The bus mastering support is also enhanced to provide access to 4 GB of memory. Unlike MCA, EISA can accept older XT and ISA boards — the lines and slots for EISA are a superset of ISA.

Although somewhat inferior to MCA, EISA was much favored by manufacturers due to the proprietary nature of MCA, and even IBM produced some machines supporting it. It was somewhat expensive to implement, so it never became particularly popular in desktop PCs. However, it was reasonably successful in the server market, as it was better suited to bandwidth-intensive tasks. Most EISA cards produced were either SCSI or network cards. EISA was also available on some non-IBM compatible machines such as the Alpha Server, HP 9000-D, SGI.

Monday, May 14, 2007

MIPS(Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages)

MIPS designs are used in a lot of embedded systems such as the Series2 TiVo, Windows CE devices, Cisco routers, and video game consoles similar to the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation Portable handheld system. Until late 2006 they were also used in a lot of SGI's computer products.

Near the beginning MIPS architectures were 32-bit implementations, while later versions were 64-bit implementations. Multiple revisions of the MIPS instruction set exist, including MIPS I, MIPS II, MIPS III, MIPS IV, MIPS V, MIPS32, and MIPS64. The current revisions are MIPS32 (for 32-bit implementations) and MIPS64 for (64-bit implementations). MIPS32 and MIPS64 define a control register set as well as the instruction set. Several "add-on" extensions are also available, including MIPS-3D which is a simple set of floating-point SIMD orders dedicated to common 3D tasks, MDMX which is a more extensive integer SIMD instruction set using the 64-bit floating-point registers, MIPS16e which adds density to the instruction stream to make programs take up less room, and the recent addition of MIPS MT, new multithreading additions to the system similar to Hyper Threading in the Intel's Pentium 4 processors.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Key

A key is a device which is used to open a lock. It typically consists of a specially-shaped piece of flat metal, with cut notches , and/or milled grooves which fit the shape of the lock and can open the properly combinated lock by (usually) being turned in the lock housing. This portion of the key is referred to as the blade. The wider grip, referred to as the bow, is establish at the top of the key to facilitate turning. regularly, there are only a small number of keys which can work a certain lock. In some residential locks, all of the keys for a lock are given to the purchaser of the lock. Duplicates of the key can usually be made by anyone with the correct key blank and key machine. Some manufacturers assign an identification number to each lock and key combination. Knowing the identification number of such a lock allows a duplicate key to be made at certain places. Many residential keys are recognized by the key cuts stamped on the key bow.Most people in modern society use keys on a daily basis, to secure their home, their vehicle, or to access their workplace, among other uses. Those that use a number of keys will typically place them on a ring or key chain, often with other items such as key fobs.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Education System

Schooling occurs when group or a society or an individual sets up a curriculum to educate people, usually the young. Schooling can become systematic. Sometimes education systems can be used to promote doctrine or ethics as well as knowledge, and this can lead to abuse of the system.

Life-long or adult education have become extensive in many countries. However, education is still seen by many as something aimed at children, and adult education is often branded as adult learning or ultimate learning.

Adult education takes on several forms, from formal class-based learning to self-directed learning. Lending libraries provide cheap informal access to books and other self-instructional materials. Many adults have also taken advantage of the rise in computer ownership and internet access to further their casual education.