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By The Numbers |
On April 13th 2008, around 3,20,000 students appeared in the IIT JEE at 600 examination centers across the country.
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Exams alert |
| The National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER) at S.A.S Nagar (Mohali) will conduct its entrance examination NIPER JEE 2008 on 8th June 2008 for admission to graduate and postgraduate level pharmacy courses. |
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Thus Spake |
It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things . |
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- Henry David Thoreau
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Interesting Facts |
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Longest Traffic Jam : The Worlds longest traffic hold-up was 110 miles long, between Paris and Lyon......
Tasmanian Tiger-wolf : Tasmanian tiger-wolf is an extinct wolf like carnivorous marsupial of Tasmania having......
SLS In Showergels & Shampoos : SLS or SLES, stands for Sodium Laureth Sulphate or it's cousin Sodium......
The Furthest Moon From Sun : No longer classified as a planet, Pluto is the furthest moon at an astonishing......
The First Water Powered Car : Swiss born inventor Isaac de Rivaz was the first to make an automobile powered.....
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Virtualization |
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Virtualization is a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources. |
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Smile Please..! |
Eating the piece of fruit |
Two Polish guys were taking their first train trip to Warsaw on the train. A vendor came down the corridor selling bananas which they'd never seen before. Each bought one.
The first one eagerly peeled the banana and bit into it just as the train went into a tunnel. When the train emerged from the tunnel, he looked across to his friend and said, "I wouldn't eat that if I were you."
Why not?"
"I took one bite and went blind for half a minute."
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What just happened here?
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A military cargo plane, flying over a populated area, suddenly loses power and starts to nose down. The pilot tries to pull up, but with all their cargo, the plane is too heavy. So he yells to the soldiers in back to throw things out to make the plane lighter. They throw out a pistol. "Throw out more!" shouts the pilot. So they throw out a rifle. "More!" he cries again. They heave out a missile, and the pilot regains control.
He pulls out of the dive and lands safely at an airport. They get into a jeep and drive off. Pretty soon they meet a boy on the side of the road who's crying. They ask him why he's crying and he says "A pistol hit me on the head!"
They drive more and meet another boy who's crying even harder. Again they ask why and the boy says, "A rifle hit me on the head!"
They apologize and keep driving. They meet a boy on the sidewalk who's laughing hysterically. They ask him, "Kid, what's so funny?" The boy replies, "I sneezed and a house blew up!"
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From The Editors Desk |
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Heartiest Greetings!
In this issue of Youniverse, we have presented an Article on “Virtualization“, which provides an introduction to this cutting edge technology that enhances the effectiveness of operations in any IT organization by facilitating flexibility to permute various hardware and software resources for varying requirements and environments.
More >>
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Complex Simplicities |
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DivX (DIgital Video EXpress)
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Div X is a media format. It is video Compression utility. DivX is a digital media that enables consumers to enjoy a high-quality video experience across any kind of device. DivX creates, distributes and licenses digital video technologies that span the "three screens" comprising today's consumer media environment-the PC, the television and mobile devices.Over 100 million DivX Certified devices have shipped into the market from leading consumer electronics manufacturers till now.
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Xvid |
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Xvid (formerly "XviD") is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 standard. Xvid features MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi masking, trellis quantization, and H.263, MPEG and custom quantization matrices.
Xvid is a primary competitor of the DivX Pro Codec (Xvid being DivX spelled backwards). In contrast with the DivX codec, which is proprietary software developed by DivX, Inc.,
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| ASF |
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Advance System Format (formerly Advanced Streaming Format, Active Streaming Format) is the file format used by Windows Media. Audio and/or Video content compressed with a wide variety of codecs can be stored in an ASF file and played back with the Windows Media Player (provided the appropriate codecs are installed), streamed with Windows Media Services or optionally packaged with Windows Media Rights Manager.
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Interesting Facts |
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Longest Traffic Jam : The Worlds longest traffic hold-up was 110 miles long, between Paris and Lyon on the French Autoroute in 1980. A more recent contender for the title was a 100 mile long traffic Jam, near Hamburg in Germany in 1993. |
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Tasmanian Tiger-wolf : Tasmanian tiger-wolf is an extinct wolf like carnivorous marsupial of Tasmania having stripes on its back. Despite its popular name, this animal is neither a tiger nor a wolf and it is closely related to the kangaroo. Tasmanian tiger-wolf has a pouch for its babies to climb in. The extinction of the Tasmanian wolf is attributable solely to activities of human beings, it was said to become extinct in 1936. |
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SLS In Showergels & Shampoos : SLS or SLES, stands for Sodium Laureth Sulphate or it's cousin Sodium Lauryl Sulphate. It is a foaming agent used in a lot of personal care products (Shampoos, Soaps etc) and is used primarily as a dirt cleaner, and you have to take extraordinary care not to touch it, let alone bath and shower with it. Facts prove that it is carcinogenic meaning it causes cancer and serious health problems. The same agent is used to wash cars because it takes care of grease and dirt. However once SLS goes through the skin into a blood it might cause breast cancer, menopausal problems, dropping male fertility etc.
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The Furthest Moon From Sun : No longer classified as a planet, Pluto is the furthest moon at an astonishing distance of 4,583,190,000 miles from the sun. If it was possible to hop into a car and drive from the Sun to Pluto traveling at a consist speed of 55 mph, then the trip would take 9512.64 years to complete the entire trip. |
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The First Water Powered Car : Swiss born inventor Isaac de Rivaz was the first to make an automobile powered by an internal combustion engine in the year 1805. Gasoline was not invented until the 1870's and this automobile operated on Hydrogen extracted from water in the form of ice. So, really Rivas not only invented the world's first water powered car, but also the first Hydrogen powered car.
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Virtualization |
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Virtualization is a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources; or it can include making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices or servers) appear as a single logical resource.
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Virtualization is the pooling of physical storage from multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage device that is managed from a central console. Storage virtualization is commonly used in a storage area network (SAN). The management of storage devices can be tedious and time-consuming. Storage virtualization helps the storage administrator perform the tasks of backup, archiving, and recovery more easily, and in less time, by disguising the actual complexity of the SAN.
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Users can implement virtualization with software applications or by using hardware and software hybrid appliances. The technology can be placed on different levels of a storage area network. |
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Virtualization can also include making one physical resource to appear, with somewhat different characteristics, as one logical resource. |
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The term is an old one: it has been widely used since the 1960s, and has been applied to many different aspects and scopes of computing—from entire networks to individual capabilities or components. The common theme of all virtualization technologies is the hiding of technical detail, through encapsulation. Virtualization creates an external interface that hides an underlying implementation (e.g., by multiplexing access, by combining resources at different physical locations, or by simplifying a control system). Recent development of new virtualization platforms and technologies has refocused attention on this mature concept.
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As with other terms, such as abstraction and object orientation, virtualization is used in many different contexts, which can be grouped into two main types: |
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As platform virtualization involves the simulation of whole computers |
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Resource virtualization involves the simulation of combined, fragmented, or simplified resources |
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Of course, virtualization is also an important concept in non-computer contexts. Many control systems implement a virtualized interface to a complex device; thus a modern car's gas pedal does much more than just increase the flow of fuel to the engine; and a fly-by-wire system presents a simplified "virtual airplane" which may have little to do with the physical implementation. |
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The counterpoint to virtualization is transparency. A virtual artifact is visible, perceivable, but does not physically exist, whereas a transparent one exists physically, but is invisible in use. |
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Most forms of virtualization involve a computing design pattern that relate a consumer and provider. A consumer and provider interact using some interface. Virtualization places an intermediary between consumer and provider that acts on both sides of the interface, providing the interface for the actual consumer and consuming the interface of the actual provider. Usually this is done either to allow a multiplicity of consumers to interact with one provider, or one consumer to interact with a multiplicity of providers, or both, with only the intermediary being aware of multiplicities. |
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Ideally, consumers and providers that work together directly, in an unvirtualized environment, should work without modification in a virtualized context. An example is virtual address spaces, in which an intermediary (the virtual memory manager or address space manager) is inserted between a real address space and its consumer. The intermediary provides a multiplicity of virtual address spaces to support multiple consumers; the consumers and the provider (the real memory) generally remain unaware of these multiplicities. |
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Processing virtualization |
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The original sense of the term virtualization, dating from the 1960s, is in the creation of a virtual machine using a combination of hardware and software. For convenience, we will call this platform virtualization. The term virtual machine apparently dates from the experimental IBM M44/44X system. The creation and management of virtual machines has also been referred to as creating pseudo machines, in the early CP-40 days, and server virtualization more recently. The terms virtualization and virtual machine have both also acquired additional meanings through the years. |
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Platform virtualization is performed on a given hardware platform by host software (a control program), which creates a simulated computer environment, a virtual machine, for its guest software. The guest software, which is often itself a complete operating system, runs just as if it were installed on a stand-alone hardware platform. Typically, many such virtual machines are simulated on a single physical machine, their number limited only by the host’s hardware resources. Typically there is no requirement for a guest OS to be the same as the host one. The guest system often requires access to specific peripheral devices to function, so the simulation must support the guest's interfaces to those devices. Trivial examples of such devices are hard disk drive or network interface card. |
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There are several approaches to platform virtualization, listed below based on how complete a hardware simulation is implemented. (The following terms are not universally-recognized as such, but the underlying concepts are all found in the literature). |
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Emulation or simulation : The virtual machine simulates the complete hardware, allowing an unmodified "guest" OS for a completely different CPU to be run. This approach has long been used to enable the creation of software for new processors before they were physically available. Examples include Bochs, Pear PC, Power PC version of Virtual PC, QEMU without acceleration, and the Hercules emulator. Emulation is implemented using a variety of techniques, from state machines to the use of dynamic recompilation on a full virtualization platform. |
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The virtual machine simulates enough hardware to allow an unmodified "guest" OS (one designed for the same CPU) to be run in isolation. This approach was pioneered in 1966 with IBM CP-40 and CP-67, predecessors of VM family. Examples outside mainframe field include Parallels Workstation, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Virtual Box, Virtual Iron, Virtual PC, Virtual Server, VMware Workstation, VMware Server (formerly GSX Server), QEMU, Adeos, Mac-on-Linux, Win4BSD, Win4Lin Pro, and Egenera vBlade technology. |
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Hardware enabled virtualization : The hardware provides architectural support that facilitates building a virtual machine monitor and allows guest OSes to be run in isolation. In 2005 and 2006, Intel and AMD provided additional hardware to support virtualization. Examples include Linux KVM, VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion, Microsoft Virtual PC, Xen, and Parallels Desktop for Mac, and Parallels Workstation. |
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Paravirtualization : The virtual machine does not necessarily simulate hardware, but instead (or in addition) offers a special API that can only be used by modifying] the "guest" OS. This system call to the hypervisor is called a "hypercall" in TRANGO and Xen; it is implemented via a DIAG ("diagnose") hardware instruction in IBM's CMS under VM (which was the origin of the term hypervisor). Examples include VMware ESX Server, IBM's LPARs. |
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Operating system-level virtualization : Virtualizing a physical server at the operating system level, enabling multiple isolated and secure virtualized servers to run on a single physical server. The "guest" OS environments share the same OS as the host system – i.e. the same OS kernel is used to implement the "guest" environments. Applications running in a given "guest" environment view it as a stand-alone system. Examples are Linux-VServer, Virtuozzo (for Windows or Linux), OpenVZ, Solaris Containers, and FreeBSD Jails. |
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Application Virtualization : Using a software virtualization layer to encapsulate a desktop or server application from the local operating system. The application still executes locally using local resources, but without being installed in the traditional sense. Application resources and components such as files and settings are typically stored a single package that is interpreted by the virtualization layer, and presented to the application as if they were installed on the local operating system where the application expects them. This is in contrast with running the application as conventional local software (i.e. software that has been 'installed' on the system so that its files and configuration settings actually reside locally). Since the virtual environment acts as a layer between the application and the operating system, it is able to intercept and address application conflicts and application-OS conflicts. Examples include the Sun Java Virtual Machine, Microsoft Application Virtualization, Thinstall, Altiris, and Trigence. (This approach to virtualization is clearly different from the preceding ones; only an arbitrary line separates it from such virtual machine environments as Smalltalk, FORTH, Tcl, P-code, or any interpreted language). |
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Cross-platform virtualization : Running an application compiled for a specific CPU and operating system on a platform with a different CPU and operating system, without modification to source code or binaries. Examples include Apple Rosetta and Transitive Quick Transit. |
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Applications of Virtualization |
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The following examples illustrate applications of virtualization:
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Server consolidation : Virtual machines are used to consolidate many physical servers into fewer servers, which in turn host virtual machines. Each physical server is reflected as a virtual machine "guest" residing on a virtual machine host system. This is also known as Physical-to-Virtual or 'P2V' transformation. |
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Disaster recovery : Virtual machines can be used as "hot standby" environments for physical production servers. This changes the classical "backup-and-restore" philosophy, by providing backup images that can "boot" into live virtual machines, capable of taking over workload for a production server experiencing an outage. |
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Testing and training : Hardware virtualization can give root access to a virtual machine. This can be very useful such as in kernel development and operating system courses. |
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Portable applications : Certain application configuration mechanisms such as the registry on the Microsoft Windows platform lead to well-known issues involving the creation of portable applications. For example, many applications cannot be run from a removable drive without installing them on the system's main disk drive. This is a particular issue with USB drives. Virtualization can be used to encapsulate the application with a redirection layer that stores temporary files, Windows Registry entries, and other state information in the application's installation directory – and not within the system's permanent file system. |
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Portable workspaces : Recent technologies have used virtualization to create portable workspaces on devices like iPods and USB memory sticks. These products include: |
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Application Level – Thinstal – which is a driver-less solution for running "Thinstalled" applications directly from removable storage without system changes or needing Admin rights |
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OS-level – MojoPac, Ceedo, Aargo and U3 – which allows end users to install some applications onto a storage device for use on another PC |
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Machine-level – moka5 and LivePC – which delivers an operating system with a full software suite, including isolation and security protections |
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Hardware virtualization technologies |
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AMD Pacifica x86 virtualization |
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IBM Advanced POWER virtualization |
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Intel Vander pool x86 virtualization |
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Hitachi's Virtage hardware virtualization, available on their Blade Symphony line of servers |
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Sun UltraSPARC T1 hypervisor |
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| Advantages of virtualization |
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| The main advantages of Virtualization include the following: |
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Cost savings on hardware |
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Cost savings on software and OS licenses |
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Ability to handle large and fluctuating work volume |
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Ability to run multiple versions of an application program concurrently on a single computer |
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Ease of application management, upgrading and migration |
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Ability to leverage resources without adversely impacting users |
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Optimal utilization of existing hardware |
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Flexibility in the acquisition of hardware resources |
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Enhanced system reliability and scalability |
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TVirtualization is useful in diverse scenarios such as e-commerce, banking, stock trading, insurance administration, business simulations, supply chain management and assistive software. The field of Virtualization is highly active and research oriented in the present scenario, and new technologies in Virtualization are making their foray day-by- day. All these technologies are especially focused towards facilitating the enterprises to leverage power of technology with a greater flexibility and ease. In the days to come, the progress in this technology will be worth watching over.
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DivX (DIgital Video EXpress) |
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Div X is a media format. It is video Compression utility. DivX is a digital media that enables consumers to enjoy a high-quality video experience across any kind of device. DivX creates, distributes and licenses digital video technologies that span the "three screens" comprising today's consumer media environment-the PC, the television and mobile devices. Over 100 million DivX Certified devices have shipped into the market from leading consumer electronics manufacturers till now. DivX also offers content providers and publishers a complete solution for the distribution of secure, high-quality digital video content. Driven by a globally recognized brand and a passionate community of hundreds of millions of consumers, DivX is simplifying the video experience to enable the digital home. |
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DivX uses the AVI format as its file container, and files have either an .AVI or .DIVX extension. But it is not actually a pure AVI, if a DivX movie is played in a media player that supports AVI, only the audio will be played, not the video. In order to play DivX videos the codec needs to be installed on the PC or it is better to play it through a DivX player software only. |
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Xvid |
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Xvid (formerly "XviD") is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 standard. Xvid features MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi masking, trellis quantization, and H.263, MPEG and custom quantization matrices. |
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Xvid is a primary competitor of the DivX Pro Codec (Xvid being DivX spelled backwards). In contrast with the DivX codec, which is proprietary software developed by DivX, Inc., Xvid is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.This also means that unlike the DivX codec, which is only available for a limited number of platforms, Xvid can be used on all platforms and operating systems for which the source code can be compiled. |
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Though it is an open source system, it still has certain patent issues with the proprietary technologies. Due primarily to concerns over patents, the official Xvid homepage does not provide binary versions of the Xvid codec. Video for Windows codecs (and DirectShow decoding-only filters) for Microsoft Windows are, however, made available at supporting websites. For Linux users, many distributions provide an Xvid codec for use with media players such as MPlayer and VLC. However, all these players use the FFmpeg MPEG-4 decoder by default and therefore don't require (or don't support) decoding with the Xvid codec. |
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Xvid is not a video format. Since Xvid uses MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) compression, video encoded with it is MPEG-4 ASP video (not "Xvid video") and can therefore be decoded with all MPEG-4 ASP compliant decoders. This includes a large number of media players, in particular all the ones based on the free/open source libavcodec library. |
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Advance System Format (formerly Advanced Streaming Format, Active Streaming Format) is the file format used by Windows Media. Audio and/or Video content compressed with a wide variety of codecs can be stored in an ASF file and played back with the Windows Media Player (provided the appropriate codecs are installed), streamed with Windows Media Services or optionally packaged with Windows Media Rights Manager. |
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| ASF is an extensible file format designed to store synchronized multimedia data. It supports data delivery over a wide variety of networks and protocols while still proving suitable for local playback. ASF supports advanced multimedia capabilities including extensible media types, component download, scaleable media types, author-specified stream prioritization, multiple language support, and extensive bibliographic capabilities, including document and content management. |
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ASF is Microsoft's proprietary digital audio/digital video container format, especially meant for streaming media. ASF is part of the Windows Media framework. The format does not specify how (i.e. with which codec) the video or audio should be encoded; it just specifies the structure of the video/audio stream. This is similar to the function performed by the QuickTime, AVI, or Ogg container formats. One of the objectives of ASF was to support playback from digital media servers, HTTP servers, and local storage devices such as hard disk drives. ASF is based on serialized objects which are essentially byte sequences identified by a GUID marker. |
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The most common file types contained within an ASF file are Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV). Note that the file extension abbreviations are different things to the codecs of the same name. ASF files can also contain objects representing metadata, such as the artist, title, album and genre for an audio track, or the director of a video track, much like the ID3 tags of MP3 files. |
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Files containing only WMA audio can be named using a .wma extension, and files of audio and video content may have the extension .wmv. Both may use the .asf extension if desired. |
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Certain error-correcting techniques related to ASF are patented in the United States by Microsoft. Although the format is publicly documented by Microsoft, its license limits implementations to closed-source development projects only. Apple's iTunes software (for Windows) now has the capability to convert WMA files to any iTunes-supported format. |
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The ASF container provides the framework for digital rights management in Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video. An analysis of an older scheme used in WMA reveals that it is using a combination of elliptic curve cryptography key exchange, DES block cipher, a custom block cipher, RC4 stream cipher and the SHA-1 hashing function. ASF files have MIME type application / vnd.ms-asf or video/x-ms-asf. (Advanced Stream Redirector (ASX) files also have MIME type video/x-ms-asf.). ASF container-based media is usually streamed on the internet either through the MMS protocol or the RTSP protocol. |
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Although the ASF container format can technically include any codec, Microsoft's encoding tools (including Windows Media Encoder and Windows Movie Maker) produce ASF/WMA/WMV files using the DirectX Media Objects (DMO) framework. So far, third-party DMO-based codecs remain almost non-existent or extremely rare. |
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From The Editors Desk |
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| Kayalvizhi |
| Email - kayal@mindlogicx.com |
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| Heartiest Greetings! |
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In this issue of Youniverse, we have presented an Article on “Virtualization“, which provides an introduction to this cutting edge technology that enhances the effectiveness of operations in any IT organization by facilitating flexibility to permute various hardware and software resources for varying requirements and environments.
Our regular section on Exam Alerts informs you of the examinations in the coming months. Section on Complex Simplicities provides you an introducion to Divx, Xvid & ASF which are the cutting edge video encoding standards.
We hope that you would find the information presented in this issue of Youniverse interesting and useful.
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We welcome your thought, views, comments & suggestions to share information as knowledge. |
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| Editor |
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Feedback |
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Please provide us with your feedback on how you feel about the Youniverse newsletter.You can also send us your queries on the VEDAS services. |
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