People in the more advanced countries in the world such as the US, Japan and Australia are more and more turning to using only High Definition Televisions (HDTV) for their viewing pleasure and thus it has become necessary to understand just how does HDTV work in order to make informed decisions. It is also necessary to learn about how does HDTV work differently from standard televisions if we are to get the most suitable make and model, especially as the television market today is flooded with numerous such makes, models and types of televisions.

Higher Quality Of Resolution

First off, a high definition television is different from standard televisions in the quality of its resolution which needless to say is much better in the high definition televisions and in addition, the HDTV also boasts of having multi-channel audio as well as an aspect ratio of 16:9 and it also comes with a wide screen. Thus, you can be sure that the HDTV works in a manner that allows it to provide clearer quality pictures as well as more detailed and better sound quality.

In fact, after understanding how does HDTV works, you can immediately come to understand that images that are provided in the HDTV models are about six times sharper as compared to what a standard television can output. In fact, on closer scrutiny of just how does HDTV work, we will also come to realize that the images on the screens are actually horizontal lines that are scanned without discontinuity and thus they end up forming the image that you see, which when it is compared to the 480 lines in standard televisions, is much higher in the HDTV, being no fewer than 1080 lines thereby ensuring better quality images.

Another notable feature that you should know when learning about how does HDTV work is that unlike standard televisions, the HDTV does not scan one line at a go and in fact can deliver entire images at a time, which results in clearer and more realistic colors and images too are also more detailed.

Another aspect to how does HDTV work is that it differs from standard televisions in that HDTVs have greater aspect ratio which is generally about 16:9, and only 4:3 in the case of standard televisions, thus forming a wider screen in HDTVs that is due to their having higher aspect ratio. In fact, because of the increasing popularity of home theater systems, it is now very usual for the latest HDTVs to use identical aspect ratios as those found in a movie theater, and this means that you get not only the whole picture, but also a picture that does not need to be cut off to make it fit into a narrow screen.

Finally, one other notable feature of how does HDTV work is that the HDTV provides sound in Dolby Digital Standard which means that there are no electronic tricks used to create better sound such as found in surround sound and so you are ensured a very thrilling audio experience.

The National Agricultural Research Center (NARC) of Japan has engaged in a robotic project that fully mechanized rice production with a global positioning system (GPS) capability that can painstakingly transplant rice using sensors and computers which can be independent from human activities or the use of human labor. The transplanting machine can make an accurate plan and direction on where to transplant around a six inch long rice seedlings. The rice seedlings are grown over two weeks on a long mat, using hydro-phonics culture system.

The long mat containing the seedlings is unrolled from the machine, and each seedling is sown into the soil, six in a row each time. Twenty rolls of mats weighing a total of two hundred eighty kilograms (280 kg.) are needed to cover a one hectare area. The transplant robotic machine is estimated to cost a farmer for acquisition cost around sixty thousand US dollars (US$ 60,000).

However, the technology is still under evaluation at present. But once proven ready for commercialization, price of the equipment may decrease to accommodate especially the farmers in developing nations where the traditional old methods of rice production are still prevalent.

Mass production of the same can lower the price or cost of the technology. A Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is set up to oversea the activities of the rice transplanter through its Equipment Control Unit (ECU), where all the sensors, motors and a main computer are all connected.

Prior to the transplanting operation of the machine, the four corners of the field and the travel path have to be plotted. During transplanting, the main computer controls actions to minimize the deviation from the desired travel path in accordance to position and direction data. The travel speed of the transplant robotic machine can be revised from the main computer in order to make any adjustments from the deviations of transplanter's path. The main computer commands the robotic to stop at the end o a field, lifts and turns it to the next path. As observed, deviations from the planned path is at ten centimeters.

To measure direction and inclination of the machine, an Inertia Measuring Unit (IMU) that has fiber optic gyro sensors and accelerator is used. The NARC is actually on a six row transplanter that already exists in Japan. Ninety nine percent of rice farms in Japan are already mechanized and even rice transplanting is reportedly in practice by one hundred percent of Japanese farms.

Apparently, Japan's average rice yield is six metric tons per hectare compared to the developing countries of three and a half metric tons only per hectare. Transplanting maximizes land use and cuts weed presence. Japan has its own mechanized rice planter since 1966 yet, but it was dependent with human labor pushing the transplanter while the farm worker's feet are on knee deep on the ground.

With the present GPS system, Japan's rice production may be fully mechanized from land preparation to harvest time. The NARC has proposed that in order to be cost efficient in producing this farm equipment technology, it has to compact the system by combining the sensors and computer segments on a rice transplanter, combine harvester, fertilizer and a tractor segments are shared as the first stage of their plan.

A recent Redmond Magazine piece doesn't give the date - it was August 2004 - that Microsoft released Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).

At that point the company committed what, according to the writer, many think was a mistake: The default switching on of the host-based Internet Connection Firewall (ICF). The problem, he says, is that getting the host-based firewall running within an organization is a "Herculean effort" involving high levels of application testing and configuration tuning. The complexity forced many administrators to simply disable ICF.

The position of this story is that ICF is potentially a helpful security tool, at least in one particular implementation. The writer says that it remains difficult to deploy ICF within the enterprise, but that the "standard profile" turns on when the device is connecting through outside networks. This can be a boon to security for machines connecting from dangerous environments such as coffee shops and airports. The piece goes on to provide a good amount of detail on why this is good and how it works.

Security folks love to compare security: Open source versus proprietary, Mac versus Windows, Vista versus XP, and so on. A recent piece at Jesper's blog was stimulated by a post at Jeff Jones' Security Blog - a link is provided - that suggests Vista security is better than that offered by XP and other operating systems.

In his post, Jesper Johansson observes that much of the comparison between Vista and XP security is based on each operating systems' first year in the field. However, that is meaningless in terms of how XP works. To them, the important thing is a comparison of how each operating system performs now.

The long piece leads to several conclusions. It found that Vista had fewer vulnerabilities than XP and that open source Firefox had more "patching events" than Internet Explorer running on XP or Vista.

A recent InfoWorld piece indicated that Vista security is far better than previous Microsoft operating systems, but that the price is more user involvement and inconvenience. User Access Control (UAC) is a feature designed to cut down on malware by asking users for permission every time a piece of software is set for installation. While this clearly improves security, it can become burdensome. Indeed, some companies offer software that automates this process and only brings out-of-the-ordinary situations to the attention of users.

The story also discusses the BitLocker encryption feature. BitLocker either encrypts the entire C drive or nothing. Some issues have cropped up, such as encryption for organizations using a D partition, the piece says and difficulty in decrypting data on machines taken from terminated employees.

Though Vista is the immediate future of Microsoft operating systems, there is a huge installed base of XP users. The company is in the extended process of introducing Windows XP Service Pack 3, which is expected to be the last update to XP. WindowsSecurity.com details the release, which contains no drastic changes. There are, however, security-related tweaks. Network Access Protection (NAP) compatibility enables XP to use the NAP feature in Windows Server 2008. This is akin to Network Access Control (NAC) approaches in which devices requesting permission to join a network have their security assessed and, if necessary, are quarantined and their software cleaned and/or updated. This is particularly useful for mobile devices.