Welcome to my blog - Manikandan

The Google Translate app is about to get a lot more powerful. In an update released today, Google is adding dozens of new languages to some of the Translate app's most powerful features, and smoothing out the app to make it friendlier to slow connections. In particular, the update makes Translate's visual translation features significantly more powerful, letting mobile users translate 37 languages via photo, 32 via voice, and 27 through real-time video. Today's changes are updates to two features added to translate back in January: a real-time video translation feature called Word Lens and a conversation feature that translates bilingual speech in real-time. The Word Lens feature lets you point your phone's camera at a sign or any other text and have it translated into another language, with the translation appearing immediately on your screen. It's designed to work entirely offline, without making any queries to Google's servers — convenient for those b...

Google is rolling out an update to Google Now that will allow you to dictate and send messages through a number of popular third-party messaging apps including WhatsApp, the company announced in a blog post. WeChat, Viber, Telegram, and NextPlus are the other initial third-party services that Google Now will be able to send messages through. Simply say "Ok Google, send a WhatsApp message to Tom," and Google will render and send the message through the proper service. The feature is currently only available in English, but Google says it will be adding more languages and more apps in the future. This is just the latest step in Google's attempt to turn Google Now into your true personal assistant, and it's a smart move. Google is consistently improving and adding features to Google Now, at a faster rate than Microsoft is with Cortana, and much faster than Apple has with Siri. At this rate, it won't be a competition for much longer. Source :  http:/...

Mr. Kalam, the country’s 11th President, was one of India’s most eminent scientists, and had the unique honour of receiving honorary doctorates from 30 universities and institutions. Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, widely acclaimed as the “people’s President”, passed away after collapsing during a lecture at the Indian Institute of Management in Shillong. Mr. Kalam (83), who was President between 2002 and 2007, took the lead in the conduct of India’s nuclear tests in May 1998 and was later fielded as the National Democratic Alliance candidate by then Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee. Patricia Mukhim, editor of the Shillong Times, wrote in a Facebook post that Mr. Kalam was reportedly brought dead to Bethany hospital in the Meghalaya capital. Every year, the former President came to Shillong to deliver lectures. This time his topic was “Making the World More Livable”, she wrote. A PTI report from Shillong quoted Chief Secretary P.B.O. Warjiri as saying that he had s...

Apache Hadoop  is an  open-source   software framework  written in  Java  for  distributed storage  and  distributed processing  of very large data sets on  computer clusters  built from  commodity hardware .  All the modules in Hadoop are designed with a fundamental assumption that hardware failures (of individual machines, or racks of machines) are commonplace and thus should be automatically handled in software by the framework.   The core of Apache Hadoop consists of a storage part ( Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) ) and a processing part ( MapReduce ).      To process the data, Hadoop MapReduce transfers  packaged code  for nodes to process in parallel, based on the data each node needs to process.    The base Apache Hadoop framework is composed of the following modules: Hadoop Common  – contains libraries and utilities needed by other Hado...

S S Rajamouli's blockbuster 'Baahubali' has broken the Guinness World Record for making the largest poster of more than 50,000 sq ft. The reference book made the declaration on its official website. "The largest poster has an area of 4,793.65 m² (51,598.21 ft²) and was achieved by Global United Media Company Pvt Ltd (India) in Kochi, India, on 27 June 2015," it said. Rajamouli, expressing his happiness, shared the link to the website on his Twitter page and wrote, "Now it is officially awarded.. Congratulations to Mr Prem Menon and his team at Global United media." The multi-lingual two-part epic, touted as the most expensive Indian movie, has been creating milestones since its release on July 10, including Rs 50 crore collection on the first day, making it the biggest opening of 2015 so far. Starring Prabhas, Rana Daggubati and Tamannaah Bhatia, it was presented in Hindi by Bollywood filmmaker Karan Johar.

Scientists of US space agency NASA are likely to have discovered a earth sized planet orbiting a star. The planet falls within the zone in that solar system where it's possible for liquid water to exist. Research suggests the planet may also be rocky, like earth. The discovery is an important step in NASA's attempts to find life outside earth. The US space agency will be holding a press conference on Thursday to reveal the latest discoveries of its exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope. The scope, launched in 2009, seeks out planets that reside in the habitable zone, known colloquially as the Goldilocks zone. Kepler Space Telescope has been scouring the skies for planets outside our own solar system. The majority of the planets identified by Kepler have been giant gas planets, like Jupiter, with only eight being less than twice Earth's size and in the Goldilocks zone. It's suspected that the Nasa announcement could confirm the identification of the most...

 Earlier this week, a hacker group named “Impact Week” hacked Ashley Madison, the dating site for cheaters, and in the process, compromised user data, pictures, credit card information and sexually explicit chats. The objective of the hack, according to reports, is to “blackmail the site into shutting down,” primarily because of their “morally dubious business model.” The Canadian site boasts of nearly 40 million users (37 million users), whose data is now at stake. A report in  The Times of India  on Wednesday claimed that 275,000 Indians may have suffered due to the hack. The report also says that Ashley Madison had a “quiet launch in India in January 2014” and “within months 275,000 Indian users signed up without any marketing push.” While online dating is not as popular in India as say in the United States or Canada, or even China, in the last few years, several Indian startups have made inroads into the space. Interestingly, social networking sites like Faceboo...

For most of us, WhatsApp has become the default go-to messenger, because everyone's on it, and it's on nearly every platform. WhatsApp has over a billion downloads on Google Play alone, the only other messenger to boast that is Facebook Messenger. The app has made itself indispensable by adding a browser version and voice calling to its platform. For those who have to deal with the app on a daily basis, we've lined up some interesting tricks and tweaks that will improve your user-experience. 1. Mute group chats and notifications Group chat notifications can get noisy, they're best turned off when you have to focus on a task at hand. On Android On a group chat, tap the Menu button, and hit Mute. Then, choose the time-frame for which you would like the group to be muted. You can also disable notifications for the specified period. This feature is now available on the web browser too. On iPhone Open Group Chat, tap the group subject to reveal the Gr...

Ah, the eternal question: If you posted something to Facebook and nobody liked it, did it really even happen? Yes, but that deafening silence will still take a toll on your self-esteem. The San Francisco-based company Klout, best known for assigning scores to users based on their social media influence, recently analyzed 144 million posts and 1.1 billion reactions to find the  best times to post on social networks, based on others’ likelihood to respond (what better metric than social affirmation?). In general, people are most likely to respond to social media posts during the weekdays—especially during working hours and from 7pm to 8pm—with a major drop-off in reactions (likes, shares, replies, retweets) on the weekends. That said, habits do  vary regionally . People who live in San Francisco are more likely to respond quickly than their counterparts in New York City. In Tokyo, meanwhile, the probability of responses increases dramatically  after  worki...

New ways to beat traffic with Google Maps in India Google Maps adds traffic updates for 12 more cities in India Ever missed your movie at Priya Cinema because you were stuck in Kolkata traffic? Starting today, Google Maps can help you better plan your drive around traffic and save time on the road by showing you real time traffic information directly on the map. Today’s update to Google Maps brings you new traffic information for 12 cities in India —  Kolkata, Coimbatore, Lucknow, Surat, Thiruvananthapuram, Indore, Ludhiana, Visakhapatnam, Nagpur, Kochi, Madurai, Bhopal — as well as a real time look at traffic conditions across all national highways and expressways in India. Once the Traffic layer is turned on Google Maps for mobile or desktop, you’ll be able to see routes mapped out in different colors, indicating the different speed of traffic on those roads. While green means there are no traffic delays on the road, orange indicates a medium amount of traffic and red a...