What is ERP?

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. In other words we can say that it’s a software package (application) that is used to manage an organization's both internal & external resources. Now to understand what this application performs, let us first see how an organization work 7 what are its different parts. For example, big organizations like petrochemical companies or aerospace companies have different departments within themselves that supports different functionalities, important for running the parent organization itself. Some of them are Human Resource (HR), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Sales & Distribution (SD), Financial Services & Support (FSS), Material Management (MM), etc. Now, before ERP applications were developed each of these departments had their own applications for supporting & managing their activities. But with ERP applications all these departments are brought under a single umbrella, sharing a same database. This has led to better visibility, traceability & connectivity within organization & with external stakeholders. The job of ERP is to facilitate quick flow of data between various departments within & external to organization. The main advantages of ERP application is that they provide a common database for all functions, more or less the outlook is same for all applications, can be easily integrated with plant machinery & can be used with all most any business functions. The most common ERP application that is being used today is SAP.

Mainframe Computers

Mainframes are often described as big, powerful computers that are used in big organisations where they manage & process huge volumes of data. Mainframes are mostly used is government & big organizations for critical applications where continuous processing of huge amount of data is required. Some examples of these type of applications are enterprise resource planning (ERP), measuring census, banking & financial transactions, etc. Most of the original mainframes architecture & basic designs were developed around 1960's but still they are evolving today to suit the market needs. We often hear about another term called supercomputers that are used for determining weather patterns or in nuclear research. We often get confused between these two terms. But we need to remember that while supercomputers are required where complex analysis and more computational speeds & accuracies are required, mainframes are used for handling high volume/traffic of data. In technical terms mainframes performance are measured in millions of instructions per second (MIPS), whereas supercomputer performance are measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS). An instruction may be read/write whereas floating point operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication or division.

Mainframes have higher reliability, availability & serviceability which are its defining characteristics. these three characteristics are very important because mainframes are used in those applications which should have very minimal or no downtime. In older mainframes, there was no interactive interface. But, today most of the mainframes support either fully or partially web based user interfaces. The new generation mainframes require much less cooling, power consumption & space. From business perspective, IBM dominates the mainframe markets. Some examples of mainframes are IBM zSeries, System z9 and System z10 servers.

Flash- Animating internet

Every day we use internet for news, social networking, listening to songs, watching movies & animation, etc. But how many of us know that most fo the animations that we see over internet are built over a platform known as flash?

Most of the advertisements, animations & online games that we see over internet are built over flash. Flash content can be viewed in almost all type of computer machines, using Adobe flash player which is available for free. Flash based content are not only available for computers but also available in mobiles & tablet devices. Flash can be used to create animations of texts, drawings & even still images. This is achieved by manipulating the vector & raster information. You can also automate your flash animations & capture user inputs with the help of an object oriented language called ActionScript that is bundled with flash. The file formats are usually in swf, referring to shockwave flash. Another format of flash video files is .flv format that can be played on variety of media players like quicktime, Km player, etc. This file format is used extensively in Youtube videos. Flash videos usually take less bandwidth because of less sizes, which in turn is due to use of vector graphics along with program script.

RADAR- Radio Detection & Ranging- Basic Idea

I guess, we all have heard about RADARS, at least once in our life. Radars are used all around us & we know where they are used but don't know much about how they actually work. In this post, I will just try to give a small summary about the RADARS & their applications. In case you want to get the mathematical or engineering details, you can visit wikipedia or other e-books that are available over internet. I will try to find out such books & in case I get any I will share them in my subsequent posts.

Radars are used in wide variety of applications like from weather/storm monitoring (meteorological applications), in Air Traffic Controlling, military operations- identifying hostile targets & guiding weapons, in space programs- to map earth or lunar surfaces, etc. There are variety of radars available depending upon their intended use like Doppler radars, Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR), Active/Passive Electronic Scanned Array(AESA/PESA) radars, etc.

Basic function of radars:-

1) To find out whether an object is present at a distance or not.

2) In case an object is there, what is its speed?

3) To map a surface (like lunar or earth's surface).

So how radar actually works? It's quite simple! At least in principle. It works on the principle of echoes & Doppler shifts.  In every radar there are two parts- transmission & receiving unit. Transmission unit consist of a radio wave emitter which emits radio waves in particular direction. The receiving unit consist of a receiver that detects the signal bounced off from targets (echoes). In this way radar detects if an object is present at a particular distance or not.

To find out, whether the object is approaching or leaving & the speed of the object, the effect of Doppler shift is used. Doppler shift is the apparent change in frequency (of sound/light) caused by an object which is approaching/moving away at some speed.