Everything you need to know about Project Ara.

You might have come across this topic "Project Ara" recently. It has been all over the news nowadays.

Project Ara is basically a platform to create highly modular smartphones. This platform includes a base or structural frame that holds smartphone modules. Remember the old days when your computer\CPU got slow you would add an extra RAM or upgrade your hard disk to have more space on your computer(people hardly do this with nowadays with laptops.). So Project Ara will bring this old and forgotten feature back and that too on mobile devices.

Project Ara dream concept

Development:

Project Ara was very popular when the concept of modular phones was uploaded on YouTube as Phonebloks in 2013. Google was the first to start development on modular phones. Google had acquired some patents for modular phones way before phonebloks.

Google officially announced this project in October, 2013 as 'Project Ara' and said that they'll be working collaboratively with Phonebloks.  The project was originally headed by the Advanced Technology and Projects team within Motorola Mobility while it was a subsidiary of Google. Later Google sold Motorola to Lenovo but it retained the Advanced Technology and Projects. Project Ara is now separated from Advanced Technology and Projects and is now a separate division of Google.

Structure and Features:

Ara Smartphones are built using modules inserted into metal endoskeletal frames known as "endos". The frame will be the only component in an Ara Smartphone made by Google. The modules will be made by many different companies. 

Ara phones will come in 3 sizes. The first size is 'mini', the base or the frame will be about the size of Nokia 3310. The second size, which is 'medium' will be about the dimensions of Nexus 5 and the third one which is 'large' will be about the dimensions of Samsung Galaxy Note 3.

Modular phones will change the way we buy phones. Sometimes you stumble upon a great smartphone but you don't like its camera and then you see another phone with great camera but not-so-good battery life and like this you never get a phone of your need. Project Ara is the solution to this. Old people that are not much into technology can buy the Ara smartphone and put a module with good battery and nice speaker while photographers can put a module with a great camera.

Is it releasing soon?

A near-working prototype of an Ara smartphone was presented at Google I/O 2014; however, the device froze on the boot screen and failed to boot completely.  The second Project Ara Developers Conference was first hosted within Google's headquarters in Mountain View on January 16, 2015. Then repeated within Google's office in Singapore on January 21, 2015. Spiral 2 was revealed this Dev Con, showing major improvements in module latency and the endoskeletons bus speeds.
And after 3 years of Project Ara's announcement, it is becoming a reality.
It sure has gone through many changes to correct the failures it has first faced. After years of failed demos, public sputters, and worrisome silence, Ara works. About 30 people within ATAP are using Ara as their primary phone.
It is said that the consumer version of Project Ara will be coming in 2017 while the developer kits of Project Ara are shipping later this year.
If everything goes right with Project Ara then be ready because smartphone revolution is coming...

   

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Top 10 Programmers.

A century back there was no computer. 50 years ago there were only main frame computers, yes the ones which occupied a space of a big hall. But as soon as we learnt the value of computers, it developed faster than anything else has in human history. We progressed from Command Line Interface(CLI) to Graphic User Interface(GUI) and in no time computer industries were revolutionizing humans' lives and making some money too(oops, big money).

But in the history of Computers, there are some names which stand out. First the computer geniuses didn't earn much from their work, they coded programs because they liked it. But as computers became more and more common, some of these geniuses became millionaires(and few billionaires, too). 

So here are 10 of the greatest computer programmers: 

1. Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie was an American computer scientist and the creator of C-language. If you're into the computer programming, there is no need to introduce C language to you. But if you are a nerd-repellent person, there is still a big probability that you've heard of it's name. C language is taught to all the students who enroll into Computer Science in universities in their freshman year. Ritchie and his friend, Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983.

He is the R in "K&R" of the "The C Programming Language" book. Unfortunately, he didn't receive much media attention or fame in his career but there is no doubt he was/is THE best programmer.

2. Linus Torvalds 

Linus Torvalds is a Finnish-American software engineer and the creator of Linux Kernel. Linux Kernel is the heart of Linux, the operating system many computer guys use. Linux is a open-source operating system and many computer guys use it because it gives you more freedom than Windows. 

He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating

system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel.

In 2006, the magazine's Europe edition named him one of the revolutionary heroes of the past 60 years 

3. Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee is an English computer scientist and is the inventor of World Wide Web. He implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet. 

Berners-lee was knighted in 2004 when he was promoted to Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the New Year Honours "for services to the global development of the Internet", and was invested formally on 16 July 2004.

4. Donald Knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the “father” of the analysis of algorithms. He contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it.

Bill Gates said about Knuth's book, "If you think you're a really good programmer... read (Knuth's) Art of Computer Programming... You should definitely send me a résumé if you can read the whole thing,"

5. Bill Gates

There will be very few people who don't know Bill Gates, the richest man in the world. He is the founder of Microsoft. Bill Gates was very intelligent from the start. Scoring great in the test and his SAT score was 1590 out of 1600.

Bill Gates's Microsoft was one of the very first companies that were mainly software based companies. Bill Gates was one of the finest coders in his days. He and Paul Allen wrote a full BASIC language interpreter in assembly language for a computer they didn't even have access to and which had only 4000 bytes of memory.

6. James Gosling

James Arthur Gosling is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the father of the Java programming language. James has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as NeWS and Gosling Emacs. Due to his extra-ordinary achievements Gosling was elected to Foreign Associate member of the United States National Academy of Engineering.

7. Petr Mitrichev 

Almost untouchable in competitive programming, where he consistently ranks in the Top 2 in the world, you name it, Mitrichev has won it: International Olympiad in Informatics, Google Code Jam, TopCoder Open Algorithm, Facebook Hacker Cup. He works on search engine Code Jam organisation for Google.

8. Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is the creator of Facebook. It is said that when other children used to play games, Zuckerberg used to create them. Zuckerberg coded Facebook and launched it from his university's dormitory. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year to complete this project.

I don't think that we need to talk about how popular Facebook is now. Facebook is the second most visited site now, after Google(of course it is a search engine that's why). 

People claim Mark Zuckerberg was not an extraordinary programmer, but he was a lot better than most of his peers in his days. 

9. Jon Skeet

Google engineer, blogger, author and Stack Overflow legend (he holds the highest reputation score of all time), an anonymous wag once said that “When Jon Skeet’s code fails to compile, the compiler apologises.” 

10. Richard Stallman

Creator of Emacs, GCC, gdb, GNU. Free Software Foundation and CopyLeft founder. Famous for pre-speaking engagement riders that would put a rock band to shame. His reputation for controversy and single-mindedness make him the marmite of the programming world – but few would argue that Stallman isn’t one of the most important figures in programming.  

There might be some other great programmers that I have missed.

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