Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Sugarcane

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Sugarcane or Sugar cane (Saccharum) is a genre of between 6–37 species (depending on taxonomic interpretation) of tall grasses (family Poaceae, tribe Andropogoneae), native to warm temperate to steamy regions of the Old World. They have heavy, jointed fibrous stalks 2–6 m tall and sap rich in sugar. All the species interbreed, and the major commercial cultivars are complex hybrids.

Saccharum officinarum grown-up in Hawaii.There are 13 million hectares (32 million acres) of sugar cane plantations worldwide, with over 100 countries growing the crop. The peak twenty producing countries harvested 1200 million metric tons of sugar cane in 2002 , more than 6 times the amount of sugar beet produced. The major producers are Brazil, India, and China..

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Solar System

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Solar System consists of the Sun and the other space objects gravitationally bound to it: the eight planets, their 162 known moonsthree currently recognized dwarf planets (including Pluto) and their four known moons, and billions of small bodies. This last group includes asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, comets, meteoroids and interplanetary dust.

In wide terms, the charted regions of the Solar System consist of the Sun, four terrestrial inner planets, an asteroid belt composed of small rocky bodies, four gas giant outer planets, and a second belt, called the Kuiper belt, collected of icy objects. Beyond the Kuiper belt lies the scattered disc, the heliopause, and eventually the hypothetical Oort cloud.

In sort of their distances from the Sun, the planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Six of the eight planets are in turn orbited by natural satellites, usually termed "moons" after Earth's Moon, and each of the outer planets is encircled by planetary rings of dust and other particles. All the planets apart from Earth are named after gods and goddesses from Greco-Roman mythology. The three dwarf planets are Pluto, the largest known Kuiper belt object; Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt; and Eris, which lies in the scattered disc.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

RAM

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Random access memory (usually known by its acronym, RAM) is a kind of data storage used in computers. It takes the form of integrated circuits that permit the stored data to be accessed in any order — that is, at random and without the physical movement of the storage medium or a physical reading head.

The key benefit of RAM over types of storage which need physical movement is that retrieval times are short and consistent. Short because no physical movement is required, and consistent because the time taken to retrieve a piece of data does not depend on its current distance from a physical head; it requires practically the equal amount of time to access any piece of data stored in a RAM chip.

Because of this speed and consistency, RAM is used as 'main memory' or primary storage: the working area used for loading, displaying and manipulate applications and data. In most personal computers, the RAM is not an essential part of the motherboard or CPU—it comes in the easily upgraded form of modules called memory sticks or RAM sticks about the size of a few sticks of chewing gum, which can be quickly detached and replaced when they become damaged or too small for current purposes. A smaller amount of random-access memory is also integrated with the CPU, but this is usually referred to as "cache" memory, rather than RAM.

The disadvantage of RAM over physically moving media is cost, and the loss of data when power is turned off. For these reasons, almost all PCs have disc storage as "secondary storage". Small PDAs and music players (up to 8 GiB in Jan 2007) may allot with disks, but rely on flash memory, to retain data between sessions of use.