• One of our department student of batch 2015-2016 has got the university rank                                                            Ms.M.Ponnarasi-VIIth rank

• Our Department staff Ms.K.Sathya has attended two days seminar in priyadarshini Engineering College on 06/01/2017 & 07/01/2017 which was taken by ICT academy and the seminar is named as "Presentation Skill level-II"

The latest changes to Google's ubiquitous mobile operating system

Android 7.0 Nougat is rolling out now, starting (as usual) with Nexus devices and eventually moving on to other phones. The new OS is loaded with new features and refinements, each one improving upon the overall Android experience. Some changes, such as bundled notifications, are quite obvious. Then there are the less visible changes, such as a new multitasking shortcut. Follow along as we take a look at what’s new in Google’s latest mobile OS.

Daydreams become screen savers

With Google repurposing Daydream as the namesake for its VR platform, a new name was needed for the previous Daydream feature. That new name is Screen Saver, which makes so much more sense than Daydream did in its previous incarnation. Android screen savers still work in the same fashion as they always have.

Quicker multi-tasking

You can now double-tap the recent apps button to quickly switch between your two most recently used apps. For example, say you’re in Gmail but need to look something up in Chrome to include in an email. You can open Chrome, find and copy a link, then double-tap the recent apps button and your device will switch back to Gmail.

Use two apps at same time

Samsung users have long had access to using apps in a split-screen mode. With Nougat, Google is officially adding support for multi-window support to all Android devices running Android 7.0. To activate multi-window mode, long-press on the recent apps button. Whichever app you’re currently using will go to the top of the screen (on a phone, or to the left on a tablet), with a list of recent apps shown along the bottom. Select the second app you want to use from the list. Drag the divider to resize the app windows, or to maximize either of the active apps.

View two Chrome tabs

It took Apple an entire year to introduce split-screen tab viewing in Safari for iPad users, but Google did it at the same time it introduced multi-window to Android. When using Chrome in multi-window mode, tap on the Menu button and select they super handy option of “Move to other window.” It’s fully acceptable to point and laugh at iOS users if you feel the need.

Finally, the lock screen gets a wallpaper of its own

It only took way too many years, but the day has finally come: You can now set a wallpaper specific to your home screen, and a different one for your lock screen. The process to accomplish the once unthinkable feat hasn’t changed much—after selecting an image to set as a wallpaper, you’re shown a new prompt to select where the image will live.

Clear all recent apps

Google added a Clear All button to the recent apps list, only it’s a bit hidden. Instead of placing it at the bottom of your screen when viewing your recent apps, you need to scroll to the top of the list where you’ll find the handy Clear All text. Tap on it, and all apps are closed out. When you’ve closed all your recent apps, a new icon is displayed letting you know there are no recent items.

Where did that APK come from?

Android Nougat will now keep track of where an app was installed from. Open Settings then Apps and tap on any listed application. Scroll to the bottom of the page, where you’ll see the source of the app’s installation. For example, if it was installed from the Play Store it will say as much. If it’s something you side loaded, it will state something along the lines of “Installed from Package Installer.”

New installer animation

Speaking of installing applications outside of the Play Store, you’ll find a fancy new installer animation when sideloading an APK. It’s a subtle change that won’t have a dramatic impact on your day-to-day use, but it’s not a bad looking change either. Who doesn’t like seeing the Android bot whenever possible?

Bundled notifications

Have you ever posted something on Facebook, only to have your notification tray blown up with alerts of likes and comments? Me neither, but for those who have you’re going to love bundled notifications. Once an app updates for Android Nougat, it can opt to have all of its notifications bundled into one alert. Slide down on the respective notification to reveal the rest of your alerts for that particular app.

Reply with speed

You can now reply to messages from apps like Facebook Messenger, Hangouts, or Messenger directly from the notification. Of course, this means you can hold a conversation without having to bounce between a messaging app and another app. It’s important to note, this isn’t limited to messaging apps. Twitter apps, for example, could add the ability to reply to mentions.

Notification importance setting

You can now set the importance level of an app’s notifications to fit your specific use of that app, including allowing an app to ignore your DND settings. With a long-press on a notification, you can view the current importance level. Tap on More Settings where you can turn off the default automatic setting, and adjust its interruption level. As you move the slider, a brief explanation will detail each alert type.

Faster websites with fewer bugs

System that automatically handles database caching in server farms increases speed and reliability.

Today, loading a web page on a big website usually involves a database query — to retrieve the latest contributions to a discussion you’re participating in, a list of news stories related to the one you’re reading, links targeted to your geographic location, or the like.

But database queries are time consuming, so many websites store — or “cache” — the results of common queries on web servers for faster delivery.

If a site user changes a value in the database, however, the cache needs to be updated, too. The complex task of analyzing a website’s code to identify which operations necessitate updates to which cached values generally falls to the web programmer. Missing one such operation can result in an unusable site.

This week, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory presented a new system that automatically handles caching of database queries for web applications written in the web-programming language Ur/Web.

Although a website may be fielding many requests in parallel — sending different users different cached data, or even data cached on different servers — the system guarantees that, to the user, every transaction will look exactly as it would if requests were handled in sequence. So a user won’t, for instance, click on a link showing that tickets to an event are available, only to find that they’ve been snatched up when it comes time to pay.

In experiments involving two websites that had been built using Ur/Web, the new system’s automatic caching offered twofold and 30-fold speedups.

“Most very popular websites backed by databases don’t actually ask the database over and over again for each request,” says Adam Chlipala, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and senior author on the conference paper. “They notice that, ‘Oh, I seem to have asked this question quite recently, and I saved the result, so I’ll just pull that out of memory.’”

“But the tricky part here is that you have to realize when you make changes to the database that some of your saved answers are no longer necessarily correct, and you have to do what’s called ‘invalidating’ them. And in the mainstream way of implementing this, the programmer needs to manually add invalidation logic. For every line of code that changes the database, the programmer has to sit down and think, ‘Okay, for every other line of code that reads the database and saves the result in a cache, which ones of those are going to be broken by the change I just made?’”

Chlipala is joined on the paper by Ziv Scully, a graduate student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, who worked in Chlipala’s lab as an MIT undergraduate.

Exhaustive search

Ur/Web, which Chlipala invented, lets web developers completely specify their sites’ functionality using just one programming language. The Ur/Web compiler then automatically generates all the different types of code required to power a website — HTML, JavaScript, SQL database queries, and cascading style sheets — while providing certain performance and security guarantees. Chlipala and Scully’s new system is a modification of the compiler, so Ur/Web users can simply recompile their existing code to get all the benefits of database caching. The language itself remains unchanged.

The new compiler begins by analyzing the Ur/Web code and determining what data to cache and how to organize it. For instance, if certain types of queries are almost always performed in conjunction with each other, Ur/Web will cache the associated data in a single table. The compiler also decides whether to cache raw data, HTML code, or, if the program structure permits it, entire webpages.

Then the compiler goes through the code and compares every operation that updates a value in the database with every operation that queries the database, to determine which cached values need to be invalidated when, and it adds the appropriate cache-invalidation commands in the appropriate places.

Like many programming languages, Ur/Web has an associated “runtime,” a small program that runs in the background to manage the execution of applications written in the language. Chlipala and Scully also updated the Ur/Web runtime to monitor the frequency with which cached database queries are reused. Any that prove superfluous are deleted, which improves the system’s efficiency.

Painless improvements

In addition to testing the system on two full websites, Chlipala and Scully also tested it on a handful of smaller programs, also written in Ur/Web, which are part of a standard set of benchmarks used to compare different Web development frameworks. On those, the new system offered speedups of between twofold and fivefold.

They did not, however, compare sites developed using their system to sites that use hand-coded caching because, as Chlipala explains, “Ur/Web’s so much faster than everything else.”

“Even if it turns out that someone could put in the extra work and get a tripling of the throughput, our argument is that it’s a pretty good deal to get a doubling of your throughput with no extra work,” he adds.

“Many websites and other programs that use databases use caches to improve performance,” says Andrew Myers, a professor of computer science at Cornell University. “However, it's quite tricky to do this correctly, since the results of database queries can become invalid. So the attempt to speed up applications in this way leads to bugs that can be very challenging to find. Rather than requiring the programmer to identify the results that need to be discarded, the [MIT researchers’] system does this automatically, by analyzing the different requests that the application makes to the database.”

  -For more details refer to MIT Website:http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-websites-fewer-bugs-0120