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There are some ways for a wise use of communication technology. First, we can use internet from midnight until early morning as it bills us out cheaper than day times. Second, we have to turn off the computer, television or radio right after we use it, not only because we have to go energy saving to save our earth from global warming but also it can make our monthly electricity bill cheaper. Third, we need to lessen the length or duration of our using telephone or cell-phone. We use it only for urgent matter or emergency. And the last, we should avoid using cell-phone if we are trying to get in touch with friends within the same premise or area. We better walk down to meet him or her in person.

In short, there are so many benefits that we can get by using communication technology. The benefit is not only for us ourselves but also for others. In addition, using communication technology wisely can save the energy and keep the earth green and cool for our next generation.

Realizing that Indonesia is a potential market as it has the fourth biggest population after China, India and America, Yahoo -one of the world giant online portals- is is seeking local partner to increase its business performance. With Yahoo.co.id, this portal site needs new partners to lure more internet users to boost revenue from advertisement. “Indonesia is a promising market thanks to its large population,” said Pontus Sonnerstedt, senior director of business development at Yahoo! Southeast Asia.

Its bump-to-bump competitor, Google, has launched its Google.co.id and seems to have been successful here. Yahoo does not wan to take it for granted. So, the Singapore-based unit of the Internet giant has been working on improving its content in conjunction with several local players, including news, mobile phone and advertisement companies. Some of the local players are news providers ‘Kompas’ and ‘Detik’ to provide local news for users of Yahoo! in Indonesia and Telkomsel, Indosat, Excelcomindo and Hutch 3 to provide news and messaging services on cellular phones.

Senior manager of communications for Southeast Asia Jason Coates said the search-engine division of the company had recently been focusing on improving its home page display. Any companies interested in posting their advertisements on the Yahoo! website can contact our partners Admax and Yellow Brick Road.

This year, Yahoo has launched new products, including Yahoo! Messenger for mobile phone users, Yahoo! GO 3G for mobiles and Yahoo! toolbar. For Indonesian edition, the company offers a number of products at its local domain www.yahoo.co.id.

Actually, Yahoo has launched Indonesian versions of Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Search in 2005. In 2006, the company revamped its local home page and made improvements to its Indonesian-language variants of Yahoo! Messenger and Web Messenger. Yahoo Indonesia has seen a rapid growth in the number of its internet users.

According to data from the Indonesian Association of Internet Service Providers, at the end of last year there were 25 million users in the country, up from 20 million in 2006 and 16 million in 2005. It is expected that internet users in Indonesia will reach 43 million by the end of 2009.

The power of the Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU, has grown tremendously since Toy Story. AMD, which acquired the computer graphics components maker ATI two years ago, feels confident enough to try to entice movie producers and directors, including George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, to work on full-featured movies only using the computer.

AMD calls the marriage between the computer with powerful graphics capability for gaming and the ultra-realistic and interactive visual computing required by movie production “Cinema 2.0.”.

AMD claims it will be made possible by an upcoming GPU code-named RV770. This chip will be the first terraflops (one terra floating point operations per second) processor. Why are terraflops so important? A GPU performs floating point calculations. In 3-D graphics, the objects that are distant from us do not have to have the same detail as those in the foreground. These objects are created using triangles and polygons like a wireframe covered with a sheet of cloth.

A good GPU makes the polygons appear or disappear quickly as we move it toward or away from us, and this process requires heavy-duty calculations. A GPU capable of completing more operations per second will make the rendering of the 3-D objects faster and the visual experience more realistic.

Thus, graphic processors are essential to the production and consumption of 3-D graphics content. Paul, a director of of advanced marketing at AMD Graphics Group, is a devoted computer graphics evangelist. He and his colleague Terry Makedon worked for ATI before the company was acquired by AMD. When AMD acquired the graphics chip and card company, they were part of the package.

Both ATI and AMD were very well established in their respective areas. I still remember buying an ATI Wonder graphics card back in mid 1990s for one of the PCs I put together. That graphics card allowed me to achieve a resolution higher than the then-standard 640×480 VGA, which would have been too low for my 20-inch Sony CRT monitor. On the other hand, AMD is a CPU company. It has been a competitor that Intel Corporation has been trying kill but without success, as it would result in a market monopoly.

ATI’s biggest competitor in the computer graphics market today is Nvidia. Both companies provide GPUs for graphics card makers, including ASUS, Leadtek and MSI. Many of their GPUs are also used in notebook computers. If you have a notebook, you will notice that the hardware is provided either by ATI or Nvidia.

Expensive graphics cards are normally associated with hardcore gamers. Most of them never think twice about spending hundreds of U.S. dollars on the graphics cards alone.

However, in reality, a powerful GPU is great for more than just playing complex and highly demanding 3-D games. We can use the powerful GPUs for other purposes, too. With the influx of High Definition videos, for example, a good GPU will help make the scenes more realistic or make the video fill up the entire screen.

To give a presentation, a short movie clip which seemed so detailed and so realistic that we thought it was straight from a movie camera. It was not. It was completely computer generated.

Most of us information workers may not even be aware of the GPU’s existence inside our computers. Unlike hardcore gamers, we usually choose to have the best CPU that we can afford. It is the right decision for us, because for tasks such as number crunching and word processing we will not need the power of the GPU.

But, if we work with programs such as Adobe Photoshop, we can finish our tasks much faster with the help of a more expensive GPU.

“With a good graphics card, we can manipulate a photo in real time,” said Terry, who is responsible for the GPUs’ software. A good GPU will also make transcoding videos from one format to another much quicker, he added.

What are the main features of the new ATI Radeon 4800 Series? First, they have 800 cores, which enable it to work faster. Second, they are the first cards to be equipped with the new Graphics Double Data Rate Version 5.0 (GDDR5) memory technology, which helps increase the performance further. Third, it is pretty small in size, which helps reduce power consumption and heat.

If you often browse around in a computer shopping center and look at the graphics cards showcased in the stores, you might have noticed that some of them are so big that they take up a lot of space on the motherboard. They also come with one or two large and noisy fans. The ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series, pictured, is a pretty compact add-on card.

Besides, according to Paul, the smaller the chip, the more chips can be cut from the same silicon wafer and ultimately the cheaper the cost will be for end users.

Now that ATI is owned by AMD, we might be tempted to ask whether there are features that work best only with AMD CPUs? I asked Paul during the one-on-one interview after his presentation.

“Our graphics processors are all processor-agnostic. Whether you use an AMD, an Intel, a Via or a CPU from any other chip maker, it will work equally well,” he promised.