Though many people reading this might know this so called fact that cats generally disappear when they are about to die, I myself am listening for the first time so I thought I would share this with you guys !

Xiaomi is celebrating its second Mi Anniversary and on account of this, hoaring special sale in India from July 20-22, where it will be giving away Mi 5, Mi Max and Redmi Note 3 smartphones at Re 1 only. Other accessories like the Mi Bluetooth Speakers, Mi Band and 20,000 mAh Mi PowerBank will also be available in the Re 1 flash sale deal.

This  Re 1 flash deal includes 10 Xiaomi Mi 5 smartphones and 100 Mi power banks (20,000 mAh) that will be given away at that price on the first day. Similarly, 10 Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 smartphones, 100 Mi Bands and 100 Mi Bluetooth speakers will be given away in the following days. The flash sales will be held on 2 p.m. every day and to participate, you will need to share the offer on Facebook before July 19.

Apart from the flash deals, Xiaomi will put up limited stocks of new items such as the 10,000 mAh Mi Power Bank, Mi In-Ear Capsule Headphones, and Mi In-Ear Headphones Pro Gold in the carnival.

Xiaomi is also promising a Mi TV to one lucky customer, who does shopping through the Mi Store App during Mi India second anniversary.

The list does not end here, there are several offers such as Mi cash coupons and a free Mi Max for playing a game on the Mi 2nd Anniverary website. The price drop deal is essentially only on its Bluetooth speaker, which will be available for Rs 1,999 for all the three days.

There are several exclusive offer on the app as well. Xiaomi known as the ‘Apple of China’ has got a huge fan following in it two-year run in the country. And now, with this three-day carnival, hopes to add more to its Mi community.

The Niantic team had three big goals in mind when building "Pokemon Go," Hanke says.

It's like no other game out there, Pokemon or otherwise. That's great news for Nintendo and its share price, which has skyrocketed on the indication that it can thrive in a smartphone-driven world.

And while "Pokemon Go" may be an overnight sensation, it took a lot of work, a lot of hard thinking, and a little bit of luck over the last few years to make it what it is.

Before "Pokemon Go," Niantic was best known for "Ingress" - the Android and iPhone game that challenged players to explore the world around them and claim territory. At its peak, "Ingress" counted millions of players around the world.

"Pokemon Go" is like a spiritual sequel to "Ingress." Niantic took a lot of the "Ingress" data, and a lot of the lessons it learned about keeping players safe, to make "Pokemon Go" work and populate its world.

To hear Hanke tell it, that's because "Ingress" was always intended to be kind of a proof-of-concept for ways in which Google and Niantic could help outside partners and customers build their own games.

"Our intent was to make a platform for many different experiences," Hanke says.

And Pokemon was a natural fit.

Enter the Pokemon Company - the joint venture that co-owns the Pokemon copyright, with Pokemon game developer Game Freak, toy maker Creatures, and Nintendo all holding an equal stake.

Google and the Pokemon Company first connected on April Fools' Day 2014, when a short-lived but extremely viral game challenged players to find Pokemon via the Google Maps mobile apps. People loved it: Google Maps plus Pokemon was "like chocolate and peanut butter," Hanke says. And an idea was born.

Emboldened by the success of the April Fools' Day joke, Niantic pitched Nintendo and the Pokemon Company on the game that would become "Pokemon Go." It turned out that Pokemon Company CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara was already a high-level "Ingress" player in Japan, which made those conversations much easier.

And the late, beloved Nintendo CEO Saotoru Iwata gave his highest approval to the project, recognizing that the company was late to the smartphone era, and willing to bet on Niantic to help turn things around.

"They totally got where we were coming from," Hanke says.

In early 2015, around the same time that Google was beginning to talk internally about spinning non-core businesses off into a holding company called Alphabet, the idea of Niantic "perhaps becoming its own thing surfaced," Hanke says.

The logic, he says, was that "we were always kind of bumping up against Google's desire to stay neutral," Hanke says.

Google builds products like Maps, and marketplaces like the Google Play Store, as a "horizontal, low-level platform," Hanke says. It meant that Niantic couldn't be given special treatment over any other developer using Google platforms, or those other developers might get upset and look for alternatives.

Plus, it opens up the door for Niantic to work with other customers and partners who might have been scared off by the prospect of working with a superpower like Google. The values and needs of certain customers were "not always aligned with Google," Hanke says.

At the same time, it was thought that it would only help Niantic's collaboration with Nintendo and the Pokemon Company if they held a financial stake in the venture, and they could "open up and share more" if they had some percentage of ownership in the finished product.

Everything "kind of lined up," and in late 2015, Niantic spun off with Google, Nintendo, and the Pokemon Company all participating in a $20 million investment round to kick things off.

Hanke has only praise for the process of working with The Pokemon Company, its main collaborator on the project.

There was a funny thing, though: The Pokemon Company loved "Ingress," and Niantic loved the Pokemon series, and they each wanted the game to be more like the other.

"We were trying to pull things from Pokemon, and they were more from 'Ingress,'" Hanke says.

The two companies shared crucial elements like the three-dimensional models and sounds for the Pokemon themselves, saving a lot of time while also ensuring "Pokemon Go" was as true to the classic games as possible.

The music, notably, is similar to the original Pokemon games - Junichi Masuda, the composer of the classic low-fi soundtrack on the original "Pokemon Red and Blue," wrote a new score for "Pokemon Go."

Masuda, who has since become the director of the modern Pokemon games, including the forthcoming "Pokemon Sun and Moon," also helped Niantic develop "Pokemon Go's" signature "capture" mechanic of throwing Poke Balls with precision at the monsters, Hanke says.

The goal was to make something that was recognizable to fans of the classic Pokemon games, including catching and battling, but that was "more accessible" to people who don't have the time or willingness to learn the more "demanding" systems of the original games. Catching Pokemon, especially, is supposed to be easy to learn, as an easy on-ramp to later-game mechanics like battling and capturing Gyms.

In fact, Hanke says, Niantic almost didn't include the Pokemon games' key element of "evolving" a Pokemon into a new form to make it stronger, because they were afraid it might be too complicated for new players. But they eventually relented. And sooner rather than later, Hanke says, more classic features like Pokemon trading with friends is coming.

"We honored the spirit of the original game," Hanke says. "I like where we landed."

So if you're a part of the "Pokemon Go" phenomenon, understand it was a series of very deliberate choices that got you hooked, the culmination of a long road that began many years ago.

Oh, and I caught the Pikachu.

References: BI, Wikipedia

Image credits: Pokemon Go App, Google

Facebook said this week it is going to start pushing ads to every single person who uses third-party sites signed up to its advertising scheme, This latest announcement has left many confused and worried about their privacy.As Facebook uses your information even if you are signed up to it or not, you might want to revise what information you are sharing with people.

It isn't just your profile that will need amending, but here are a few ways you can clean it up to get started and protect your privacy.

This could lack your privacy as the intruders can get access to your profile through it.

Birthday

Your birthday could lead scammers to get access of your personal details and bank account.

Keep it off your Facebook or risk losing your money once they get your name and address.

Keep it to real friends

Time to clear out Facebook and keep it to the people you know and trust.

Relationship Status

Once upon a time, no relationship was real until it was confirmed on Facebook, but these days it's better to keep that lovin' feeling to yourself.People have already cottoned on to how adverts appear suddenly promoting wedding dresses and venues as soon as the engagement post goes up on the social media site.

Do you Know why IRCTC does not allow you to choose seats? Would you believe that the technical reason behind this is PHYSICS.

Booking a seat in a train is far more different than booking a seat in a theatre.

Theatre is a hall, whereas train is a moving object. So safety concern is very high in trains.

Indian railways ticket booking software is designed in such a way that it will book tickets in a manner that will distribute the load evenly in a train.

Let me take an example to make things more clear : Imagine there are sleeper class coaches in a train numbered S1, S2 S3... S10, and in every coach there are 72 seats.

So when some one first books a ticket, software will assign a seat in the middle coach like S5, middle seat numbered between 30-40, and preferably lower berths (Railways first fills the lower berths than upper one so as to achieve low centre of gravity.)

And the software books seats in such a way that all coaches have uniform passenger distribution and seats are filled starting from the middle seats (36) to seats near the gates i.e 1-2 or 71-72 in order from lower berth to upper.

Railways just want to ensure a proper balance that each coach should have for equal load distribution.

That is why when you book a ticket at the last, you are always allotted an upper berth and a seat numbered around 2-3 or 70, except when you are not taking a seat of someone who has cancelled his/her seat.

What if the railways book tickets randomly ? A train is a moving object which moves around at a speed of around 100km/hr on rails.
So there are a lot of forces and mechanics acting on the train.

Just imagine if S1, S2, S3 are completely full and S5, S6 are completely empty and others are partially full. When the train takes a turn, some coaches face maximum centrifugal force and some minimum, and this creates a high chance of derailment of the train.

This is a very technical aspect, and when brakes are applied there will be different braking forces acting at each of the coaches because of the huge differences in weight of coach, so stability of train becomes an issue again.

I felt that this is a good information worth sharing, as often passengers blame the Railways citing inconvenient seats/ berths allotted to them.

Source: Facebook and Google.

Throughout the history of mankind  there  have  been  many  questions  that have  been  left  unanswered  and  "VONYICH  MANUSCRIPT"  is one  of them. For almost 100 years experts and researchers have tried to solve the mystery behind the manuscript and its content, but none of them succeeded. The numerous theories to unravel the mystery behind this manuscript are contradictory and rang from plausible to adventurous.

The modern  history of the manuscript  began in 1912, when an Italian book collector  and seller  Wilfried voynich" found it in an Italian Jesuit college and carbon dating  proves that the manuscript was first written in the 15th century(between 1404-1438).the manuscript is written in a language unknown to man. There are between fifteen and twenty different letters in the manuscript. The language can be brought in line with European languages, because the average word length is four or five letters. However the language of the manuscript does not correspond with any of the European language because the voynich has no two-letter words or words with more than ten characters.  The only idea anyone has of its origin are the drawings and illustrations found on various pages. Unlike the text, the illustrations can be divided into different sections and can be distinguished as botanical, astronomical, balneological, cosmological, pharmaceutical and chapter with food recipes, And the problem is none of them match with the species of plants , animals and astronomical units known to man. statistical analysis of the text  indicates it was written in a natural language and no flaws were found in the writing which means the person who wrote it had  a very good command over the language and isn’t a hoax. The different illustrations can hardly be related to one topic. Thus, one can possibly say that it is a textbook for magicians, physicians, and astrologers but when it comes to these professions their borders were still blurred 500 years ago. It is hardly illuminating to take look at the astronomical and cosmological sections, which contain pictures that can be identified as the zodiac signs still familiar today. Unfortunately, this observation does not result in further insight into the book. The celestial bodies illustrated in the astronomical section cannot be identified and probably are only figments of imagination or they belong to some other star system (but how the hell can they know about other star systems in fifteen century...this raises some questions which conspiracy theorists link to aliens...aliens). There are two theories worth mentioning about the manuscript. The first one is based on a fact that is known by every cryptologist, that the design of a secure text is longer than the original text. Under this condition, it is possible to hide the original information in the meaningless filler text, then there is only a minimal chance that it will ever be decrypted....but this trick only works when you make meaningless sentences out of known languages, so if that is the case then the author of the book must have known the language used in the manuscript. And the second theory is based on what the conspiracy theorists say. They believe that the manuscript is a encyclopaedia of knowledge given to man by the extra-terrestrials who visited them at the time.
So, question is why would any take such an effort to write a book in a language unknown to others????????  Did the people or the person who wrote the book didn’t want anyone to know about its contents?? does it contain secrets unknown to mankind  like  attaining  immortality or the medicine to cure any disease or interstellar space travel Or does it describe about  the species of another dimension(from another world) or is it a mere hoax as proposed by many theorists. What does the manuscript really contain about?????? These questions still remain unanswered.