wordweb - A useful desktop dictionary

Reading the articles or news is useless unless you understand the true meaning of the words and their nature. It is not possible for anyone to know the complete vocabulary. Hence it is a good practice to have a dictionary with you. If you are using a computer, you don’t have to carry a real physical dictionary, it is sufficient to have good software that solves this problem. Word web is a desktop dictionary cum tiny encyclopedia. It is available in both premium and free version. It comes very handy when you want to write any article or while surfing if you want to know the meaning of any typical word. You can find the meaning of a word by simply selecting a word and opening the wordweb software or by pressing the shortcut key ctrl+alt+w. I prefer it because it also contains synonyms, antonyms and many other features for a single word. It also suggests the nearby words and anagrams when you type a wrong spelling. You have to install different dictionary addons to find the meaning later. It neatly resides in system tray so that it won’t bother you and starts up with windows. Good software to try out.

Understanding the computer -What is Direct Memory Access?

Direct Memory Access is shortly known as DMA. Usually, all the data transferred between different devices of computer have to move through CPU. DMA is a technique supported by modern computers through which data can be sent between different peripheral devices without intervention of CPU. Since the data is not intervened by CPU in middle, the overall time taken for the transfer of data from one source to there is less compared to ordinary computers. The new hardware supports Ultra DMA though which data can be sent more effectively than the present DMA technique.

Usually, small portion of the RAM is divided for both DMA transfer as well as normal transfer of the data. DMA is also used for multi-tasking. Different types of DMA operations are single transfer, block transfer, burst-block transfer, repeated single transfer, repeated block transfer, repeated burst-block transfer. The DMA is works in low power mode as it uses the one and only available bus for transferring the data which is always busy with CPU. DMA is used in multi-core processors especially for the transfer of data between various processors at a high speed. DMA may cause cache coherency problems, it can’t differentiate between the external memory and cache but this can be solved.