Personal computer

About: Personal computer is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 58809 publications have been published within this topic receiving 800814 citations. The topic is also known as: PC.

Apparatus and method for diplaying an alert to an individual personal computer user via the user's television connected to a cable television system

Abstract: A user's personal computer is coupled to a home controller which is, in turn connected to the input cable from a cable television system and to a set top box which determines the channel to be delivered to an associated television. The service provider transmits over a conventional modem communication link the alert message to the user's personal computer. If an acknowledgment by the user is not transmitted to the service provider, a command message is transmitted by the dial-up communication link to the personal computer instructing the personal computer to activate a modulator contained in the home controller to provide an RF encoded signal representing the alert message to be displayed on the television associated with the set top box. In order to determine the channel to which the set top box is tuned, the home controller receives such information from the set top box and relays the information to the personal computer which can then instruct the modulator contained in the home controller to tune to the correct channel being viewed on the television associated with the set top box. This permits the service provider to effectively display an alert message over the television served by the cable television system thereby, providing a greater likelihood of alerting the user or someone in the user's household that an alert has been received.

Method and system for navigating a display screen for locating a desired item of information

Abstract: A method and a system for navigating a display screen to search for a desired item of information stored in an electronic device. The electronic device includes a novel fly over user interface (FOUI) capable of receiving commands from a user to provide a zoom out view of the display screen. A user may commence a navigation session by touching the display screen in a non active area or by clicking on a specifically designated icon to activate the user interface. During the navigation session, the display screen is zoomed-out and a magnifying area may appear on the display screen. The user interface enables the user to scroll the zoomed-out display screen by dragging the magnifying area towards an edge of the display screen to find a desired item of information. The display screen may be a display screen of a digital device (e.g., portable computer, personal computer, a cellular telephone, a digital watch, etc). The user may terminate a navigation session by removing the pointer from the display screen.

Construction-Site Layout Using Annealed Neural Network

Abstract: Construction-site layout is an important construction planning activity. The impact of good layout practices on money and timesaving becomes more obvious on larger construction projects. In this study, we formulate the problem as a combinatorial optimization problem. Construction-site layout is delimited as the design problem of arranging a set of predetermined facilities on a set of predetermined sites, while satisfying a set of constraints and optimizing an objective. In this paper, the annealed neural network model, which merges many features of simulated annealing and the Hopfield neural network is employed to solve the problem, and a program written in C, called SitePlan, is built on a personal computer to implement the algorithm. In addition, a strategy to set a reasonable initial temperature in the simulated annealing procedure is proposed, the effects of various parameters in annealed neural network are examined, and two case studies are used to illustrate the practical applications and to demonstrate this model's efficiency in solving the construction-site layout problem.