CHARONWARE, s. r. o., a software company specializing in developing database modeling tools, has released a new version of its flagship product CASE Studio 2 version 2.18.

CASE Studio 2 is a highly customizable database design tool that allows database designers to visualy create and maintain Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD) and Data Flow Diagrams (DFD) and generate SQL scripts for various databases automatically. Other powerful features are reverse engineering, generation of HTML and RTF documentation, export into XML format and many more.

"CASE Studio 2 helps companies create or redevelop their database structures easily, quickly and, particularly, at a very reasonable price in comparison to other similar competitive products," says Vaclav Frolik, Charonware's Sales and Marketing Manager, and continues: "At same time, CASE Studio 2 is a highly professional and customizable CASE tool that supports more than twenty databases and is being used in more than sixty countries."

Basic Computer Thermodynamics

By Stephen Bucaro

That desk in front of you and everything else around you is made up of atoms. An atom consists of electrons orbiting around a nucleus. An atom is increadibly tiny. You could line up 10 million of them inside a millimeter. What if we could scale up an atom so that nucleus was size of a basketball? The orbits of its electrons would then be 15 miles away.

From this you can understand that atoms are almost all empty space. The nucleus of atom is composed of quarks. If you could see a quark or an electron up close, it might appear as a tiny vibrating glow of energy. It turns out this world, which is causing us so many problems and so much stress, is mostly an illusion!

The electrons orbit nucleus at about speed of light. If you could see them, they might appear as a blur. They do not orbit in a plane like pictures in books. They create a shell. Sometimes two or more atoms will share electrons, causing them to link together forming a molecule.

Looking at that desk in front of you again, it looks pretty solid. Actually, unless your desk is floating in deep space where temperature is close to absolute zero, molecules of your desk are vibrating like crazy. Picture molecules bouncing around and smacking into each other like balls on a pool table.

If you have ever played pool, you're very familiar with how when a pool ball hits another pool ball, it transfers it's energy to second pool ball. When heat causes molecules to vibrate, they transfer energy between each other in a similar fashion. This action is called "conduction".

Now picture CPU of a computer cooking away because designer wants to push too much power through a small piece of silicon. If we don't take away that heat as fast as it's created, that CPU will fry!

The problem is usually solved by mounting a heat sink on CPU. Conduction causes heat to move from hot CPU to cooler heat sink. Because air doesn't conduct heat as well as metal, We apply a thin layer of heat sink compound between CPU and heat sink to fill in any gaps.