Posted by Vidya Nagarajan, Product Manager, Chrome for Work

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog.)

Editors note: Chromeboxes help businesses and schools update employees and students with timely information and create a sense of community. To learn more about using Chromebox for digital signage and how it can help your business or school work smarter, join Chrome Live on April 22.

Schools and universities across the country use digital signage to share announcements, news and schedules. Chromeboxes give students waiting in dorm lobbies for friends or standing in the cafeteria line for lunch the opportunity to learn about campus events on the go. And digital signage apps for Chrome built by Rise Vision, one of our content partners, power many of these digital experiences that go beyond traditional campus fliers.

Here are three ways academic institutions are using Chromeboxes for digital signage to better engage and inform students:

Personalizing content at Siena College

Siena College, a private liberal arts college in Loudonville, New York, prizes its close-knit community of 3,000 students. In this intimate class setting, individual departments manage their own content featured on Chromeboxes for display. IT and display managers don’t have to be involved in day-to-day content updates, and each department is nimble and flexible with their content. For example, the Student Senate features content from the athletics and academic departments on several of its screens and those departments directly update their content to ensure it’s relevant and timely.

Cutting IT costs and time at University of Toronto Mississauga

The University of Toronto Mississauga uses its 25 digital signage displays to profile professors, highlight research projects and market events to their more than 12,600 undergraduate students. Their previous display technology required extensive IT time to configure and update. Since Chromeboxes automatically update with new features and security fixes, IT can spend time on other tasks. Chromeboxes have also freed up the University’s budget, since they’re much more affordable than their previous display equipment, which cost $1,300.

Reducing power use at Manor Independent School District

The 20 digital signage displays in the Manor Independent School District notify the 8,000 K-12 students about announcements, lunchroom menus, upcoming events and recent posts from a live Twitter feed. Previously, the schools relied on netbooks to power their screens, which consumed a lot of power, were noisy and crashed often. Chromeboxes, which don’t have fans or spinning hard drives, were a natural fit as the district sought more eco-friendly display solutions.

As universities and school districts continue improving their digital display technology, they’re finding better ways to deliver informative and entertaining content to teachers and current and prospective students. Join Chrome Live to learn how to use Chromebox for digital signage at your school.

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Posted by Mugur Marculescu, Product Manager

The gRPC team is excited to announce the immediate availability of gRPC Beta. This release marks an important point in API stability and going forward most API changes are expected to be additive in nature. This milestone opens the door for gRPC use in production environments.

We’re also taking a big step forward in improving the installation process. Over the past few weeks, we’ve rolled out gRPC packages to Debian Stable/Backports. Installation in most cases is now a two line install using the Debian package and available language specific package managers (e.g. maven, pip, gem, composer, pecl, npm, nuget, pod). In addition gRPC docker images are now available on Docker Hub.

We’ve updated the documentation on grpc.io to reflect the latest changes and released additional language-specific reference docs. See what’s changed with the Beta release in the release notes on Github for Java, Go and all other languages.

In the coming months, the focus of the gRPC project will be to keep improving performance and stability and adding carefully chosen features for production use cases. This is part of our principles and goals to enable highly performant and scalable APIs and microservices on top of HTTP/2. Documentation will also be clarified and will continue to improve with new examples and guides.

We’ve been very excited to see the community response to gRPC and the various projects starting to use it (etcd v3 experimental api, grpc-gateway for RESTful APIs and others). We really want to thank everyone who contributed code, gave presentations, adopted the technology and engaged in the community. With your help support we look forward to the 1.0!

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Yes, most plasma TVs ship with ports to allow a whole range of peripherals to be connected and take advantage of the large screen format.

For home computing, the internet, digital and High Definition TV is now coalescing around plasma monitors. These disparate elements are fusing together to become less solo pursuits and more family and sharing experiences played out on the big screen for all too see.

Chances are youre looking at this site on a 17 inch monitor. Try for a second to imagine surfing the net, gaming online or watching streaming media via your broadband connection on a screen that was almost three times as large.

The main worry now when buying a plasma monitor is whether it has enough ports and slots for all the peripherals you want to plug in. Take account of equipment such as your PC, DVD player, satellite receiver, cable TV, HDTV, games console, etc. and then add on one or two more.

The possibilities are almost endless, limited only by the number of ports and bandwidth available.

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Functions can be thought of as separate programs that are designed to perform
specific tasks. For example, in a program, separate functions can be so designed
to perform specific tasks such as taking input, doing calculation, giving output
etc.

In this article we will be discussing about what functions are and how they
are designed in C++.

Generally, programs have many logically different parts (input, output etc.)
which can be coded separately as function. This makes programs easily manageable
and understandable.

Suppose we have to design an invoice program that takes input, calculates and
at last displays the output. We have two options to do so, we can either program
the whole thing linearly or we can make separate functions for each of the tasks
(input, output etc.), this would make the program far more manageable and upgradeable.
(In the future, if you need to change certain things, you only need to alter
the functions)

In this way if you divide various activities of the program into different
function, then it would be easy for you to code and check each of the function
besides making the program easier to understand and manage.

Have a look at this program:

   //C++ program
   #include<iostream.h>

   int sqr(int x);//declaration of the function

   void main(void)
   {
   int a=9;
   cout<<"square of "<<a<<" is ";
   cout<<sqr(a)<<endl;//function is being called here
   }

   int sqr(int x)//no ;(semicolon) here
   {
   x=x*x;
   return (x);//return keyword is used
   //to return values, in this case
   //the value of x is returned
   }

Few points about the program:

• In C++, it is necessary to declare a function before defining it as we have
  done in the line:
  
  int sqr(int x);//declaration
  of the function

• One function cannot be defined inside another. Therefore sqr(int x) function
  cannot be defined inside main () which itself is a function.

• A function can return any type of values except arrays.
  The value is returned in the line:
  
  return (x);
  
  and the value got accepted and printed in the line:
  cout<<sqr(a);

Now that you understand how to declare and use functions, let me give you a
slightly more complex program:

   //C++ program
   #include<iostream.h>

   //declaration of functions
   int take_input(void);
   void play(void);//it is optional to use the void keyword
   void help(void);
   void quit(void);

   //main program starts from here
   void main(void)
   {
   int choice;
   choice=take_input();//take input

   //perform action as per the value returned
   if(choice==1) play();
   else if(choice==2) help();
   else if(choice==3) quit();
   }

   //functions are defined below
   int take_input()
   {
   int ch=0;
   cout<<" MAIN MENU";
   cout<<endl<<endl;
   cout<<"1> PLAY"<<endl;
   cout<<"2> HELP"<<endl;
   cout<<"3> QUIT"<<endl;
   cout<<endl<<endl;
   cout<<"enter choice and press enter"<<endl;

   while (ch!=1 && ch!=2 && ch!=3)
     {
     cin>>ch;
     }

   return (ch);
   }

   void play(void)
   {
   cout<<"write code for PLAY"<<endl;
   }

   void help(void)
   {
   cout<<"write code for HELP"<<endl;
   }

   void quit(void)
   {
   cout<<"write code for QUIT"<<endl;
   }

This is a simple program to illustrate how the various activities of a program
can be divided into separate functions. Notice how easy it is to understand
the program. Even if the functions play (), help () etc. had 100’s of
lines of code, the program would have been easily understandable.

Hope this helps…

Related Articles:

• 
  

  Destructor
  Functions in Detail

  
  


• 
  

  Introduction
  to Constructor and Destructor functions

  
  


• 
  

  Introduction
  to Function Overloading in C++

  
  

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