I wondered why people are so reluctant to adopt open source software in their daily life. The corporate world was skeptical for a long time to use open source software such as linux in their business until recently. Now, open source software have become so reliable that they are much better off than their commercial counterparts.

Think of softwares such as Linux which is a roboust operating system when compared to windows xp. I havent tried windows visa yet but i swear that linux never crashes. Apache has been a stable webserver used by many websites. When it comes to encryption, PGP has been very reliable . Some intelligence agencies consider it too good for encryption of your data or emails etc.

GIMP is a popular Image processing software which has all the functionalities of photoshop and Email client thunderbird replaces outlook express very easily. There are movie players such as xine , kaffeine or Mplayer or VLC player which provide features much better than your windows media player. Instant messaging clients such as Kopete and GAIM fare support all messenger protocols such as yahoo, icq, msn , AIM,jabber etc . XMMS can support almost all features of winamp.

Gnu C++ , QT , kdevelop and ANJUTA are very good development environments for writing code in C, C++ and Java. Anjuta and QT are my favorite IDE's which i had used to develop code in a linux environment. Anjuta is a visual studio like IDE which is very simple to use and not too complicated for the novice user. Eclipse has been the standard IDE for Java on linux machines. It has powerful features which are only found in high priced commmerical softwares.

Open source software has revolutionized computing and general computer usage much to the fear of those 'corporations' which had the market share for all softwares ever produced. I am a huge fan of the "freedom" concept of open source software where we can choose what softwares we want to use and how much control we can have over them. Richard stallman is the pioneer of free software who started this idea of free software in the 80's. It is time that people have realized that it is better to have open source source softwares than use an OS which might monitor your internet usage or your personal records by keeping data mining software or allowing third parties to track you. I am waiting to see how reliable commercial software can be when compared to open source softwares such as linux inspite of their many flaws which we have seen so far.

I read an article on theregisters which says that most ISPs such as verizon , AT & T etc are thinking of charging search engines like google, msn etc who use bandwidth of end users to make money for their business. It is indeed true ..that there are some companies who generate revenue from bandwidth of third party networks who don't get any revenue but connect different networks together to provide bandwidth to the end user.

We will have to see if internet providers such as verizon , at & t , british telecom etc really start charging search engines for using their computer networks.

Google hasn't given any official declaration on this issue.

Major media companies might dictate terms to the end users and create markets which suit their business interests. If the carrier networks and media companies , search engines unite, then it might not be good to the end user , who gets targeted advertising and is controlled by various moghuls as to which kind of rights he or she might get while using their services.

This is an important consideration for customers in the years to come.

What do you think about the whole issue?

Students at a German university have facilitated the downfall of human civilisation by developing a robot to replace the pub landlord, Ananova chillingly reports.

So far though, the Hermann the barman can only pour pressurised German wheat beer - child's play relative to the fine art of pulling a pint of foaming nut-brown ale.

Professor Thomas Weber at the Technical University of Darmstadt set students the challenge of bringing in a working prototype for £53, in the hope that it will go into mass production.

The misanthrope tried to mitigate his treason against humanity: "We don't want to compete with landlords, merely make their lives and those of their waiters easier."

PI is a movie about science . A computer scientist is obsessed with finding out secrets of nature by searching for a number which will discover all laws of nature. If you are a physicist or have read "A brief history of time" , you might have come across the term "Grand unified theory". Max cohen ( Sean Gullette) is on the search for a number which will unlock the secrets of our universe. Below is a review of the movie

PI isn't about the mathematical constant 3.1415.., representing, among many other things, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diametre. The movie is about the deranged and beautiful quest of one person in search of the truth, the answer to the universe. The plot is a common one in science fiction: a phenotypic "aberration" in the brain causes the protagonist to develop special abilities that makes him sought after and feared. In this particular cases, Max acquires a deep grasp of number theory. With his assumptions, that mathematics is the universal language, that number theory can represent everything in nature, and that there is a pattern in everything that occurs in this universe, he sets about trying to find it in the stock market.

After him are people who are interested in his stock market analyses for monetary purposes, and more strangely, a group of Rabbis who are convinced the same pattern of numbers is the key to their salvation. However, Max is the only one who can understand the semantics of the 216 digit number that is key to the universal lock, a plot device that I thought was truly brilliant. In the end, Max succeeds on his quest, but what he understands is never revealed to us. I was fascinated with the idea of a Grand unified theory where if you understand the laws of nature, you can predict the course of events in the past as well as the future. We might disover laws of nature and soon be able to understand how our planet will behave in future including the course of events which might happen on it.

PI has an obscure plot but it might keep your attention if you have a scientific background. The movie is filmed in black and white and we are always kept wondering what is on Max's mind who is the lead character of the movie.

I strongly recommend this movie if you are a mathematician or a computer scientist or if you can relate to science and techonlogy. I would rate this movie 8 out of 10.

Here is a review upon which this text is based upon

There are other reviews under " Movie Ram-blings" which are worth checking.

Today, I watched many episodes of the British geek sitcom , "The IT Crowd" . It is a comedy about a bunch of guy geeks working in a company who know nothing other than fixing computers and hacking stuff. They are grounded .. and their office is in the ground floor ,alienated from the rest of the people in the company.

As usual, they are considered weirdos and uncool for they are geeks.They are also socially inept and have serious problems when dealing with women. This might have happened to you if you are a geek as well :-) . "Have you tried turning it off and on again ?? " This is the most likely response they'd give to any IT problem they would get from upstairs.


This sitcom is first of its kind and I've never seen anything like this.. There are a list of tv series and movies which one would associate with the geeks which are startrek , starwars and other scifi material . Never have been such a series about a bunch of IT guys. Of course there is a cool movie about a bunch of geeks called "Office space" which I'm sure you have seen it ...if you are following this series religiously .

I liked some situations in The IT crowd . .The thing with the Goth is hilarious. This guy used to work in the company in the top floor and he used to be successful ... After he becomes addicted to the gothic lifestyle and music etc .. He gets demoted and is grounded behind the "Red Door" . I was wondering what was behind the red door until i saw the episode , which is really cool . The flashbacks , his voice , the drama behind his "turning into a goth " . There were many things which were funny.I enjoyed it They could included eerie music with the red door thingy . You might like it . Jen , Roy and Moss played by Katherine , Chris O'Dowd and Richard Ayoade have given excellent performances. Their boss is funny as well.

Its been ages i saw british comedy ... The last british sitcom i liked was "Yes minister" which is another classic. I think that this series has a serious following in the geek community which is enjoying it a lot after being featured in slashdot and Theregister. It would have been great if channel 4 has provided streaming of this series for internet surfers outside the UK as well . I dont know why they have blocked the non-UK geek community :/ . Neverthless I saw them .. after downloading from filecloud.com and as well as from atariboy.wordpress.com .

It would have been nice if there were some gags . They might be interesting. If you've seen seinfeld ,we never saw the face of the yankees chief whenever he talks. It would have been nice if there were such things in The IT Crowd.

Over and all I strongly recommend this series to anyone who is related to computers even remotely !! This migth be a worth series to watch if you are doing something related to computers for a living. Probably ,I'm going to archive "The IT crowd" along with my collections of startrek and starwars :)

Enjoy the series.

I was reading wired and came across an article which says that.. a lot of americans use the internet just for fun. It made me think of internet in general and how i started using it . It was in the 90's and i had used it only to search information , scientific articles or read episodes previews of startrek. Now, a great deal of trivia has penetrated internet .Chatting ,porn, blogging and online gaming sites which steal away our time.

Internet is a waste of time , if used casually and you might never know how much time you would spend on it. Internet addiction is a serious thing .. If you're addicted to the internet , you would spend hours on the internet increasingly to while away your time or just to hang out.It might be worthy to decide on how much time you would spend on a computer when you are hooked on to the web.

One of the earliest uses was to send and receive emails. Now, Instant messaging has hooked most people to their computers ,where they type messages instead of using traditional means of communication such as a telephone or letters which were popular for over a century.

I think that internet is a tool and is of great help if used wisely and can be a waste of time if we use it aimlessly . It had helped me a lot in reseaching things which would have been impossible otherwise.

There is a considerable debate on whether goverments should regulate the web or not if you think of china as an example. china has banned websites which depict content unsuitable for children. It had also banned many websites and asked search engines to not show any banned results on its website if you seach in china. Google has dropped some entries from its search results and complied with the chinese goverment. Other countries are considering banning websites which might be unsuitable for certain age groups.

What do you think of Internet in general ? Do you think there should be control of information people should see or it should be allowed to all irrespective of their age,location and status?

Sometime ago I heard that high schools were introducing computer programming languages and I wondered if it is the right thing.. I used to think that it might be a better idea to teach basic science and math to high school and students and introduce computing machines later when they finish school. Computers are mechanical devices and they might forbid us to be creative as to create art or music. Although they are useful in understanding laws of nature or for communication with the world , they cannot teach us to be creative yet. It would be a while before we would see artificial thinking machines which can guide us. The current state of AI research is at its beginning.

Teachers should prepare children to think creatively so that pupils wont just apply pure logic to solve real world problems but rather tacke each problem independetly. It might be futile to feed children with object oriented programming languages like java or c++ before they have strong mathematical skills. Maths and computing is strongly related . The more skilled a person is mathematics or logic, the better programmer he/she may become.

Technology is not the key to each and every issue in human life . It might help us lead a better life and is necessary for one to be comfortable but it shouldn't be introduced until we are ready yet. Some issues are not new: the early and excessive concern about “computer literacy,” too often at the cost of basic literacy. Other issues are familiar but more clearly documented than usual-the inability of school systems to maintain equipment or train teachers once the hardware is in place.

"For the first time researchers have created a working prototype of a radical new chip design based on magnetism instead of electrical transistors. As transistor-based microchips hit the limits of Moore's Law, a group of electrical engineers at the University of Notre Dame has fabricated a chip that uses nanoscale magnetic "islands" to juggle the ones and zeroes of binary code. Wolfgang Perod and his colleagues turned to the process of magnetic patterning (.pdf) to produce a new chip that uses arrays of separate magnetic domains. Each island maintains its own magnetic field. Because the chip has no wires, its device density and processing power may eventually be much higher than transistor-based devices. And it won't be nearly as power-hungry, which will translate to less heat emission and a cooler future for portable hardware like laptops."

References:

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Videogames as 'games' is inhibiting their adoption by mainstream society (who relates gaming to children's activities). From the article: "Things have changed, of course. Video game content now runs the gamut from kid-friendly titles like Curious George and LEGO Star Wars to adult-themed offerings such as GTA San Andreas and Black to the highly socialized online communities of World of Warcraft and Second Life or the largely adult-populated casual game scene of Pogo.