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Showing posts from November, 2006

Apple iPhone: how to create hype 101 PDF Print E-mail

Ya yah... I've been posting too much news these days... By Stan Beer Monday, 27 November 2006 The buzz that is starting to build around one of Apple's most anticipated pieces of vaporware resembles the atmosphere at a rock concert before the big act appears. It is now at the stage where if Apple doesn't unveil an iPhone on or before MacWorld Expo 2007 next January, fans will tear the house down. Microsoft's Zune marketing team must be shaking their heads in wonder. Apple has spent exactly nothing on promoting or pre-marketing a product that the company has never acknowledged but somehow everyone knows is on the verge being announced. There have been leaks from unnamed sources of course. There was the tale of an order being placed for 12 million iPhones to be made by Taiwanese iPod manufacturer Foxconn. There were reports of registration of the iPhone name by Apple (which doesn't prove anything really). However, in stark contrast to the controlled drip-fed deliberat

Let us test Darwin, teacher says

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DNA by design? Officially the teaching packs are frowned on Science teaching materials deemed "not appropriate" by the government should be allowed in class, Education Secretary Alan Johnson has been urged. Chemistry teacher at Liverpool's Blue Coat School, Nick Cowan, says the packs promoting intelligent design are useful in debating Darwinist evolution. Education officials insist intelligent design is not recognised as science. It argues that evolution cannot explain everything so the Universe must have had an intelligent creator. The packs were sent out to 5,000 secondary schools by a group of academics and clerics known as Truth in Science. The Department for Education and Skills said they were inappropriate and not supportive of the science curriculum.

French MPs dump Windows for Linux

Everything from OS to email By Christophe Guillemin Published: Friday 24 November 2006 After the gendarmes and the Ministry of Culture, it's the French MPs' turn to switch to open source. From June 2007, PCs in French députés' offices will be equipped with a Linux operating system and open source productivity software. The project, backed by MPs Richard Cazenav and Bernard Carayon of the UMP party, will see 1,154 French parliamentary workstations running on an open source OS, with OpenOffice.org, Firefox and an open source email client. A spokesperson for the parliament's administration said a decision as to the choice of OS and email client hasn't yet been taken. Currently, some of the parliament's servers have been running Linux, with Apache web servers and the Mambo content management system. The project was the subject of a study by Atos Origin, whose conclusions convinced the French parliament, the Assemblée N

New Idea

Well, after working on this blog for a while, I've decided to make it free for my friends to add content as well and model it as a customized news site that really matter to us... You can think of it as an aggregator of the news on the internet over custom tastes. It is no more just a personal blog site but a collection of information... hopefully true to its name infinity unbound.. I'd prefer to see technical text pertaining to these but not limited to these topics Open Source Hacks Interesting jokes Pictures educational material .... just about anything if you think you can contribute, mail me at prasannagautam(at)gmail(dot)com

AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS

this is one of those texts that defined Microsoft.... By William Henry Gates III February 3, 1976 An Open Letter to Hobbyists To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market? Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000. The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC

Visual Development on Linux

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Many people are not aware that programming on Linux, if you are fond of your mouse, is very enjoyable. If you are fond of your command line, it is also very enjoyable as well. The _CHOICE_ is up to you. A lot of visual development IDEs are available. I have been noticing, posts on Digg and other places, that people think there is no Linux equivalent of tools like Visual Basic, Delphi, etc. Here, I list some of the tools that you can expect on a linux Desktop. I am using Kubuntu Edgy and all these nice eye-candy tools are available in the Ubuntu Repositories. Other non-free Visual Tools are also available on Linux, e.g. Delphi, Oracle JDeveloper, etc. Click on any of the images to enlarge QT. QT is one on the best development environments on a KDE platform. QT also works with Gnome. You can develop C++ database driven applications by dragging and dropping. http://www.trolltech.com/developer/downloads/qt/x11 Gambas T

this was made in MS-Paint

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This guy made this pic using MS Paint http://www.deviantart.com/view/17908194/

Freedom!!

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Kerala logs Microsoft out of schools

An old news I just read today.. really happy.. we need a govt which can do this... George Iype in Kochi September 02, 2006 The Communist Party of India (Marxists)-led government in Kerala headed by Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan is not just against American cola majors -- Coca-Cola and PepsiCo -- alone. Nearly three weeks after the Achuthanandan government banned the sale and manufacture of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo products in Kerala, Microsoft has been logged out of the state-run schools. Here on, nearly 1.5 million students in the 2,650 government and government-aided high schools in the state will no longer use the Windows platform for computer education. Instead, they have switched over to the free GNU/Linux software. "We have decided that we will use only free software for computer education in Kerala schools. We have implemented the Linux platform in high schools; it will be implemented in other schools step by step," Kerala Education Minister M A Baby told rediff.com. H

The Hacker Manifesto

A rather inspirational piece of text that never ceases to inspire.. by +++The Mentor+++ Written January 8, 1986 Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"... Damn kids. They're all alike. But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world... Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me... Damn underachiever. They're all alike. I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..." Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike. I

Java GPLed

Not too long ago Sun CEO Scott Mcnealy made a comment that he saw no point in giving away java in GPL and in response to the FSF evangelist openly recommend us not to use Java because they felt it's too easy to get trapped in a proprietary sansar. I know RMS once said FSF cannot recommend OpenOffice "on ethical grounds". It severely depend on Sun JRE. The solution would be to improve GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ), and the GNU Classpath. OpenOffice folks refused to refactor their code to meet GCJ and classpath. Whatever GCJ and gang claimed was not to the ground. It still lacks several features. Gosling vowed against the parallel re-invention and development of java classlib.. As known GNU Classpath, folks were refuted against his remark. Its not new though, there were already a plethora of java product based on GPL and Apache License, The significant of those are from ASF, recently plunged into JavaEE market, that happens when JBoss lead engineer frustrated and decl