One buys physical books because they are easy to read - I still find paper much easier to read than on screen, though e-book readers could change that. Today e-book readers are way too expensive. Add to that the fact that I can make notes in the margin (though in some cases it could be too small: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_last_theorem) and books make worth buying. But, the digital ones make sense - many are easily available, they are searchable etc. One nice model is bundling the physical and digital version together. The physical book should actually cost less than or equal to what would be spent in printing out the book and binding it - there should eb an advantage to the economies of scale. A book that needs colour should have it in the publisher printed version - that is one advantage - colour laser printers are still probhibitively expensive.
Scribd seems to allow people to make money off digital books. Possibly docstoc too...
Haven't used them, but I didn't a mention in the few responses I checked. Open Source books, reasonably priced. Check out: http://authors.packtpub.com/
MsWord has too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change. Somewhere near 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use MsWord. It might not die. Even if it does it wont die swiftly.
A fraction of the quoted figure - 0.6-1bn actually know how to use MS-Word. The rest just behave like monkeys would if given a typewriter. Frankly, people just do not get it. You send documents in editable formats like that of MS-Word if and when you want the recipient to make changes. Else, you just send out a PDF.
For me - TeX/LaTeX and the userfriendly WYSIWYM GUI LyX on top of it
The only way a competitor can use your code without letting you use any improvements he makes is to not make any changes to your code at all.
Or, not to distribute the modifications. One important thing to remember is that the GPL's clauses kick-in only on distribution. As long as changes stay within the organisation, there is no legal requirements to give back the changes. In that case, IMHO, all Free and Open Source licenses are equal.
We got HP Compaq Laptops shipped with Windows Vista Basic that was promptly *replaced* with a Corporate copy of Win XP SP2 (which was again replaced with Linux in many cases):)
If people are using Vista, then it may be possible they are using it under duress. The manufacturer gives you a nice shiny comp and only ships it with vista. I for example, have asked many dealers to give me a quote with the Vista (whatever edition) replaced with XP SP2, but they said they couldn't do it legally. So, between choosing an unlicensed copy of XP (and feeling bad about it) and a legally acquired copy of Vista, most people just take it:(
OpenWengo http://wwww.openwengo.org/ has a desktop app, as well as a FF extension. The desktop app supports multiple IM protocols, as well as SIP. You can use the FF extension to make calls from the browser.
I had a look at OpenWengo http://www.openwengo.com/. It is a nice SIP multiprotocol messenger that can also do SIP. Suports Yahoo! and Jabber, though I thik you can't do Yahoo! voice chat.
Hoping to have standardised IM protocols/clients soon...
Re:What do you need that OpenOffice doesn't provid
on
Manual Writing Tools?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I have been a longtime user of LaTeX http://www.latex-project.org/ and have found TeXnicCentre http://www.toolscenter.org/ to be a nice front end for LaTeX. I have tried word-processors, but haven't really played with OO.org long enough to understand the sectioning and styles feature. Now, I recently re-stumbled over LyX http://www.lyx.org/ I think I will stick with LyX/LaTeX till I understand DocBook better.
On a side note, I came across NaturalDocs (http://www.naturaldocs.org/) yesterday. It looks to be a neat way to generate documentation without messing up the whole thing with tags.
Now, it would be a nice idea to take all these diverse ideas and combine them together into a single tool that can work as a driver for various formats (somthing like GCC, which can compile multiple languages). So, you need to know 1 tool, which can parse reST, NaturalDocs, Doxygen etc. You know, the great unified theory of text processing...
But lets assume the more conservative number of 7:1:
- so for about 50% additional cost (higher salary), you can get 600% additional productivity
- so the work being done by a team of 100 mediocre system & network admins could probably be perform by 15 really sharp engineers (~80% savings)
- so the cost savings of just moving to available sharp engineers in the US would exceed the cost savings of shipping work to India (which is now often calculated at merely 25-50% savings best case)
And what if it were done by 15 really sharp Indian engineers in India? You get the stuff done 90% cheaply...
And unlike in Europe, dialling *to* a mobile phone is no more expensive than calling a landline.
Well, you *are* wrong there. Calling to a mobile phone *is* more expensive than calling a landline. BSNL has 45s/60s pulse to calling a mobile and a 180 second to a local landline. You don't feel the difference because of the generally lower cost, but it is substantial if you call a lot of mobiles. So, the preferred way is to use landlines to call landlines and mobiles to call mobiles, unless you use the employer provided phone in your cubicle to call everyone, in which case you increase your CTC by that much:)
Why does someone have to convert from Kelvin to Fahrenheit and screw up everything? When will the USAians understand that the world is metric. Even the British have switched to metric! Hopefully, the guys who read/. know Kelvin & Celsius, so there was *no* reason on earth (or the Sun, for that matter:)) to convert the units from those acceptable worldwide to that obsolete unit which is only used by a few million people in 1 country (out of 3) in North America and screw up majorly in the process!
I used sysrescuecd & partimage to ship disk images to our customers. It was real neat. It was pretting instructive as to how to go about this.
First, we installed Linux and our custom software on a hardisk which was part of a small system.
Then, we booted this small system using the SysRescueCD. We were running a partimage server on another machine on the network. We imaged the partitions of the hardisk on the partimage server, saved the MBR and partition table using dd and sfdisk (as documented in the SysRescueCD manual), put these on the server.
Then, I wrote a couple of scripts to restore the MBR, partition tables and partition data onto other hardisk. Created a CD image with these scripts, MBR, partition table and partition data using the excellent directions given in the SysRescueCD manual (customising SysRescueCD). But, it is important to note that I cut a couple of coasters by failing to understand that all these extra files should be outside the cloop.
BSNL has recently increased pulse rate for internet calls to 10 minutes (peak hour) and 15 minutes (non-peak). This works out to Rs. 8 and Rs. 5.30 per hour, including taxes. This is pretty cheap! I pay Rs. 500/= pm for 300 MB of download on a 64 kbps link in bangalore. So, this would be a great thing. If only we have it in Bangalore:(
Re:Does it work properly/completely with Opera yet
on
Gmail Adds Features
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· Score: 1
Regarding Firefox support for gMail: why can't I open my e-mail messages in a new tab using Firefox?
You know, right now India has one of the worst poverty situations in the world, the second largest population in the world, and was just hit by a tremoundous earthquake. They should really try to build up their infrastructure.
I agree that my country has one of the worst poverty situations in the world and we are still reeling under the impact of an earthquake.
But, who gave you the impression that
"5 km outside of Delhi and it doesn't look like a civilised city!!"?
How many places in India have you been that you can generalise about the whole country like this?
U tend to forget that India has one of the largest pools of trained technical manpower in the country. The Indian space programme is completely indigenous and has been going on for nearly 25 years and we have already been to space using our *own* rockets!
And, I wonder whether one can really say that stop building spaceships because of other problems. Sure, we may need funds for the reconstruction of Gujarat, but we also need those satellites. In a country as large and divesre as this, we need satellites for remote-sensing, meteorolgy and communications. India can ill-afford the enormous amounts of hard-cash it takes to borrow transponders on other satellites. And, why should we, when we can do it ourselves at a fraction of the cost. The space programme is just not about satellites and rockets, its about pervasive technology. The spinoffs from such a programme are massive.
India is a country of around 1 billion people, i.e. 4 times the size of the U.S. of A. and when we Indians heard about the Florida 2000 voting fiasco, we simply laughed!!
Imagine the richest country in the world not being able to choose their prez., simply b'cos some guy, somehwere didn't know how to properly use a punching machine! Then everyone else going out trying to measure the depth of the punched hole to see who it was meant for. Frankly, that system sucks big time.
In India, in the old days, before we had Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), we used to get results in 4 days flat. This election with EVMs, we got the bulk of the results by the second day!
I frankly wonder when will the Americans learn:)
Slashdot Mirror
One buys physical books because they are easy to read - I still find paper much easier to read than on screen, though e-book readers could change that. Today e-book readers are way too expensive. Add to that the fact that I can make notes in the margin (though in some cases it could be too small: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat's_last_theorem) and books make worth buying. But, the digital ones make sense - many are easily available, they are searchable etc. One nice model is bundling the physical and digital version together. The physical book should actually cost less than or equal to what would be spent in printing out the book and binding it - there should eb an advantage to the economies of scale. A book that needs colour should have it in the publisher printed version - that is one advantage - colour laser printers are still probhibitively expensive.
Scribd seems to allow people to make money off digital books. Possibly docstoc too ...
Haven't used them, but I didn't a mention in the few responses I checked. Open Source books, reasonably priced. Check out: http://authors.packtpub.com/
MsWord has too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change.
Somewhere near 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use MsWord. It might not die.
Even if it does it wont die swiftly.
A fraction of the quoted figure - 0.6-1bn actually know how to use MS-Word. The rest just behave like monkeys would if given a typewriter. Frankly, people just do not get it. You send documents in editable formats like that of MS-Word if and when you want the recipient to make changes. Else, you just send out a PDF.
For me - TeX/LaTeX and the userfriendly WYSIWYM GUI LyX on top of it
AMD logo on an ARM newsitem?
Slashdot is getting old ...
The only way a competitor can use your code without letting you use any improvements he makes is to not make any changes to your code at all.
Or, not to distribute the modifications. One important thing to remember is that the GPL's clauses kick-in only on distribution. As long as changes stay within the organisation, there is no legal requirements to give back the changes. In that case, IMHO, all Free and Open Source licenses are equal.
What's the news here? 65 MPG = 27.63 kmpl.
In July 2006, a Ford Fiesta diesel averaged 31.48 kmpl
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/autocar-ford-fiesta-enter-limca-records/19402-7.html . In August 2008, it averaged 33.4 kmpl under real world conditions http://www.indiantelevision.com/release/y2k8/mar/marrel57.php and http://www.merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID=131281
Now these are Indian conditions - I guess cars should be able to do much better in Europe and US.
This is the Indian Ford Fiesta which sells at almost USD 16K
I thought it was the 80/20 rule Pareto principle. So, 20% of the people should be using 80% of the bandwidth ....
We got HP Compaq Laptops shipped with Windows Vista Basic that was promptly *replaced* with a Corporate copy of Win XP SP2 (which was again replaced with Linux in many cases) :)
:(
...
If people are using Vista, then it may be possible they are using it under duress. The manufacturer gives you a nice shiny comp and only ships it with vista. I for example, have asked many dealers to give me a quote with the Vista (whatever edition) replaced with XP SP2, but they said they couldn't do it legally. So, between choosing an unlicensed copy of XP (and feeling bad about it) and a legally acquired copy of Vista, most people just take it
Forced migration, that is
OpenWengo http://wwww.openwengo.org/ has a desktop app, as well as a FF extension. The desktop app supports multiple IM protocols, as well as SIP. You can use the FF extension to make calls from the browser.
:)
Been there, done that
I had a look at OpenWengo http://www.openwengo.com/. It is a nice SIP multiprotocol messenger that can also do SIP. Suports Yahoo! and Jabber, though I thik you can't do Yahoo! voice chat.
...
Hoping to have standardised IM protocols/clients soon
Just started out with Vex http://vex.sourceforge.net/. It looks to be a pretty neat XML editor, based on Eclipse, with the DocBook DTD http://www.docbook.org/ built in.
...
I have been a longtime user of LaTeX http://www.latex-project.org/ and have found TeXnicCentre http://www.toolscenter.org/ to be a nice front end for LaTeX. I have tried word-processors, but haven't really played with OO.org long enough to understand the sectioning and styles feature. Now, I recently re-stumbled over LyX http://www.lyx.org/
I think I will stick with LyX/LaTeX till I understand DocBook better.
On a side note, I came across NaturalDocs (http://www.naturaldocs.org/) yesterday. It looks to be a neat way to generate documentation without messing up the whole thing with tags.
Now, it would be a nice idea to take all these diverse ideas and combine them together into a single tool that can work as a driver for various formats (somthing like GCC, which can compile multiple languages). So, you need to know 1 tool, which can parse reST, NaturalDocs, Doxygen etc. You know, the great unified theory of text processing
Try the Tag List extension for Vim. Great & it rocks!!!
- may/may not have EDGE, GPRS etc. I might rather check my e-mail over SMS.
All this for less than $150Why does someone have to convert from Kelvin to Fahrenheit and screw up everything? When will the USAians understand that the world is metric. Even the British have switched to metric! Hopefully, the guys who read /. know Kelvin & Celsius, so there was *no* reason on earth (or the Sun, for that matter :)) to convert the units from those acceptable worldwide to that obsolete unit which is only used by a few million people in 1 country (out of 3) in North America and screw up majorly in the process!
Look at clonezilla (http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/). Meant for this only.
Just 37mm by 52mm http://www.sizes.com/materls/paperISOA.htm
I used sysrescuecd & partimage to ship disk images to our customers. It was real neat. It was pretting instructive as to how to go about this.
First, we installed Linux and our custom software on a hardisk which was part of a small system.
Then, we booted this small system using the SysRescueCD. We were running a partimage server on another machine on the network. We imaged the partitions of the hardisk on the partimage server, saved the MBR and partition table using dd and sfdisk (as documented in the SysRescueCD manual), put these on the server.
Then, I wrote a couple of scripts to restore the MBR, partition tables and partition data onto other hardisk. Created a CD image with these scripts, MBR, partition table and partition data using the excellent directions given in the SysRescueCD manual (customising SysRescueCD). But, it is important to note that I cut a couple of coasters by failing to understand that all these extra files should be outside the cloop.
Marvellous thing, sysRescueCD is.
BSNL has recently increased pulse rate for internet calls to 10 minutes (peak hour) and 15 minutes (non-peak). This works out to Rs. 8 and Rs. 5.30 per hour, including taxes. This is pretty cheap! I pay Rs. 500/= pm for 300 MB of download on a 64 kbps link in bangalore. So, this would be a great thing. If only we have it in Bangalore :(
Regarding Firefox support for gMail: why can't I open my e-mail messages in a new tab using Firefox?
I agree that my country has one of the worst poverty situations in the world and we are still reeling under the impact of an earthquake.
But, who gave you the impression that "5 km outside of Delhi and it doesn't look like a civilised city!!"? How many places in India have you been that you can generalise about the whole country like this?
U tend to forget that India has one of the largest pools of trained technical manpower in the country. The Indian space programme is completely indigenous and has been going on for nearly 25 years and we have already been to space using our *own* rockets!
And, I wonder whether one can really say that stop building spaceships because of other problems. Sure, we may need funds for the reconstruction of Gujarat, but we also need those satellites. In a country as large and divesre as this, we need satellites for remote-sensing, meteorolgy and communications. India can ill-afford the enormous amounts of hard-cash it takes to borrow transponders on other satellites. And, why should we, when we can do it ourselves at a fraction of the cost. The space programme is just not about satellites and rockets, its about pervasive technology. The spinoffs from such a programme are massive.
India is a country of around 1 billion people, i.e. 4 times the size of the U.S. of A. and when we Indians heard about the Florida 2000 voting fiasco, we simply laughed!! Imagine the richest country in the world not being able to choose their prez., simply b'cos some guy, somehwere didn't know how to properly use a punching machine! Then everyone else going out trying to measure the depth of the punched hole to see who it was meant for. Frankly, that system sucks big time. In India, in the old days, before we had Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), we used to get results in 4 days flat. This election with EVMs, we got the bulk of the results by the second day! I frankly wonder when will the Americans learn :)