Why not use OpenOffice.org instead ? Agreed, Microsoft Office 2007 is very beautiful to look at and also has made a number of advances in usability. But that does not condone its history of changing the MSWord file format even across different versions of MSWord as well as locking the users to its proprietary format.
Microsoft has to learn to support open file formats as people now a days are becoming more and more aware of the hazards of vendor lock in.
1) that hardware based rootkit detection is unreliable and 2) that a beautiful girl cannot be a part of the geeky world of cyber security research (considered exclusively a part of male fiefdom).
15 year Linux veteran and the maintainer of the linux kernel block layer,...
In the interview he says he is now 30 years old. Wow that means he started working in Linux at the age of 15 - a real prodigy. A very interesting interview.
Btw, it is nice that kerneltrap.org has finally had a make over. The earlier website design looked rather drab.
I happened to read the autobiography of Richard Branson titled "Losing my virginity" which makes a fascinating read. And this book provides a peep into the kind of turbulent life he led in his younger days. So I find it really funny that he had to name his company "Virgin".
But I admire him for his active participation in adventure sports - such as his endeavor to circumvent the globe in a hot air balloon. And how he made his billions through his slew of virgin companies including a music store chain (Virgin records) and airlines company.
So it is no surprise that Richard has now set his eyes on outer space.
I have viewed a couple of videos of Stallman's speeches and have transcripted one of them. Listening him speak, I couldn't help thinking that he has all the qualities of a leader. His speeches strike a cord and entertain at the same time. He has very good oratorical skills.
Recently, I was viewing a TV program reviewing a number of cell phones (which are the current craze in India). And their findings was in terms of cost effectiveness and design, the Motorola MotoFone F3 was their choice. This cellphone is sold for just around $25. And how did they cut the cost so much ?
Enter their unique display which uses Electronic paper which is developed by the US based E-Link. This cell phone doesn't need power to constantly display an image on the screen. It only needs a little charge when the text (or whatever) needs to be changed. The display stays on even when the battery is pulled out! And more over it is a beautiful phone sleek and thin.
I believe more and more gadgets are going to be manufactured using this new technology. Sony has already released its e-book reader which has the same effects of reading a real book. So PlasticLogic the company is on to a good thing.
Could this be the begining of the end of the paid hosting business ? I wonder what will happen to all those web hosts who are providing shared hosting plan now. If this trend catches on, only dedicated hosting will be profitable for these professional web hosting providers.
Having said that, I welcome this new venture by WikiPedia founder.
Craiglist is a wonderful site which is put to use and also sometimes misused by the people using its services. But one is bound to believe that the good it provides far outweighs the bad things. I know atleast one guy who emigrated to USA who has used craiglist to find better accomodation. Having read the story, I feel that the two owners running craiglist are true philanthropists.
Agreed, visual basic is a easy to use language with drag and drop widgets and all but when compared to a language such as Delphi - (Borland's now Inprise's Object Pascal language), it reveals a lot of chinks in its armour. More over, there is no dearth in scripting language that Mac users should miss this particular feature in their MS Office.
The VoIP could very well be the death of the telecommunication industry in India. Consider this fact - a call to the US can be made just for Rs 5 a minute using VoIP compared to Rs 20 a minute using land line or even more using mobile phone. And over the years, the quality of voice in VoIP has significantly improved.
The booming telecommunication industry in India is going through a flux and will not be able to bear this setback of allowing VoIP calls which will cut into their margins unless of course they also provide their customers VoIP handsets. More over, the BPOs can very well afford to use the land line phones to communicate with their contacts abroad.
In fact, it is 4 times costlier than the one hundred dollar laptop being developed by OLPC. And more over, OLPC project is purely a humanitarian project aimed at improving the education of the children. Where as Intel's project even though commendable is no where near to the lofty ideals of OLPC.
I have installed the latest ver of firefox on my machine running Linux and I can vouch that this new version is not buggy. It has never crashed even once and I found it to open quicker than firefox 1.5.
Having said that, if you are using a lot of extensions including del.icio.us and many prominent ones, then it could consume some memory and might significantly slow down the machine. I think it has got to be some problem with the extension you are using rather than firefox itself.
I do hope that the one laptop per child project will succeed in setting benchmarks for what a laptop should be and also how the applications which run on that laptop should behave (efficiently using memory being one of them).
The main problem with yahoo mail beta is the time it takes to load the interface in the web browser. It takes much longer to load yahoo beta than it takes gmail to load its mail interface.
On top of that, when you compare the sheer number of features that come with gmail, yahoo mail falls too short.
But I do like the new interface of yahoo mail beta - maybe they need to make further refinements and add new features which provide value.
Gimp already allows saving images in Gif format. It didn't earlier because of patent issues. It is nice really because now we can create banners which are less than 2k in size - even just a couple of hundred bytes.
But I do find that saving images in gif using gimp creates larger size image compared to saving the same image using say photoshop. I have sometimes wondered why this happens....
I agree wholeheartedly with the article. In India for instance, Now a days where ever you look, you can see people with a cellphone glued to their ear. News channels provide SMS (Short Messaging Service) numbers where the viewers can send messages via their cellphones. And the cellular service doesn't come cheap. It is atleast twice as costly as making calls via landline though deals are available dime a dozen. Sometimes I wonder if all this is really a good thing.
Somebody should do a detailed study of the negetive effects of using a cellphone.
"...that continuously synchronizes your browser settings - including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords - across your computers."
Suppose there are 10 machines in ones office and you decide to use google sync on each of them. Now if you use say your gmail account to check your personal emails and by mistake tick the checkbox - "Remembers this on this computer". Won't it propagate the passwords you do not want the browser to remember to all the 10 machines ?
Now think of what happens if you have a 100 computers.....
When was uptime a factor in deciding whether an OS was better than the other? True uptime is one of the factors but not surely the decisive one. Security, how quick the patches are released for bugs and the stellar technical support should be the decisive factors in deciding the superiority of an OS. And taking all these factors, I feel tha t Linux comes way ahead of Windows.
I remember having recieved a rubic cube as a gift many years back. It took up a lot of my time in solving the cube. Heck the cube was so popular that there were entire books written detailing how to solve the cube. And the least time in which I could solve the cube was 20 minutes. Now a five dimentional rubic cube (albeit a software one) - that could be a real challenge even for rubic cube champions themselves. Too bad the software require microsoft dot net framework to run.
Isn't creating PDFs a default feature in openoffice.org ? And there are many programs in Linux which can convert a file into PDF. So how is what Microsoft is doing different from what we have in Linux ?
This inculcation of curiosity and resourcefulness is what makes studying at MIT truly unique. No wonder it is one of the premier educational institutions in the world.
All the exciting features apart, will Microsoft release the file format as an open standard ? That is the big question. Any new file format is most welcome as long as they are open and not controlled by propritery licences.
What I like most about half life game is that it is not just blind shooting of monsters though that is also involved. But you are forced to think while playing the game. It is just like solving a series of puzzling problems inside the game to get to the finishing line. And combined with the superior graphics engine, this is one game which rivals even Quake in game play and enjoyment.
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Why not use OpenOffice.org instead ? Agreed, Microsoft Office 2007 is very beautiful to look at and also has made a number of advances in usability. But that does not condone its history of changing the MSWord file format even across different versions of MSWord as well as locking the users to its proprietary format.
Microsoft has to learn to support open file formats as people now a days are becoming more and more aware of the hazards of vendor lock in.
1) that hardware based rootkit detection is unreliable and
2) that a beautiful girl cannot be a part of the geeky world of cyber security research (considered exclusively a part of male fiefdom).
when the rocket reaches outer space, the computer puts it in 5th gear. The article isn't clear on whether there is a reverse gear ;-)
A reverse gear could be useful for reusable satellites.
15 year Linux veteran and the maintainer of the linux kernel block layer,...
In the interview he says he is now 30 years old. Wow that means he started working in Linux at the age of 15 - a real prodigy. A very interesting interview.
Btw, it is nice that kerneltrap.org has finally had a make over. The earlier website design looked rather drab.
I happened to read the autobiography of Richard Branson titled "Losing my virginity" which makes a fascinating read. And this book provides a peep into the kind of turbulent life he led in his younger days. So I find it really funny that he had to name his company "Virgin".
But I admire him for his active participation in adventure sports - such as his endeavor to circumvent the globe in a hot air balloon. And how he made his billions through his slew of virgin companies including a music store chain (Virgin records) and airlines company.
So it is no surprise that Richard has now set his eyes on outer space.
I have viewed a couple of videos of Stallman's speeches and have transcripted one of them. Listening him speak, I couldn't help thinking that he has all the qualities of a leader. His speeches strike a cord and entertain at the same time. He has very good oratorical skills.
Recently, I was viewing a TV program reviewing a number of cell phones (which are the current craze in India). And their findings was in terms of cost effectiveness and design, the Motorola MotoFone F3 was their choice. This cellphone is sold for just around $25. And how did they cut the cost so much ?
Enter their unique display which uses Electronic paper which is developed by the US based E-Link. This cell phone doesn't need power to constantly display an image on the screen. It only needs a little charge when the text (or whatever) needs to be changed. The display stays on even when the battery is pulled out! And more over it is a beautiful phone sleek and thin.
I believe more and more gadgets are going to be manufactured using this new technology. Sony has already released its e-book reader which has the same effects of reading a real book. So PlasticLogic the company is on to a good thing.
Could this be the begining of the end of the paid hosting business ? I wonder what will happen to all those web hosts who are providing shared hosting plan now. If this trend catches on, only dedicated hosting will be profitable for these professional web hosting providers.
Having said that, I welcome this new venture by WikiPedia founder.
Craiglist is a wonderful site which is put to use and also sometimes misused by the people using its services. But one is bound to believe that the good it provides far outweighs the bad things. I know atleast one guy who emigrated to USA who has used craiglist to find better accomodation. Having read the story, I feel that the two owners running craiglist are true philanthropists.
Agreed, visual basic is a easy to use language with drag and drop widgets and all but when compared to a language such as Delphi - (Borland's now Inprise's Object Pascal language), it reveals a lot of chinks in its armour. More over, there is no dearth in scripting language that Mac users should miss this particular feature in their MS Office.
The VoIP could very well be the death of the telecommunication industry in India. Consider this fact - a call to the US can be made just for Rs 5 a minute using VoIP compared to Rs 20 a minute using land line or even more using mobile phone. And over the years, the quality of voice in VoIP has significantly improved.
The booming telecommunication industry in India is going through a flux and will not be able to bear this setback of allowing VoIP calls which will cut into their margins unless of course they also provide their customers VoIP handsets. More over, the BPOs can very well afford to use the land line phones to communicate with their contacts abroad.
In fact, it is 4 times costlier than the one hundred dollar laptop being developed by OLPC. And more over, OLPC project is purely a humanitarian project aimed at improving the education of the children. Where as Intel's project even though commendable is no where near to the lofty ideals of OLPC.
I have installed the latest ver of firefox on my machine running Linux and I can vouch that this new version is not buggy. It has never crashed even once and I found it to open quicker than firefox 1.5.
Having said that, if you are using a lot of extensions including del.icio.us and many prominent ones, then it could consume some memory and might significantly slow down the machine. I think it has got to be some problem with the extension you are using rather than firefox itself.
I do hope that the one laptop per child project will succeed in setting benchmarks for what a laptop should be and also how the applications which run on that laptop should behave (efficiently using memory being one of them).
The main problem with yahoo mail beta is the time it takes to load the interface in the web browser. It takes much longer to load yahoo beta than it takes gmail to load its mail interface.
On top of that, when you compare the sheer number of features that come with gmail, yahoo mail falls too short.
But I do like the new interface of yahoo mail beta - maybe they need to make further refinements and add new features which provide value.
Gimp already allows saving images in Gif format. It didn't earlier because of patent issues. It is nice really because now we can create banners which are less than 2k in size - even just a couple of hundred bytes.
....
But I do find that saving images in gif using gimp creates larger size image compared to saving the same image using say photoshop. I have sometimes wondered why this happens
I agree wholeheartedly with the article. In India for instance, Now a days where ever you look, you can see people with a cellphone glued to their ear. News channels provide SMS (Short Messaging Service) numbers where the viewers can send messages via their cellphones. And the cellular service doesn't come cheap. It is atleast twice as costly as making calls via landline though deals are available dime a dozen. Sometimes I wonder if all this is really a good thing.
Somebody should do a detailed study of the negetive effects of using a cellphone.
The article left out one significant item that all are interested in. It doesn't say how much it costs for a person to use their facilities .
Suppose there are 10 machines in ones office and you decide to use google sync on each of them. Now if you use say your gmail account to check your personal emails and by mistake tick the checkbox - "Remembers this on this computer". Won't it propagate the passwords you do not want the browser to remember to all the 10 machines ?
Now think of what happens if you have a 100 computers.....
When was uptime a factor in deciding whether an OS was better than the other? True uptime is one of the factors but not surely the decisive one. Security, how quick the patches are released for bugs and the stellar technical support should be the decisive factors in deciding the superiority of an OS. And taking all these factors, I feel tha t Linux comes way ahead of Windows.
I remember having recieved a rubic cube as a gift many years back. It took up a lot of my time in solving the cube. Heck the cube was so popular that there were entire books written detailing how to solve the cube. And the least time in which I could solve the cube was 20 minutes. Now a five dimentional rubic cube (albeit a software one) - that could be a real challenge even for rubic cube champions themselves. Too bad the software require microsoft dot net framework to run.
Isn't creating PDFs a default feature in openoffice.org ? And there are many programs in Linux which can convert a file into PDF. So how is what Microsoft is doing different from what we have in Linux ?
This inculcation of curiosity and resourcefulness is what makes studying at MIT truly unique. No wonder it is one of the premier educational institutions in the world.
All the exciting features apart, will Microsoft release the file format as an open standard ? That is the big question. Any new file format is most welcome as long as they are open and not controlled by propritery licences.
What I like most about half life game is that it is not just blind shooting of monsters though that is also involved. But you are forced to think while playing the game. It is just like solving a series of puzzling problems inside the game to get to the finishing line. And combined with the superior graphics engine, this is one game which rivals even Quake in game play and enjoyment.