I have used Private tunnel to connect to Hulu and similar services. It is offered by OpenVPN Technologies, the company behind OpenVPN, is quite fast compared to other offerings and the pricing is based on data usage as opposed to monthly plans, so it works out cheaper if you just want to use it occasionally to watch a few shows.
A couple of suggestions from someone who has done that over 5 years.
* Do *have* a mailing list. Nothing beats it reach.
* Have a good ticketing system. We used to let people who are online to pick up tickets from any geo and work on it unless it is something that requires hands on , in which case, we used to pass it on to the local contact.
* Use a good text based chatting solution. Video / audio solutions are good, but text is better for a lot of things, like small talk , sharing links or a way to avoid misunderstanding or misinterpretation that could happen in speaking. I generally prefer IRC for group chat. Setup a proxy server for IRC like https://code.google.com/p/dircproxy/ or have some form of logging and you could let users catch up with whatever happened on the channel while they are away.
* Arrange their timings, such that atleast one person from each geo will have atleast a hours overlap with a person from the geo closest to him. EG:
* Have video meetings r meetings over the phone atleast once a week.
* Get them to put their pictures, phone nos., and responsibilities on a intranet / address book.
* Have weekly meetings in any medium and if you can't have everyone to have their say, let one person from each geo each week talk about any issues they have or something good they did that week.
* Other collaborative software that is good to have : wiki , version control, Calendar (egroupware / google / exchange) , pastebin (share code / error snippets).
I think it has its uses as a replacement for Dynamic fonts.
Dynamic fonts was mostly useful for Indic and other complex scripts at a time when Unicode was still nascent and there were still challenges in getting Indic and other scripts rendered properly. Publishing houses (all of them earlier and most of them now) use an ASCII based font and push dynamic fonts to IE users while expecting other browser users to download them. While Unicode should make this moot, slow adaption of Unicode by publishers and users and the fact that by default, most Windows XP installs did not come with Indic pre-configured means there is still market for this hack. Publishers could push either their ASCII hack font or Unicode font to users this way at least until there is more mainstream adoption of Unicode and in the process help non-technical people, especially those not using IE, access to content with less issues.
No doubt, the no. of good American films are more on an average than Indian films(especially Hindi movies), but you saw the wrong movies. Except the 2nd one, both are duds and the 2nd one was a remake of a Tamil movie, which is far better in terms of production quality, story telling, etc., I also suggest you try Tamil/Malayalam movies. They sometimes go over the top, but are more entertaining. Also, try the List of popular Bollywood films at wikipedia and the forums at Desitorrents, a bittorrent site.
That is an oversimplification. The generally accepted Hindu theory of the origin of the universe is the one mentioned in the Rig Veda, which many Indians pride on being close to modern scientific theories. Carl Sagan, in his Cosmos, states that the Hindu religion is not only the only religion that is dedicated to the idea that the cosmos itself undergoes infinite deaths & rebirths but also its time scales correspond to modern cosmology. Both these articles provide a better overview (although the first one is a sort of advertorial, it is bang on.)
On topic, I agree with the point you made. Each & every religion & civilisations had their own theories about the universe's existence and more or less, some of them may be premonitory and some exaggerated, so its quite stupid to claim the Bible/Quran/Rig Veda/etc is the sole truth.
We have a similar effort going on to provide low cost computing for public schools. After much thought, we finally weighed in for a live CD solution over thin clients, because networking still requires maintenance, bandwidth is an issue and still expensive since these schools use donated hardware. We will be using a light weight modified Ubuntu Live CD with XFCE4 as the default desktop, which will be copied and run from the hard disk.
Try Privoxy, a GPL'ed lightweight proxy server that runs on OS X, linux, *nix & Windows. Besides installing and pointing your browser to 127.0.0.1:8118, there is nothing else to be configured/done. I actually prefer it over adblock, since it gives me a choice of browsers and the default filters are better than some of the filters available for adblock and you can override ads that you want to visit, handy when I am using Gmail and find something interesting.
The m17n library allow you to view and type complex text languages like Indic, Arabic, Hebrew and other languages. While this is possible by using QT3.2+ & GTK2.0+pango, this restricted one to just 2 toolkits and to two heavyweight desktops(XFCE4 is the exception though). The library is also a good compromise between a toolkit dependent solution like pango/QT3.2 and Server based solutions like the doomed Indix and STSF.
The screenshots here show firefox and magicpoint, applications that use different toolkits displaying multilinugal texts. I have even seen but not used windowmaker rpms compiled with m17n support.
A very practical example would be something like Damn Small Linux, which is a pretty lightweight live CD in both disk size (~50 MB) and Memory usage (runs on 64 MB RAM). This was ideal for a school near my place that wanted to use it as a teaching resource but wanted it in their native language. I finally am settling for XFCE4 and GTK2 applications like OO.o, Firefox.
The keyboard solutions were too rudimentary, in the case of xkb for phonetic keymaps for indian languages or too buggy and complex, in the case of IIIMF. M17n was a joy to use from day one and rpms for Mandrake 10.1 & debs for Ubuntu/Debian unstable are available.
The conflict in kashmir is more complex than you think and not all kashimiri's want independence or secede from india (esp those living in Ladakh and Jammu) or want to join pakistan. You have to remember that Kashmir is a ethnically & religiously diverse state comprising of Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists and even the Kashmiri muslims and hindus have much more in common with each other than with muslims or hindus from outside the regions. Personally, i feel an autonomous region with free moment among Kashmir, India & Pakistan to be a good idea. But whatever the solution, i want it to happen in my lifetime.
To be on topic, the LeT is mostly comprised of Pakistani extremists and is a declared terrorist outfit by the USA and one of the first Kashmiri terrorists outfits to be banned by Pakistan. To end on a positive note, read this editorial in the pakistan newspaper Dawn.
Actually, rails/any ruby library/app/whatever is quite easy to install if it is available on ruby gems and you have installed ruby gems. ruby gems is sort of like apt for ruby. Once you install gems, to install rails, all you have to do is, gem install rails and gem uninstall rails to uninstall rails. Although you are unlikely to need it.:-D
Another great resource is the Ruby on rails weblog which has links to more tutorials, job postings about rails, updates, etc., There's also an updated video tutorial on building a weblog.
Wikipedia has two articles churning out information about things as they happen besides info about the disaster that have already happened and they contain plenty of links to other news sources. See, 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake in India
In this case, it's India's IT Act which has allowed this crap of holding the service provider responsible for all acts of it's users. This story from the same newspaper shows the aptitude & intelligence of Indian cops and lawmakers when it comes to technology.
Windows(XP) and Linux more or less support the same no. of languages. The latter more, because of obvious reasons. In fact, the technology ( Opentype fonts ) used for Indian and other Complex text languages like Arabic, Urdu, Khmer,etc., was actually created by Microsoft and now supported in QT, GTK and other X11 apps that use the m17 library
As far as Indian language is concerned, Microsoft had the first mover advantage in terms of input & reading Indian languages, but in the past 4-5 years, Linux has caught on and is ahead in terms of translation of applications & DE's like kde,gnome,mozilla, openoffice.org,etc.,
Some links:
Indlinux A project localising FLOSS apps into Hindi and providing support for other teams working on other Indian languages.
Indlinux wiki has got a fortnightly newsletter and other pieces of info.
IANAL and I don't know about India's legal system, but I don't think they have the sue-for-every-mistake mentality we do here.
Two recent developments, One where doctors
fall under the Consumer Protection Act. Here complaints are handled by a consumer forum, ie., headed by a retired judge and other experts and the doctor & the patient have to trash it out. its quicker than going through the courts.
Secondly, the Supreme court in a judgement has ruled that a doctor cannot be held liable for criminal negligence for the death of a patient during the treatment due to error of judgement or an accident.
It is fixed.
Squarefree has a good summary of the changes in 1.0, along with the releases.
Another major improvement i love is the find as you type toolbar that appears everytime you do a search. The behaviour is like opera, but much more user-friendly since the toolbar is dynamic, appears at the bottom and allows you to highlight the searched text.
The only thing i complain is, there should be a CTL and Pango enabled binaries available for linux for people viewing indian language sites(UTF-8 encoded).
The New York Times has reviews of the books published way back when they were released. Of the three, the first and the second are by W.H.Auden, who was one of the staunchest fan of Tolkien and it's quite interesting to read what he thinks about fantasy.
Slashdot Mirror
No limit at all. Unless, you get a seizure first.
The mint has a humorous post on one of the worst jobs in that list.
I have used Private tunnel to connect to Hulu and similar services. It is offered by OpenVPN Technologies, the company behind OpenVPN, is quite fast compared to other offerings and the pricing is based on data usage as opposed to monthly plans, so it works out cheaper if you just want to use it occasionally to watch a few shows.
A couple of suggestions from someone who has done that over 5 years.
* Do *have* a mailing list. Nothing beats it reach.
* Have a good ticketing system. We used to let people who are online to pick up tickets from any geo and work on it unless it is something that requires hands on , in which case, we used to pass it on to the local contact.
* Use a good text based chatting solution. Video / audio solutions are good, but text is better for a lot of things, like small talk , sharing links or a way to avoid misunderstanding or misinterpretation that could happen in speaking. I generally prefer IRC for group chat. Setup a proxy server for IRC like https://code.google.com/p/dircproxy/ or have some form of logging and you could let users catch up with whatever happened on the channel while they are away.
* Arrange their timings, such that atleast one person from each geo will have atleast a hours overlap with a person from the geo closest to him. EG:
* Have video meetings r meetings over the phone atleast once a week.
* Get them to put their pictures, phone nos., and responsibilities on a intranet / address book.
* Have weekly meetings in any medium and if you can't have everyone to have their say, let one person from each geo each week talk about any issues they have or something good they did that week.
* Other collaborative software that is good to have : wiki , version control, Calendar (egroupware / google / exchange) , pastebin (share code / error snippets).
I think it has its uses as a replacement for Dynamic fonts. Dynamic fonts was mostly useful for Indic and other complex scripts at a time when Unicode was still nascent and there were still challenges in getting Indic and other scripts rendered properly. Publishing houses (all of them earlier and most of them now) use an ASCII based font and push dynamic fonts to IE users while expecting other browser users to download them. While Unicode should make this moot, slow adaption of Unicode by publishers and users and the fact that by default, most Windows XP installs did not come with Indic pre-configured means there is still market for this hack. Publishers could push either their ASCII hack font or Unicode font to users this way at least until there is more mainstream adoption of Unicode and in the process help non-technical people, especially those not using IE, access to content with less issues.
Another effective and greener solution is to use Turmeric. It does not kill ants, but just deters them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-12-05/Page_creation_restrictions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pum p_(news)#Anon._page_creation_disabled
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Nocreatetex t - The message that gets displayed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Nocrea tetext
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_fo r_creation - The page where anon users can list content.
No doubt, the no. of good American films are more on an average than Indian films(especially Hindi movies), but you saw the wrong movies. Except the 2nd one, both are duds and the 2nd one was a remake of a Tamil movie, which is far better in terms of production quality, story telling, etc., I also suggest you try Tamil/Malayalam movies. They sometimes go over the top, but are more entertaining. Also, try the List of popular Bollywood films at wikipedia and the forums at Desitorrents, a bittorrent site.
Surprising or not, not the first instance, though.
Dupe or not..It seems Jon Katz's article on slashdot itself is cited.
Not only the music industry, even the UK newspaper's are facing tough competition from the BBC's news website.
On topic, I agree with the point you made. Each & every religion & civilisations had their own theories about the universe's existence and more or less, some of them may be premonitory and some exaggerated, so its quite stupid to claim the Bible/Quran/Rig Veda/etc is the sole truth.
We have a similar effort going on to provide low cost computing for public schools. After much thought, we finally weighed in for a live CD solution over thin clients, because networking still requires maintenance, bandwidth is an issue and still expensive since these schools use donated hardware. We will be using a light weight modified Ubuntu Live CD with XFCE4 as the default desktop, which will be copied and run from the hard disk.
Try Privoxy, a GPL'ed lightweight proxy server that runs on OS X, linux, *nix & Windows. Besides installing and pointing your browser to 127.0.0.1:8118, there is nothing else to be configured/done. I actually prefer it over adblock, since it gives me a choice of browsers and the default filters are better than some of the filters available for adblock and you can override ads that you want to visit, handy when I am using Gmail and find something interesting.
The m17n library allow you to view and type complex text languages like Indic, Arabic, Hebrew and other languages. While this is possible by using QT3.2+ & GTK2.0+pango, this restricted one to just 2 toolkits and to two heavyweight desktops(XFCE4 is the exception though). The library is also a good compromise between a toolkit dependent solution like pango/QT3.2 and Server based solutions like the doomed Indix and STSF.
The screenshots here show firefox and magicpoint, applications that use different toolkits displaying multilinugal texts. I have even seen but not used windowmaker rpms compiled with m17n support.
A very practical example would be something like Damn Small Linux, which is a pretty lightweight live CD in both disk size (~50 MB) and Memory usage (runs on 64 MB RAM). This was ideal for a school near my place that wanted to use it as a teaching resource but wanted it in their native language. I finally am settling for XFCE4 and GTK2 applications like OO.o, Firefox.
The keyboard solutions were too rudimentary, in the case of xkb for phonetic keymaps for indian languages or too buggy and complex, in the case of IIIMF. M17n was a joy to use from day one and rpms for Mandrake 10.1 & debs for Ubuntu/Debian unstable are available.
To be on topic, the LeT is mostly comprised of Pakistani extremists and is a declared terrorist outfit by the USA and one of the first Kashmiri terrorists outfits to be banned by Pakistan. To end on a positive note, read this editorial in the pakistan newspaper Dawn.
Actually, rails/any ruby library/app/whatever is quite easy to install if it is available on ruby gems and you have installed ruby gems. ruby gems is sort of like apt for ruby. Once you install gems, to install rails, all you have to do is, gem install rails and gem uninstall rails to uninstall rails. Although you are unlikely to need it. :-D
Another great resource is the Ruby on rails weblog which has links to more tutorials, job postings about rails, updates, etc., There's also an updated video tutorial on building a weblog.
Wikipedia has two articles churning out information about things as they happen besides info about the disaster that have already happened and they contain plenty of links to other news sources. See, 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake in India
In this case, it's India's IT Act which has allowed this crap of holding the service provider responsible for all acts of it's users. This story from the same newspaper shows the aptitude & intelligence of Indian cops and lawmakers when it comes to technology.
Some links:
Indlinux A project localising FLOSS apps into Hindi and providing support for other teams working on other Indian languages.
Indlinux wiki has got a fortnightly newsletter and other pieces of info.
Kannada Localisation Initiative a project localising and translating FLOSS applications into Kannada
Indic computing project Similar to Indlinux in structure, but focussing on documentation and support for ISV's, linguists and Developers
Whitehouse.org has done a great interview (parody) job here.
IANAL and I don't know about India's legal system, but I don't think they have the sue-for-every-mistake mentality we do here. Two recent developments, One where doctors fall under the Consumer Protection Act. Here complaints are handled by a consumer forum, ie., headed by a retired judge and other experts and the doctor & the patient have to trash it out. its quicker than going through the courts. Secondly, the Supreme court in a judgement has ruled that a doctor cannot be held liable for criminal negligence for the death of a patient during the treatment due to error of judgement or an accident.
Squarefree has a good summary of the changes in 1.0, along with the releases. Another major improvement i love is the find as you type toolbar that appears everytime you do a search. The behaviour is like opera, but much more user-friendly since the toolbar is dynamic, appears at the bottom and allows you to highlight the searched text.
The only thing i complain is, there should be a CTL and Pango enabled binaries available for linux for people viewing indian language sites(UTF-8 encoded).
The New York Times has reviews of the books published way back when they were released. Of the three, the first and the second are by W.H.Auden, who was one of the staunchest fan of Tolkien and it's quite interesting to read what he thinks about fantasy.