Go the Ubuntu Way!

Although the world is going gaga over the free to home OS delivery service provided by Cannonical to market its Linux OS Ubuntu, many people I have met still are unaware about it.So I suggest strongly that you order your copy of Ubuntu today!

Visit http://www.ubuntu.org

Here is my review of Ubuntu

The Good
Here are a few things I really like in Ubuntu / Linux:

The Gnome Epiphany Web Browser: my favorite browser. See my blog entry on the subject.

Edutainment + kids games: On linux, one can download a number of games for children that are of high quality from the point of view of the material they cover. Sure, some games like supertux, are just plain fun 'mario brothers' style games. But many can be powerful tools that can hone the brain power of children. Here are some of them:

kturtle (logo programming)
gcompris
tuxmath / tuxtyping

Quality open source desktop applications. Who said that open source can't produce desktop apps of higher quality than their commercial counterparts. If you thought the adobe had the best vector graphics editing application, take a look a inkscape. For pictures, check out the beauty of f-spot. For spreadsheets, I think gnumeric is terrific.

I particularly appreciate lyx, a wonderful wysiwym editor that does all the heavy lifting for you. If you're about to write a book and don't have in-depth knowledge of docbook or latex, then I believe lyx is the right choice.

Strong pdf support. One can easily produce a pdf version of a document, translate a postscript file to PDF. I recently printed a web page to a postscript file and then translated it to PDF.

Editors galores. Lots of editors to choose from. gedit, kedit, kate, jedit, and many more besides.

Strong device support in general: plugged in my camera and automatically started downloaded photos, without even having to download anything.

Amazing endless suite of kde apps. from kontact to koffice, kde is simply an amazing source of seemingly boundless energy.

Java:

Unlike the last OS i worked on, there are no issues regarding obtaining the latest java udpates on time all the java ides work with it: intellij, eclipse, and netbeans
have the option of building java applications that use the gtk toolkit
latest firefox

No viruses, no Symantec, no McAfee

The Bad

Projector support is not really there like it is on a mac

Sleep does not conserve battery well

Had some hickups with hibernate after a kernel update

Have some weird totem/video problems at the moment, though there's no lack of video players for gnome or kde, this one happens to be the default and for some reason hangs when attempting video playback

Summary
The main reason I switched to ubuntu is that I can now compile and launch my java apps in 1/2 to 1/3 the time it used to take me on my last OS.

Finally, contrary the general perception, I don't compile my gnome apps or kernel. I download and install precompiled binary distributions of all my apps.

I'm very satisfied with Ubuntu and I give it a 8 out of 10

The New Look!

Changed the template along with some new links.

Although I was successful in removing the navbar, but it looked ugly as the template was having an empty space and it didn't look nice.

Please let me know your views on the new template.

Regs
Gaurav

CTF Football

I have been threatened by many to release the CTF-Football pac, which I keep boasting about.

So finally, its up for grabs.

http://www.geocities.com/neutrinoblast/ctf-football.zip

Why not a Reservation in the Parliament..?

Reservation. The dirty Indian politics has made the mock of the issue once again. Its the turn of the so-called non-dicriminatory Congress to play vote-bank politics. It seems so obvious that this just to please the OBC voters. When the country voted for people like Sonia Gandhi, they had in mind that this lady has a cool head with her. You can expect these local bully-turned-MPs to do this stuff but people like Manmohan Singh not only trying to destroy these world class institutions for their petty interests. They are not satisfied even now. He is shamelessly asking for reservation in PRIVATE SECTOR JOBS!

But this not their fault totally. People like Mayawati, Mulayam Singh etcetra have hardly studied beyond the middle school, so they have initiated about 50% reservation(the max. it can get) in the UP State level institutes for they want to garner those extra OBC votes. So it is quite natural that any cheaply influenced party would follow. Now that Congress is following them, I'll have to set my grading in the following order : cheap, cheaper, cheapest, worst.

Agreed that they want to save their seats from the other parties who are doing their Reservation bit in their respective states.. but they must realize that this is an irreversible process. Because once started, the party which genuinely is concerned about the true interests of the country will have to face the brunt of being labelled as an anti-social, foreign power influenced party and is most likely to be swept off.


What is really flabbergasting is the fact that the taxpayer pays for educating some of the unworthy students in IITs and IIMs. The cost for educating an IITian is around 1.5 lakh rupees and for an IIM guy is around 4.5 lakh Rupees. Assume even if 5% students out of those 50% seats reserved in IIT (around 2000 seats) and IIM (around 500 seats) (125 in all) are not worthy enough, the government loses 3 crore rupees every year, forget about the possible rise in standards if the reservation is removed completely. The same money is sufficient to fund the complete schooling of about 1100 students!

Some more facts. CS at NIT Trichy closed at an amazing AIR 663 for a UP General candidate. The same seat went to a SC from UP with an AIR of 93000! Such situations are very common at AIEEE, its just that until its not IIT or IIM who the hell cares..

Okay, Sardarji.. what about Reservation of weaker sections in your arena? Petrified...?

What about reservation in the jobs for Pilots.. let them crash your plane..

What about reservation in the jobs for the PM's private physician.. let them experiment on your body when you have a cardiac arrest..

What about reservation in the jobs for the PM's security.. let them hapilly surrender you to the LeT commander in return of their lives..

We buy Headlines!

Sunday afternoon and I'm flipping channels when I spot this on the ticker of CNN IBN: Nobel Laureate Kroto visits Amity campus: says Amity students most exciting he has ever met.

Yeah, right. I mean sure Kroto must have visited Amity and made some pleasant remarks about the students but to see this flashed on national television under the heading "Edu News" is a bit much. And this, on a channel that says it is serious about journalism and will do 'whatever it takes.'

Of course, it's an advertisement - just like Medianet articles in Bombay Times - but surely you can't put such information out on a ticker under the heading "Edu News". Imagine a ticker ad bought by Narendra Modi or Uma Bharti. If you wouldn't book misleading "ads" issued by politicians why are educational institutes exempt? Because they should not be.

Especially in the light of:
1) Students sue Amity
2) This site recently put up by folks claiming to be Amity's own students

But the issue is not even how genuine Amity is. The issue is that advertisements must clearly APPEAR to be advertisements on a news ticker. Otherwise they will be mistaken for news - and that would tarnish the reputation of the channel as a whole.

And oh, the same 'news' was running on Star News as well. But then, one doesn't really have very high expectations from that channel!

Lastly, for all I know Google Adsense is going to deliver an Amity ad in the space right above this post. Such is the irony of life... But you clearly know it's an ad, right? That's all I am asking the powers that be in television to ensure.

Correction: I saw the ad again and it does say "advertisement" on the right hand corner. However "Edu News" is far more prominent on the left hand corner and this apparently is the handiwork of the advertiser and not the channel.

However, as a viewer I still feel misled. As an adpublisher on my blog I am the last one on the planet to suggest channels should not make money from ads. But in certain cases one does have to intervene and specify what is acceptable and what is not.

Desi Skype or Damp Squib? :: VoiFi

Well, all you Skype fans.. meet the so-called 'Desi Skype'.. VoiFi.
VoiFi is the brainchild of Sabeer Bhatia (co-inventor of Hotmail).

The recent extra-hyped launch of VoiFi prompted me to try this out.

On paper VoiFi inculcates features like :-]
a) PC2PC Calling for Free.
b) Free SMSing
c) IM
d) Playing small built-in games with friends

The demonstration by Sabeer Bhatia was actually quite impressive, but atleast I did not find any USP which would propt Skype and other popular messenger software users to get hooked on to VoiFi.

Let me explain the process first. You have to visit VoiFi.com and get yourself registered. Even the registration process is quite difficult as the page asks you to type a text throught the image, and the right input is treated wrong. I had to do the process four times before finally getting registered.

Then, you have to download the 6 MB program and get it installed. The program requires the msxml4 pack which is not available in Win98 and the initial version of Windows 2000. It keeps prompting every now and then about this. Finally I got logged in, but I had to have a VoiFi friend for using the mentioned features. When after some invitations I finally got a friend who had signed up, I used the PC2PC feature and the sound quality was VERY IMPRESSIVE.

The Gaming part is a small time-pass event and you don't get much choice for the games. Regarding the SMS feature, you cannot SMS to non-VoiFi people unlike Yahoo! and that's quite absurd.

The other bugs in VoiFi were :
a) It WANTS Internet Access whenever the computer boots up, and it keeps on prompting every now and then about this.

b) After realising my YahooMessenger and GoogleTalk were much better, I decided to dipose it off. Even uninstalling does not remove it completely. You gotto do all the stuff yourself.

c) Very Frequent hangs and application crashes.

On the overall i would give it a 4 out of 10. I mean, the only thing worth the trouble is the sound quality during PC2PC calls. Frankly I did't expect this from Sabeer.

Welcome to CrossFire!

Welcome to CrossFire!

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