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Archive for March, 2006

One Decade of Proprietary Remains

CD's pile

THE head of the Apache project — the project which runs about two-thirds of the world’s Web sites — suggests that free software will rein. He predicts the end of commercial software to be only a decade away.

Apache’s Greg Stein says commercial software’s days are numbered. Instead, we’ll be paying for software support in the years ahead, he says

So on the face of it, commercial software already fights a losing battle.

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Turning 30 Thousand

Pause/Resume Demo
My pause/resume demonstrative program

EARLIER this afternoon noticed that my MATLAB profile had gone past the 30,000 count milstone. That count corresponds to the number of downloads of my code and programs over at MATLAB Central. I keep track of these numbers three times a week using HTML syndication. After some hesitance, I thought it was worth raving about; just because I rarely get the chance! [smile /]

Related item: A short write-up on an honourable highest position: first world-wide. This was my greatest moment of excitement, for which my grandfather popped some champagne.

In Memory of Duke Nukem

This clip reminds me of my teenage years as a heavy gamer. I wonder if this mentally ‘tickles’ others in quite the same way.

[UPDATE: clip omitted as it caused the page to poison and crash the browser]

The above, by the way, is not valid XHTML. It contains attributes that are application-specific. For the very first time and after almost 1,000 blog posts, I permit an invalid element to exist. Then again, it is also the first video embedment, which fortunately is cross-platform.

Dell Buy Alienware

Dell XPS
The new Dell XPS 600

RUMOURS have revolved for over a week, according to which Dell wish to buy Alienware. This is finally confirmed to be true. High-end AMD-based computer would extend the level of choice, which is something that becomes more prevalent with Dell. They are slowly departing from Wintel as the exclusive offer. Clearly enough, they are beginning to sell Linux as well.

Dell has agreed to purchase gaming PC maker Alienware, in a rare acquisition designed to improve Alienware’s supply chain and boost Dell’s standing among PC enthusiasts.

The Business Search Engines Create

Yahoo telephone

COMMERCIAL effects of search engines can no longer be ignored. Now that Google Finance has gone live, even economy is managed and supervised by major search engines (Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and Google Finance).

Various agencies and freelancers are finally offering services which promise manipulation of search results while businesses perceive search engines as a vital source of revenue. The
following recent article provides somewhat of a decent primer with special reference to the current industrial state-of-affairs.

Part science, part art, search-engine marketing is perhaps the fastest-evolving segment of the Internet. A cottage industry of search-marketing techies labors to adjust keywords to a search engine’s algorithm, the set of rules used to rank search results. The algorithm used by Google, the market leader, has hundreds to thousands of components that determine the results.

Windows Vista Delayed Until Next Year

Longhorn beta

THE release of Windows Vista has been delayed until January 2007. This of course implies that its emergence will miss the holidays season.

Windows users: Now should be an excellent time to put resentment or fear aside and migrate to Linux.
Just because you dislike it or do not know it sufficiently well, does not make it evil. If you are still unconvinced that Vista (formerly Longhorn) will be disastrous, see the links below. This has been said time and time again, but funded advertisements begin to mask the truth. Be misled no more; put apathy and resistance to change aside.

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Mozilla Thunderbird Calendar Released

CrossOver

AFTER some long experience with a large variety of E-mail clients, I settled on Mozilla Thunderbird. I did so without any hesitation once the application was sufficiently mature. Thunderbird is immaculate: stable, predictable, highly-extensible and even interoperable (including importers and exporters).

A calendaring component for Mozilla Thunderbird (version 1.5 or later) has been officially released. It bridges a certain gap where Sunbird, as well as another third-party applications, integrated calendaring into Thunderbird insufficiently well. The last time I checked, one such Thunderbird extension was developed to become Windows-compatible only (shame on the developer/s).

The site introduces the new extension as follows:

The Lightning Project is a redesign of the Calendar component. Its goal is to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Mozilla Thunderbird.

I am still reluctant to move my calendar from a portable Palm PDA onto a desktop. It can have an adverse effect on partability. I will have to look into the interaction between the two, as well as multiple desktops. I currently have close to 10 Thunderbird extensions, which make it beyond bloated (albeit very stable and robust, unlike an overloaded Firefox).

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