OMPUTERS slowly penetrate the less developed nations. Only sheer ridicule can at times prevent this from happening, as Bill Gates once tactlessly demonstared. Possibly in response to the $100 Open Source laptop, Microsoft announced that they will launch Windows XP Starter Edition in Africa around July this year. Yet, do not get excited or raise your hopes prematurely. Starter Edition of Windows XP is very limited, much like the Starter Edition of Windows Vista. To quote an old writeup:

The cut-down software limits the users in a number of ways including number of applications running at once, printing and network abilities. Gartner’s research has pointed out that the lack of features and limitations with applications will be very frustrating for users who may have had access to computers before at school or in cyber-cafes.

Thunderbird with an Aqua-based theme called CrossOver

OZILLA Thunderbird is an Open Source mail/news (most latterly RSS) client, which I have praised several times in the past. It is also my default mail application — the haven I found after experience with various other packages.

At present, I continue to use a mail notifier for Thunderbird which is rather stripped-down and is called the Mozilla New Mail Icon (project homepage). However, it lacks some of the power of other checkers — particularly those that deliver detailed information without interfering with the user’s current work (e.g. steal window focus). The good news is that the Thunderbird team is making progress and is bridging the gap between the latest of Outlook and the Mozilla family of applications. A good example of this is their calendar extension. They may even go farther ahead by incorporating tabs, which for mail clients is unprecedented.

In Thunderbird 2.0 there will finally be a built-in function which triggers an overview-type popup whenever new mail arrives (see screenshot). This way, users will not necessarily have to divert attention to the bulky application. When mail arrives in large volumes, such features can be very valuable.

A great proportion of today’s software is illegally copied

OR those who insist on using proprietary commercial software (or, in some cases, Open yet not Free open-source software), there are probably more reasons to fear. Apart from Genuine Advantage in Windows — that which delivers critical updates only to legal copies of the operating system — there is a further crackdown on illegal use of software in the UK. As one article suggests:

Anti-software piracy group the Business Software Alliance is offering a $36,000 reward to anyone who informs on employers who use illegal or unlicensed software.

The days are over when vendors turn a blind eye to piracy, wishing that the prospective cutomer becomes dependent on the package and locked in due to closed formats. With largely networked machines, network licences can be enforced, often in the form of invasion to privacy and communication that is made behind the user’s back. Be warned.

AKING up early and staying focused permanently is a hard task, especially if maintained on a daily basis. I sometimes need some motivators and ideas for support. Exercise often gives me a mental boost, owing to natural extraction of endorphins, but there are also proverbial statements that I go by. They describe my relationship to work pretty well.

• Do what makes you hop out of bed in the morning and keeps you busy until it’s too late to stay awake.
• Do what you love, the money will come

The first among the two is an attempt to recapture a statement that I once read.

OME numerous weeks ago, a film was released which was created using nothing but Open Source software. Whether its content (graphic objects) and source code were published under the GNU GPL, it is hard to tell, but it could raise intersting questions and lead to ideas. Apparently, it was the Creative Commons Licence. More details can be found in the official site of the film.

Why is it all so intersting and worthy of a mention? Think about downloading the source code, which was used to render the film. One can then tweak it, re-genrate the film, and release what becomes a quickly-built derivate. Open Source films and their high merit can be illustrated by looking at re-use made by Disney. Although this latter site is in Russian, the pictures are self-explanatory.

number of links that reach a given site can be probed (or estimated based on crawlers) using some special syntax in queries. The universally-accepted form for the query has become link:http://example.org, where the string http://example.org can be either a domain name or an individual page that resides deeper inside the site.

Altavista seems to report the highest number of inbound links, yet not all of them are visible. In general, the overall number of results, as estimated at the very start, is always misleading. Not all results are reachable from the search engines, so a false illusion is given. In terms of saturation of results (number of links reported), then comes Yahoo and only later comes Google. MSN does not support this query syntax, yet it appears to lose popularity anyway (“MSN’s search market share dropped from 14 percent to 11 percent”).

Technorati is a good tool for finding fresh links to a given site very quickly. Links are tracked almost in real time, owing to feeds and pinging services. In that respect, Technorati is Web 2.0-oriented.

ORE nations than ever before are showing interest in a purely electronic system for managing people’s records, funds, and vehicles. Take, for example, this older story on the use of biometrics. Cities and individual shops can already make authentication immediate when payment are being made. More latterly, a city in France began testing the idea of cities where cash is a antiquated notion of the past.

The tourist city of Caen in Normandy is hosting a major European trial of the use of NFC (near field communication) – a mobile technology that can be used for anything from paying for groceries to finding out about your home town.