Kabhi kabhi aditi zindagi mein yuhi coding karna padta hai,
Kabhi kabhi aditi wo, code naa chale to ek sapna lagta hai,
Aise mein koi kaise apne ungliyon ko chalane se roke?
Aur kaise koi soch le everything’s gonna be ok?
Just a day back, CUIL was launched. And from the day one, every one started raising questions, whether it can be a Google Killer or not. So, I decided to use CUIL for one full day, instead of Google.com, just to figure out whether CUIL is worth the hype or not, and figured out that somehow its not a good idea to switch to CUIL. Well, there are a lot of reasons for that. But before that, lets just list out why it is getting so much of hype.
Enough of praise of CUIL, as a potential google killer. Lets just face it now. The search engine is not worth the hype, as I found. Atleast I am not switching to CUIL permanently, for next few months. May be it will be just another search engine, like Powerset or Wisenut, which also tried to make a dent in Google’s market share, but miserably failed. Obviously, I have got a proof for the same, as I have used it for one day. Listing out my findings below.
Finally after one day of using CUIL, and missing google, I feel a bit too relaxed, as I am back to Google. Any search engine trying to call itself a Google killer, should atleast think again. After powerset, wisenut, a9.com, and now CUIL, it seems that for the next few years, Google have to wait for the true contender. May be MS-Yahoo merger can result in a better alternative of our most beloved search engine. Till then, happy googling.
Just a few days back fed up with the signal quality of a few channels that were put in the far end of the spectrum, I called my local cable guy and told him to remove the connection as I would be moving to DTH. He asked me to try the new digital Set Top Box that they were about to install. I agreed thinking what could I possibly lose? I was completely surprised when the new set top box was installed. The picture and sound quality was just like DTH. All my favourite channels were available and where of uniform quality. I am not the lone case. Cable operators across India in non CAS notified metros are migrating their networks to digital from their old analog systems in a big way. This is in the face of stiff competition from DTH operators who are weaning away a large number of cable subscribers with their better services.
TRAI on Friday asked the government to set a five-year timeframe for all cable TV operators to upgrade their analogue network to digital mode to compete with new distribution platforms, such as IPTV, HITS, besides improving their revenue earning prospects. The regulator, while acknowledging that spectacular growth of Indian Cable TV industry during the past two decades was due to the entrepreneurial skills of the local operators, has pointed out that the present mode of Cable TV transmission, which is predominantly analogue, has various limitations. “It (analogue systems) lacks scope for technological upgrade, appropriate addressability and efficient resource utilisation,” TRAI said. While existing operators will be given a five-year window, TRAI has said that new cable TV players must be mandated to have digital networks in place within a three-year timeframe. In its final recommendations, the regulator also added that Multi System Operators (MSOs), too, should be mandated to do away with analogue networks in five years.
Trai has also asked the government to implement regulations so that Cable TV operators become eligible for seeking Right of Way (RoW) for laying fiber underground as well as over poles on non exclusive basis. “Ministry of I&B may initiate a dialogue with the state governments to facilitate the formulation of uniform RoW policy for Cable TV operators,” TRAI added.
The reasons that digital scores over analog cable transmission in my view are
1. Since all channels are carried on a single channel using digital modulation, signal quality of all the channels is same, this is not the case in old analog systems. You might have experienced this at your homes where the initial channels have very good quality but as we start moving to the next channels the signal quality also starts deteriorating.
2. Digital technology also gives two-way communication capability to the cable box, so users can purchase pay-per-view programming without use of a telephone line, in addition to video on demand services and a secure signal.
3. By using digital mode the widespread practice of customer under declaration will be stopped. The local cable guys regularly understate the number of their subscribers thus causing large under recoveries for television channels. Now since every subscriber will need a set top box this would no longer be that easy to do.
4. New services like language selection, subtitle selection, changing of viewing angle while watching a live cricket match, storing of live feed etc which were earlier only available on DTH can now be easily deployed on the cable network as well.
In the coming few years if the government pursues this policy with much vigor, we are going to have a widespread deployment of digital cable throughout India. We have already witnessed the telecom revolution, rolling out of digital cable along with new technologies like DTH, IPTV and HITS could also in the near future bring about a revolution in Television broadcasting also.
Friday, July 25, 2008 Microsoft announced that, Microsoft will sponsor $100k money to the Apache Software Foundation and Microsoft called this as “The Apache Way“. Microsoft also contributing a patch to ADOdb. Microsoft also moved 1000 protocols from it’s Communications Protocol Program to its Open Specification Promise. This move help developers to use code without any fear of patient law suite.
Ramji Said, who runs the Open Source Software Lab for Microsoft and is its director of open source technology strategy.
PHP is a popular language. Nearly 80% of PHP projects are developed on Windows but that 80% are deployed on Linux. “If we create great PHP support and we create excitement among PHP developers then there is opportunity for Windows Servers. We are passionate about this and with great support from our legal team we found a way to do it.
ADOdb patch enables support for SQL Server through a new “native driver for PHP” that was built by Microsoft’s SQL Server team.
Jim Jagielski, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation said,
The collection of sponsors that we have allow us to provide the supporting infrastructure to our community so they can focus on writing high quality code and make it available to everyone.
Microsoft’s $100k sponsorship to Apache software foundation make them one of platinum sponsors of Apache software foundation. Other two sponsors are Google and Yahoo
Source : Networlworld
Abstract data type (ADT)
Abstract data type (ADT) is a specification of a set of data and the set of operations that can be performed on the data. Such a data type is abstract in the sense that it is independent of various concrete implementations. The definition can be mathematical, or it can be programmed as an interface. A first class ADT supports the creation of multiple instances of the ADT, and the interface normally provides a constructor, which returns an abstract handle to new data, and several operations, which are functions accepting the abstract handle as an argument.
Block Diagram
A block diagram is a pictorial model of a process or system. They are heavily used in the engineering world in hardware design, software design, and process flow diagrams.The block diagram is typically used for a higher level, less detailed description aimed more at understanding the overall concepts and less at understanding the details of implementation. Contrast this with the schematic diagram and layout diagram used in the electrical engineering world, where the schematic diagram shows the details of each electrical component and the layout diagram shows the details of physical construction.
Code Access Security
Code Access Security (CAS), in the Microsoft .NET framework, is Microsoft’s solution to prevent untrusted code from performing privileged actions. When the CLR loads an assembly it will obtain evidence for the assembly and use this to identify the code group that the assembly belongs to. A code group contains a permission set (one or more permissions). Code that performs a privileged action will perform a code access demand which will cause the CLR to walk up the call stack and examine the permission set granted to the assembly of each method in the call stack. The code groups and permission sets are determined by the administrator of the machine who defines the security policy.
ECMAScript
ECMAScript is a scripting language, standardized by Ecma International in the ECMA-262 specification. The language is widely used on the web, and is often erroneously referred to as JavaScript or JScript, after two major dialects of the specification.
Flowchart
A flowchart is a schematic representation of an algorithm or a process.A flowchart is one of the seven basic tools of quality control, which also includes the histogram, Pareto chart, check sheet, control chart, cause-and-effect diagram, and scatter diagram. They are commonly used in business/economic presentations to help the audience visualize the content better, or to find flaws in the process. Alternatively, one can use Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams.A flowchart is described as "cross-functional" when the page is divided into different "lanes" describing the control of different organizational units. A symbol appearing in a particular "lane" is within the control of that organizational unit. This technique allows the analyst to locate the responsibility for performing an action or making a decision correctly, allowing the relationship between different organizational units with responsibility over a single process.
Genetic programming
Genetic programming (GP) is an evolutionary algorithm based methodology inspired by biological evolution to find computer programs that perform a user-defined task. It is a specialization of genetic algorithms where each individual is a computer program. Therefore it is a machine learning technique used to optimize a population of computer programs according to a fitness landscape determined by a program’s ability to perform a given computational task.
Handwriting Recognition
Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input. The image of the written text may be sensed "off line" from a piece of paper by optical scanning (optical character recognition). Alternatively, the movements of the pen tip may be sensed "on line", for example by a pen-based computer screen surface. Handwriting recognition principally entails optical character recognition. However, a complete handwriting recognition system also handles formatting, performs correct segmentation into characters and finds the most plausible words.
Image processing
Image processing is any form of signal processing for which the input is an image, such as photographs or frames of video; the output of image processing can be either an image or a set of characteristics or parameters related to the image. Most image-processing techniques involve treating the image as a two-dimensional signal and applying standard signal-processing techniques to it.Image processing usually refers to digital image processing, but optical and analog image processing are also possible. This article is about general techniques that apply to all of them.
Java Enterprise Edition
Java Platform, Enterprise Edition or Java EE is a widely used platform for server programming in the Java programming language. The Java EE Platform differs from the Standard Edition (SE) of Java in that it adds libraries which provide functionality to deploy fault-tolerant, distributed, multi-tier Java software, based largely on modular components running on an application server.
Kernel
kernel is the central component of most computer operating systems (OS). Its responsibilities include managing the system’s resources (the communication between hardware and software components).As a basic component of an operating system, a kernel provides the lowest-level abstraction layer for the resources (especially memory, processors and I/O devices) that application software must control to perform its function. It typically makes these facilities available to application processes through inter-process communication mechanisms and system calls.These tasks are done differently by different kernels, depending on their design and implementation. While monolithic kernels will try to achieve these goals by executing all the code in the same address space to increase the performance of the system, microkernels run most of their services in user space, aiming to improve maintainability and modularity of the codebase.A range of possibilities exists between these two extremes.
All definitions are taken from wikipedia
Updating software with latest updates is good practice but some vendors using their updates to push some other software’s also. All these companies installation includes some additional downloads and users has to unselsect these default options. So are these additional software are working as "Malware" ?
Apple: Apple Quick time updates pushes Apple’s Safari web browser and iTunes towards your computer. Recently I think they also pushes the Mobileme as their software update.
Adobe : Adobe’s Acrobat Reader default installation includes Google reader.
JAVA: Java default updates are now pushing Puzzle Pirates. Sun has also included their Open office as Java software update. Java Update also includes Yahoo toolbar.
REALAUDIO: The media player’s default installation includes BOTH the Google Toolbar and Google Desktop Search.
Yahoo’s Zimbra is now available in beta and allows users to access their email accounts offline. Zimbra currently offering Post Office Protocol and Internet Message Access Protocol for accessing Email accounts. Users can access up to three E-Mail accounts from Different E-Mail providers.
Zimbra Features
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Conversation Views, Tags, and Search
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Web mash-ups
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Contacts
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Calendar
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Documents, Tasks, Briefcase
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Extra features with Zimbra Collaboration Suite
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Download Zimbra Desktop
Zimbra Features and Images are taken from Yahoo’s Zimbra Website
