Apple ipod: size less than AA size battery!!!!

Apple has come up with next version of iPod!!!!
The things which fascinated me is its size!! Its less than a AA size battery!!!
click here, to check the pics.

It is a 4GB iPod which can store around One Thousand songs. Battery life is 10 hours. Device price is $79, available in silver & black color. Full aluminum body of 1.8 inches tall & 0.3 inches thick. On the right earphone cord, navigation & volume controls are provided.

The VoiceOver feature can speak in 14 languages: English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. Also users can organize songs in multiple playlists.


I am waiting for this iPod to be launched in India.

What is FOSS? Why FOSS?

FOSS is 'Free & Open Source Softwares.'
After reading about this, the question arises : What does this 'Free' means? and What is Open Source?
This 'Free' is not 'Free' as 'Free Beer'. Free means Freedom. There is a person called 'RMS'( Richard Stallman) idol of all free software people, who has defined four types of freedoms for softwares.

• Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
• Freedom 1: The freedom to study and modify the program.
• Freedom 2: The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor.
• Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code is highly impractical.

Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose: this means the software could be run for training purpose, educational purpose, commercial purpose or just for R&D purpose. There is no restriction on this.

Freedom 1: The freedom to study and modify the program: this means that, one can study the program flow, can study the logic & can also add some piece of code to make it better. Can add more functionality into the program.

Freedom 2: The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor: this means, we can share the program with our friends, relatives, colleagues, neighbors etc.

Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits: this means, after studying & modifying the program we can release the improvements for other people to make use of it. This will improve the quality of program, also we'll get credit for the piece of code that we have written, at the same time, the person who has written original code will also retain his credits.

Open Source, is business model of Free Software, where we can charge the customer for some service or customization of the software.

reference: wikipedia.org

Why Should I Use Linux?

Every human being has its own existence in this world !!!

We have curiosity about life, we want to know things..
Remember when we were child, or just watch a child playing with his/her toys. What does it do?? Suppose you gave a toy-car to a boy no doubt he'll be happy, he'll play with it.. But for how long? Within 2/3 days he wants to know more about the car.. He is never happy with just sliding the car to you, thus .. he adds some obstacle to its path, he'll through it (in IT our language he'll test the car to the best of his knowledge). Then one day he'll broke the car & see exactly what is there inside it!!!
Isn't this true?
Consider a baby girl playing with her barbi doll.
She'll play with her for few days, then she would like to change her gadgets. She'll change her hairbands, handbags, shoes, cloths etc..

Imagine of a company who says "You cannot make changes to the toy purchased from us without our permission". Would you ever buy any such toy to your kids??

We purchase bike or car of our choice. Then we add reflectors, seat covers, horn, indicators, numberplate, side stand, side guards etc. of our choice.
Why do we do these things?
- Because we are humans, our natural tendency is to learn the things, experience the things. We are not donkeys who do not bother of whether 50 kg of mud it is carrying or 50 kg of gold!!!
We want to know about things around us.
If we stop a kid from breaking its toys & asking questions about it, the kid cannot gain knowledge.

Suppose one day i am driving on a highway with my friends & my car tyre bursts!!!! What are my immediate action?

1. Search for a garage nearby
2. if no garage available take help of your friend to change the tyre
3. if friends cannot help take help of some vehicle passing nearby
4. in worst case try to change the tyre yourself.

If a company says i cannot/shouldn't change the tyre (because i have signed such license when i purchased my car) instead i should call the company, who will attend the call as soon as they finish their current task (serving other people in queue)..
Would i wait for them to come?? Don't i have something meaningful to do rather than waiting for them? So would i ever want to purchase a car of such a company again???

But why are we forgetting same things when we become mature??
Why do we not want to break our operating system & see what is exactly inside it??
Why do we not want to solve small bugs ourselves rather than waiting for the company to release next patch??

Or some of us want to do this.. but they are caught into licensing!!!!!!!

If you are one of these unlucky people caught into licensing of your operating system,
PLEASE use Linux!!!!!
This is the reason I AM USING LINUX!!!
This is the reason why You should use Linux..

Gmail was down for 2.5 hours!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can you believe it guys????
Many would say am i kidding or what.. But this is true.

Gmail went offline for 2.5 hours on Tuesday, around at 2.00pm(Indian time). 'Gmail' one of the most popular email service in the world which has 110 million users.
"The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 0930 GMT. We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We're really sorry about this ... our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem," said Acacio Cruz, Gmail site reliability manager.

This affected most of the gmail users throughout the world, especially users from India & Europe.

Google has apologized for this mess. Many users reflected about this mess on twitter

For more information click, here.

Oscar & Indians

“Slumdog Millionaire” won 8 Oscar Awards!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jai ho!!!

The Indian king of music has won 2 Oscars.. One for original score and Another for original song..

The another Indian Resul Pookutty won Oscar for the same movie in ‘best sound mixing’ category.

This is really golden day for Indian Film Industry!!

But.. the controversy is with the word “Slumdog”, many people many views.. Everyone has a different angle to look at things. What i think is: people living in slum area are not dogs.. If the intentions of the writer are not to call them dogs but to show their problem & the treatment they are getting, then we all should be Ok with it.

Laptop in Rs.1000/- ????

Does it look possible?

At least not to me, until i read this news.

Government of India has allocated Rs 5,000 crore for education mission through ICT, so that students of all professional-science programmes could own their own laptops.

Later after few days i heard that these laptops are having only few files in it, which will be used by students for their study purpose. If this is true then its just a calculator with some memory…

I am waiting for real news to come & also waiting for actual price & configuration of laptop..

I remember something like “Desktop in Rs.10,000/-” project Indian government, that was really BAD..

It was a p3 computer with over-clocked processor

Mark Cuban is Funding Open Source Entrepreneurs

I think, this is right time to start any business because you don’t have anything to loose. Whatever customers you will be getting is your plus point & of course if you can survive in this recession period you’ll definitely bounce back with next boom..

I came across this great blog regarding Funding for Open Source business

So, if you think you have some idea which can be transfered into a big business go ahead & put you business plan to Mark’s blog.

There are certain conditions like

• Business should be Open Source
• Break even in 60 days & profitable in 90 days
• Mark keeps all rights to fund a business or stop funding at all etc..

There are some more conditions, which you’ll find on his blog. Obviously there are hundreds of people submitting their business plans. I am waiting to see how many of them actually get funding & whether this creates some good companies.