My Blog

On the Eve of completion of 150th birth anniversary celebrations of Mahatma Gandhiji, got a flash of thought on the parallels between the philosophies of Mahatma Gandhiji and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Thought of writing it as a blog post. Before writing it, did a bit of searching on the web and came across a few articles in which similar comparisons were presented. Nevertheless, decided to proceed with my version of the comparison:   If you are new to Free and Open Source Software, let me tell you simply what it is. There are two types of software : Proprietary Software  Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) A proprietary software is built by a company and sold for a price to its customers without letting them know the internal working mechanism of the software. The end-user is simply allowed to perform operations which the developer of that software has permitted. On the contrary, FOSS is built with the efforts of a diverse set of coders across the globe. The ...

During the past one year or so i was in a discussion with my students regarding building (rather customizing) a Linux distro which would be tailor-made for our needs.. The below list are the set of sample features which we aimed at: * Booting the system like switching on the TV.. meaning to say it should have a boot time of ~0 Second... Looks more ambitious, right?.... But with current growth it might become true... * Every functionality would be browser based... so very less resources.... * Some specific academic related services incorporated in it... Yesterday in a discussion i mentioned to them "Google Chrome OS" is very much similar to what we discussed last year.... PS: Unfortunately we haven't yet started implemenation... Bcoz its not on the mainstream schedule...

"What happend?" this is the question which I answered more than a few times today. This question was regarding my previous post on "Win 7".. I always advocate Linux to my students.. I can proudly say that most of students laptop/comp are running some or other Linux flavours. All these days they used to listen to my Linux propaganda.. So after reading the last post some of them got a doubt/question regarding this.. Here is my reply : Most of the courses that i teach are opensource techs.. So it becomes obvious that Linux becomes the default OS.. In that post itself i have indicated that it is no way a compromise formula.. I still prefer Linux over it.. Though a PC is running faster even after its got affected with virus, it is not an optimal situation. You take the scenario of Linux where there is ~0.0% virus. More than all of the above you would get a fair enough understanding of installation and configuration process if you do it in Linux... The case with Win is th...