No Nonsense this!
Nonsense is one of the more interesting projects on Sourceforge. This one produces, yes, nonsense.. lots of it.. it can produce nonsense versions of popular websites among other stuff. Looking for a great sounding, meaningless mission statement for your organization? No sweat, Nonsense can help you out! Reload the page for more gibberish.
“How dare the government intervene to stifle innovation in the computer industry! That’s Microsoft’s job, dammit!”
Microsoft has been portrayed as the evil big corporation so many times that it has become part of common knowledge. As per Goebbel’s philosophy, a lie repeated from multiple sources will eventually become known as the truth. True, Mircosoft is a monopolistic corporation, but that’s true of any big company. You do not build up such a big organization and then let anyone take a bite out of you. At the same time, Open Source does a good job of keeping Microsoft and other big companies on their toes. That said, it is wrong to hope for Microsoft’s demise for they are solely responsible for many of the computing benefits we enjoy today. It is all right to bitch about how MS stole Apple’s GUI concept to create Win 95, but that very act has been the reason why many people took to computers. If we were still in the age of command line DOS and Unix, computers would still be relegated to companies and universities. MS might create huge bloated software, but they also make things simple for most people. Ever tried installing a program on Linux? Ever tried to configure a printer on Linux? or even tried to install a flash plugin for Mozilla on Linux? You’ll know what I am talking about. Even after decades of OSS, Linux has not achieved the ease of use that Windows 95 had (and neither has the ease of use of Mac OS X which was achieved in a much shorter period than either Windows or the Linux GUIs). While we still need Open Source to help innovate without the burden of patents and market constraints, we need corporations like MS and Apple(yes, really Apple is no different from MS, it’s just smaller) to provide us with products that we can actually use without having to go to geek school.
[For humorous takes on MS and Open Source, visit Humorix ]
Guys who have to cope with late nights and loads of unfinished work might find this discussion on slashdot interesting.
It was a dark and stormy night…
The San Jose State University’s 22nd Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest celebrates bad writing. The 2003 winner Mariann Sims wrote the following opening line for a fictional novel to bag the $250 prize.
“They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . . Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn’t taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently”
The children’s literature section winner:
“The Prince looked down at the motionless form of Sleeping Beauty, wondering how her supple lips would feel against his own and contemplating whether or not an Altoid was strong enough to stand up against the kind of morning breath only a hundred year’s nap could create.”
Read all the hilarirous entries here!
This is hilarious!
Someone at Microsoft Research has come out with a really great system for generating and remembering complicated passwords using inkblots! The idea is that as with the Rorschach tests, each person interprets a random inkblot in a different way. So this program generates a series of random inkblots and all you have to do is take the first and last letters of your mental description of each image and then combine them to form your password. To enter your password, all you have to do is look at this sequence of inkblots and you can mentally generate your letter sequence. It involves keyboard typing, so that someone looking over your shoulder need not be able to see what you are typing (unlike other image based methods where you click on specific parts of the image).
The hilarious bit is the discussion about this technology at slashdot! Just look at the 20 inkblots given on Microsoft’s page and then read the interpretations given by /. readers! Boy, I killed myself laughing!
Of all the dumb uses of good technology I can think of, this one takes the cake. Guys at Monash University in down under have created technology that makes it possible for people to log on to their computers by simply laughing. One of the uses mentioned is “the system could be used to follow an executive as they walked through an office, ensuring that their email was always available on the nearest computer“. Boy, I surely wouldn’t want my email to appear on every computer I pass. Imagine people in cubicles tearing out their hair everytime someone cracked a joke and got logged on to every computer, hehe..And what if I am feeling grumpy?
Outsourcing to create savings of US$ 390 billion by 2009!
Nasscom has released a report which says that contrary to popular perception, outsourcing actually saves jobs and helps the US economy. According to their statistics, US firms have saved from $6-8 billion in the last four years due to outsourcing to India. This isn’t as weird as it sounds – outsourcing helps companies reduce their business process costs which leads to greater profits to the company. While specific jobs related to the business process may be lost, the economy grows as a whole, and this creates more jobs within the economy.
The point missed by many people is that it is possible to provide software related services in countries such as India at a fraction of what it would cost in the US. If American companies were not to take advantage of it, they would simply lose business to Asian firms, which would lead to erosion of share value, job cuts and a possible downturn in the American economy. Outsourcing helps these firms stay competitive, and the resulting increase in profits lead to growth of the economy. To put it simply, increase in profits have to be invested by these firms at some point of time(not every company hoards cash like Microsoft, and even MS is trying to reduce it’s $43 billion cash hoard), and these investments help create new jobs. In net terms, outsourcing has actually increased jobs by more than 125,000 according to the Nasscom study.
Just out of curiosity, I’m gonna put up my webcam online for a while. I think it takes snapshots every 30 seconds or so and I’m really curious to see what kind of embarassing pics make it to this site. Here’s the pic, if you are curious. (Make sure your browser doesn’t cache it).
[I've switched off the cam - having a live camera in the room gets on my nerves!]
This GMU grad student thought his work was boring till he began to ‘advice government officials and company CEOs’. His PhD dissertation work consists of a map of the American business and industrial world. Seems harmless till you realize that his work actually maps every communication network across America! So , he can ‘click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where.He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge.clipper.’!
There are those who feel that stuff with so much potential should not be published at all. The irony is that Sean Gorman got his entire data from publicly available material on the Internet!
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[On the Net: $7.5 million for Britney | Making an Invisibility Cloak]
Salon on the white collar ‘sweatshops’ that are draining tech jobs from America.