vrage

I read an article on theregisters which says that most ISPs such as verizon, AT & T etc are thinking of charging search engines like google, msn etc who use bandwidth of end users to make money for their business. It is indeed true .. that there are some companies who generate revenue from bandwidth of third party networks who don’t get any revenue but connect different networks together to provide bandwidth to the end user.

We will have to see if internet providers such as verizon, at & t, british telecom etc really start charging search engines for using their computer networks.

Google hasn’t given any official declaration on this issue.

Major media companies might dictae terms to the end users and create markets which suit their business interests. If the carrier networks and media companies, search engines unite, then it might not be good to the end user, who gets targeted advertising and is controlled by various moghuls as to which kind of rights he or she might get while using their services.

This is an important consideration for customers in the years to come.

What do you think about the whole issue?

I just read Bruce Geryk’s review of the Civilization IV: Warlords expansion. I am glad to see that I was not the only one who found the inclusion of Joseph Stalin in that expansion to be of “questionable taste.”

As a Russian-American whose family was directly affected by Stalin’s purges, frankly I find Stalin’s inclusion as a leader of the Russian civilization to be patently offensive, t was glad that Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders haven’t been present in recent incarnations of Civilization, which makes sense anyway, considering that under the Bolsheviks, Russia ceased to exist as an independent state until it regained independence in 1991.

So not only did Stalin not lead ‘Russia” as such, but he wasn’t even Russian - he was Georgian.

I understand that, given the expansion’s Warlords name, Firaxis Games wanted to include a leader who could be considered a ‘warlord.” But as Bruce pointed out, they wisely didn’t include Adolf Hitler for Germany - so why include Stalin, who was no better than Hitler? If they wanted a Russian warlord, Firaxis could have included one of the Russian Grand Princes like Alexander Nevsky or Dmitri Donskoy. whose names aren’t associated with the deaths of tens of millions of people. I wouldn’t have had a problem if this expansion was specifically devoted to WWII, in which case the inclusion of Stalin and Hitler would have been accurate for historical reasons, but having Stalin as the leader of Russia in an overall context is irresponsible - and I certainly won’t be buying that expansion unless Firaxis issues a patch to remove Stalin.

I wondered why people are so reluctant to adopt open source software in their daily life. The corporate world was skeptical for a long time to use open source software such as linux in their business until recently. Now, open source software have become so reliable that they are much better off than their commercial counterparts.

Think of softwares such as Linux which is a roboust operating system when compared to windows xp. I havent tried windows visa yet but i swear that linux never crashes. Apache has been a stable webserver used by many websites. When it comes to encryption, PGP has been very reliable. Some intelligence agencies consider it too good for encryption of your data or emails etc.

GIMP is a popular Image processing software which has all the functionalities of photoshop and Email client thunderbird replaces outlook express very easily. There are movie players such as xine, kaffeine or Mplayer or VLC player which provide features much better than your windows media player. Instant messaging clients such as Kopete and GAIM fare support all messenger protocols such as yahoo, icq, msn , AIM,jabber etc. XMMS can support almost all features of winamp.

Gnu C++, QT, kdevelop and ANJUTA are very good development environments for writing code in C, C++ and Java. Anjuta and QT are my favorite IDE’s which i had used to develop code in a linux environment. Anjuta is a visual studio like IDE which is very simple to use and not too complicated for the novice user. Eclipse has been the standard IDE for Java on linux machines. It has powerful features which are only found in high priced commmerical softwares.

Open source software has revolutionized computing and general computer usage much to the fear of those ‘corporations’ which had the market share for all softwares ever produced. I am a huge fan of the “freedom” concept of open source software where we can choose what softwares we want to use and how much control we can have over them. Richard stallman is the pioneer of free software who started this idea of free software in the 80’s. It is time that people have realized that it is better to have open source source softwares than use an OS which might monitor your internet usage or your personal records by keeping data mining software or allowing third parties to track you. I am waiting to see how reliable commercial software can be when compared to open source softwares such as linux inspite of their many flaws which we have seen so far.