I ll try to post more often from now on. but the subject matter will be more specific . I hope the modest user base I had accumulated over time still reads my feed .

“An advertising framework registers context data sources and advertising display clients from a variety of resources on a local computer. The ad framework may then receive context data and display triggers from the registered context data sources. The context data and display triggers may be processed and an advertising request generated and sent to an external advertising source. Non-advertising content may also be supported. When a targeted advertisement is received in response, a display manager may send the ad to an appropriate display client. When the ad has been presented a the advertising framework will communicate to the advertising supplier who may apportion and credit advertising revenue to the participating parties.”

There are a lot of other interesting claims which the patent application makes, and then goes on to state the importance of targeted advertising . Point taken .. but was ‘nt MS aginst this , with the spam and spyware blocking crusade . Oh .. I get it ,Instead of others flooding you with all sorts of unwanted ad’s , let Microsoft do it for them .

One workaround which my brother came up with is to make a small script which looks something like this.

$ beryl-manager
$ sleep 10
$ gdesklets start

Remove both beryl and gdesklets from startup and place this script in the startup . Works fine for us . Hope it helps someone .

Verizon’s new broadband service, FiOS delivers a super-fast connection by replacing the old copper phone line to each home with a fiber-optic cable, offering Internet downloads as fast as 30 megabits per second, vs. the 1 Mbps to 6 Mbps of the typical cable or DSL broadband line .

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts recently demonstrated a new technology called DOCSIS 3.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) that promises to give cable modem users speeds as high as 150 Mbps .

And this more recently from a Swedish news website

“Sigbritt Löthberg’s home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link “.

Sadly life in Bangalore is not as good , I have to pay $23 for a 256kbps line , It took me 3 days to download Fedora core 7 . All this after the former I&B minister declared 2007 as the year of the Broadband (read fraudband). There are plans for speeds upto 2mbps but they come with a download limit of 1Gb .

Probably the government doesn’t understand that from an economic growth standpoint, broadband is crucial for India’s future .US based venture capital firms are investing huge amounts of money in Web startups and India seems to have stalled on the broadband front. There is no dearth of a fibre backbone for providing better service as Reliance and the Tatas are in control of huge bandwidths. Reliance Communications, Bharti, BSNL, Gail, Railtel and PowerGrid and VSNL have their own fibre networks. Reliance Communication has a 60,000-km network and VSNL over 40,000 km.

BSNL and MTNL are mostly to blame as the two state telecom operators refuse to share their last mile networks with the private sector and instead are hell bent upon providing third class service on their copper based networks .

I think its high time that the government woke up to this reality. For a country which has the highest number of young people in the world this is absolutely pathetic .

“experimental science-fair project SoCs shoe-horned into low-cost consumer-grade plastic boxes”.

This is how a chap describes the X360 in a letter to the Inquirer .I am not going to bash MS here, but there are a few things about the console which bother me . Recently I happened to read this at PC World.

“The real number [of Xbox 360 failure rates] is between 30 to 33 percent,” said one former EB Games employee. An anonymous Best Buy employee said the failure rate for the console was “between a quarter to a third” of all units sold”.

Those are numbers which a Chinese manufacturer of duplicate i pod’s would be ashamed of ,recently Daily Tech ran an article about the X360m failure rates which was apparently based on a field survey .

EETimes reports that MS is preparing a new game plan to upgrade the 360. Microsoft is moving its existing chips to new process technologies as it evolves toward a smaller, quieter, cooler system dubbed Falcon. It’s not clear exactly when Microsoft will roll out its Falcon version of the Xbox 360. Microsoft plans to introduce multiple flavors of the system over time, each with its own internal and external code-names. and thats the part of the story I don’t quite get. So now we have - Xbox 360, Xbox 360 Elite ,XBox 360 Falcon , and maybe in the future X360 low power edition , X360 Shakira edition .

Rather than dishing out multiple avatars of the same console, I think MS should try to improve the existing X360 and provide better support and guarantee to its customers . Its gonna be fun though because MS has already said that it would require a billion-dollar charge to extend the warranty on the Xbox 360 from one to three years.
Fanboys are free to comment

Read the Daily tech article here .

This is not about how to install and configure Ubuntu, trust me! its simpler than you think, so I ll leave that to the readers. What this is about is Why you should move to Linux .

The strongest reason to move is Freedom , and by freedom I don’t mean price . Once you have Ubuntu installed , you have access to a list of thousands of applications which you have the freedom to download install and modify to suit your needs . It doesn’t matter if you are an expert computer user or a newbie , Ubuntu’s software library provides enough to suit everyone’s needs . There are no trial versions or registration keys , no exe’s to patch, no more crackspider or astalavista

I believe the key to the success of Windows lies in its usability , Ubuntu is not yet on par with Windows XP or Vista on this front , but it’s awfully close . Installing new software is a breeze, no restarts , no configurations . The package managers downloads, installs and configures the software for you. All you need is a good broadband connection.

Hardcore gamers will have problems moving because games as of now remain a Win32 exclusive. but there are some utilities like Wine which can run Windows applications efficiently.I am an Arcade fanatic and all popular emulators like Mame etc are available for Linux and Yes! they do perform better than their windows cousins.

If for nothing else you should move to Linux for the change, Its faster and more efficient than Windows XP. I won’t compare Ubuntu with Vista because I’ve never used the latter. Readers are free to comment
My rig is powered by an Amd X2 processor and 1 GB of DDR2 RAM running on a nVidia 430 chipset , and I’ve got Ubuntu running with all its glory. If you may need any help with your rig, do write to me .

Spread the word , go Linux.

Resources:
Download Ubuntu

Other Distributions

By 2010, we seek to reduce global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons per year, equivalent to the annual output of 11 million cars or 10–20 coal-fired power plants. With your help, this effort will lead to a 50% reduction in power consumption by computers by 2010, and committed participants could collectively save $5.5 billion in energy costs.

While this is a great initiative, making computers more power efficient does make them cost more and the figure ranges from $20 for desktops and $30 for servers , but in the long term it does result in smaller power bills .Except for hardcore enthusiasts no one really cares about what kind of PSU they have,  the least we could do is to see that they comply to the latest energy star specifications.

The climate savers Website has some great facts about your PSU and how much energy does it actually waste . Read more about it here.

Visit the site

Read a part of the NFO below

Release Notes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tired of waiting for Falling Leaf to produce drivers so that you can play
Shadowrun in XP? The wait is over, because Razor1911 already has the remedy!
Yes, you read right. This game will also function in Windows XP (following the
installation procedure below).
This release will work with bot matches and lan mp. If you want to play
online, buy the game!
Install Notes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. Extract RARs
2. Install
3. Go into your installationfolder and delete the srsw_shadowrun.dll.
4. Copy srs_shadowrun.dll and srsx_shadowrun.dll to your installationfolder.
5. If you want the XP compatability, copy the files from the xp/ subdir to
your installationfolder.
6. If you want a shortcut on your desktop, this is the time to make one!
7. Play!
8. Have fun!
Razor 1911 Greetings

Moloney also states that the aim of the low cost classmate PC is to enable the children to access the World Wide web more than anything else . ( read the interview here ) .

Low cost alternatives like XO and Classmate face a lot of problems in realizing their goals . Take for example India where $285 translates to Rs 11,400 which is way beyond what a poor family can afford . Even if any of the state governments decide to bear the cost , even for 100,00 kids its going to cost them Rs 11,400,00000 or $28500000, now that’s is quite a big number . Subsidy is an option but not the definitive answer.
Content delivery is another hurdle , the software and the training material will have to be customized according to the particular needs of the country and that requires a support staff , fixing a conked laptop will require trained manpower which is another overhead especially when you are at such shoe string budgets.

Accomplishing the goals set by the OLPC project or Intel is not going to be easy, especially when there are over 2 billion children who do not have access to computers . Its a very long and winding road ahead

Find out more about OLPC here.

Read about Intel classmate .

Download the Classmate brochure here .