Is Open Source really the mantra to the age-old software crisis? This article on lotus.com has a slightly different take on the topic. Expectedly enough, this article generated a lot of debate at Slashdot, you can read the discussion here.

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The Gallery of CSS Descramblers gives me hope about the future of free speech on the Net. After taking a pretty much relentless beating at the hands of the US judicial system these last few weeks, I guess the geek in me takes solace that whatever the circumstance, ingenuity will always find a way.

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I would like to add a 11th point to the Top 10 Signs You Work in the 90s (or ’00s, for that matter). Somewhat an extension of point 1, this is something I really felt while coming out from work one day:

You step out of the office before sunset and say, “Wow, daylight! Kickass!”

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James Gosling’s Top 10 Signs You Work in the 90s are funny, but contain a grain of truth in them somewhere. I could totally identify with point 6:

You normally eat out of vending machines and at the most expensive restaurant in town within the same week.

as well as point 1:

You think a ‘half-day’ means leaving at 5 o’clock.

And the others struck chords with me to one extent or the other.

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So you think you know all about computers? Great. Let’s quiz on you the basics. How much is a kilobyte? How much is megabyte? (and don’t cop out by saying that disk drive manufacturers and computer scientists have different standards) A gigabyte? This page lists the definitions of the SI units: the binary prefixes.

It’s funny, but a lot of textbooks in India still blissfully print the old “1024-bytes-equal-a-kilobyte” chestnut for folks who don’t know better. And a lot of these textbooks are actually used at schools and colleges across the country. I’m not sure what this says about the state of Indian education, but I don’t think it is terribly complimetary.

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If you’ve ever received a PostScript file (perhaps from a friend using a Macintosh or Unix, or as part of a technical paper) and were in despair about how to go about opening it, here’s some hope. You don’t have to go out and buy Adobe PageMaker or CorelDRAW for an incredible sum of money. Download the excellent Aladdin GhostScript from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/, this is an open-source PostScript interpreter that’s free for end-user use. It is available for many different platforms including Linux, the Macintosh, VMS, DOS and, inevitably, Win32. If you use Windows you should also get the graphical interface to GhostScript, called GSView, unless you’d much rather type PostScript commands at a prompt all day. As an added bonus, GSView can display Acrobat PDF documents for you.

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