Britney’s Guide to Semiconductor Physics is the perfect place to visit if you an student of electrical engineering stressed out from too much cramming before the exams hit you. Hey, it is also an educative experience. Seriously.

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Not all of us are kernel hackers, and even fewer have the time or inclination to install the Linux source code onto their computers. (Some of the newer “for-newbie” distributions skip the source entirely.) But what if you browse through the code over the web? Try the Linux Source Navigator — it helps you do just that!

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The Atlantic Monthly never ceases to bore me… well written prose, excellent analyses, great fiction once in a while — what more could you possibly want? The articles do tend to be longish, but then if you have the attention span of the average MTV watcher, you’d better stay away from the Monthly anyway. What caught my attention this time was The Heavenly Jukebox, an excellent piece on the dwelling on — but not confined to — the RIAA vs Napster Battle, of which more will be said in a subsequent post.

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Indian E-com sites still need a lot of work. Most are characterized by churlish interfaces, bad writing, poor grammar, pathetic delivery options, poor searchability, and often, blatant mis-classification of the goods on sale. Add to the this the extremely limited selection available at most of these places. Even something as slick as Fabmart fails in this department. My two bits on the subject are in this piece: Why Many Indian E-Com Sites Suck.

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Anyone with even the slightest inclination towards the technology behind software in the past few years would have noticed how Microsoft post-Win95 products have gradually stopped becoming (contrary to popular belief) monolithic apps and become more like little jigsaw pieces which become full-fledged apps when assembled together. For example, did you know that iexplore.exe, the primary executable for Internet Explorer 5, is less than 80kB in size? Kilobytes, not Megabytes. Much of IE’s rendering capability is in a 1MB file called shdocvw.dll which lives in your Windows\System directory. But any Windows app can use it, any many do: Lotus Notes, editors like EditPlus (see this screenshot — this is actually IE (3.0 or better required) running) to name but a few.

Ironically, for desktop and productivity apps at least, the least amount of code reuse and componentization comes from the Unix world. But Bonobo, a new initiative from the guys who brought you Gnome, promises that the Unix of the future will lead, not lag in the application space — in addition to the server space it occupies already.

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Napster like processes have existed for a long time in the real world. Sharing stuff like computer software, music CDs etc is prevalent even today, especially in Asia. And now we have vast corporations screaming how it’s not okay for us to do so any more on the Net, and are moving to enforce it. (Actually they’d love to enforce In Real Life too, if it were not for the financial costs.) This piece by Peter Wayner leads me to ask: will the (inevitable?) commercialisation of the web lead to the death of one of the Net’s earliest functions: to be an effective information sharing tool, even in the face of hostile environment? Will the system designed to withstand war outages succumb to copyright law and the RIAA?

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One of the main problems of anybody building a site on the cheap is getting good, professional quality graphics without paying megabucks for things like Adobe Photoshop. The GIMP can help, but not everybody runs Linux yet :-(. To that end, try these websites: SpinWave, CoolText and the unfortunately-named FlamingText… the last two are actually web interfaces to the GIMP! Ah, may the wonders of open source never cease!

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If you think all this talk of the Information Superhighway bringing about “a new utopia of openness, freedom, choice and democracy” is a horrifying sham, you are not alone. Often the truth is obscured, and all you have to do to find the truth is look deeper.

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Poor, poor Microsoft. It can even get a fair deal from the supposedly ‘impartial’ guides of the information superhighway: the search engines. Sometime back, there was a big to-do about how Google returned Microsoft at the top of any query for “more evil than Satan himself”. This story is pretty well documented at these two places. Since then, many webpages have been created on the subject and Google has faithfully indexed them as well. Thankfully, links to these pages are now returned instead a reference to the hallowed www.microsoft.com site. But have the problems truly gone away? Can Microsoft ever escape the tag of the Evil Software Company?

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Are skins bad for you? They are distracting, and I wouldn’t want them in my editor, but they look good on “Entertainment”-ware like WinAmp, nevertheless. But your browser? Mozilla, I have said below, rocks — but only in terms of its HTML/XML rendering. In terms of looks, it is ugly. You can spice it up with skins — in fact, with XUL support, you can drastically alter its appearance — but this begs the question: shouldn’t the default have been a little more aesthetic and fuctional? The worst bit is that Netscape 6 might just end up perpetuating the myth that free software is ‘clunky’, not ‘polished’ and ‘professional’. Before you jump to conclusions, try out — or take a look at — KDE. There, even the default looks great!

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