Ryan provides plenty of examples demonstrating Google’s attitude towards disregarding users’ privacy and being ready to compromise on many fronts when it comes to making their products successful. For example, when the whole privacy fiasco happened with Google Buzz, Google’s attitude was anything but apologetic, in fact, Google’s product engineer for Buzz said

What we’re going to have to come to terms with is this stuff happening more. I honestly don’t think it’s a bad thing for people to be exposed to the issues this way.

Add this up with what Eric Schmidt (Google’s CEO) said a few months ago and you would understand what user privacy means to Google:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

What makes Googlers so delusional about their brand is apparently the price of their stock. At least thats what it seems like based on a number of remarks by Google employees and Google’s CEO. However, what’s interesting about this issue is none of these examples, controversies or accusations involve Larry Page or Sergey Brin. Is it possible that the founders have left a lot to their CEO and executives? May be they need to step in once more to shake things up a bit and set Google on the right path again.

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Gaikai, with its trademark “Streaming Worlds” technology streams the game at full resolution and speed to your internet-enabled computer and lets you play these games without the requisite hardware or software. While this is pretty much the same thing that OnLive will be serving, Gaikai will be fee-free!

InstantAction, on the other hand, relies on small downloads and your computer’s processing power to play games. The result – an embedded flash-like game stream that is smooth enough without having a relatively fast internet connection.

So if you have a relatively fast PC, you can start playing Assassin’s Creed within minutes using InstantAction. However, if you are playing on a meager laptop, you can push in the Gaikai partnership to play the same game (probably from where you left off as well) in the laptop with the internet connection.

Pretty neat, if you ask me. However, it still has no effect on gamers in India because the servers are based in the US. Let’s see what the future holds!

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• Ubisoft’s servers DRM servers, which are used to authenticate games like Assassin’s Creed II went down, rendering all legit users copies useless as they were unable to play the game. Ubisoft was quick to point out that the servers were down because of hackers – like paying customers are going to give a damn about why they aren’t able to play a $60 single player game without an Internet connection.
• Mac gamers were delighted when Valve announced that all of their Source engine games, including Portal 2 would be ported over to the Mac. Pretty certain Mac gamers went ballistic after Valve’s confirmation that existing  owners will not have to purchase the games again, and the games would be native to Mac, and not emulated crap.
• OnLive, the online gaming service which allows you to play games similar to how you can stream movies using Netflix or Hulu, announced that their service would go live on June 15.  If you have a good enough Internet connection and the $15 per month fee plus additional fees for actually owning/renting the game  doesn’t deter you, then OnLive just might be a good option.
• Sony finally realizes that motion controlled gaming is the “in” thing, and introduces us to a rather silly named contraption, the PlayStation Move.
• Palm announced that the awesome Unreal Engine 3 has been ported over to webOS. Wonder if will boost Palm’s fortunes significantly.
• To round off, Steam has been having an Eidos Square Enix Deals week, and on the final day we have Batman: Arkham Asylum and Just Cause on sale at 50% off for individual games, and at 66% off for the full collection.

Happy gaming weekend, everyone!

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Sunbird is a open source cross-platform Calendar management tool which you can use to manage your schedule easily and store it wherever you want. Sunbird though open source has never got much popularity as other Mozilla projects including Thunderbird and Firefox.

The Release Candidate 1 of Sunbird 1.0b1 is available for downloads through the Mozilla FTP repository. Click on the links below to download the version for your OS.

• Windows
• Linux (32 bit)
• Linux (64 bit, English Only)
• Mac OS X

The final version of Sunbird 1.0 may be released some time late March, based on the two weeks testing period for the RC1, however, we could also see a RC2 preceding the final release. Users can file the bugs they find in Sunbird here.

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The Sense UI was spotted by Android Central in a leaked page from Verizon’s site, which has the specifications for the HTC Nexus One for Verizon.

I do have some internal news that the Nexus One is coming to Verizon by end of March, but we cannot confirm it at this point. However, the phone will not be sold in Verizon stores and will only be available online.

I do not really understand what Google has against brick and mortar stores, however, their "online only" problem has gotten forecasters to cut down the sales forecast of Nexus One from 3.5 million to 1 million in 2010.

Don’t forget to watch out this space for more details on the Google HTC Nexus One released date on Verizon Wireless.

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One of the most important things a writer can do to improve their writing, is to become a good editor. Writing well, is a result of what you take out of a post, as much as what you put into it. You’ll need to take out the spelling errors, grammar errors, and the clutter.

Spelling:

The spelling errors are the easiest to remove. Spell checkers are built into most writing tools and are even embedded in the some web browsers. For anyone using a computer, there is no good excuse for misspelled words.

Proof-reading your text for grammar and readability is much harder. Fortunately there are many online resources for writers. Below are two online checkers that may help you improve by showing you weak points in your readability or grammar.

Readability:

If you’ve used Microsoft Word, you might be familiar with it’s readability statistics. It gives a quick test score called the Flesch-Kincaid (FK) Grade Level. The FK score tells you what U.S. grade school level is needed to fully understand your writing. Generally, a score close to 7 (7th grade) is recommended for general audiences.

I’ve found a great site that gives your text not only an FK level, but plenty of other information as well. It’s called “ADDEDBYTES – Check Text Readability.”

Here’s a screen-shot of the results from the first three paragraphs of this article. I think I did pretty well.

There are several scores shown here. Most of them don’t make much sense unless you study what they mean. There are links next to each score that lead to more information if you are interested.

I pay the most attention to the “Average Grade Level” and the “SMOG index”.  The average grade is pretty understandable, since it’s simply the average of the scores shown. The SMOG index tells you how much gobbledygook you have included in your post. Gobbledygook is words that are used only in special cases, such as political speeches and scientific or technical papers. These are words that most people don’t understand. I try to keep the SMOG below 6 by using common words that everyone knows.

Recently, I told one of my fellow bloggers that their post was too lofty. New writers are always tempted to show off by using long sentences and lots of fancy words. I asked another blogger if they were writing poetry or writing a software review. A light punch in the belly will usually wake people up.

Good writers impress people with humor or great ideas, not fancy speech. Write to your readers like you are talking to a good friend.

Another site I found recently, checks your text for mistakes in grammar. I’ve never found a tool that catches most grammar mistakes, so don’t be disappointed when you discover the same thing.

Grammar:

Language Tool will catch the obvious grammar errors, but it will also generate plenty of false errors. Computers are still only as smart as an insect at this time, so I’m not surprised. Humans rule, and only an experienced editor will catch most grammar problems.

Here’s an example of the results from the “Language Tool”.

In this case, it found three errors, yet only one of them was a real error. Despite the false errors, if you need help finding grammar mistakes, the “Language Tool” offers you a chance to find the most obvious problems.

Last Thoughts:

Hearing your written words read out loud is an easy way to catch errors of all kinds. Try to find a friend who can read your writing back to you. If you are on your own, read it out loud to yourself. My wife mentioned that it might be good to have a text-to-speech tool read your post to you.

Thanks for reading this long post. If it helps at least one person write better, I’ll be happy.

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We have the cube desktop and the cool compiz effects to rotate the desktop, add gears inside the cube, paint fire on desktop, menus effects, water ripple effects and all that we absolutely do not need. Though, once we require a simple hack for software or application or a simple job to be done, it all boils down to the same old command line. Write some scripts, change permissions, compile and run with some parameters and what not!

Not only that, in this process, at times, you reach a stage where you have upgraded a few of your package which were dependencies for some other packages and made things worse. Finally, your installation is going nuts and you are set to reinstall or do a heavy patchwork.

This is the exact picture we need to change! Love it or hate it, by now, in the year 2010, everyone hates the command line.

Isn’t the CLI (Command Line Interface) what we left behind years ago? Isn’t that what we have been trying to beautify by writing programs to add a front-end to our boring illegible command line applications? Isn’t that what makes Windows so much better, so dominant and so much the Operating System it is today?

It is time we shed this arrogant nature of being the privileged few, capable of handling the command line and work towards making a better OS for any Tom, Dick and Harry out there.

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The gallery essentially lists waves containing links to extension installers. All these extensions use the Google Wave API. As the official blog post from Google indicates, the gallery might not be very pretty right now since it is just an initial version. If you are a developer and want to try your luck with a Google Wave extension, you can submit it for review using this link.

You can read complete details and instructions on how to use the installers here. The gallery would definitely make Google Wave users to find extensions they need without searching on Google or opening up a new web page. The gallery currently showcases 18 extensions but its bound to grow pretty rapidly. Do you think offering extensions can help Google Wave do a bit better than it has since it launched?

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The newest rage and most preferred way to start a new comic these days is through the internet. It’s called a “Webcomic”. If you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably are aware of the popular xkcd. There are also other popular comic publications/sites like Doghouse Diaries and Explosm. To give expression to your thoughts in a graphical form, you no more need a publication house. It can all be done through the internet, in minutes, all by yourself. Even better, you’ll be saving paper!

So if you have got the artistic talent to draw and the capability to put people into fits of laughter, this is where you should be starting out. Read on to see how you can create a comic site, or a webcomic in minutes.

Webcomic

Webcomic is a plugin for Wordpress that helps you set up and manage comic sites in little time. It is inspired by the ComicPress theme that was probably the first theme specifically built for a comic site. It works together with its sister theme “Inkblot” and surpasses ComicPress with features like Flash comic support, user-submittable transcripts, multi-comic support, support for loading entirely different WordPress themes based on the current comic, advanced storyline navigation, WordPress MU support, and internationalization support. The plugin also provides support for independent comic libraries. With ComicPress, people often complained about the lack of flexibility. Webcomic won’t let you feel that. If you decide on this, don’t forget to checkout the video tutorials.

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OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives.

[Quote Via: Wikipedia ]

This new version of OpenGL introduces a better support for GPU and an advanced tessalation, which breaks a model into smaller patches or surfaces for better handling and rendering. The OpenGL standard, when adapted to the version 4.0, is presumed to match the qualities of that of DirectX 11 which is the current dominant API for Windows graphics.

Another interesting fact is that OpenGL is compatible with another technology called OpenCL which is used to trade off some of the computational load from the CPU to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

Another fork of OpenGL, the OpenGL ES bring similar capabilities for handheld devices. This marks the presence of OpenGL over various platforms. The new OpenGL 4.0 is quite promising in its features and will change the losing scenario of OpenGL.

The announcement of this release was made at the Game Developer Conference on Thursday.

[Via: CNET ]
[Image via: hisdigital ]

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