If you want a more flexible and open source text editor, this can be useful:jEdit features include:
- Runs on any operating system with a Java 2 version 1.3 or higher virtual machine – this includes MacOS X, OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows.
- Efficient keyboard shortcuts
- Comprehensive online help
- Unlimited undo/redo
- Copy and paste with an unlimited number of clipboards (known as “registers”)
- Syntax highlighting for more than 130 file types
Posted in Free Softwares | No Comments »
The best thing about Open source is finding alternative softwares or programs that come close to the so-called “real thing” or in other words, the commercial version. This is for the simple matter that it feels great not having to pay for something you can have for free.
One of the easiest ways to find out which Open source alternative would best fit your needs, do visit Open Source Alternative. The jam-packed website lists the various open source resources in its directory which is smartly arranged into various categories such as business, graphic applications, etc.
Photo credits: Adam Ciesielski
Posted in Tips | No Comments »
Very swiftly, Wikipedia became the tail that swallowed the dog (Nupedia). In less than a month, it had 1,000 articles; by the end of its first year, it had 20,000; by the end of its second year, it had 100,000 articles in just the English edition. (By then it had begun to spawn foreign-language editions, of which there are now 185, from Abkhazian to Klingon to Zulu, with the German edition the largest after English.) Sanger himself did not stay around to enjoy Wikipedia’s runaway growth. By late 2001 the tech boom was over, and Bomis, like most other dot-coms, was losing money and laying off employees. An effort to sell ads to pay Sanger’s salary foundered as Internet advertising tanked, and Sanger lost his job in February 2002. He continued intermittently as a volunteer but finally broke with the project in January 2003 over the project’s tolerance of problem participants and its hostility to experts.8
Since then, Wikipedia’s growth has accelerated. It had almost a half million articles by its third anniversary in January 2004; it broke the million mark just nine months later. More than fifty-five thousand people have made at least ten contributions to Wikipedia.9 Over this short history, it has also evolved a style of operation and a set of operating principles that require explanation before any discussion of history on Wikipedia.
Posted in Information | No Comments »

Hello everybody out there using minix -
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)among other things).
This is the first post that Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, made about his new project on an online discussion board in 1991. This project, the Linux kernel, would grow through the contributions of thousands of developers and would cause him to be named one of the heroes of the past 60 years by Time magazine, alongside Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II.
Posted in General info | 1 Comment »
If you work in IT security or are simply want to check out some computer security information you read about, OSVDB is a helpful site. You can browse their comprehensive database and even subscribe to categories you are interested in, such as wireless routers or Microsoft products.
The site’s goal is to provide accurate, detailed, current, and unbiased technical information on security vulnerabilities. It began as an ambitious project in 2003 and through the hard work of its many volunteers is now a very successful site, cataloging computer and internet vulnerabilities in an unbiased, open way, although this job is proving to be increasingly difficult because the amount of material to cover is simply too much for even the most devoted contributors. As with many open source projects, the site survives through donations and sponsors.
Posted in Tips | No Comments »
In an interview with Open Enterprises, Director of Engineering at Hewlett Packard’s Open Source and Linux Organization, says that the company will invest in new Open Source services to support lifecycle and governance. This is a good example of Enterprise support for open source platforms.
Over the past 6 years, HP has developed internal processes and best practices for open source governance and we’re developing several services offerings from the HP Services Consulting & Integration group.
… we’re continuing to evolve and improve our Insight Control Linux Edition which is a premier solution for managing our industry standard servers and blades. We also have plans underway to develop stronger linkages between our Linux management solutions and our broader OpenView management solutions from HP Software.
Posted in General info | No Comments »
• In no way guess a particular order of execution – thread execution order cannot be established and restricted by the OS scheduler. You cannot predict the sequence of threads flowing from one execution to the next, not even what thread comes next.
• If possible, use thread-local storage – to keep coordination to a minimum, use exclusive memory location.
• For better concurrency, you can change the algorithm – when programmers are given 2 or more choices of algorithm, they can rely on the asymptotic order of execution because it is almost always that the theoretic metric is connected with an application’s operation.
Following these rules, it will be easier to create strong concurrent solutions with less threading problems.
Posted in Tips | No Comments »
• Plan scalability to get the benefit of the increasing number of cores – write flexible codes that can handle an increase in cores because the more cores you have, the greater the possibility of expansion of data processing.
• Use thread-safe libraries – a hotspot computation can be executed through library call and should use a similar library function rather than a handwritten code. This ensures that library calls are thread-safe even if routines are called from 2 separate threads, you’re sure to get correct answers for both calls.
• Use of right threading model – if there is a need to use user-controlled threads, don’t use the more complex threads.
Posted in Tips | No Comments »
Creating a multithreaded application requires 4 major steps and of the four, the design and implementation part is not often discussed. The following rules will give you a better chance of writing the best and most useful threaded application:
• Identify accurate independent computations – simultaneous execution is not possible unless the executable similar operations can run independently of one another.
• Concurrent implementation should be at the highest level – during the analysis phase of the threading methodology, identify the hotspots – code segments that require the longest execution time – and if they can run parallel you will be able to get its maximum performance.
Posted in Tips | No Comments »
The realm of closed systems developed in secrecy with closely guarded algorithms and software engineering may become a thing of the past as with the advent of more and more open-sourced systems being deployed across the internet. Cloud computing is set to be ruled by open-sourced applications, developed by big businesses to cater to commercial and personal users. Even the world’s largest and most secretive companies have begun to develop open-sourced systems(in secret of course), as they may be seeing more than just a trend to allow them to have something in case the world does shift all of a sudden to open source. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General info, Information, Supporters | No Comments »