General

If you missed any of our posts in 2008, below you will find a list with the most popular of them. Best 2009 wishes for all our readers, too!

• 17 Sensational, Free and Downloadable Graphic Novels: The web is home to a treasure-trove of free culture. Thousands of artists, writers, film-makers, poets and illustrators craft impressive creative works and share them freely online, in the interests of making their work accessible to as many people as possible. We thank them for that.
• 18 Undiscovered Websites Every Gamer Should Know: The gaming niche is characterized by its haves and have-nots. You’ve seen Kotaku, IGN, GameSpot, Joystiq, 1UP and the others, but what about the great, lesser-known gaming sites?
• 25 Incredible Skins, Resources & Tools for the Gmail Power User: Gmail is one of those rare things unanimously loved by everyday web users and tech-heads alike. The possibilities are endless. It can be anything from a simple email client to your central nervous system on the web. How far you take it is up to you.
• 8 Freeware Alternatives Every Windows User Should Install: Paid Windows software like Norton AntiVirus, Adobe Photoshop and Nero are etched into the minds of users thanks to years of advertising by the powerful corporations that own them.
• 10 Best, Free Programs to keep Windows Protected: Windows isn’t secure as you might have known. You’ve probably faced threats and trojans on your computer. There are loads of programs that are targeted at keeping your Windows computer safe from intrusions, here’s a pick of the best of them.
• Who Spent $10 For These Domain Names? Seriously!: Sure, domain names are the real estate of the future, but that does not justify spending $10 on crazy stuff. Below you will find some of the craziest (and crapiest) registered domains that I came across through my research sessions on the web.
• 7 Tips to Keep Windows XP Fast and Responsive: Windows XP is a landmark in Microsoft’s history. After a couple of unstable releases, Windows XP ironed out all the creases. Even today, Windows XP is more stable and considered a better OS than Vista by many.
• 11 Undiscovered Website Ideas to Steal and Make You Rich: Community-based sites and web applications are rapidly becoming hot property. Young entrepreneurs are making startling amounts of money with simple ideas that connect people and places. Fancy becoming one of them?
• 5 Ways to Make Your Web Surfing More Productive: Many of us could certainly manage our time more wisely while online. Bloggers in particular are surfing the Web daily and can be easily distracted from more important work. There are many ways to curb your wayward surfing and streamline your Internet experience, however, starting with the following five.
• 10 Must See Virtual Places To Visit Before You Die (with video!): Daily Bits is pleased to present a video travelogue of essential virtual destinations; a mixture of must-see places spread across consoles from the past, present and future, as well as some that are available to visit in your browser today. Start ticking them off your virtual list, and make sure you bookmark the rest — all due to arrive this year.
• 5 Terrific (and Unusual) Twitter Uses: As growing social sites like Facebook and MySpace collapse under their own weight, drowning users in never-ending streams of “Pirate Ninja Hug For Cancer!” applications, the high-tech haiku of Twitter is gaining ground. With 140 characters to answer the question “What are you doing?”, the service has soared from simple status messages to a global information network. Here we look at five uber-uses people have put twitter to.
• 5 Webcomics That Don’t Suck: One popular image of the internet is of a wonderful utopia, allowing creators worldwide to share their genius without “The Establishment” holding them back. The only problem is that most people aren’t geniuses, and huge sections of that “Establishment” are filters designed to protect the innocent public from a never-ending torrent of terrible music, garbage writing and – worst of all – comics so bad they’d make Marvel back off and re-launch as a house painting firm.
• 6 Better Ways to Search Google: Everyone uses Google these days and often multiple times each day. We use it for work, for fun and for general interest. It has made our researching so much easier. Google makes looking up the most mundane detail simple. Need a phone number for the pizza place down the street? Google it.
• 8 of the Best Adobe AIR Applications: Adobe AIR showed a lot of potential during its period of public beta but unfortunately had very few applications that really took advantage of the technology. Thankfully over the last month or so we have begun to see some impressive and useful applications being released.
• Top 10 Countries Censoring the Web: When the World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee (not to be confused with the Internet itself, which is the core network developed many years earlier), its main objective was to enable the free exchange of information via interlinked hypertext documents.

The OLPC project was a grand vision. Making computers accessible to the young generations provides them a portal to information that should go a long way in reducing the knowledge divide. But at $188, the project is still a tad costly on a per child basis. Enter Virtualization. A concept that makes one physical computer system host several virtual systems with resources allocated to them.

California based NComputing is using virtualization to provide an alternative to governments looking to provide affordable computing resources in their learning centers. The software from NComputing turns a PC into a number of virtual PCs which can be accessed by maximum 30 people, each with their dedicated mouse, monitor and keyboard.

An excerpt from PC World:

NComputing’s virtualization software runs on a desktop PC, said Stephen Dukker, chairman and CEO of NComputing. That PC is connected through an access terminal with the “virtual” PCs, which consist of a monitor, keyboard and mice, also known as “thin clients.”

The thin client does not have any storage. All of the computing is done on the main PC. NComputing software works with Microsoft’s Windows and Linux operating systems.

A single PC has more than enough processing power to be shared by several users, Dukker said. A typical person running productivity, multimedia, e-mail and Web browsing applications uses on average just 1 to 2 percent of the capacity of standalone PCs, with occasional peaks using 10 to 20 percent of a computer’s processing power, he added.

While the XO laptop provides a personalized all time available computing resource, it is pertinent question whether laptops are the solution for the same, if at all portable computing is as much a necessity. NComputing’s virtualized solution does provide a better priced alternative to the OLPC.

You might be shocked with the latest events in Wall Street and around the world as well, but this is not the first time that we experience a financial crisis. Taking a look at what happened in the past can help us both to understand what caused the problems, and how people manage to solve them. For that purpose Neatorama published a really interesting post titled 10 American Financial Meltdowns in the Past Century.

Here is the quote from the first one, the Panic of 1907:

Background: At the time, the young US stock market was in a decline – it was off 25% since the beginning of the year and Wall Street was jittery over the tight money supply.

Trigger: Then along came Otto Heinze with his get-(even)-rich(er)-quick scheme. In October of 1907, Otto, along with his brother, a copper magnate named Augustus Heinze, and the ice king (yup, he sold ice – remember, this was before the age of household refrigerators) Charles W. Morse, aggressively bought shares of United Copper, thinking that they could corner the market on the stock. Their plan failed spectacularly, and immediately bankrupted the trust companies and banks that provided the financing.

Runs on banks immediately ensued as depositors pulled their money from banks that had dealings (or rumored to have dealings) with the trio. In a little less than two weeks in the Panic of 1907, a chain reaction had left 9 trust companies and banks bankrupt.

They also covered how each crisis was solved. Check out the post to read the complete list.

Any person in the world, sparing those who have been blessed with seclusion from information, would have come across the words LHC or Higgs Effect or Doomsday proclamations today. Invariably, this day marks a milestone in human achievement. The results from this experiment involving the largest particle accelerator man has built so far will make some staggering contributions to particle physics and eventually to the whole of science and engineering.

The Large Hadron Collider, a circular tunnel with circumference of 27 km, located about 100m below the ground at the border of France and Switzerland. The purpose of the device is to collide protons (its a particle accelerator after all) at nearly the speed of light which would make it possible to study the state of particles in the minute time brackets similar to the ones after the Big Bang. This basic opportunity is what makes this whole experiment so unprecedented. There are many theoretical models as to the origin of the universe and this is one time when they can be put to test to see which one predicts the outcome the best.

The project has required co-operation on a global scale with about 8,000 scientists from 85 countries. Piloted by CERN (where Tim Bernes Lee worked on the concept of hyperlinks that eventually led to the Internet) and at a cost of about $10 billion, the project has a few skeptics who see it as merely a means to prove a theory. The main purpose of the project is to confirm the presence of Higgs boson, the particle that is causes other elementary particles to acquire mass.

The project is as much about particle physics as it is about the bleeding edge technology that has gone into making it possible. The whole experiment is hinged on the analysis of minute sub-second activities between sub-atomic particles and hence deploys the very best in digital photography, networks and processing. Considering that scientists began work on this a few decades back, its amazing to the extent they have been able to predict the developments in various technologies and how best to use them.

Coming back to particle physics, the atom is composed of Protons and Neutrons which in turn are made up of elementary particles called quarks. There are two kinds of quarks – up quarks and down quarks. There are several other sub-atomic particles as well but the LHC is basically about confirming the presence of Higgs Boson, a sub-atomic particle that causes other particles to gain mass (the Higgs Effect) and which in theory is incorporated in the Standard Model.

This experiment also has its publicity owing to the Doomsday scenarios ( which are very very unlikely). There is one in 50 million chance that this experiment could result in creation of black holes that may suck in the whole experiment or cities or even earth. But this is really all in the realm of remotest of remote chances. The hope is that this experiment will provide gargantuan amount of information about a time when the universe began.

Nonetheless, like the sequencing of the Human Genome, this is one massive project that we are lucky to be part of in our lifetimes. As we read, the particles are making the rounds in the tunnels of the LHC that would hopefully provide a revolutionary view of the creation of the Universe. Do take the time to go through the videos on YouTube, there is a lot of information to be had from them. This is one time when I have really known the advantage of having online videos so readily accessible. Its provides the best figures of knowledge density ( Information gathered per unit time spent ).

Just wanted to make a quick shout to our sponsors and thank their support. They provide useful services for web-savvy people, so check them out.

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Directory Maximizer: A reliable company for web directory and blog directory submissions. Their campaigns cost $14 for every 100 directories. They make sure that the links will send you juice, and that you get a gradual number of backlinks over time.

Doreo Hosting: A long time sponsor, Doreo is also the company that provides the web hosting for all my blogs and websites. Facts speak louder than words right? Just browse around the site and see how fast it loads (keep in mind I don’t use cache plugins).

Krumler: What about a social bookmarking website in the Twitter style? That is what Krumler is about. You can follow friends and they can follow you in return, and you all will be able to share interesting web pages or stories from around the Internet.

If you have some time to spare, here are online quizzes that I came across this week. The first one is about how much money you could take in a bank robbery. Weird huh? Apparently I could take as much as $3 million…

Now robbing a bank is risky right? Why not find the chances of you ending up in prison then? You can do that on the Are You Going to Prison? quiz. (I have 7% of chances of ending behind the bars).

Finally, we have some vocabulary, spelling and grammar quizzes on Daily Writing Tips. On those you might at least learn something!