Sugar on a Stick

What can be sweeter than a name with Sugar in it? Does it help that its for students, its open source and is fun too? Well then I’m definitely talking about “Sugar On A Stick” – A new initiative that aims to put accessible, fun software on a pen drive that students can carry around:

  • Sugar on a Stick as 1-to-1 computing in an elementary school
  • Sugar on a Stick to empower middle- and high-school students to help test, and learn computing platforms as learning tools
  • Sugar on a Stick for learning conferences to let people try Sugar and collaborate with other conference participants

Its based off Fedora 11, comes as a 380 MB ISO, and is primarily runs off your USB or CD media. The first release, tastily titled “Strawberry was released on 24th of this month. So here is to a great initiative, and I’ll be taking it for a spin this week and get back with my thoughts.

Author: Srinath June 27th, 2009 Comment (0) linux, open source

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India has 6 supercomputers in top 500 list

In the recently published bi-annual Top 500 supercomputer list, India has a total of 6 supercomputers, down from the 8 that made it to the last time. The “EKA” cluster at the Computational Research Laboratories at Pune, leads the list for India at 18th place. “EKA”  topped it at 4th place globally during 2007, but lost out to the wave of new supercomputers build by the US, Germany, China and other countries.

HP and IBM still hold the major vendor share, with a whooping 80% between them. The RoadRunner cluster still holds on to its number 1 spot, but is closely followed by the Jaguar Cray cluster. With more emphasis on lower power consumption, greener cooling solutions, and more efficient processors and interconnects, we can only expect a slew of better clusters in the years to come.

Author: Srinath June 25th, 2009 Comment (1) technology

Windows and editions

Reading about the various editions of Windows 7, it made me wonder just how many major editions Microsoft has released in this decade. Just to keep things simple, I decided to skip pre 2000 operating systems, and focusing on 4 main Windows flavors: 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7. So lets get started :

Windows 2000 (4)

  • Windows 2000 Professional
  • Windows 2000 Server
  • Windows 2000 Advanced Server
  • Windows 2000 Datacenter Server

That was nice and easy. Although two different Server editions? Well MS is just getting started.

Windows XP (5)

  • Windows XP Home
  • Windows XP Professional
  • Windows XP Starter
  • Windows XP Media Center
  • Windows XP 64 bit

The XP list doesn’t contain minor version changes like N, K, KN, which were for specialized markets due to monopolizing practices. It also doesn’t include the specialized editions that weren’t available for retail like Tablet PC edition, Embedded systems edition, and the incremental versions of Media Center. If you take all into consideration, you’ll get a number greater than 12.

Windows Vista (6)

  • Windows Vista Starter
  • Windows Vista Home Basic
  • Windows Vista Home Premium
  • Windows Vista Business
  • Windows Vista Enterprise
  • Windows Vista Ultimate

Here is where it gets a little confusing. With two versions for Home, and the cheaper version normally finding its way only into most lower end consumer laptops and desktops, there was very little need for the other. And allowing only 3 running user applications? What the hell was that? Why would someone spend money on such an OS, considering you can get a limitless, top of the line one for free (read linux). Wouldn’t three versions suffice – one for home, one for business and one so called ultimate for poor MS to make some money?

Windows 7 (6)

Just rebadge the Business edition to Professional, and you have 6 editions of Windows 7 as well.

So there you have it – 21 major editions of Windows have been released starting from 2000. Adding in the 9 editions of Windows Server 2003 and 10 editions of Windows Server 2008, we have a grand total of 40. Good going Microsoft, and all hail Bill Gates!

Author: Srinath June 17th, 2009 Comment (0) technology

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Hello bizzhost

Yup, I managed to upgrade my blog without any accidents, unlike the last time I moved from Habari.  I’m now hosted on bizzhost on their tiny plan which costs me Rs 350 a year (yea, damn cheap!) The plan does have its limitations, but I’ll do just fine. Not only is it faster, its also offers pretty comprehensive options panel, and again  its cheap.

So cheers to the move, and I’ll fix the remaining weak spots in the next couple of hours.

Author: Srinath June 17th, 2009 Comment (0) blog

Announcing jGridTable

After my post about developing a new jQuery plugin, I’ve managed to shake off my apprehensions, and get it hosted on googlecode. The project is titled jGridTable, and hopefully isn’t already taken. I will dedicate a page to it in this blog, where I can keep track of day to day developments, invite comments and suggestions from people, and more importantly, ask for guidance. And if at all I get it to work, I intend to publish it with the liberal MIT license, so that others can keep improving it. My overall aim for the project is to make it as flexible as possible, without bloating up.

So here is to jGridTable. Lets see how far it goes.

Author: Srinath June 16th, 2009 Comment (0) open source, projects

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