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| Posted on: Jul 17, 2012 06:37:14 IST |
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After years of rumours and leaked clients, there is finally a confirmation from Valve that they are indeed looking towards Linux as their next platform. For those who are unfamiliar with Valve, it is the operator of Steam, the biggest digital retailer of games. It is also the creator of the popular Half-Life, Portal, and Left 4 Dead franchises. This is indeed good news not only for Linux users, but for Linux as a platform as well. Gaming is one of the aspects of computing that had been rather weak on the Linux platform. While recently there has been a huge increase in the number of games being released for Linux, with Valve and Steam behind Linux, thing should get even better. It is important to note that Valve’s games already run quite well under Linux for those who use Wine to...
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| Posted on: Jun 29, 2012 21:21:17 IST |
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The concept of self-replication, or the ability for something to create another version of itself has always been rather alluring. We see it everywhere in the organic world, animals give birth to the same animal, plants to the same plant. So it’s genuinely exciting when we find artificial systems capable of such complexity.Take something like the RepRap, an open source, open hardware design for a 3D printer that has been carefully constructed such that it can print its own parts, and in a sense give birth to another RepRap printer. It goes even a step ahead by being able to print not only its own parts, but also the parts of the next, improved model of the machine. An excellent model for evolution in machine form. Consider this, once you make or buy a RepRap machine, you are set...
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| Posted on: Jun 28, 2012 20:33:25 IST |
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Another interesting Kinect-based experiment has come to light. It is interesting how most of the exciting applications for this gaming device are those that have nothing to do with gaming at all!This new open source project enables you to control Qt applications via gestures captured by the Kinect device. With Kinect as an input device you can move your hards about in the air to control a cursor, and use gestures to perform operations such as clicking, dragging and dropping. The project is quite appropriately named Air Cursor.You can see a video of this technology in action, being used to drag and drop items around in an HTML5 application:While touchscreens have become popular on small form-factor devices such as phones and tablets, they are still mostly unheard of on even...
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| Posted on: Jun 28, 2012 17:13:30 IST |
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The upcoming Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” has been announced and showcased at Google I/O.The update brings not only a number of new features, but quite a lot of the focus this time around is on performance. Improvements have been made to the very core of Android where it handles input and refreshing the phone screen such that everything feels and works much smoother. All events and display refreshes are now synchronized and triple buffering has been added.There is good news for Indian users with heavily restricted internet plans. A new feature called “Smart App Updates” means that Android will now be much smarter about application updates and will only now only need to download the bits that have changed.Another change to applications is the ability for paid apps to...
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| Posted on: Jun 27, 2012 08:32:59 IST |
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Mozilla has announced the availability of the latest version of Firefox for Mobile that features a new updated Native UI that promises a much faster browser for mobile. One of the key reasons the Firefox has had so many add-ons, is that it is extremely customizable; the browser itself is built with the same kind of technologies that most websites are which makes it easy for browser developers to hack on features and UI changes. Just like the web is built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (among other technologies and formats), Firefox is built on XUL, CSS and JavaScript, with the user interface heavily built on the HTML-like XUL. It turns out that this comes at too heavy a cost when it comes to mobile platforms. Mozilla decided to implement an UI that used native platform features...
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| Posted on: Jun 27, 2012 06:12:06 IST |
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The hacking community is constantly engaged in pushing hardware farther than it can go. The latest example of their efforts is a “working port of Google’s latest Android 4 “Ice Cream SandwichOS to the Samsung Galaxy Wave S8500.This project clearly shows the strength of community in that this port possible thanks to the effort of many. While this project was undertaken by one person, but built on the effort of many hackers, the developer got funded for purchasing his Wave device through donations from others. Currently the only the Samsung Wave S8500 is supported by this custom Android ROM, however the developer’s secondary target is to port it to the Wave II S8530 as well. Both these phones have been around for quite a while now, and are available at quite a good...
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| Posted on: May 30, 2012 01:49:50 IST |
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The amazing open source cloud storage software ownCloud has recently released a new major version that brings a number of new features. There are a large number of cloud storage apps available today, however they are all closed, proprietary systems that each need their own client, and work with only their own hosting. With ownCloud you can actually own you data as you can host it anywhere, on any hosting service that offers PHP and MySQL support. There are even dedicated ownCloud hosting services available now days, much like there is Wordpress or Drupal hosting.It can perhaps be best compared with Google Drive, which forms a base service with a number of included apps, but can be extended with other applications which can use it as storage. With ownCloud you get an image gallery app, a...
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| Posted on: May 30, 2012 01:48:10 IST |
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Those who develop on Windows will be familiar with Microsoft Visual Studio Express edition products. For the rest, the Express editions are free versions of Microsoft’s popular Visual Studio development suite. The Express editions include a basic IDE and compilers for creating Windows applications. There are express editions available for C++, C#, Basic, and web development.These are great tools for starting developers to create apps for Windows that have been compiled using Microsoft’s own tools. These compilers are used by most popular software including open source software such as Firefox, Python etc. For the many developers working on these open source products, Visual Studio Express is often the only way. It appears that in the next iteration of Visual Studio, the Express...
