A Short Note on Open Source...

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials.
Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Before the term open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; open source gained hold with the rise of the Internet, and the attendant need for massive re-tooling of the computing source code.

Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. Subsequently, the new phrase "open-source software" was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.

The label “open source” was adopted by some people in the free software movement at a strategy session held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator. The group of individuals at the session included Christine Peterson who suggested “open source”, Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Michael Tiemann and Eric S. Raymond. Over the next week, Raymond and others worked on spreading the word.

The term was given a big boost at an event organized in April 1998 by technology publisher Tim O'Reilly. Originally titled the “Freeware Summit” and later known as the “Open Source Summit”, The event brought together the leaders of many of the most important free and open-source projects, including Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Eric Allman, Guido van Rossum, Michael Tiemann, Paul Vixie, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape, and Eric Raymond.

Open-source software is software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies.

Examples of open-source software products are:

Application software---

7-Zip — file archiver

Blender — 3D graphics editor

Eclipse — development environment comprising an IDE

GIMP — graphics editor

Inkscape - Vector graphics editor for .svg

Mozilla Firefox — web browser

Mozilla Thunderbird — e-mail client

NASA World Wind — virtual globe, geobrowser

OpenOffice.org (and the LibreOffice fork) - office suite

Operating System---

FreeBSD — operating system derived from Unix

Linux — family of Unix-like operating systems

OpenIndiana — a free Unix-like operating system

Symbian — real-time mobile operating system

ReactOS — operating system built on Windows NT architecture

Haiku — free and open source operating system compatible with BeOS

Programming languages---

Perl — a general purpose programming language

PHP — scripting language suited for the web

Python — general purpose programming language

Server software---

Joomla- Content management system (CMS)

Openclass- Classified content application

Apache — HTTP web server

Drupal — content management system

MediaWiki — wiki server software, the software that runs Wikipedia

MongoDB — document-oriented, non-relational database

Moodle — course management system or virtual learning environment

WordPress — blog software

Media Open-source journalism, referred to the standard journalistic techniques of news gathering and fact checking, and reflected a similar term that was in use from 1992 in military intelligence circles, open-source intelligence. It is now commonly used to describe forms of innovative publishing of online journalism, rather than the sourcing of news stories by a professional journalist. In the December 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine this is referred to as user created content and listed alongside more traditional open-source projects such as OpenSolaris and Linux.

Weblogs, or blogs, are another significant platform for open-source culture. Blogs consist of periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts, using a technology that makes webpages easily updatable with no understanding of design, code, or file transfer required. While corporations, political campaigns and other formal institutions have begun using these tools to distribute information, many blogs are used by individuals for personal expression, political organizing, and socializing. Some, such as Blogspot, LiveJournal or WordPress, utilize open-source software that is open to the public and can be modified by users to fit their own tastes. Whether the code is open or not, this format represents a nimble tool for people to borrow and re-present culture; whereas traditional websites made the illegal reproduction of culture difficult to regulate, the mutability of blogs makes "open sourcing" even more uncontrollable since it allows a larger portion of the population to replicate material more quickly in the public sphere.

(Portions from various sources)

A Short Note on Future Of Broadcasting...

No one can predict the future, but it seems that in future, the broadcasting may shift from TV to PC.
In the recent future we will witness the TVs with Internet compatible and PCs with TV...
All TV content would be created according to its internet feasibility. Viewer would surf TV and internet on same platform ... on... mobile, tablets etc.
Analysts give the term 'Convergence' to it.
Some computers are already fitted with TV cards that permit reception of analogue TV broadcasts. This feature will probably become more common with the advent of digital broadcasting. Microsoft has predicted that “More than of 50% of PCs will be capable of receiving digital TV broadcasts till year 2020”.
This obviously represents a new and expanding market for normal broadcast TV services. It could also permit important new forms of broadcast multimedia services, using the processing power and storage capability of computers.
Various commercial services allow consumers to display Web pages on standard TV sets. They use special set-top boxes connected by a modem to a normal telephone line. A key feature of such services is that they are easier to use than computer-based access to the Internet.
As Web pages are designed for viewing on computers, the pages must be magnified and re-formatted to ensure legibility on TV screens. The result is that many graphics cannot be accurately displayed and only part of the page is visible without scrolling.
Another term also exists in current market, which is called 'Data broadcasting'.
Data broadcasting can be used to deliver pages from the Web. Some use the vertical blanking interval of analogue TV services, whilst others use digital television transmissions which offer much greater capacity.
Broadcast transmissions will, of course, eventually become digital, but analogue services will continue for another 15 - 20 years. For historical reasons, terrestrial transmission has been the dominant form of delivery for radio and TV services. However, in the future, broadcast services will be delivered by a multiplicity of methods:
Wireless – terrestrial, satellite and microwave multi-point video distribution (MVDS); Wired – cable, telephone lines and optical fiber.
Two trends appear inevitable: Portability and mobility will become major requirements – even for TV reception which has, hitherto, been an essentially static application; interactivity will blur the distinction between “traditional” broadcasting and wired services, including those delivered by the Internet (and its successors).
From a technical perspective, the Internet is a “powerhouse of technology” (such as streaming audio/video, downloadable software and push technology). Such technologies require user terminals with considerable processing power and local storage. However, broadcasting standards have historically been designed to minimize the complexity of receivers, so as to reduce the costs for consumers.
This constraint will become less necessary because of the falling costs of computer processing and storage.
Broadcasters will embrace the Internet, adopting and adapting the new technologies to benefit from the advantages of broadcast delivery.

A Short Note On Internet Protocol

The Internet Protocol (IP) is the method or protocol by which data is sent from one computer to another on the Internet. Each computer (known as a host) on the Internet has at least one IP address that uniquely identifies it from all other computers on the Internet.

In simple words, IP is an address of a computer or other network device on a network using IP/TCP. For example, the number "166.70.10.23" is an example of such an address. These addresses are similar to an addresses used on a house and is what allows data to reach the appropriate destination on a network.

In more simple words, An identifier for a computer or device on a IP/TCP network.

When you send or receive data (for example, an e-mail note or a Web page), the message gets divided into little chunks called packets. Each of these packets contains both the sender's Internet address and the receiver's address. Any packet is sent first to a gateway computer. The gateway computer reads the destination address and forwards the packet to an adjacent gateway that in turn reads the destination address and so forth across the Internet until one gateway recognizes the packet as belonging to a computer within its immediate neighborhood or domain.That gateway then forwards the packet directly to the computer whose address is specified.

Because a message is divided into a number of packets, each packet can, if necessary, be sent by a different route across the Internet. Packets can arrive in a different order than the order they were sent in. The Internet Protocol just delivers them. It's up to another protocol, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to put them back in the right order.

IP is a connectionless protocol, which means that there is no continuing connection between the end points that are communicating. Each packet that travels through the Internet is treated as an independent unit of data without any relation to any other unit of data.

The most widely used version of IP today is Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4). However, IP Version 6 (IPv6) is also beginning to be supported. IPv6 provides for much longer addresses and therefore for the possibility of many more Internet users. IPv6 includes the capabilities of IPv4 and any server that can support IPv6 packets can also support IPv4 packets.

Historically, IP was the connectionless datagram service in the original Transmission Control Program introduced by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974, the other being the connection-oriented Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The Internet Protocol Suite is therefore often referred to as TCP/IP.

देव साब, अलविदा...!

अस्सी के दशक में मैंने देव साब का एक इंटरव्यू पढ़ा था, तब उनकी कई फिल्में लगातार फ्लॉप हो चुकी थीं... उनसे सवाल किया गया था कि इतनी शोहरत मिल चुकी है अब फिल्में बनाने की क्या जरूरत है... सिर से बाल उड़ने लगे हैं, मुंह में से दांत उखड़ रहे हैं, बॉलीवुड में से पैर उखड़ रहे हैं... बूढ़े हो रहे हैं आप...। उनका जवाब सुनिए...

'बाल उड़ रहे हैं तो विग लगा लेंगे, दांत उखड़ रहे हैं, तो नकली लगवा लेंगे, शरीर की चमक जाएगी तो अच्छे कपड़ों से ढक लेंगे लेकिन बॉलीवुड में से पैर नहीं उखड़ने दूंगा... आखिरी दम तक फिल्में बनाता रहूंगा...।'  उस इंटरव्यू के करीब 20 साल बाद तक वह उसी उत्साह से बिना किसी फल की इच्छा किए अपना काम करते रहे। 

तब में करीब 14-15 साल का था... लेकिन उस दिन मन में यही आया कि चाहे कुछ भी हो जाए, जब तक मरेंगे, अपने को फिट रखेंगे और काम करेंगे... अलविदा देव साब... आप हर वक्त जेहन में रहेंगे।