Original Message -----
From: "IT@School" <itschool(a)asianetindia.com>
To: <manjushmenon(a)hotmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2002 5:08 PM
Subject: Reply
> Mr.Manjush G. Menon
> We are not giving to depend totally on Ms. Products. Rather MS
> Office is taught along with open office and Windows along with Linux
> from this year. Arranging the resource persons for training an open
> software, making available the software, the maintenance of a help desk
> etc. are logistical issues which could not be immediately undertaken.
> We plan switch out to open software within three years.
> Executive Director
>
---- Original Message -----
From: Manjush G. Menon
To: itschool(a)asianetindia.com
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 5:46 PM
Subject: Respected sir,
From
Manjush G. Menon,
Sr.Programmer,
Sofker Solutions Pvt Ltd,
Kochi-18.
To
The Executive Director,
'IT @ SCHOOL' Project,
SCERT Buildings,
Poojapura,
Thiruvananthapuram-12.
Respected sir,
SUB: In protest against the inclusion of products from multinational companies
in the syllabus of 'IT @ SCHOOL'
It's a very dissappointing fact that when the whole world is moving towards
Free software, we at kerala are going behind a major MNC - Microsoft. I hereby register
my protest in such an act from 'IT @ SCHOOL' Project team.
Breaking of prototypes will definetly help us in finding economical and high quality
products for our future generation.
For students and programmers, the GNU Linux contains 'GNU Compiler Collections'
which includes C, C++, FORTRAN, PERL, TCL etc. Also, for DTP and other publishing purposes,
it includes GNU Office utilities like Abi-Word, gedit, and other worksheet utilities,
all these with a nominal cost of Rs 700-800/-. The software as it is, is free and
the cost is accounted towards the media (CD + Documentation) included.
By this letter, I urge you to take this matter seriously and suggest necessary modifications
in the action plan of 'IT @ SCHOOL' project.
Wishing you all the best and wishing all 'Students @ SCHOOL' a bright future,
Thanking you,
Yours faithfully
Manjush G. Menon.
______________________________________________________
Check out all the latest outrageous email attachments on the Outrageous Email Chart! - http://viral.lycos.co.uk
Thanks to George Lessard for posting this across. FN
---------- Forwarded message ----------
PERUVIAN EFFORT COULD BAN MICROSOFT ON GOV. COMPUTERS
Peruvian Congressman Edgar Villanueva is pushing legislation to obligate all
public institutions to convert exclusively to open-source software.
Open-source programs, embodied by the Linux operating system, have
underlying code available to anyone who wants to modify or customize it.
Such software, in unadorned form, can be downloaded from the Internet for
free. Villanueva hopes his measure triggers activity in Peru's software
industry by freeing programmers from the constraints of working with coding
controlled by a few large companies. Open-source could take the expense out
of software upgrades; which is important for a country like Peru that owes
about $30 million in overdue software license fees.
[SOURCE: San Jose Mercury, AUTHOR: Associated Press]
(http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/3531007.htm)
Sorry for this off-topic mail. Just could not resist this.
This is a delightful takeoff on how IT could spoil our lives. Not just
funny, it talks of our freedom to ignore our health too!
A 40 year old middle class man wants to buy pizza, this mail shows what
he experienced..
Operator: "Thank you for calling Pizza Hut. May I have your..."
Customer: "Hi, I'd like to order."
Operator: "May I have your NIDN first, sir?"
Customer: "My National ID Number, yeah, hold on, eh, it's
6102049998-45-54610."
Operator: "Thank you, Mr. Sheehan. I see you live at 1742 Meadowland
Drive, and the phone number's 494-2366. Your office number over at
Lincoln Insurance is 745-2302 and your cell number's 266-2566. Which
number are you calling from, sir?"
Customer: "Huh? I'm at home. Where d'ya get all this information?"
Operator: "We're wired into the system, sir."
Customer: (Sighs) "Oh, well, I'd like to order a couple of your
All-Meat Special pizzas..."
Operator: "I don't think that's a good idea, sir."
Customer: "Whaddya mean?"
Operator: "Sir, your medical records indicate that you've got very high
blood pressure and extremely high cholesterol. Your National Health Care
provider won't allow such an unhealthy choice."
Customer: "Dang . What do you recommend, then?"
Operator: "You might try our low-fat Soybean Yogurt Pizza. I'm sure
you'll like it."
Customer: "What makes you think I'd like something like that?"
Operator: "Well, you checked out 'Gourmet Soybean Recipes' from
your local library last week, sir. That's why I made the suggestion."
Customer: "All right, all right. Give me two family-sized ones,
then.What's the damage?"
Operator: "That should be plenty for you, your wife and your
four kids, sir. The 'damage,' as you put it, heh, heh, comes to
$49.99."
Customer: "Lemme give you my credit card number."
Operator: "I'm sorry sir, but I'm afraid you'll have to pay in cash.
Your credit card balance is over its limit."
Customer: "I'll run over to the ATM and get some cash before your
driver gets here."
Operator: "That won't work either, sir. Your checking account's
overdrawn."
Customer: "Never mind. Just send the pizzas. I'll have the cash ready.
How long will it take?
Operator: "We're running a little behind, sir. It'll be about 45
minutes, sir. If you're in a hurry you might want to pick 'em up while
you're out getting the cash, but carrying pizzas on a motorcycle can be
a little awkward."
Customer: "How the heck do you know I'm riding a bike?"
Operator: "It says here you're in arrears on your car payments, so your
car got repo'ed. But your Harley's paid up, so I just assumed that
you'd be using it."
Customer: "@#%/$@&?#!"
Operator: "I'd advise watching your language, sir. You've already got a
July 2006 conviction for cussing out a cop."
Customer: (Speechless)
Operator: "Will there be anything else, sir?"
Customer: "No, nothing. Oh, yeah, don't forget the two free litres of
Coke your ad says I get with the pizzas."
Operator: "I'm sorry sir, but our ad's exclusionary clause prevents
us from offering free soda to diabetics."
---
Will information technology really improves our life, or will it take
our freedom of life from us. is it a good idea to give IT tremendous
influence on our lives.. Choice is yours and its your fundamental right,
choose wisely.
--
V. Sasi Kumar <vsasi(a)hotpop.com>
Here is an interesting bit of news about how a piece of software can be
used to sabotage a country's economy. This is from
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/feb2004-daily/28-02-2004/world/w17.htm. A
Google search would give a number of pages on this issue, including an
article by William Saffire (the guy who writes about the English
language in Frontline) who gleefully narrates the background of the
incident which "was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire
ever seen from space."
Can we trust their software?
‘CIA’s flawed software caused 1982-Siberia gas explosion’
WASHINGTON: The CIA exploited the Soviet Union’s desire to pilfer
western technology to send it flawed software that resulted in a huge
explosion on a natural gas pipeline in Siberia in 1982, The Washington
Post said on Friday.
Nobody was killed in the blast, but it did significant damage to the
Soviet economy, said the daily quoting the memoirs of Thomas Reed, a
former Air Force secretary who served in the National Security Council.
Approved by then US president Ronald Reagan, the plan was part of
‘cold-eyed economic warfare’ against the Soviet Union that the Central
Intelligence Agency conducted under Director William Casey, said Reed,
whose book, ‘At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War,’ will
be published next month.
Reed said the Soviets in 1970 had created a special KGB section to plumb
Western research and development for badly needed technology. The secret
programme was later disclosed by a Soviet engineer to French
intelligence, who in turn alerted the Reagan administration in 1981.
Shocked by the knowledge the Soviets were stealing abundant Western
technology and aware the United States at the time was trying to block
Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas, the CIA came up with
the idea of slipping the Soviets technology that would work for a while,
then fail.
"In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings
from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software
that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go
haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve
settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline
joints and welds," Reed writes.
The resulting explosion in the summer of 1982, said Reed, was observed
from space by US satellites and caused concern for the US military who
feared it was a missile liftoff. A CIA agent quickly told the military
what had happened.
"While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion,
there was significant damage to the Soviet economy," Reed writes adding,
"Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is
what brought the Cold War to an end."
--
V. Sasi Kumar <vsasi(a)hotpop.com>
Please excuse the posting of a completely off-topic posting here. This is
a campaign that is underway since the mid-nineties. FN
---------- Forwarded message ----------
DO YOU believe that radio has a role in enhancing communication among the
common(wo)man in India? Join a network meant to campaign for the opening up
of genuine community radio in India. Click on the link-below to sign-up on
the 'Community Radio-India' mailing list. FN (Frederick Noronha)
_______________________________________________
cr-india mailing list
cr-india(a)sarai.net
https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/cr-india
PFM2058 | 22/10/2003 | 970 words
Radio Suffers As Colombo Bosses Call The Shots
By Nalaka Gunawardene
COLOMBO (PANOS FEATURES) -- Soon after conquering Mount Everest half a
century ago, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay turned on their transistor
radio -- and the first thing they heard was an overseas broadcast of Radio
Ceylon, from more than 3,000 kilometres away. They joined millions of people
across the Indian subcontinent who regularly tuned in to these broadcasts. A
pioneer in broadcasting in Asia, Radio Ceylon for decades informed and
entertained an overseas audience many times the population of Ceylon, now
Sri Lanka.
How times have changed. The once influential, popular and monopolistic
state-owned radio in Sri Lanka has been completely sidelined in the past
decade. A cacophony of privately-owned channels now crowd the airwaves --
albeit only in the FM band -- competing with each other to inform, entertain
and sell consumer goods to the island nation's 19 million people. The
product of media and economic liberalisation, these channels are operated by
half a dozen companies, each struggling to make money in a market that until
recently was depressed by a protracted civil war.
Loss of listenership and advertising revenue are not the only problems that
plague Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), successor to Radio Ceylon.
Over the years, successive governments have misused the station for
political and state propaganda. Inconsequential and boring speeches of
politicians were broadcast in full.
Not that the private commercial channels have completely fulfilled their
expectations: after the initial novelty had worn off, discerning listeners
found that they could take only so much of the popular culture dished out by
young announcers endlessly chattering in a mix of Sinhala or Tamil with
English. Yet, on balance, many have come to the conclusion that even bad FM
radio is better than SLBC.
Private channels moved closer to their audiences by presenting news in
colloquial and friendly Sinhala. Not so SLBC, which insists on using an
imperious and archaic version of the language.
*Our listeners immediately welcomed news in spoken Sinhala, and only a few
pundits raised objections,* recalls Asoka Dias, news director at Sirasa FM
which pioneered this innovation. *Now everybody does it -- at least in
selected news formats.*
It was Sirasa FM -- the first private channel started in 1992 -- that turned
broadcasting in Sri Lanka upside down. Nimal Lakshapathiarachchi, its
founder director, recognised the critical need for new formats to make radio
more engaging and relevant in the multimedia age. Arguably some of these
were in the *tabloid* mould, but Sirasa -- and other FM channels -- have lured
back a whole new generation of listeners.
Major gaps remain. Most FM signals can only be picked up in urban areas, and
their profit-oriented owners are unlikely to invest further to achieve rural
coverage. SLBC is the only station broadcasting on medium wave, short wave
and FM bands -- and, in spite of considerable media freedom granted by the
current government, it remains *His Master*s Voice* on all key political,
social and economic matters.
And in spite of having more choice than ever before, many Sri Lankans
regularly listen to foreign broadcasts.
By far the biggest gap concerns community radio.
SLBC broadcasts from all corners of the country, including stations located
in remote areas. The channel involves local people in programme production,
and it maintains a strongly agrarian audience. But listeners have no say in
running the stations -- these are managed by a tight bureaucracy in the
capital Colombo, whose rigid guidelines control content: strictly no
politics, and nothing remotely against the government in office.
But, although touted as such, SLBC is not community radio, which is supposed
to promote access, public participation in production and decision-making
and listener-financing -- where each listener contributes a small amount
towards the running of the radio station.
In Sri Lanka, ironically, only armed rebels have challenged this state
dominance by running clandestine channels. The Marxist People's Liberation
Front ran Rana Handa (Sound of Victory) in the 1980s when it spearheaded a
youth insurgency. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) -- the
guerrilla group now talking peace with the government after two decades of
war -- ran Voice of Tigers which made a mockery of Colombo's broadcast
regulations.
In November 2002, the government granted a license for LTTE to continue its
broadcasts legally, a move that has since been contested in courts by other
citizen groups.
But that's the first -- and so far only time the state has accommodated such
a request. Four successive governments since 1992 have refused to grant
broadcast license to non-profit, non-governmental or cooperative groups.
Organisations such as Sarvodaya -- the country's largest development NGO --
are keen to use the airwaves for public benefit, but their requests have
been ignored.
A major bottleneck is the discretionary broadcast licensing system that
lacks transparency, accountability and consistency. As a result, the electro
magnetic spectrum -- a public property -- has been plundered by officials and
politicians who have granted licenses to relatives and business cronies.
Some licenses have been traded for huge sums of money. The FM band is now
saturated.
Governments have never explained why community groups are not given
broadcast licenses. Senior officials have sometimes cited fears of media
misuse for 'anti-social' or political purposes. Strangely, such concerns
don*t seem to extend to profit-making companies, some of whose channels are
openly aligned with political parties.
Meanwhile, the smokescreen of so-called 'community radio' has been used by
bureaucrats hand-in-glove with commercial interests to block the evolution
of broadcasting to the next stage * where community media are owned, managed
and sustained by the people.
'Colombo Calling' was the station call in the early days of radio
broadcasting in colonial Ceylon. Eight decades on, Colombo is still calling
the shots. A few token rural transmissions of the state cannot redress this
huge imbalance, no matter how they are dressed up. The first step towards
truly community media is to demand the real liberation of the
airwaves./PANOS FEATURES
Nalaka Gunawardene is a media commentator and a director of Panos South
Asia.
This feature is published by Panos Features and can be reproduced free of
charge. Please credit the author and Panos Features and send a copy to MAC,
Panos Institute, 9 White Lion St, London N1 9PD, UK. Email:
media(a)panoslondon.org.uk
Photos (c) Panos Pictures except where otherwise credited. Panos London is
a registered charity number 297366 Site development by viplondon. Design by
John F McGill.
CIRCULATED VIA:
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------
February 2004 | Frederick Noronha, Freelance Journalist
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa | Goa India 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | ----------------------------------------
8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | Email fred at bytesforall.org
15 16 17 18 19 20 21 | Writing with a difference
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 | ... on what makes *the* difference
29 | http://www.bytesforall.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------
---------- Forwarded message ----------
GNU Libidn is an implementation of the Stringprep, Punycode and IDNA
specifications defined by the IETF Internationalized Domain Names
(IDN) working group, used for internationalized domain names. The
library contains a generic Stringprep implementation that does Unicode
3.2 NFKC normalization, mapping and prohibitation of characters, and
bidirectional character handling. Profiles for Nameprep, iSCSI, SASL
and XMPP are included. Punycode and ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE)
via IDNA are supported. A mechanism to define Top-Level Domain (TLD)
specific validation tables, and to compare strings against those
tables, is included. Default tables for some TLDs are also included.
Here are the compressed sources:
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libidn/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz (1.6)
http://josefsson.org/libidn/releases/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz (1.6MB)
Here are GPG detached signatures:
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libidn/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz.sighttp://josefsson.org/libidn/releases/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz.asc
Here are the build reports for various platforms:
http://josefsson.org/autobuild/libidn.html
Here are the MD5 and SHA1 signatures:
71f3db9892848073c0c76b4d3326fd9a libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz
61c126e7a889ab571b62a547505ead02b0f5b84c libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz
Noteworthy changes since version 0.3.5 (last version announced here):
* Version 0.4.0 (released 2004-02-28)
** Support for TLD restrictions on IDN strings, contributed by Thomas Jacob.
Many TLDs restrict the set of characters that can be used, from the
full Unicode 3.2 range that is normally available. This contribution
make it possible for you to test strings for TLD conformance locally.
The code can be disabled by --disable-tld. If enabled (the default),
the new API "tld.h" is installed which can be used to check a string
for conformance to TLD specific rules. This add a new self test, and
a new chapter in the manual. People responsible for maintaining TLD
tables are hereby encouraged to contribute them (under reasonable
licensing terms) for inclusion in future versions of Libidn. Be
warned that the API for TLD checking may change throughout the 0.4.x
series as we get feedback on it.
** Kerberos 5 stringprep profile macro is no longer documented.
The macro itself will probably be removed in the future, if the
specification is dropped from the Kerberos WG agenda.
** API and ABI is backwards compatible with the previous version.
stringprep_kerberos5: DEPRECATED.
Tld_table_element:
Tld_table:
Tld_rc: ADD. New data types.
tld_get_4:
tld_get_4z:
tld_get_z: ADD. New functions to extract TLD from string.
tld_get_table:
tld_default_table: ADD. New functions to get TLD table from TLD name.
tld_check_4t:
tld_check_4tz: ADD. New function to provide core TLD operations.
tld_check_4:
tld_check_4z:
tld_check_8z:
tld_check_lz: ADD. New functions that combine all TLD operations in one call.
* Version 0.3.7 (released 2004-01-22)
** The command line parameter '--' idiom is documented.
** The iSCSI stringprep profile now recognized as "iSCSI".
The earlier name "ISCSIprep" is still recognized, for backwards
compatibility.
** DocBook manuals no longer included (the tools are too unstable).
** API and ABI is backwards compatible with the previous version.
* Version 0.3.6 (released 2004-01-06)
** The manual now contain a troubleshooting section for the command line tool.
** The PHP interface pass the string directly on the command line.
** The macro that create 'idn-int.h' has been updated to latest version.
** API and ABI is backwards compatible with the previous version.
_______________________________________________
GNU Announcement mailing list <info-gnu(a)gnu.org>
http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu
Hello Friends,
When RMS was here last, he had a badge which said :
"Free Software ... Want to know more" or something like that... With the 3
logos of BSD, GNU & Linux.
I was thinking that we should make badges like those for us to use. I mean how
many of us actively talk about Free Software in trains or buses? Hardly...
right?
I'm thinking maybe wearing these badges may help instigate others to ask what
this is and that would start the ball rolling?
Any comments?
Regards
Rishi
Eben Moglen speaks at Harvard.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040226003735733
Summary:- Free Software Movement is not about software alone.
--
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+
Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M.,
'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road,
Ernakulam, Cochin-682018,
Kerala, India.
http://paivakil.port5.com
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+
Hi All,
Audio of RMS speech at Centre for Earth Science Studies, Kerala.
Topic: Scientific Journals and freedom of knowledge.
http://www.gnu.org.in/rms1.ogg
regards,
arun.
GNUHeads,
RMS' answers to questions put forward by Samuel Abraham of `The Week'.
These questions were mailed to RMS and he patiently answered them in
great detail. He was asked these questions after his talk at the CUSAT
campus in Kochi, January 23.
http://puggy.symonds.net/~fsug-kochi/rms-interview.html
Regards
--
.''`. Dileep M. Kumar <dileep(a)kumarayil.net>
: :' : http://www.kumarayil.net
`. `'` Mobile: 98474-47437
`- Debian GNU/Linux - Choice of the Freedom Lovers