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Showing posts from 2011

Remembrance 9/11: Reason or Irrationality - Time to Choose

I am re-posting this article of mine published in Economic and Political Weekly, immediately after the tragic event. Some of the intellectually well-meaning criticisms of many policies of US governments have been internalised as hatred of America and Americans in the conscious or unconscious minds not only of the lunatic fringe of religious fundamentalists but also of large numbers of apparently rational people, particularly in the poorer countries. In the aftermath of the maniacal attacks of September 11 the foremost challenge will be to dispel the clouds of hatred if irrationality is not to triumph over reason Remembrance: 9/11 (2001)Reason or Irrationality: Time to Choose  Today (12th September) as I post  this,  I also remember my mother, C.A. Annamma, who left us in 2006.

Welcome LibreOffice! A time to move on

For some time I have truly been a bit out of touch with developments in Open Source software. To me, the flagship Open and Free application was OpenOffice. There are of course, mightier and more beautiful ones like MySQL. But this one is closer to one's finger tips, purring on our Laptops and Desktops. Quite unlike others enthroned on the arrogant servers or known only to developers. OOo (OpenOffice.org) was for me a good enough substitute for MS Office. It was steadily improving. But sadly, our worst fears – of commercial greed choking this great effort – seemed to have come true. As many are aware, Oracle, the database major, acquired Sun Microsystems some time back. Sun had developed Java. Sun had placed the licensing of its Java implementation under the GNU General Public License in 2006. Java had, by then, already become the hot favourite on the web and on all sorts of devices – from big computers to cell phones. Hmm, Yes! I do mean – Java everywhere! It was too true.