“Triumph of the nerds” – A documentary by Robert Cringley tells the story of the personal computer and how the industry evolved. Unsurprisingly it mentions Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple) and IBM, but there are some not-so-well-known figures that contributed significantly to the fledgling industry of the 1970s and 80s.
Category: Technology
The new ‘Powered by reddit’ indiahacker.com brings social news for India; based on reddit source and with a clean and minimal user-interface like YCombinator’s Hacker News. The site allows user participation to submit new stories, to share them via email, comment on them or vote it up or down.
Streaming allows the upload and download at the same time, without the first person completely uploading the file. New startup brings streaming of files to web — innovative!
VCs are collectively pumping about $7b per quarter on average in the US, with an average deal size of $7.5m, so approx 1000 new/renewed investments per quarter! The hot industries are usual suspects: software, energy and bio-tech.
Former Vice President of USA and an environmental activist, Al Gore, issued a challenge yesterday to all fellow Americans to achieve 100% energy from indigenously produced renewable sources within 10 years. This is not only a challenge for Americans, but a mission for all residents of the planet who ought to play their own part in their own region. Visit weCanSolveIt.org to sign up and join the revolution.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idlJDcr669o]
Free, open-source boot disk utility Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) automatically and completely deletes the content of every hard disk it can find on your computer when you run it.
Darik’s Boot and Nuke Securely Wipes Your System in an Emergency
Scenario (for Windows): You’ve got multiple GMail accounts, say, one for work and another for personal use; and you would like to sign onto both Google Talk accounts on the same computer at the same time. By default, GTalk doesn’t permit multiple instances, but a simple hack can fix it.
Right Click on the Google Talk icon (in the start menu, either in your quick launch or, Start > All Programs > Google Talk > Google Talk), then click Properties, then add /nomutex at the end of the line, for example, in my setup this looks like:
“C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe” /startmenu /nomutex
Now, launch as many Gtalk instances as you want. Voila! Have fun 😉
Yahoo! is taking a bold step tonight: opening up its index and search engine to any outside developers who want to incorporate Yahoo! Search’s content and functionality into search engines on their own sites.
Search War: Yahoo! Opens Its Search Engine to Attack Google With An Army of Verticals
JumpBox offers a neat array of read-made open source software stacks as Virtual Appliances, pre-configured with “best practices”.
The new version touts two major upgrades. ‘First, TrueCrypt now performs parallel encryption and decryption operations on multi-core systems, giving you a phenomenal speedup if you have more than one processor available. Second, it now has the ability to hide an entire operating system, so even if you’re forced to reveal your pre-boot password to an adversary, you can give them one that boots into a plausible decoy operating system, with your hidden operating system remaining completely undetectable.’