Tech droppings

"My experience as a SysAdmin has significantly enhanced my technical knowledge."

The line above has been copy-pasted from my resume. I thought I should share a few 'technical knowledge' tips I have on day to day CR(Computer Relations) with those who think its never going to concern them because they belong to a different industry(heh.. good luck to you!).

This is it.. we are living right in the middle, in the age of the machines its like Die Hard 4.0, if you haven't watched the movie watch it, your life is about to depend on it. If you don't know it already, the world now is sneakily pushing below it a machine layer, a computer layer which is now almost complete, the foundation is almost complete and it always will seem almost complete. This is more important to you than you think it is.

To be more precise with sub-genres this is the age of the web. A computer without internet is as good as people without clothes, we were happy being naked for a while but soon we started wearing clothes, right? look what happened to those who chose not to wear clothes. Clothes have gained so much importance that to some people, it defines them. Internet doesn't define a computer, but how you use it defines you. In the sense that if you know how to exploit the internet, it will give you an edge over those who don't.

You can find just about anything on the internet with search engines, with Google, moving steadily to replace the term search.If you're somebody who needs to be heard, your audience is vast and steadily growing. I could start listing out the endless advantages of the internet but that would lead to people calling me Mr.Tanenbaum. My point being, this is the biggest revolution media has seen since the words media and revolution were coined.

Tip1: Do you think you're 'up-to-date' because you're using Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Vista? Not only is Office 2007 unpopular, there are now online tools to create presentations, documents, spreadsheets and such, have you heard of docs.google? Here's an uber cool demo



Tip2: It is time to get rid of MS' softwares one by one. If you use Internet Explorer and Outlook Express to browse and check emails, you should stop doing so! Let me explain, these softwares are Microsoft's creations and are therefore directly connected to MS' kernel. Any major virus attack will easily bypass these softwares and bring your OS down. I'd recommend Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird since they're 3rd party, free and open source. Here's the equation Free+Open Source = great support for an average user. Open source software is good for you in more ways than you can think of, personally I think FOSS is the future. You can read more about that in my article for The Hindu.

I shall post more such random tech tips and I might also rant off about how the society needs to be altered for the greater good, watch this space! I now need to take a piss, so later.