The Mount St. Mary’s School is organising an inter-school computers and economics symposium.The symposium is going to be held on the 28th and 29th August, 2008. The following is the list of participants:
QUIZ
GAMING
PROGRAM IT
MATRIX CHALLENGE
COMPUTER CROSSWORD
CARTOON MAKING
ROBO RAGE
There will be a session on Robotics on Friday 22nd August, which will be held by Siddharth Nangia (Exun batch 2006). He was the person behind the extremely well produced Exun video (2006) and his skills in photoshop and likewise are unchallenged. He was also part of Roboknights (the robotics club of D.P.S. R.K. Puram) and has received a certificate from IIT in the field of robotics.
It’s highly encouraged that Exun members and non-members alike come for the session as none of the previous batches have got such an exposure. The session will take place in the 4th and 5th periods. Interested students must reach the Web Resource Center (egurucool lab) as soon as the break ends.
This is to notify all Exun members that there will be a meeting in the break on Friday 22nd August 2008 in Computer Lab- IV to finalize participants for the upcoming events, collect articles for the Underscore Magazine, organise Exun 2008 and other related topics.
This is a very important meeting and ALL exun members MUST attend it.
Regards,
Aviral Goyal and Kartikeya Asthana
The Mount St. Mary’s School is organising an inter-school computers and economics symposium.The symposium is going to be held on the 28th and 29th August, 2008 and will feature concurrent and general sessions that will focus on development of the field of Computer Science and Economics including:
Symposium
Quiz
Gaming
ProgramIt!
Matrix Challenge
Computer Crossword
Cartoon Making
Robo Rage
Ad-Enact
Art-o-nomics
Terphes-choronomics
Matrix Challenge
Details of all the events can be found here.
Note: – One participant may participate in more than one event, but no event will be delayed for the convenience of a participant.
Guest posting from Gary Phillips by the kind invitation of Mukesh Kumar.
Windows considered Harmful
Open Source considered Useful
Hello fellow computer geeks
I guess you are all masters of Windows or at least disciples of Guru Gates.
I’m making this effort to encourage you to start working with open source programs because I think it will make you a better computer engineer, make better use of your computer’s resources, allow you to contribute better to your country’s development and might even save you some money.
I’m writing this in an excellent word processor in a virus free operating system on a tiny, lightweight and cheap laptop expressly designed around open source. Top marks if you guessed I’m using an Asus Eee PC (512Mb RAM, 2Gb SSD, 900Mhz Celeron).
From a computer geek’s point of view, the best thing about my laptop is that I can see the original source code of every program, every driver and every library. I can examine the code in order to learn from it, I can modify the code to add a feature or fix a bug and I can even share my changes with other developers. You might think having this level of control over my computing environment might be very costly but the only cost to me was downloading the software over my broadband internet connection.
What is Open Source?
“A program in which the source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design free of charge.”
The Open Source movement began when a few developers wanted to have more control of their computing environment. They wanted the freedom to change programs to suit themselves. Their leader, Richard Stallman initiated the GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) project which was an attempt to replicate his favourite operating system (Unix) with code that could be examined and modified by anyone. Stallman started the Free Software Foundation (FSF) with the goal of supporting development of software which could be freely modified (the meaning of ‘Free’ for FSF is ‘Freedom’). Over the last 25 years the number of projects using an open source license has grown dramatically, most particularly through the success of the Linux Operating System.
The most well known Open Source applications are Firefox (web browser), Thunderbird (email reader), Open Office (word processing, spreadsheet, presentations), Apache (web server), MySQL (database), PHP (web programming language) but there are hundreds (or thousands) more. Many open source applications can run on Windows as well as Linux.
In India all software is free. Well yes but it’s only free in terms of initial cost. My pirate Windows XP CD from Nehru Place has 2 viruses on the disk. I can’t pick up security updates from Micro$oft so my computer is more prone to infection. In Leh this summer I had to repair 18 school computers which had almost ground to a halt from the infestation of viruses and worms. Open source software tends to have fewer security problems than closed source, most obviously because more people can look at it to find and fix security bugs but less obviously because the open source development model forces a modular approach to system building. A bug in Firefox does not affect my use of Open Office but a bug in Internet Explorer has implications for Microsoft Word since they are tightly integrated and share a code base.
Windows itself is a huge pile of poorly engineered and closely linked components. Most effort in new releases goes towards increasing the feature count, gratuitously changing the user interface and maintaining binary compatibility. Not much attention is given to improving system stability or run-time performance. You’ll know about these effects if you’ve tried to use the latest versions of MS Office or (horrors!) tried to run Vista on a system that handles XP perfectly. Open source systems tend to have different aims. For example, the Linux kernel has become faster and less resource hungry over the years.
The highest traffic web sites run on open source including Google, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, AOL.
Embedded systems often run on open source, this includes your TV set top box or satellite receiver, internet router, fridge and increasingly mobile phones (the most popular mobile phone software is Symbian OS which is being ‘Open Sourced’ next year).
Do you want to trust your life and your country to a huge monopoly whose idea of innovation is to buy any company that has a new idea? India has enormous potential as an IT development powerhouse but I hope it will not become just an outsourcing department of Micro$oft.
I encourage you to install some open source applications, perhaps from the TTCS CD-ROM of open source applications for Windows (that’s Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society, www.ttcsweb.org). This collection includes applications for office, games, multimedia and education.
You might also try out one of the many Linux distributions. My favourite is Ubuntu which comes in a live-CD version (boot your PC directly from the CD, run all the applications and decide later if you want to install it along with Windows) www.ubuntu.com.
I’m very interested to read any comments or questions you have and will do my best to help you.
All the best
Gary Phillips
Freelance Software Engineer
Exun elite 2008 for class XIth has been concluded. The unprecedented response again shows the rising levels of enthusiasm and awareness among the students about Information Technology!
However, there were some glitches in organising the event this time which shall not occur again.
The result is as follows:
1st Position
Praachi Pandey XI-F
Sampoorna Biswas XI-G
2nd Position
Aman Mathur XI-K
Nishant Chaudhary XI-K
3rd Position
Ashish Pandey XI-F
Utkarsh Srivastava XI-I
Congratulations to all the winners!
Mothers International School’s annual symposium MINET is going to be held on Saturday, the 9th of August.
The events are as follows –
Teams to be of 2 students wherever applicable.
Click here for the schedule and here for the registration form to be filled out and sent to minet@themis.in
Best of luck!
The tentative schedule for Exun e-lite is as follows;
Day 1 – 8th august
Note: Programming Finals shall be held after school tomorrow i.e. on the 8th of August ; hence be prepared.
I was recently browsing thru Digg when I came across this site which features the 5 best Linux commercials. I especially liked this video which (unlike the usual advertisments) carries a very strong and inspirational message.