Ankur – Page 567

Google Pack: What the doctor advised for the novices – A review

New to the Big Bad Wild West Internet? Are you prone to drowning frequently in the tsunamic waves while surfing the World Wide Web? Don’t know why the heck some media files ask for their buddy Real Player? Well, here’s the answer to these headaches.

Google has recently launched another freebie service for download, Google Pack. In essence it is a marketing ploy to distribute loads of Google software, but the sweeten the package by allowing you to add your own software from a list. Here’s what they have to offer:

Google Earth: This must-have app will literally make the world your oyster.
Google Desktop Search: Haven’t tried it out since I like Yahoo! Desktop Search better. One problem is that it stores the index online, while Yahoo! does it offline. So a lost connection means goodbye to desktop search. The benefit of both over normal Windows search facility is that it is ‘search-as-you-type’, i.e., results are displayed instantly.
Picasa: Google’s photo organizing software that allows you organize and edit photos. It also gives options for publishing online. For starters though, I would advice Adobe Photoshop 3.0 Starter Edition; Picasa is damn to cheery (like the doors in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) for me to like it.
Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer: Nice toolbar, but I like Great Quizzard’s Toolbar more.
Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar: Another must-have. There’s a link for this at the starting of this blog.
Ad-Aware SE Personal: Award-winning spyware and adware removal app.
Norton Antivirus 2005 Special Edition: A 6-month subscription to that crap. OK, fine it works for beginners, but I use avast! 4 Home, although it’s not advisable for first-timers.
Adobe Reader 7: Useful to read those PDFs.
Google Talk: THE app used by Gmail user to, well, talk and chat.
RealPlayer: My favorite media player. Believe me it can play EVERYTHING, except ‘.ogg’ files. Good for playing streaming video/audio.
Trillian: A product of Cerulean Studios, this can connect to every IM account, like AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Google, ICQ, etc.
GalleryPlayer HD Images: Never even heard of it, but sounds fun if you own a broadband company.

Remember, you have the option to select the ones you want, or don’t. Also, this would take a very looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time to download if you have a slow connection. Also, download it as a pack only if you are in a jiffy to join the cyber community, I like to search and hunt down software the old-fashioned way.

The ‘C’ programming language was designed and developed by Brian Kernighan, and Dennis Ritchie at The Bell Research Labs. ‘C’ is a language specifically created in order to allow the programmer access to almost all of the machine’s internals- registers, I/O slots and absolute addresses. However, at the same time,’C’ allows for as much data hiding and programme text modularisation as isneeded to allow very complex multi-programmer projects to be constructed in an organised and timely fashion. During the early 1960s computer Operating Systems started to become very much more complex with the introduction of multi-terminal and multi-process capabilities. Prior to this time Operating Systems had been carefully and laboriously crafted using assembler codes, and many programming teams realised that in order to have a working o/s in anything like a reasonable time this was now longer economically feasible. This then was the motivation to produce the ‘C’ Language, which was first implemented in assembler on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7. Of course once a simple assembler version was working it was possible to rewrite the compiler in ‘C’ itself. This was done in short order and therefore as soon as the PDP-11 was introduced by DEC it was only necessary to change the code generator section of the compiler and the new machine had a compiler in just a few weeks. ‘C’ wasthen used to implement the UNIX o/s. This means, that a complete UNIX can betransported, or to use the simple jargon of today; ‘ported’ to a new machine inliterally just a few months by a small team of competent programmers.