Adobe lashes back at Apple’s on lazy remark

Adobe has lashed back at Apple CEO Steve Jobs' comment where he characterised Adobe as "lazy". According to Wired, at an event on January 30 Steve Jobs remarked that Adobe is lazy, Flash is buggy, and the world is moving toward HTML5 anyway. Whenever a Mac crashes, it is most frequently because of Flash, Jobs asserted.

A blog entry by Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch responds to Job's comments. The blog begins taking a hit at Apple's just launched iPad, "Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device."

Lynch then goes on add that Flash was originally designed for "pen computing tablets, about 15 years before that market was ready to take off." He writes that Flash is currently used in more than 85% of the top Web sites, including Nike, Hulu, BBC and Major League Baseball. Also, Flash is a critical part of the smartphone market; Adobe is "on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers. This includes Google's Android, RIM's Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet-connected TVs." "Even the Nexus One will be Flash 10.1-equipped," according to Lynch.

Regarding HTML5 replacing Flash, he wrote, "If HTML could reliably do everything Flash" can, it would "certainly save us a lot of effort." But because Flash is still enabling more than 75% of Web video, Flash will be around "even as HTML advances."

Incidentally, this is not the first time that Apple and Adobe have clashed. Apple's been resisting user demands to add Flash to the iPhone for more than three years now. On March 6, 2008, Steve Jobs reportedly made another public jab at Adobe, saying that the Flash Lite Player wasn't "advanced enough" for use on the iPhone, and that it performed "too slow to be useful."

Some Open Source Software Packages

This is a list of Free software / open source software packages: computer software licensed under an open source license / Free software license. Software that fits the Free software definition may be more appropriately called free software; the GNU project in particular objects to their works being referred to as open source. However, nearly all software meeting the Open Source Definition also meets The Free Software Definition and vice versa. Some of the softwares that meets either is listed here.

Computer-aided design softwares:

Archimedes(CAD):
Archimedes - "The Open CAD" - (aka Arquimedes) is a computer-aided design (CAD) program being developed with direct input from architects and architecture firms. With this design philosophy, the developers hope to create software better suited for architecture than the currently widely used AutoCAD, and other available CAD software. The program is free software released under the GNU General Public License.

AutoQ3D:
AutoQ3D is an OpenGL based software used for 3D modeling. It is written in C++ using Trolltech Qt libraries. It is released under the GNU General Public License, making it free software.

Ayam:
Ayam is a free 3D modelling environment for the RenderMan interface.


AutoREALM:
AutoREALM is an open source program designed to draw maps for role-playing games, mainly in fantasy settings. The program is similar to the commercial Campaign Cartographer.

Computer simulation softwares:

SimPy:
It is a queue-theoretic event-based simulator written in Python. It is a process-based, object-oriented discrete-event simulation language.

Blender:
It is a 3D modeling software written in Python and C++ that can make animations and games. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications, including games.

Speech Synthesis/Speech Recognition Softwares:

CMU Sphinx:
CMU Sphinx, also called Sphinx in short, is the general term to describe a group of speech recognition systems developed at Carnegie Mellon University. These include a series of speech recognizers (Sphinx 2 - 4) and an acoustic model trainer (SphinxTrain).

Festival Speech Synthesis System:
Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system originally developed at Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at the University of Edinburgh.


Flash animation Softwares:
Pencil:
Pencil is a 2D graphical animation software that runs on Mac, Windows, Linux and BSD. Pencil uses a unique bitmap/vector drawing interface to produce simple 2D graphics as well as animation. Pencil is written in C++ and is Qt-based. The application license is GNU General Public License.

SWFTools
SWFTools is a suite of software tools to create and manipulate SWF files. SWF is the file format used by Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) animation software. SWFTools runs on Windows, Mac OS X, AmigaOS, Linux and several other Unix-like systems. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License and is thus free software.

Anti-virus Softwares:

AVG:
AVG is an umbrella term for a range of anti-virus and internet security software for the Microsoft Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD computing platforms, developed by AVG Technologies, a privately held Czech company formerly known as Grisoft.

ClamAV:
Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) is a free, cross-platform antivirus software tool-kit capable of detecting many types of malicious software, including viruses. One of its main uses is on mail servers as a server-side email virus scanner. The application was developed for Unix and has third party versions available for AIX, BSD, HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS X, OpenVMS, OSF and Solaris. At one time it had a native version available for Windows, but that project has been ended. Both ClamAV and its updates are made available free of charge.

Media Player Softwares:

VLC media player:
VLC media player is an open source, free software media player written by the VideoLAN project. VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats.

VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but that meaning is now deprecated. It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS, Syllable, BSD, MorphOS, Solaris and Sharp Zaurus, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads for version 0.8.6.

Media Player Classic:
Media Player Classic (MPC) is a compact media player for Microsoft Windows. The application mimics the look and feel of the old, light-weight Windows Media Player 6.4 but integrates most options and features found in modern media players. It and its heirs are standard media players in the K-Lite Codec Pack and the Combined Community Codec Pack.

Office Application Softwares:

OpenOffice.org:
OpenOffice.org (OO.o or OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is an office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. It is distributed as free software and written using the gtk toolkit. It supports the ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office formats among others.

KOffice:
KOffice is a cross-platform office suite for the K Desktop Environment (KDE). All its components are released under free software/open source licenses and use OpenDocument as their native file format when possible.



Go-oo:
Go-oo (previously called ooo-build) is a concentrated set of patches for the cross-platform OpenOffice.org office suite. Go-oo is also one of OpenOffice.org variants created from these patches. It has better support for Office Open XML file formats than the official OpenOffice.org releases produced by Sun Microsystems, and other enhancements that have either not yet been accepted into the upstream Sun version, or will not be because of business or political reasons.

The All New Moser Baer MP565-2 G Music Player

With a slew of cheap music players being hawked on the streets, it is tough to zero in on a trustworthy product. Moser Baer comes to our rescue with the MP565-2 G, its latest MP3 player. With a high-contrast LCD display and seven-colour backlight, it sure looks smart.

It has a 2 GB integrated flash memory and supports FM radio. Unlike low-end products, it can play most popular audio file formats. It uses the plug-and-play principle (no software needed) and can work on Windows Vista, XP, 2000 or ME and Macintosh OS X. Moser Baer MP565-2 G is priced at Rs 1,490.

Samsung Marine

A submersible mobile phone, Samsung Marine provides water protection up to 1 metre of water for 30 minutes.Encased in anti-shock material, Samsung Marine can withstand bumps, bangs, scrapes, dust and water.

The phone is adaptable for even the toughest environments -- including rain, fog, humidity, sand, and extreme temperatures. The Marine is equipped with outdoor friendly features such as external speakers, noise cancellation and a flash light.

Multimedia features include a built-in camera, camcorder, FM radio, a music player, and expandable memory up to 8GB. The phone is priced at Rs 7,030 and available in two colours. javascript:void(0)
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The New Transcend T.Sonic 320

I’ve just bought a new Mp3 player, the Transcend T.Sonic 320. It’s simply amazing. I bought it for Rs.2300 at Spencer Plaza in Chennai on 13.09.2008. It’s a 4GB USB flash drive that has a built in USB connector. It is compact and portable, with measurements of only 85.5mm by 25.5mm by 13mm. Weighing in at a mere 29g (with rechargeable Li-ion battery), the T.sonic 320 is light enough for users to conveniently carry around all day long in a purse or pocket. Its special high-gloss front face is attractive and blends well with any fashion motif, so you can even wear it around your neck to show off your unique personal style. Additionally, the T.sonic 320 has a brilliant dual-color OLED display that can easily be viewed at any angle, even in broad daylight. As a high capacity portable music player, the T.sonic 320 allows for storage of up to 1000 songs, and provides 15 hours of seamless music entertainment on a full charge(when screen saver set to “Blank” and “Lyrics Sync” disabled).

The versatile T.sonic 320 also features several useful value-added functions, such as a built-in FM radio that can be easily recorded on the fly whenever you hear something you like. Other functions like A-B repeat and variable playback speeds are excellent tools for students and professionals alike, allowing easy review of important class lectures, meetings or foreign language lessons. Above all, the T.sonic 320 is a great music player with support for MP3, WMA, WAV, and even WMA-DRM10 subscription music. To adjust the music output, you can select from not only the seven built-in equalizer modes, but also Transcend’s special USER EQ mode that lets you create your personal music style. Moreover, the T.sonic 320 includes a karaoke-style Lyrics Sync function so you can sing along to your favorite tunes with perfectly synchronized lyrics text display.

The compact, feature-rich T.sonic 320 supports display of 13 languages and comes bundled with a unique software application that allows you temporarily lock your computer, password protect files and partition the MP3 player’s memory into Public and Private areas.

Features
- MP3 Player – supports MP3, WMA, WMA-DRM10 (subscription music) and WAV music formats

- Recordable FM Radio with 20 station presets
- Advanced Digital Voice Recorder
- Karaoke-style lyrics display
- Dual-color OLED screen displays clear text at any angle and in any light
- VAD (Voice Activity Detection) for high quality gapless audio recordings
- A-B repeat function allows you to continuously replay a designated section of a track
- Variable track playback speeds
- Supports 13 languages including menus, song/album title, artist name and lyrics(English, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Simple Chinese, Traditional Chinese)
- USB flash drive capabilities for data transfer and storage
- Included software can be used to lock your computer and password-protect your files
- 7 Equalizer effects, including a customizable USER EQ setting
- Internal rechargeable Li-ion battery provides over 15 hours of continuous music playback when screen saver set to “Blank” and “Lyrics Sync” disabled.
- Built-in USB 2.0 connector for easy computer connectivity and fast file transfers
- Real Time Clock displays local and world times

Specification:

Capacity and Color	:	2GB(Burgundy) 4GB(Sapphire) 8GB(Dark Black)
Dimensions	:	85.5x25.5x13 mm
Weight	:	29g (with Li-ion battery)
Display Type and Size	:	1 inch Dual color OLED
Display Resolution	:	128x64
Music Formats	:	MP3, WMA, WAV and WMA-DRM10
Recording Format	:	IMA_ADPCM (WAV)
FM Function	:	Worldwide - 87.5~108 MHz Japan - 76~90 MHz
Battery Life	:	15hr (when screen saver set to “Blank” and “Lyrics Sync” disabled)
Battery Type	:	Lithium-ion
Compression Rates	:	32Kbps to 320Kbps
Erase Cycles	:	≥ 100,000 times
S/N Ratio	:	≥ 90dB
Certificates	:	CE, FCC, BSMI
Warranty	:	2 years (Lithium-ion Battery : 6 months)

Moreover, there is no need to use special software for copying songs into the drive as that of I-Tunes player for IPods. It’s simple drag and drop functionality is an added feature. Also we can customize songs that suit our mood by making playlists. Although the software that comes along with the player does not have this feature, the newer version that is available for download in Transcend’s website has it.