We are living in a world which encourages proprietary software culture. Most of us are used to using only proprietary software on our computers. Students are being taught to use it and they are partially or completely unaware of free software and benefits it provides. However, what does the proprietary software actually provide? It adds malicious features on our computers such as spying on the users, restricting the users, imposed upgrades,  and more.

I am not forgetting the fact that sometimes proprietary software will be powerful and reliable. But it does not respect the users’ freedom. Software can be said to serve its users only if it respects their freedom.

Birth of Proprietary Software

Before starting the golden era of Information Technology, computer manufacturers aimed only for hardware innovation and didn’t consider software as a business asset. Since most of the users of computers were scientists and technicians who could modify the software themselves, hardware was distributed with software installed in it. It is funny to commemorate the words of Thomas J. Watson here:

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”

Yes, this machine was supposed to be handled only by scientists and technicians at that time. Because there was no big standardization of hardware, computers architecture was different from each other. So, software for one machine would not be compatible with another one. Today programmers expertise in a programming language or group of languages but at that time programmers used to expertise in an architecture or family of architectures.

Later high level programming languages were introduced which were compatible for almost every kind of computers. So even less efficient hardware design could work better. This led to a decline in profit margin for the hardware manufacturers who brought innovations in design and who considered hardware as their only business assets. They treated selling software as an essential part of hardware sales which made manufacturers enforce a strict copyright on the software.

Richard Stallman once said:

“The rule made by the owners of proprietary software was, “If you share with your neighbor, you are a pirate. If you want any changes, beg us to make them.”

There starts the era of proprietary software.

Why you should uninstall Proprietary Software: a Case Study

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

In 1996, Microsoft released two versions of its operating system: Windows NT Workstation and Windows NT Server. Windows NT Server cost $800 more than that of Workstation. According to Microsoft, those Server and Workstation versions were “two very different products intended for two very different functions.”

The NT Workstation restricts users to use a maximum of 10 simultaneous TCP/IP connections, whereas the Server version allowed for unlimited connections. Since both versions seemed very similar, O’Reilly studied and analyzed the difference between them. He found that the kernel and every binary file included in both versions were identical, except that the Workstation was added with anti-features. An anti-feature is a function that disables certain functions in a program. In this case, anti-features restricted it to 10 connections if it was a Workstation and provided unlimited access if it was a Server. Truly, it is really harder to add an anti-feature to limit and restrict functionality rather than to leave them unrestricted.

This is not an individual and a one-off case. When closed-source software vendors release new versions and claim that they made improvements in the programs and security, users are forced to believe it, since the source code is not provided. Think about that… you are paying more money for the same program that you’ve already installed in your computers!

This is just one reason to stop the usage of proprietary software. It also provides plenty of other threats to our computers and the whole society.

Let’s put our hand together and let’s take a pledge for a better world. Support free software movement by taking small steps. Uninstall proprietary software and start to use free software. Spread the idea of freedom.

=== About the author ===

Shahzad Saeed is an open source enthusiast and has written a complete guide for those who are interested in switching from proprietary software to free software. He is also the author of the upcoming ebook Google Summer of Code guide which guides student for participating in the open source program, GSoC.

If you are someone like me, you might download a lot of images, music and video from the internet. However, over the course of time you might have downloaded tons of duplicates. In the past we have told you about several software which find duplicate files fast free and also allow you to find and delete duplicate files from your hard drive, however, lot of time has past since then and I had the changes to use another software specifically to find and delete duplicate images and pictures.

VisiPics is a simple duplicate image finder which works very well to find duplicate images. It allows you to scan through various folders and sub-folders to find duplicate images and delete them from a single interface. The best part is that it allows you to preview those images before you can actually delete them.

Once you have downloaded VisiPics you can launch it and select the folders you want to run duplicate checks on. Once you have selected the folders you can set the comparison filter for the images. There are three different filters available: Strict, Basic, Loose. Running the Loose filtering allows for greater comparison and a chance to find more duplicate images.

After you have changed the settings for finding duplicate images click on the play button and it will start scanning the folders and then running duplicate checks. The duplicate checks might take a while depending on how many images it has to compare and the type of filtering you chose.

Once the comparison is over VisiPics will show you the duplicate images in the left hand side container, you can hover over the images and see their preview and then mark the images by clicking on the image. Once you have scanned and marked the images which are duplicate you can either move them, rename them or delete them using the buttons in the right hand side container. You can continue browsing more duplicate images by clicking on the page links at the bottom of the left hand side container.

Overall, I have used VisiPics and have claimed over 1GB of space by deleting duplicate images, this is definitely a great software to compare and remove duplicate images from your hard drive.

Techie Buzz Ratings: 4.5/5

Download Link: Download VisiPics

With the rise of Internet use and advances in new technologies, more and more companies are starting to use web based applications. Distributed teams and a heavy focus on outsourcing are two other major reasons why web based apps are becoming popular. When it comes to distributed teams, software engineers are some of the most affected. Below are five web based apps that are not very popular, but can be used to make your software engineering easier.

Rescuetime – Rescuetime is a productivity tool which helps you become more efficient. Although some companies have already adopted this, it is also extremely useful for software engineers involved in freelance work or consulting work. Since software engineers are knowledge workers, productivity is very important to them. Rescuetime helps track which website you spend time on, lets you specify a time limit for specific websites. According to Rescuetime, it helps save an average of three hours per week that can be used for more productive tasks. I could sure use three more hours every week.

Creately – Creately is on online diagramming tool with support for many diagram types. Because it’s web based, you can access your diagrams anywhere in the world. It has a free version with some limitations, but I think that the single user license for $5 is a bargain. Try comparing it to software like Visio, which costs 300-900$ depending on the license. For a single user this is definitely a must have diagramming tool. An added advantage is the collaboration built into the tool. So even if you aren’t in the same location, you can work on diagrams as a group. It supports almost every type of diagram needed by software engineers, including the ability to come up with simple Gantt charts.

Confluence – Confluence is software for wiki page creation. It’s useful to distributed software teams, especially in large organizations. It encourages knowledge sharing and saves a lot of time when looking for expertise in specific areas. The ability to quickly find experts and information is critical for the success of any organization, and Confluence supports this in an efficient way. As an added bonus, it has social networking built in.

Basecamp – Basecamp is a project management software. Although it’s not fair to categorize Basecamp as not very popular, but I couldn’t think of better project management software. Jira, PivotalTracker and others, also provide some great tracking features, but I still don’t think they offer as much as Basecamp. The ability to collaborate on your projects is the critical element of Basecamp .

Escrow – Escrow is service that acts as a middle man in a payment. If you’re a software engineer who works for a company, then you won’t have any need for this. But if you are doing freelance work as a part time job without using websites like Freelancer or ODesk, then this is a very useful service.

There are hundreds more web apps that I could list here, but these are my favorites, and I’ve personally used each to some extent. If you know of similar web services that make your software engineering work easier, feel free to share them in the comments section, below.

==== About the Author ====
Nishadha Silva is a Software Engineer specializing in Oracle. He does SEO work in Sri Lanka and manages his own blogs in his spare time. He’s passionate about social media and always looking for ways to increase Twitter followers without following back everyone.

If you were waiting for the PlayBook to get an update to OS2.0 before actually being useful, unfortunately you’ll have to continue waiting.

While RIM is going against all odds and continuing to provide support for the PlayBook, the shiny brick won’t be getting the expected update to OS 2.0 until February of 2012. It’s not the recently announced BBX, but it is supposed to be a fairly large upgrade for existing users. It wouldn’t be a product from Research in Motion if it didn’t ship missing crucial features, would it? Of course not, so it’s very fitting that RIM has decided to leave BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) support out of the update. That’s right, it’s going to take an additional 4 months of work before the system is polished up, but it still won’t have their proprietary instant messaging functionality. Feel free to purchase a new $500 (likely) BlackBerry to accompany your $700 PlayBook so you can use BBM with it. That’s a pretty good option, right?Maybe news of RIM doling out a couple of hundred PlayBooks loaded with OS 2.0 beta might make you feel better. Developers and any other DevCon attendees were given a new PlayBook. So, technical journalists, hobbyists and other random kids got them, but not paying customers. Members of the BlackBerry Early Access Program will also be getting closed betas of 2.0 shortly, this is mainly for tackling Enterprise support and integration.

In a post to the Inside BlackBerry Blog, Senior VP of BlackBerry PlayBook at RIM, David Smith gives a few reasons for the delay and lack of features upon launch.

First off, we have decided to defer the inclusion of the BBMâ„¢ application to a subsequent BlackBerry PlayBook OS release. We are committed to developing a seamless BBM solution that fully delivers on the powerful, push based messaging capabilities recognized today by BlackBerry ® users around the world and we’re still working on it. In the meantime, BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to continue to use BlackBerry ® Bridgeâ„¢ to securely access BlackBerry ® Messengerâ„¢ on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet’s high resolution display.

These betas will be rolled out over the course of this year and are an important next step to bringing our unmatched enterprise app deployment, device manageability, security and email integration capabilities to the tablet category.

There is a bit of good news in the tidbit. When OS 2.0 does pop around for download, it will bring integrated email, calendar and contacts. Your “business ready” tablet, isn’t exactly business ready at all, but it soon will be.

The software update will add advanced integrated email, calendar and contact apps, a new video store, as well as new functionality that will allow your BlackBerry smartphone and BlackBerry PlayBook to work together even better.

Hopefully this means a few software managers at RIM got slapped with a trout and are now starting to put actual work into the PlayBook. Their half-assed Android Player isn’t going to bring any new customers, so hopefully the brand spanking new OS, BBX, will make it to smartphones by February with the new PlayBook OS in tow.

Even though you didn’t get your hands on a webOS TouchPad, there’s nothing stopping HP from providing marginal updates to their defunct platform, right?

HP has just started pushing out the latest update to the their tablet, the TouchPad. It’s still webOS, although there are ways to get Android running on yours. It’s a small update, it brings the usual speed improvement, performance and stability updates, and fixes some rather huge gaps in the system (that you probably never cared about). You may have noticed that puny 1.3 MP camera on the front, but that there was no way of actually using it to take pictures; well fear no more. There is now a built-in Camera app to take care of your video and picture-taking requirements. Likely, the camera attached to your phone is more suited than the TouchPad, but it’s nice that HP has addressed this.

You also may have been having issues pairing your phone with the TouchPad — that’s because in their infinite wisdom, HP decided to disallow non-webOS devices from connecting. Well, they’ve also fixed that. You can now pair any device, smart or dumb phone to your TouchPad and use it as a phone. Thanks HP, holding and talking into a 10″ screen is exactly what I want to do. Instead, HP should have added the Bluetooth DUN profile for tethering or maybe OBEX-FTP for sharing files between devices. There’s no reason a modern mobile platform should be missing either of these. Shame on you, HP.

Of course some other minor additions such as OGG Vorbis support, and being able to actually toggle between offline and online while logged in to an IM service have been added.

These certainly are nice additions that most definitely make up for HP stabbing Palm in the back, abandoning webOS and shattering the dreams of many customers. Thanks for the bone, HP! Next time, do all your customers a favor and instead of shipping 2 or 3 devices with Android pre-installed, set it up for everybody and save yourself the PR nightmare.

The very popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu, has received its new name. With every public frozen release of Ubuntu, a code-name is chosen which traces its roots back to when Canonical took the reigns and pushed out ‘Warty Warthog’ in 2004. Since then, each 6 month release has received a name made up of a carefully selected adjective paired to the name of an animal. From 8.10 ‘Intrepid Ibex’ to 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot’,  we have now arrived at the latest iteration of Ubuntu nearing release – 12.04.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ltd, explains the thought process for coming up with the newly named release, Precise Pangolin.

We’re looking for something phonetic, something plausible and something peaceful too. We’ll avoid the petulant, the pestilent, the phlegmy (phooey!), the parochial, the palliative and the psychotic. We’re aiming for mildly prophetic, and somewhat potent, without wanting to be all pedantic and particular. Phew.

Let’s ask the question differently what are we trying to convey? 12.04 is an LTS. So we want it to be tough and long-lasting, reliable, solid as a rock and well defended. It’s also going to be the face of Ubuntu for large deployments for a long time, so we want it to have no loose ends, we want it to be coherent, neat.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the  Precise Pangolin.

So, what on earth is a pangolin and why is it precise?

It’s very similar to an ant-eater. It has armor to protect itself, it’s versatile and can adapt to the environment. Fitting name for an operating system that needs to be robust and reliable, yet friendly and approachable by a new user.

To anticipate the launch, the Ubuntu team has put up an online countdown timer. It’s vague and they’re purposely skimping on details to create a stir. The timer runs in real-time and will end in just over 24 hours, when everything will, hopefully, be revealed.

Let’s face it, Apple started and hyped the entire ‘app metaphor’. They made it important to have a centralized distribution center for software  and  bundle it into an ecosystem — where multiple layers of hardware and software interact and have clearly defined relationships. With the not-so-recent push to “web technologies”, browsers are becoming the dashboard for data and dedicated ‘apps’ are taking the back-burner. We’ve been slowly moving away from using a specific source to get specific information. This is where voice control comes into play.

Voice control has been around for years. Everybody knows about Nuance, Windows Voice Command and the Mac OS text-to-speech widget, yet they have an extremely limited scenario for usage. People use voice control on their mobile devices for simple tasks like dictation, music control or calling people. Siri on is going to change this. Although it was available in the App Store previously, now that Siri is integrated into iOS5, things are going to be different.

I’ll say the majority of mobile usage can be separated into 2 streams; either you’re giving information, or you’re getting information. Sending emails, taking pictures or replying to text messages, falls under giving. Browsing the web, listening to music/podcasts or using navigation software, falls under getting.

The purpose of Siri is to abstract both of these activities into a single method of interaction. It’s  appstraction!  Current smartphones owners have learned to launch apps to complete tasks. It requires active thought in order to do so. I want the weather, so naturally I am going to open a weather app. I want to set an alarm for tomorrow, so I’ll open the alarm/clock app. There is an active thought, a solution to the thought and then physical interaction with the mobile device begins. It’s an extremely recently-learned response. Speech, however, isn’t. Most of us have been talking since we were at least 3.

Speech is an immediate and direct subset to thought. It’s the next easiest thing to do — ask a question, get an answer. Using speech to get and give information is inherent to humans. It’s intuitive. It’s fast and it’s (usually) straight forward. If there’s one thing that Apple has been able to do, it’s provide relatively intuitive interfaces and experiences, on a consistent basis. Consistency is key.

Most people are lambasting Siri because they don’t want to talk to their phones. Voice usage is down, data usage is up. We know you don’t want to talk to people, let alone your phone. Stop trying to imagine yourself in a crowded subway station or mall, yelling at your phone in order to dictate an e-mail. You can still type it out on the horrid virtual keyboard. Now imagine you’re in bed and you forget to set an alarm. Don’t lift the glaring screen to your face, tap an icon, fat-finger the input to 7 AM and then put it back down. Lean over, press the home button and say “Wake me up at 7 AM”. Roll over and go to sleep. You didn’t even open your eyes.

I know change is hard. You want to interact with your phone. You want to hold and look at your phone. You want to swipe and flick through the interface on your phone. Except when you don’t want to and you simply want to get something done. Siri simply enhances your ability to reduce the amount of interactions it takes to get something done. Most consumers use technology because it betters their life. Siri will drastically reduce complications you have with your iPhone, if you want it to.

The mouse was invented to make navigation easy and perform common tasks as quickly as possible. But that was 1970, when multi-tasking was an unknown phrase.

Computers and computing have come a long way since then. Today, we have dozens of apps, browser tabs, documents, settings and other things to worry about and if your computer is without a mouse it is as good as a block of metal weighing 2.72 Kg.

Another annoying problem I encounter every single day is to copy and paste stuff from one place to another. A cool Facebook status update, Google search for a phrase, retweeting someone’s tweet, copying a link and pasting it in Microsoft Outlook, referencing to the biography of the author whose eBook I am reading the list goes on.

Click, Copy, minimize, maximize, click, paste – eyes and fingers moving like crazy. A single mistake in the sequence and you find yourself starting the loop all over again.

If you’re anything like me and need a simple way to copy and paste stuff from one application to another, try Click.to. It’s a sweet little utility for Windows which lets you copy text and files from one application and paste it on any other application. Text, photos, videos, uploads anything!

Did you copied an article on Wikipedia and want to add it to the word document you are currently editing? Do you want to bulk upload photos to your Facebook account from desktop? Do you want to copy a phrase and tweet it?

Select the text or files, hit Control C and Click.to will give you one click options to send the copied text and files to any application on your system. This is useful because you don’t have to open the target app, copy the text from the source app and paste it again on the target app. Click.to will handle all the three hassles in just one mouse click

From the program preferences, you can choose which application icons are shown on the default Click.to dialog box, that pops up whenever you hit Control + C. With Click.to, everything on your computer transforms into a hyperlink. It’s sort of hopping over from one app top another and pasting stuff on the fly. When you are editing huge segments of code and need a quick way to copy and paste codes from one file to another, Click.to will be a lifesaver!

Watch the following video to understand how Click.to works

Yesterday, I saw the most amazing videos. These are called Mandelbulb videos, and half the fun of watching them is understanding the science and mathematics behind them. If you don’t want to learn how these are made, you can skip to the end of this article.

What is a Mandelbulb?

It’s a type of mathematical entity that’s based on ideas behind  Fractals  which were discovered in the 17th century. Fractal mathematics describe  geometric patterns that repeat at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes and surfaces that cannot be represented by classical geometry. Fractal patterns are often seen in nature, such as in snowflakes. Here’s an example of a Von Koch curve, which is one of the simplest forms of a fractal.

When a fractal shape is calculated, it is calculated in steps, or iterations. You can see the shape change, above, as it goes through each iteration.

Here’s another example of a complex fractal which was generated by the  GoogleLabs JuliaMap Generator.

If you follow that link to Google Labs, your web browser will generate a fractal. One of the unique properties of fractals are that you can zoom in on the patterns and see even smaller but very similar patterns.

Over the years, many mathematicians have tried to determine the formulas for true 3D fractals. Finally, in 2007,  an amateur fractal image maker,  Daniel White, came up with some formulas that seem to generate these 3D fractal shapes. Daniel started his work by using one of the most famous fractal types, called the  Mandelbrot set. The resulting shapes are called Mandelbulbs.

A couple of months later, some software hackers and fractal enthusiasts got together to work on software to render Mandelbulbs on computers. The Mandelbulber Project has been a success, and as you’ll see below, it’s also resulted in some very fantastic images and videos.

Here’s a screenshot of what the software looks like, running on a Linux PC. The software is Open Source, completely free to download  and also runs on Windows PCs.

Here are a few screen-shots of Mandelbulber’s artificial worlds.

Finally, we have reached the video. As you’ll see, Mandelbulber can create entire virtual worlds that can be explored. In fact, it can create an infinity of different worlds and some of them are almost scary in their complexity.

Video:  Trip to center of hybrid fractal

Here are more Mandelbulb videos from XLACE. It’s interesting to see how his videos have evolved over the years, and how Mandelbulber has suddenly changed the world of fractals forever. Someday, I expect to see these artificial worlds appear in movies. If you need an alien place for a Sci-Fi movie, it’s pretty easy to see where you could get one.

iTunes apps store is flooded with loads of GPS apps that offer varying features and options. This variety of GPS apps normally confuses users about which apps to go for, because some of them might be useful and some are just crap.

Today, I will be highlighting certain very useful GPS apps for iPhone that are easy-to-use and above all, free of cost. If you happen to be an avid traveler and own an iPhone, then I will recommend that you should give these free GPS apps a try. Here is a brief review of them:

Free GPS

This app is simply amazing; it’s basically a no-frills GPS that works smoothly. The app’s interface is simple with no complex features embedded, locations can be easily tagged by clicking on the option Make Current position New Way point.

Waypoints can also be added manually. You can download Free GPS app from iTunes app store for free.

GPS-Logger

If you are a geocacher, then GPS-Logger is the perfect GPS iPhone app for you. We normally take a lot of pictures of stuff around us, but we tend to forget to tag the location of these pictures. What makes GPS-Logger unique is that it allows users to go back and give coordinates to photos that have been taken with an un-smart camera.

You can connect pictures to any specific location and also you can add-in the date on which they were taken. GPS Logger is available as a free download from Apple App store.

Waze

Waze is yet another useful GPS app for iPhone that offers loads of cool features. Basically, it’s a social networking-based GPS app that allows users to share their location details and stuff like traffic block reporting with other Wazers.

You can also locate nearby Waze users in real-time and interact with them. The app’s social networking shade is that you can chat or connect with other Waze users and it also allows map pinning of Wazers. Another unique feature of this app is that you can report traffic blocks to other Wazers either via texts or by uploading pictures.

Though there are hundreds of GPS apps available on App store, I think these are the best ones to start off. Do try them and let us know that whether they were of any use or not?

==== About the author ====

Naufil Ali is an Apple iPhone and all-around mobiles tech enthusiast from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and often writes articles for Calling All Geeks.