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50 Killer Apps for your USB

These free apps don't require any installation. With portable applications, all you have to do is plug in your USB and run the program without the hassle of installing the program or leaving traces behind. If you like these portable apps, many of them also have an installer allowing you to install the program on your computer for more speed and accessibility.

How to Choose a Computer

Buying a new computer can be an overwhelming task for anyone. But finding the computer that is right for you doesn't have to be hard. You just have to think about what you want the computer to do. Does it have to be portable? Is it just going to be used for homework? Are you a big gamer? This all factors into what type of computer suits you best.

Pirates In Space!

Recently, pirated software as well as the sites that host them have been receiving a lot of criticism for their "lack of morals." The entertainment industry is attempting to stop any and all of the countless torrent sites littering the internet, but to no avail. The most famous (or infamous) and well known website distributing pirated software is The Pirate Bay.

The entertainment industry has been chasing The Pirate Bay for a long time with little to show for their efforts. Although they have won numerous lawsuits opposing what the site is doing, the industry isn't even close to removing the site from existence. The Pirate Bay almost seems impervious to any attempts to get even close.

Tables != Layout

Tables exist in HTML for one reason and one reason only: To display tabular data. That's it. Then border="0" came along and made it possible to make a table to organize data without being able to see the table itself. Which then led to tables being used to lay everything out on all beginner websites and even some professional websites. The time has come for this to stop. Professional websites are now designed in a way that makes the website more flexible and more functional, not to mention the massive increase in the readability of the code. Still on the edge? Let me change that for you.

Qualities of Good Code

Although knowing how to program is obviously the most important quality of being a comptuer scientist, code architecture follows closely behind. The quality of underlying code will have a great impact on the reliability, scalability, security, extensibility, and maintainability of your program. Basically, without good code architecture, you will run into many problems down the road.

Self Repairing Solar Panels

With the goal of transferring the world's energy demands to renewable sources quickly becoming more and more essential to the existence of the human race, scientists at MIT are focusing on creating revolutionary, super-efficient solar panels to harness the sun's power. But there is something extraordinary about these solar panels. They have the uncanny ability to repair themselves.

Lingodroids

Its one thing for a robot to be programmed to understand Japanese or English or any other language that already exists. But it quite a feat for two robots to develop their own language and be able to communicate with each other like these two have.

Created by Ruth Shultz and her colleagues at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology, each of these Lingodroids have developed a specialized language for the sole purpose of navigating their way around obstacles and recognizing where they are.

Less - CSS Preprocessor

Everyone who calls themselves a web designer has quite a bit of experience with Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is extremely simple, including only rulesets and declarations. The only reason CSS exists is to encapsulate the elements to style and how to style them. For the newcomer, it does everything it is supposed to do, but to an experienced developer managing a dynamic website, CSS is a massive limitation on how easily values can be changed and related to one another.

Why Linux (Still) Sucks

Over the past few months, there has been a great increase in the amount of interest in open source options and that isn't limited to software. It also applies to operating systems, specifically to Linux. To Linux activists, Linux is a gift from the gods, saving humanity from the evils of Bill Gates and his cursed Windows operating system. But to everyone else, it is just another attempt by less than 1% of the market to dethrone Windows as the most effective end user operating system currently available on the market.

Ninite: The Universal Installer

Getting a virus and having to reformat your computer wouldn't be so bad if you didn't lose all of your favorite programs. But it happens to everyone. Viruses and malware troll theinternet just waiting for some unexpecting user to come by. Then they attack and there isn't much you can do about it. The virus will ravage your computer until all hope is lost and your only hope of regaining use of your computer is to reformat the computer. And every program you ever installed is gone too.

Qualities of Good Code

Why Linux Still Sucks

By Daniel Taylor on March 6, 2011 23:09

Just to get this straight, I am in no way denying that Linux is an important step in the evolution of operating systems. Compared to Windows, Linux is a very clean operating system, but it comes at a cost of usability. Just like any new product on the market, Linux was brought in to solve the problems brought to the table through Windows, but new problems cascaded down on Linux that have never been a problem in Windows. Windows has its place while Linux has its place. Linux is built in a minimalist interface perfect for computers that need processing speed and can sacrifice a bit of usability. Places like servers are perfect for Linux. And Linux will always have a place in the heart of every uber geek.

The most common complaint submitted by users of Linux is the complete lack of gaming support. There are very few developers thinking about compatibility with Linux due to the tiny percentage of the market using Linux. Spending time developing compatibility for an operating system that takes up less than 1% of the market is not worth the money. And even if they did decide to develop for Linux, which of the dozens of Linux distros should they develop for? The facts are that every new game works on Windows, and one or two work on Linux.

Linux is also scaring people off from even trying Linux out because it lacks a tool to migrate between Windows and Linux. Many people have their entire life on the computer and switching to a new operating system nullifies any backups that have been made. There is currently no application able to duplicate all of the data from a Windows computer to a Linux computer. If users have to start their computer lives over or spend weeks duplicating the data manually just to switch to a computer that could possibly be better is just not worth it.

Most people have seen labels on hardware packages notifying the buyer that the product is compatible with Windows 7, but have you ever seen a Linux compatibility sticker? The answer would be no. And to the average buyer, there is absolutely no way for them to figure out if the printer, router, graphics card, or any other piece of hardware is actually going to work with their new Linux distro. Linux has made a point of working with many different hardware configurations, but not all hardware works with Linux and there is no way of knowing which pieces of hardware will work and which ones don't.

The root of all of the problems with Linux is the high reliance on the use of the terminal and CLI interfaces in general. End users have grown accustomed to the eye candy and visual effects that satisfy our senses. And Linux falls way short of the expectations of any user migrating from Windows or Mac. The simple lack of an advanced GUI interface for Linux drives many users back to the operating system from which they came. Hopefully, the UI of Linux will improve with time.

And that is the story of Linux. Most things may be slightly more flexible and reliable, but at the cost of usability. And that seems to be just a little too much for most end users to take.