Twitter is one intriguing medium that constrains you to a mere 140 characters while continuing to draw millions of users worldwide. Twitter sports a high signal-to-noise ratio with users constrained to write pithy messages.
This limitation imposed by twitter somehow attracts more and more users to announce lots and lots of things in the terse messages. With Facebook leading the social networking revolution (I presume it is), it is imperative for twitter to look for other options to make itself more desirable for users.
If you have not seen the new twitter you may want to read this . Here's what is worth observing. Among other things twitter allows you to view pictures and videos posted on a different website within your twitter page.
Forget visiting twitpic and yfrog. All the content will be accessible from within twitter. If you tagged your tweets with the location then a google maps image will be inlaid along with the tweet. That is UI Magic.
The distinguishing trait of twitter which attracts people will still not be violated. It is only that in 140 characters you will be expected to write information enough to identify the source of information.
While currently only pictures and videos are supported, it is likely that in the future twitter will allow you to render custom html within a frame (or whatever) on the twitter home page. Thus you could post entire blogs without being bogged down by the 140 char limit. It might also be possible to decorate content before rendering it on twitter.
Facebook currently generates a thumbnail view of the link that you post. But what I am talking about is completely different. Viewing the content within the twitter page ...
But wait isn't this what Google Reader does. Only thing is that Google Reader is a reader first and then a social networking portal.
With Google Chrome trying to the move all your computing needs to the cloud making your PC a mere viewer, twitter could go one step further by making its website the one stop tab (within chrome of course) to collate information from various sources and relate tweeple with the information.
To sum it up, looking forward it appears twitter will strategize by acting as a proxy for content hosted on remote servers without actually burdening its own servers.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Write an SMS/Tweet ... 3 Marks
At school, I remember that of the many types of writing exercises that we practised one of them was - Writing a Telegram. Mostly we wrote letters and essays, writing a telegram did form a small part of the curriculum.
However with the advent of the Internet and Mobile Phone revolution in India things like telegrams are so passé.
Most people in India currently use SMS to communicate short messages. I am not sure if the school curriculum has been adapted to account for these developments.
Imagine questions like
"Write SMS to tell your boss that you will be late for the meeting." (2 Marks).
"Compose a tweet to announce the launch of your new social networking website. Invent details to market your website. (Character Limit: 140)" (3 Marks).
It would be quaint at first sight but only meaningful to include such questions in the exam in place of those concerning the snail mail.
However with the advent of the Internet and Mobile Phone revolution in India things like telegrams are so passé.
Most people in India currently use SMS to communicate short messages. I am not sure if the school curriculum has been adapted to account for these developments.
Imagine questions like
"Write SMS to tell your boss that you will be late for the meeting." (2 Marks).
"Compose a tweet to announce the launch of your new social networking website. Invent details to market your website. (Character Limit: 140)" (3 Marks).
It would be quaint at first sight but only meaningful to include such questions in the exam in place of those concerning the snail mail.
rm rm
What does the linux command rm do?
It accepts a file name as an argument and deletes that file from the file system.
What happens if the file name is rm itself?
It deletes the file without any error.
How?
Linux Kernel maintains the number of processes which have currently kept the file open. A file is removed from the disk only if the number of processes that have kept the file open and the number of hard links to the file are both zero.
So when rm command deletes the file it simply removes the hard link of the file to the disk area. But since rm process is executing, the rm file is open. When the rm process exits the kernel notices that there is no process holding the disk area and hence removes the file from the disk.
You can try this out. But don't do it with the rm file in the /bin directory. Instead make a copy of rm in some other directory and try
'./rm ./rm' from that directory.
It accepts a file name as an argument and deletes that file from the file system.
What happens if the file name is rm itself?
It deletes the file without any error.
How?
Linux Kernel maintains the number of processes which have currently kept the file open. A file is removed from the disk only if the number of processes that have kept the file open and the number of hard links to the file are both zero.
So when rm command deletes the file it simply removes the hard link of the file to the disk area. But since rm process is executing, the rm file is open. When the rm process exits the kernel notices that there is no process holding the disk area and hence removes the file from the disk.
You can try this out. But don't do it with the rm file in the /bin directory. Instead make a copy of rm in some other directory and try
'./rm ./rm' from that directory.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)