semanticvoid

The rumour about Googles acquisition of Meetroduction has been denied by a Meetro co-founder. He has conveyed that there has been no deal with Google through a blog.

Google takes a snapshot of each page examined as it crawls the web and caches these as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable. If you click on the “Cached” link, you will see the web page as it looked when we indexed it. The cached content is the content Google uses to judge whether this page is a relevant match for your query.

When the cached page is displayed, it will have a header at the top which serves as a reminder that this is not necessarily the most recent version of the page. Terms that match your query are highlighted on the cached version to make it easier for you to see why your page is relevant.

The “Cached” link will be missing for sites that have not been indexed, as well as for sites whose owners have requested we not cache their content.

Via Google

Other search engine “spiders” may make record a reference to a particular portion/text within the page but Google (as usual) goes one step ahead by creating a digital snapshot of the page.

This raises serious issues regarding copyright infringement. One can have indirect access to pages which may require authentication/subscription. Also websites may have removed certain pages which may still be accessible through the “cache”. This a direct copyright violation.

But Google does offer website developers to opt out of the cache feature which many developers may not be aware of. Websites often have no option but to go ahead with the cache feature as it would affect their page rankings. Websites would start losing big bucks but not many users are aware of the “cache” feature.

The question of whether Google Cache is a copyright infringement still holds on as a point to debate. What is your opinion?

Many applications are becoming increasingly popular day by day and inorder to achieve this they need to cater to a wide variety of users. This calls for the application to be deployed on different platforms having varied system architectures, filesystems and look-and-feel. Therefore developers have to develop platform specific applications for all platforms. This leads to increased development time and cost. An alternative is to use OS independent languages like Java but then again it has the added disadvantage of providing the runtime environment.

This leads us to think – “Is it possible to have a common unified medium to deploy applications?”. The answer is yes. The solution was in front of us all along – the “Browser”. Through this medium applications can be distributed across varied platforms and devices (Handheld/Mobile etc) as they all have implicit support for internet browsing.

X-Desktop.org provides a common application desktop library. It facilitates the creation of browser based thin client applications which can be used by companies to deploy products either on the internet or intranet. It provides a single unfied interface(GUI). The basic design goals are:

1. Open Source
2. 100% browser based
3. Supporting all operating systems
4. No plugins required
5. Simple Object Model Interface
6. Customizable skins/themes

Screenshot of X-Desktop

Reusability is one of the key features expected out of good programming. We programmers often tend to use code available freely inorder to reduce our workload. Source code reading is also informative in terms of developing good coding skills and also tends to sharpen our language skills. But its often difficult infact almost impossible to find good readable code over the net. Although you can download open source projects and go through its code but usually its difficult to make out head or tails of such large projects.

So one day I set out on the internet to search out an alternative. My search led me to Koders.com a source code search engine. Here you can search specific functions/algorithms implemented in various languages. You have an option to search language specific code. If you plan to reuse the code in your project you can also get license information so that you can safely abide by its license policy. License Information can also be used as a parameter for the search. This is how it may help: For example suppose you have to implement something as trivial as Quick Sort in say Java. Although its a ‘piece of cake’ kinda code but implementing it does take some time. And time is money my friend :-). Moreover why redo something that someone has already done and is kind enough to let others reuse it.

So let us all support open source by contributing to it and utilising it to the fullest. By the way Koders.com also has a feature that allows you to submit your open source project incase you make up your mind to better your Karma and follow the path of Enlightenment suggested by me above.