talk smart, talk tech

A BLUFF article in a recent magazine had an interesting page that showed how a simple switching of words can make you sound hip.

Instead of saying Motherboard, try saying MoBo; and instead of 1 Gigabyte of RAM, use 1 Gig; or use 1 Meg for 1 Megabyte.

Similarly, when you are explaining someone about 3D animation, say MoCap instead of Motion Capture. And if you want to explain him what NURBS is, you could say, “NURBS stands for Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines” or say, “NURBS is an advanced computing technology. The tools are complex and require knowledge about certain jargons.” Then add, “Nurbs basically deals with curves whose shapes are governed by control vertices”. Occasionally, look at your listener and judging his mood, throw out words such as interpolation, b-splines, wireframe, mesh, animation path, perspective, muscle & bone animation, gait cycle, ambient animation, etc. – just make sure that you do not get caught in a difficult question.

In that case, just point your audience to the web and make an excuse, like, “There are tons of tutorials out there for….”

“Thank God for SCSI and PCI – I remember the ISA days – they sucked! Can’t wait for everything to go Fibre Channel.”

open yourself to open-source

A friend of mine has been trying to get into using Linux based Open Source software, however, due to the unmanaged > 200 Gigs of stored content in his Windows Xp machine, he has not been able to format it and install Ubuntu Linux. At this point, there are hundreds of duplicate files; and (seemingly) important files that are scattered throughout the remotest folders possible. As a result, his machine is beginning to get crappy and slow. He said he is now actually motivated to switch to Ubuntu Linux. Last week he showed me a list of software suited for Ubuntu.

• Animation: Blender
• Audio Player: Amarok, JuK, XMMS
• Audio Editor: Ardour, Audacity
• CD Burner: k3b
• Desktop Publisher: Scribus
• Email: KMail, Thunderbird
• Graphics: GIMP, Inkscape
• Gaming: Chromium, GnuChess, Lbreakout2, Tuxracer, XBill
• Instant Messenger: GAIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Xchat
• Office Suite: Open Office
• Video Editor: Cinelerra, Jahshaka, KdEnlive, Kino
• Video Player: mPlayer, Xing Player
• Web Browser: Firefox, Konqueror, Opera
• Web Editor: Mozilla Composer, NVU

Due to the rising popularity of Open Source software, many new users are increasingly getting attracted to Linux. The main reasons for the popularity of OS software are their variety, increasing reliability and freedom of distribution.

What do you want to use today?