mere funde

If you thought that the search engine wars were settled, with Yahoo! laying down arms, you couldn’t be farther from the truth. Rupert Murdoch reignited the battle saying that he could de-index the WSJ and other content providers from Google. Now Microsoft (MS) has gone a step ahead and offered New Corp money to provide exclusive content for Bing.

Will this lead to more such players providing exclusive content on certain search engines? Personally, I don’t think so. Google won’t take this lying down, and given that it retains a large share of web searches, more content providers would want to be listed on Google (for lower money) than Bing. Ultimately we might have two major search engines with one having more content than the other – which one would it be is anyone’s guess. MS has a lot of money to throw at the search business but Google is no slouch itself. If they end up paying a lot, they are only going to hurt themselves. Also, I am not sure if MS would fight as much for search, which is still a small part there entire biz, unlike Google.

While it is not inconceivable that the search engines might have to pay the content providers some money, I do not foresee it being a huge amount. Search still remains, along with social networking, the killer application of the internet.

Whatever may be the outcome, MS has thrown the gauntlet and I bet Google is just about to respond!!

Whenever Google launches a product there is a huge brouhaha over in the blogosphere (There. I used the stupid word.) and people go nuts about how it is going to be the next big thing. I am not the clean one and am as much to blame as any one else for being a fanboy. However, when Google launched the free legal case law I was hardly excited.

I was transported back to the days when I was so happy at the launch of Google Patents that I almost predicted doom for patent database providers. Heck, I even sent them an email with features I thought would have been easy to implement.

Little did I know that it would turn out to be some time pass project for some one bored of regular work at Google. Sure the tool is great, but the limited coverage and search make it almost useless, when Google, using its immense technological prowess could have brought patents to everyone with very little incremental work. But then I guess the team that worked on it got shifted to some more important stuff and the project now sits there like a tool which I use only to read patents – and not search them. What a waste I tell you!!

Sleep in peace Lexis Nexis – there is no battle brewing on your home turf!

Anyone who knows me decently well, knows my hatred for all things MS on one hand, and the extreme love for MS Office on the other. I think that Office is one of the most useful piece of software ever written.

Anyway, the generous folks at MS were good enough to give me a copy of the Technical Preview of Office 2010 sometime back. I started using it almost ten days back, and so far I have been pretty pleased. I was never a huge fan of Office 2007, as I was never comfortable with the ribbon. However, Office 2007 is the standard install at ISB, and having gotten used to the ribbon over the last three months, it was not too difficult to transition to Office 2010. I did not install the newer version of Outlook, and from what I have read, it seems to be a major improvement. So this is in no way a complete review.

Most of Office 2010 is pretty similar to the previous version, but there are a few enhancements that I particularly like.

1. Excel Sparklines – create good looking graphs in cells easily. Minimal formatting, but immensely useful for dashboard kind of stuff.
2. Insert Screenshot – immensely useful! How many times did we have to do Print Scrn to paste pics from other widows. Kiss goodbye to such troubles. The new office suite gives immense control on the kind of screen shots you can include.
3. Advanced Picture Tools – from a damn cool background removal tool, to advanced Photoshop like features, this is a a major improvement.
4. More Smart Art than the 2007 version, and pretty useful ones.
5. The older Office button has been replaced by a much more useful Office tab with control over printing etc.

On the negative bits, it is quite slower on launch than 2007, and the online help has not been updated to reflect extra options.

On the whole though, I like this better than 2007 edition, and hopefully they will have some more additional features before the final launch.

After the Vista fiasco, I hoped Microsoft would learn. But guess what – they haven’t!!

The new Windows 7 is all set to be released in 6 different versions. Aren’t we all pissed with the nonsense?? Don’t you get it?? The Home Premium version, which would set you back by USD 260, does not offer Remote Desktop. Are you f$$$ing kidding me?? And don’t even get me started about the Starter version that will only allow three apps concurrently. So AntiVirus, Music Player, FireFox, and… wait. You have reached a limit and can’t run Word. Bummer.

Let me spell it out for you folks - let there be a single version. Now stop smoking that thing you borrowed from Phelps, and chant with me.

One Version to rule them all, One Version to find them,
One Version to bring them all and in the darkness bind them!!

This is the first time I am writing my B-School essays using this great full screen text editor and it is mind blowing. I wish I had used it earlier. Simple, effective, and free. Minimizes all distractions!!

Highly recommended. Download here.

This is why – they are distasteful, and they destroy the usability. Ads should not be larger than the actual post under any circumstance.

As are Facebook ads. I thought Google knew better about ads.

I was tired of writing and rewriting and then editing the BSchool essays, and wanted to hit the bed. God knows why I opened up GReader!!

Anyway – I saw this article on how to jazz up the Windows desktop. Pretty useful and fun I would say. 10 minutes later, I had finished downloading and installing RainLendar and RocketDock.

And then I thought how about syncing RainLendar with GCalendar. After some googling GCalDaemon came to rescue. I used the instructions on their website but the damn things wouldn’t work!!

At Step 3 you would need to edit the location of the iCal file. Also, the sync by File method is not enabled by default and you would need to do it manually. Finally, I had a perfect system of syncing my calendars, and combined with an SMS service provided free of cost by Google, I have myself a perfect alert system. Wow!!

Hang on. That’s not all. As I browsed the GCalDaemon website, I saw that I could use it to run a local LDAP server and replicate the Google Contacts within my Thunderbird system. By now I knew what needed to be done [enable LDAP] to get it up and running. At around 2 in the night, I had finished doing all this and was really satisfied with myself. I now have a less cluttered desktop, which not only looks awesome (I use this as my wallpaper), but is extremely useful!!

LinkedIn is a great professional networking tool. I have used it often to get answers to professional queries, and have also benefitted from the questions and answers posted by others.

However, I was checking up something today when I saw this strange trend where people reccomend someone else, and the same set of people reccomend them back. I mean no harm done, but its wierd when a person has 20 odd reccomendations and you notice that a majority of them are from the same people they have reccomended. It’s like you scratch my back, and I will scratch your’s.

Maybe LinkedIn should institute some method of highlighting such reccomendations. Any thoughts??

I have been using the Windows Vista on my brother’s Sony Vaio for a couple of weeks now, and am amazed at the uselessness of the OS. I would say that XP is at least a thousand times more user friendly and smarter OS. In fact it is so irritating at times that you feel like gnawing your arm off!!

1. The UAC – Stupid. You are making an OS for people. Not for asses. If I click on Windows Update and want to go ahead with installing some update by clicking on “Install Updates”, it means I want it done. Please do not ask me if I want to continue with it!! If I did not want it, I would not have made two effing clicks.

2. The Windows Update – The Vista applied some updates everyday till yesterday, and suddenly decided today morning to install the SP1. Can someone tell why the fuck did it not do it at the first go itself instead of installing a copy of those updates individually earlier when the SP1 has been available for months now?? Further, it would not allow me to install SP1 till I plugged my laptop into a power supply despite having 90% battery life left. For God’s sake – Stop being my mom!!

3. Stability – Its a joke. It hangs more than Windows 98 I would say despite having very few installed software, latest drivers, and all OS updates.

4. Speed – Yeah right!!

Thankfully Vaio provides all XP drivers on its website and I am thinking of “upgrading” to Windows XP within the next couple of weeks. I think the Vista team can let go of the Mojave, and start being smart.

If you think the iPhone was expensive, think again!!

Its a complete rip-off here in India. Both Vodafone and Airtel have priced the iPhone so high that I guess you won’t see it going mainstream in India anytime soon. Also, with India not having a 3G network yet, the new iPhone is not of much use anyways.

The 8GB model is priced at ~USD 710 while the 16GB is priced at ~USD 830, without the data that is. The only option left now is to get an unlocked device from US (for ~USD 550) – sigh!