Brownie Points

Britain's Prime Minister understands the internet and the power it brings to the masses. So also do the Chinese :-)

Media Cos Convergence

Over the last few days, several mergers and acquisitions took place. HP buying EDS was the hot news.

But more interesting than that are the mergers happening in the internet media world, which IMHO is a pointer that the industry needs consolidation big time.

CBS bought CNET Networks, Condé Nast bought Ars Technica, Vodafone bought a Social Networking Startup - ZYB.

Particularly interesting is the Condé Nast deal. With the latest one, they have three of the most popular and high-traffic websites of the tech world - Wired, Reddit and Ars Technica.

Microsoft's failed buyout bid for Yahoo! - Some musings

• Was Microsoft really interested in buying Yahoo! ?
• Did Jerry Yang do the right thing by rebuffing Ballmer ?
• Will the Yahoo! investors remain quiet even after losing out on the deal ?
• Does Microsoft realise they could/can never integrate Yahoo into their own ?

• Would the merger have been a good thing for Zimbra users ?
• Did Microsoft lose out on it's only chance of becoming a contributor to Open Source ?
• Would projects like Hadoop, YUI, Zimbra died a premature death under the Microsoft's management ?

• Seemingly unrelated events influence one's personal and professional lives in ways that can not be even imagined.

Introduction to Open Source

I was the keynote speaker at a local opensource fest. Here are the slides I'd prepared for the same. [odp][ppt]

BTW, the video which may miss out is this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE

Note 29

Collecting thoughts.

Online annoyances

Back after a long hibernation!!

Of late, lots of websites have started asking users to register on their websites even to view content or comment on other's writeups.

Though understandable, too many signups are an annoyance of course. Especially when they start spamming our inboxes. I happened to discover a couple of neat tricks that could help privacy freaks/lazy people like myself.

• A well known trick - BugMeNot: This aggregates account details specific to websites from everybody. When you need to signup, just visit the bugmenot site and query the accounts for the website you want to login. If you don't find any, signup for one at that website and contribute. Paired with the firefox extension, this is a very useful tool.
  
• Another intelligent service - Mailinator: The most painful part of signing up is providing our email address, verifying that and get the followup spam, alerts and so on. Mailinator is a cool service that provide throwaway email addresses for you to use. Once you've provided the email check up in the mailbox just by giving your email address. No need to login, etc.

Neat innovations :-)

Winduhs Genuine (Dis)Advantage

Microsoft pulled out it's stinking "getthefacts" campaign and replaced it with the equally ridiculous compare campaign. They needed to get back attention to their campaign. It was almost dying, and what best than a redesign and a rename ??

But, while they were touting their supposed superiority over Linux, the crashing of their WGA programme gave a hint as to where Windows stands in comparision or more generally, how their technologies lack the scalability and the smartness to reliably serve day in and out.

People at M$ acknowledged that there was a problem and were fixing it. It shows that they were not in full control of the situation as can be known from their program manager pleading with their users:

"I guarantee that I will personally resolve this issue before I go to sleep - whether or not it is Tuesday I sleep."

Wow!! Nice, they got on top of the problem and fixed it some time later. But they ought to let their marketing people know that Windows is not yet "comparision" material and should stick to their traditional methods of pushing and hiring idiots to shove their products in.

If not, they'll find lots of customers asking many uncomfortable questions before signing up with Redhat, SuSE or even us for Debian/Ubuntu. :-)