10-point plan of Dayanidhi Maran

Rediff writes about the 10-point plan of Dayanidhi
Maran, India's new Union Minister for Communications and IT, to boost IT in the country:

1. Achieve convergence of information, communication and media technologies: He will expedite the convergence of technologies and prioritise PC penetration, thereby bringing cyber connectivity to every citizen.

2. Bring about transparency in administration: Maran plans to make government functioning more citizen-centric. He will stress on e-governance and quick implementation of a National E-governance Plan.

3. Broadband connectivity: Maran said he will look to providing broadband connectivity to all, at the most reasonable prices.

4. Next generation mobile wireless technologies: "I plan to leapfrog from the current generation of mobile telephony to the next 4G. India is currently using the technology of GSM (2.5 G) and CDMA for mobile telephony. The 3G standard has been evolved, but has not proved cost-effective. I therefore plan to leapfrog this generation and develop 4G technology. We will also set up a National Center for Excellence in this area," he said.

5. National Internet Exchange and Indian Domain Name: He plans to connect all ISPs in India to a national Internet exchange in order to achieve efficient Internet traffic routing, cost reduction and improvement in the quality of service for the Internet users in India. His aim is to bring about improvement in Indian Internet Domain Name with a greater market focus to proliferate the Internet and will encourage multinational companies to host their mirror sites in India and encourage Indian enterprise to host sites to promote business and trade in India.

6. Migrate to new Internet Protocol IPv6: Worldwide the new IPv6 is being implemented on the Internet to accommodate increased number of users and take care of security concerns. Maran plans to bring about migration to IPv6 in India by 2006.

7. Security & Digital Signature: He will concentrate on Cyber Infrastructure Protection. All efforts shall be made to promote the use of digital signatures in the financial, judiciary and education sectors.

8. Media Lab Asia: He plans to ensure that the programme of Media Lab Asia of the government focus on the following areas of importance to the large Indian populace:

- Providing seamless communication connectivity to rural areas and promoting value-added services and micro enterprises to double the village GDP in a couple of years.
- Extend quality healthcare services to remote areas using the technologies of telemedicine and Internet access.
- Use information and communication technology tools to improve literacy through distance education.
- Promote development and availability of low-cost PCs and communication access devices to increase internet penetration 10-fold in a few years.

9. Language computing: Maran's plan is to accelerate dialogue with state governments, linguists, R&D labs and industry for increased deployment of language computing solutions in government, industry and the society at large.

10. Outsourcing skilled manpower and R&D thrust: He plans to make India the world's hub for outsourcing skilled manpower in the IT sector.

IBM vs Micrsoft

Everybody is fighting Microsoft.

Excerpts from an blog by rajesh jain
IBM has a broader agenda--undermining Bill Gates' company. Here lies the next big battle in tech, pitting two erstwhile allies against each other in a fight to rule the computer industry in the years ahead. As big corporate customers seek to lash together worldwide networks and imbue them with more online commerce, a new $21 billion market for Web-linked software has emerged.

Microsoft wants to dominate this business and make it a Windows world. IBM has embraced Linux and in doing so has stoked the biggest threat ever to confront the Microsoft monopoly. While IBM's products run on Windows, it wants its customers to see how nicely they would run on Linux as well, using the free operating system as a lure. "Like getting free bread in a restaurant," says Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology and strategy at IBM and a pivotal proselytizer of Linux inside the company. Ultimately, customers may not need Windows at all.

IBM's embrace of Linux attacks Microsoft at its very foundation. Windows provides 40% of sales and 65% of operating income for the software powerhouse. "IBM is trying to drive the value out of the operating system," says Martin Taylor, a general manager at Microsoft. "I don't think it's a direct attack on Microsoft--but we are definitely a fairly big casualty."

Last year 828,000 servers were sold with Linux instead of Windows, denying Microsoft up to $1.7 billion in potential sales. The pain has just begun. Sales of Linux servers grew 48% last year to $3.3 billion, while Windows servers grew 11% to $15.5 billion. By 2008, predicts IDC, Linux server sales will reach $9.6 billion, versus $21.7 for Windows servers. Worse yet, while so far Linux has been confined to servers, now developers are pushing the free operating system as a way to run PCs, too.

Wladawsky-Berger is betting that IBM can make money selling software and hardware around those free layers."More money will be made in services and less in acquiring the software itself," he says. "Make no mistake: This is a business." Could Linux shift the balance of power in the computer industry to IBM's favor? Wladawsky-Berger suggests Microsoft has made a blunder by fighting Linux instead of embracing it. "For five or ten years Microsoft will continue to do very well," he says. "But perhaps they will become more of a legacy business, like our mainframes."

For 20 years Microsoft has out-earned, out-smarted and out-maneuvered IBM. At long last IBM may have found a way to get even. Twenty years ago IBM ruled the computer industry. But today Microsoft runs the show. It earns 30% more profit than IBM on one-third of IBM's revenue and has almost double its market value. With Linux, IBM hopes to get even.

I see myself at two exteremes sometime i am in a state of mind were i can manage to read a real lengthy blog / mail/ note/ document and then there are days where i cant manage to look past the first few lines and the graphics well. Suggestion make the content of the documents/blogs / mails more prcise and concise, below are excerpts of a blog which suggests just that,

Don't Make Me Read
Okay. I admit it. I'm not the world's most concise writer. I often go on and on and on when I shouldn't.

But today, I got an email from someone that makes me want to make a very specific point:

If your email is more than 3-4 paragraphs, I'm probably not going to read it.

The longer I "live" in the world of email, the more intolerant I am of long-winded text. I'm growing impatient with reading long documents, plowing through long email threads, reading long magazine articles, and browsing text-heavy web sites. Give me the gist. Give me what I need to know. Give me some charts or pretty pictures. And if I need more information, tell me where I can get it.

The sad fact is, though, that a lot of well-intentioned employees (I used to be one of them) think that lots of text proves lots of thought, and longer means better. I learned that if when someone can't get to the meat of the issue, it's overly-complex, or worst, not thought through.

Bill Jensen gives some good advice in "Simplicity Survival." Keep your emails "above the line" (so you don't have to scroll), and only write what you want the recipient to know, feel, and do.

Most business decisions are pretty simple, when you get to the heart of the matter. If you can't tell me what I need to know in the first paragraph or two, an email is probably going to get deleted (or almost as bad, put into my "read me" folder--I should rename it to my "pretend-to-plan-to-read-me-but-delete-later" folder).

There are very few exceptions: 1) if it's something that's completely relevant to me, and I need the information; 2) if your writing style is engaging and you're telling a story; or 3) you do a great job outlining the email, with titles that lead me to relevant content; 4) it's an email from my wife, my mom, BillG or SteveB.

One advantage of blogging

Excerpts from Scoble blog

Another fully employed .NET programmer...

Sorry for not posting much this week. We've had visitors and it's just been hard to weblog.

Kunal Das is working on a version of his drag-something-to-a-folder-in-Outlook-and-have-it-automatically-posted app that'll just put links to each item, so that I can start a link blog up. I have a TON of stuff to put up there when it starts back up.

Kunal got a new job this past week too. Congrats! Another fully employed .NET programmer. Who's next? Yes, his new boss did Google and found out that he's been doing cool stuff. See how that works? Write a cool little .NET app. Improve it quickly. Get linked to by other bloggers (I wasn't the only one). Apply for new job at a place that understands how rare it is to find a developer who can do the above. Get new job.

Google vs Microft

After Gmail, what's next on Google's agenda? Desktop search, apparently. Rumor has it the company will soon launch a search utility that will challenge Microsoft on its home turf, the desktop. Code-named Puffin, the tool -- developed with the help of a former Microsoft product manager -- will be offered as a free download. No doubt the folks up in Redmond, who were hoping to marginalize Google by building more search functionality into Longhorn, the long-delayed update of the Windows OS, will be none too happy to learn they've been marginalized themselves. Longhorn isn't expected to arrive at market until 2006, which gives Google plenty of time to secure a firm foothold on the desktop, and give Microsoft something to chew on as it plots a way to turn Google into the next Netscape.

Now that Gates mentioned it in his keynote speech there is expected to be significant interest in blogging from the enterprise community, here is some excerpts from the blog of a person who has written about enterprise blogging

Enterprise clients using the Plastic platform can:

• Allow employees to efficiently manage, navigate and enhance the collective knowledge base of the company

• Organize the company’s collective intelligence using the platform’s intuitive, customizable information-architecture options

• Allow employees to rate content (industry news, sales strategies, etc.) according to relevance, ratings that are available to all employees

• Empower employees with a set of communication tools that facilitate ongoing discussion of the company’s stored knowledge

It's nice to think that we were on the right track back then, even if we were about three years too early. But I have to say, part of me is glad we didn't get a chance to prove the model. It would have taken two years of hand-to-mouth financing before the business environment got ready to understand what we were saying, and I'm honestly not sure if I was cut out to be an enterprise software salesman. Much more fun to be hanging out in Brooklyn with my kids and writing books all day.

Convergence

Excerpts of a piece i read at unbound spiral,

VoIP Future

Jeff Pulver picks up on a theme that I'm now investing a lot of time in. I've bolded his statement where it counts and resonates from my perspective.

The time has come for the IP Communications Industry to start to move beyond the HYPE of VoIP and start to deliver some of the services which are only possible because of the advent of IP based communications.(bold) Some of these services start to become very visible only when we start to blur the line between instant messaging, presence, and voice communication. Throw in things like blogging, social networking and gaming and things just start to get interesting. (my bold)

The advent of a technology like SIP means that for the first time in the 127 year history of telephony, the same protocol can be used on an end-to-end basis between customers on two ends of a telephone call. This represents a total radical change in the engineering of communication networks and ways, which value added services, can be and will be introduced in the near future.

I look forward to reading about the next wave of companies, which truly will help redefine the future of the communications industry. My hope is that such services start to arrive in 2004. The Jeff Pulver Blog

Google VS Microsoft

Excerpts from a Rajesh Jain Blog

San Jose Mercury News summarises a lot of the recent discussion that has been happening on Google and what it needs to do to fend off Microsoft:

What if Google decided to snuggle up a lot closer? What if it embedded itself deep into your computer's operating system? What if it acted as your gateway to a host of other services, such as e-mail, word processing and the ability to search for information anywhere, from your computer's hard drive to the Internet?

Google hasn't said anything publicly about its plans. But industry insiders say the Mountain View company is considering entering into that kind of intimate technological relationship with users.

Many experts expect that Microsoft will seek to suffocate Google with a built-in function that can scour the Web or search any of a user's computer files, including e-mails and Word documents, all with a simple click of the mouse on a key word or phrase.

``It's clear to me that search is going to become more deeply embedded in the operating system. It's where the value is,'' said Michael Robertson, chief executive of Lindows, a San Diego company that competes with Microsoft by selling a version of the Linux operating system.

Google is reportedly considering a half-step: an add-on desktop tool that will allow computer users to search their own files as well as the Web.

But some experts say that such a search capability would be inferior to one that is embedded in the operating system.

An operating system that incorporated Google technology would allow users to conduct Web or file searches from inside e-mails or documents with a single mouse click. More important, such an arrangement would allow Google to own all the search capabilities on a computer, driving traffic to its ad-supported search results.

Experts believe Google could potentially turn its network into a full-fledged ``online operating system'' that manages everything, effectively allowing the user to bypass Windows. Users would simply go online for all their needs.

``That seems perfectly real and plausible to me,'' said Brad Templeton, a longtime technology entrepreneur and chairman of the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ``There are many technically appealing things about centralization.''

some observers are skeptical that Google could persuade users to manage their personal and business lives online.

``This has been tried before, and it doesn't work,'' said Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative. ``People don't like not having physical control of their bits and bytes. You put your data on someone else's servers and it's fundamentally out of your control.''

Separately, News.com provides an overview of the activity in the context of Google's plans to launch a desktop search tool:

Google could establish a foothold--and a competitive edge--in this desktop search market by getting in early with free consumer software, supported by advertising. Also, it could broaden its advertising into a much more intimate PC environment, off the Web, where people spend at least 50 percent of their time.

Microsoft is working on updating the next version of Windows--Longhorn--to allow people to search text, files and the Web within many applications. However, that version isn't slated for release until after 2006.

AltaVista, now owned by Yahoo, was among the first to take a stab at desktop search, but its product failed to catch on. Since then, a slew of companies have developed downloadable software applications to address the problem, including Copernic, Groxis, Enfish, 8020 and X1 Technologies. None have gathered critical mass.

Adware companies such as Claria and WhenU are trotting out new desktop applications to appeal to consumers and support their ad businesses...In a sign of growing overlap between Web search advertising and ad-supported desktop tools, Yahoo's Overture subsidiary has struck a deal to display tiny text advertisements through Claria and WhenU.

Autonomy, Convera and Verity are all companies that are working to solve these enterprise search problems and typically offer much more robust technology than Google's enterprise technology. Google's system tends to focus on simplicity and works particularly well with HTML-based documents.


Paul Allen of Infobase Ventures writes: "Google is developing and giving away more valuable tools (primarily web based) than anyone in the history of the computer industry. Google doesn't make any money from end-users. Google is subsidized by nearly 200,000 advertisers. Microsoft can't Netscape Google, but Google can Netscape Microsoft!...With their super-efficient ad revenue model, they can continue to develop and give away all kinds of free software and internet tools in order to get eyeballs for their advertisers...I guess the question in my mind is this: what is to stop Google eventually from giving away a free open operating system (Linux or Lindows) and Office-like suite (OpenOffice, Star Office) to anyone that wants to buy a $200 computer from Wal-Mart? Their current revenue model would support this. The Innovators Dilemma invites this. Microsoft must shudder to think what Google might do to commoditize their most valuable and profitable software revenue streams."

Ruthless Reading,

In MSN they have come up with a list of suggestions for a mobile executives, here are excerpts from one on reading,

You've got to keep up in your field but who's got the time for all that reading? You, that's who, using these tips for ruthless reading:

Read differently for business. With books and reports, spend time initially on the table of contents and index. Read for names, subject areas, themes and conclusions, problems and solutions. Look up topics that catch your eye.

Once you understand the organization, flip through from back to front, pausing to read charts and graphs. What are the main arguments and supporting evidence?

Google the book and author; skim reviews to get a critical analysis.
Get coffee at a bookshop and spend time browsing the shelves, noting topics that are hot or prevalent.

Check out buzz words and phrases at http://www.googlism.com. This tool quotes snippets from articles and sites using the term, giving you a sense of context.

Carry magazines in your car for when you're stuck in traffic or waiting for appointments. Tear out articles you want to read and toss the magazine.

i was just reading this excellent piece called "Lost in Translation"

Excerpts

Many CEOs feel confused by the translation they receive from their technology staff regarding the benefits of technology. One CEO told me it's like having someone translate French to English, however, every third word is still in French. Just for a moment, imagine how lonely that conversation would make you feel.

Your CIO sits at the intersection of business and technology. He must be able to translate business strategy into technology and the benefits of technology into business language that senior management understands.

i am having problems with gmail account, i sent my self a mail on that account and i got a error message saying that the message box was full , well i am still only using 18% of the account as of now so i am not able to understand why i got the error, need to check it out.

i was just reading the speech gates made at the CEO summit recently, In his speech he said that there were 4 key areas he is refering to

Redefining Entertainment
Digital Lifestyle
Rewiring the economy
Redifining business productivity

which basically was led from the dream of "Seemless Computing"

Excerpts from the article/speech

Redefining Entertainment

the idea that you can get any show whenever you want, that you can chat with other people while you're watching shows. That video games, through things like Xbox Live, will become a very social experience that goes to every age. And so, that entertainment pillar. We're doing a lot there.

digital lifestyle

the idea that when you create and learn, that your memories can all be recorded so that the photos of your kids, the things that you did, the people you know, all of that is easily accessible. Those two pillars are much more consumer oriented.

Redifining business productivity
Security & Agility

security is important to bring up, not because it drives productivity, but it's been a drain on productivity. And it has really crowded people in terms of saying, 'Well, what are we going to do, what is our liability here, should we even sleep at night knowing that there are malicious people trying to attack these systems?' And they have had some success in propagating these various attacks. What is the key answer to this? Well, the reason we didn't have this historically is that your computer systems, it wasn't that the software was written better or anything like that. They were isolated. Their mainframe is not sitting there with any teenager in the world able to throw arbitrary attacks at it. It was only accessible to a small set of people. And so, as we got Internet connectivity, which is absolutely a great thing, we haven't had the systems in place to make absolutely sure that the right isolation is taking place.

Communication
Information Visibility
Meetings

Rewiring the economy
Web Services
People & Processes
Direct Connections

Benefits of Seemless Computing

Awesome productivity potential
Empowered Information Workers
New Business Insight and ooportunity
A rewired economy

An Open Source Search Engine....want to adopt it and make it the next google...:)

Here is an piece on the same at link
Nutch
Search engines are as critical to Internet use as any other part of the network infrastructure, but they differ from other components in two important ways. First, their internal workings are secret, unlike, say, the workings of the DNS (domain name system). Second, they hold political and cultural power, as users increasingly rely on them to navigate online content.

When so many rely on services whose internals are closely guarded, the possibilities for honest mistakes, let alone abuse, are worrisome. Further, keeping search-engine algorithms secret means that further advances in the area become less likely. Much relevant research is kept behind corporate walls, and useful methods remain largely unknown.

To address these problems, we started the Nutch software project, an open source search engine free for anyone to download, modify, and run, either as an internal intranet search engine or as a public Web search service. As you may have just read in Anna Patterson's "Why Writing Your Own Search Engine Is Hard", writing a search engine is not easy. As such, our article focuses on Nutch's technical challenges, but of course we hope Nutch will offer improvements in both the technical and social spheres. By enabling more people to run search engines, and by making the code open, we hope search algorithms will become as transparent as their importance demands.

The Google vs Microsoft Battle ...Is it becoming a reality,

"Google, the leading Web search engine, is preparing to introduce a powerful file and text software tool for locating information stored on personal computers, a move which would enable it to compete with software giant Microsoft.

The software is expected to be introduced soon and is the clearest indication to date that Google hopes to extend its search business to compete directly with Microsoft's control of desktop computing, The New York Times quoted company sources as saying."

a lot more talk about the IBM Server Centric office suite, like had mentioned quite a few times in my earlier blogs...this is pretty cool stuff, I think I had read once in the MIT Tech review about about the possibility of someday having complete hard drives of people on the WWW. I think the possibilities for the future are very many.

Everybody is going after the office platform - here is an excerpt from another blog that I just read on "possibilities of Apple - Steve Jobs"

"If Jobs and team point their considerable innovation and creativity back toward desktop applications, they could blow a lot of new thinking into the market. Call it "iWorks"--an integrated desktop suite based on Linux. Apple would feature iWorks first on the Mac and then make it available on Intel machines. This would mean that 5 percent of desktops would have Linux desktops right out of the chute--a great start for the first serious Linux-based Microsoft Office fighter. This one's a stretch, given that Mac is based on OpenBSD, not Linux. But if the opportunity becomes compelling, I'll bet Jobs will move. "

Collision Course

Jim Fawcette wrote in his blog on the impending collision course between Google & Microsoft...are we making/reading too much into this Google OS stuff....maybe then again may be not?

Microsoft and Google are on a collision course, but the battle is about much more than searching for Web pages.

Google has the potential to become a primary interface for computing. Much as Lotus Notes aficionados spent their entire computing lives in Notes, Google potentially could and wants to become the platform through which users view the world.

You can see this evolving—even before Google has its IPO money to spend—with the introduction of Google News, Google Local, Gmail, Froogle, and ambitions for mobile products that are barely scratched by today's offerings. Google already has a little publicized "enterprise appliance," which is a server with Google search to use inside corporate firewalls.

In the extreme, this means Windows would be reduced to a bloated BIOS and a bunch of device drivers. You boot Windows, go to Google, and work from there. Microsoft kindly provides the browser stack, printer, and video drivers, so Google doesn't have to develop or deliver them, thank you very much, but Google, in this scenario, becomes the face of computing.

Your Browser has been high jacked

i have faced this problem, so have quite a few people, i know....here is a piece detailing the problem by wired

Browser hijackers are malicious programs that change browser settings, usually altering designated default start and search pages. But some, such as CWS, also produce pop-up ads for pornography, add dozens of bookmarks -- some for extremely hard-core pornography websites -- to Internet Explorer's Favorites folder, and can redirect users to porn websites when they mistype URLs.

Continuing - about the book I am reading, "Microsoft secrets"

Pearls of Wisdom/dumbdom - The was this section on how the in Microsoft no architecture documents are maintained and it is believed that the "Source is the ONE Document". Let me put that in perspective, this book was written way back in 1994....

but lets think about it a little bit do all the documents that we at development companies generate/create, Are they of any use ? yeah yeah there is a lot talk about continuity and stuff, but I don't think most of these documents make sense, Yes the operative word there is most not all. Most developers look straight into the code to get an idea of what is happening. Most documents are not complete or clear those that are both and no up to date.

I agree with the need for documents , but nothing the tune of what we are churning out today,

In a leading business daily sometime back I was reading a piece on how all this documentation is reducing the innovation capability of the people on the job in software companies,

I agree..more on this in days to come

Since I have been posting on a really wide array of topics, I have decided that I need to get some follow up posts in place, Here is the first one of them

Following up on an earlier piece I had written about the possibility of the dollar being replaced by the Euro on May 04, Well when I was doing some research work on it, I came across this article in business week called the Super Euro

Excerpts from the article

By the end of last year, the dollar's share of Moscow's reserves had fallen below 75%. The Central Bank's new love: the euro, which has gone from under 10% of reserves to over 20%. Russia is buying euros, says bank First Deputy Chairman Oleg Vyugin, to diversify its risks, improve its returns, and reflect the fact that the euro zone is by far Russia's most important trading partner.

The story is the same across the globe. Money traders say that institutions as diverse as Bank of Canada, People's Bank of China, and Central Bank of Taiwan are giving more weight to the European currency. By the end of this year, they predict, the euro could account for 20% of global foreign currency reserves, which today amount to a cool $2.4 trillion. Little more than a year ago, the euro made up just 10%

Indeed, the euro has, for the moment at least, stilled the complaint that it would never match the strength and stability of the Deutschemark, which in its heyday was the world's No. 2 reserve currency. In the first three years of its life, the euro never reached the 13% of global reserves made up by the Deutschemark and other former euro-zone currencies.

i am one of those guys who likes to test a lot of stuff at the same time, And the speed on my laptop is a definite indicator of the amount of stuff that i am working on playing with at a given time, Yeah most of these applications start running on start up and eat away a large portion of the memory and then i need to do go to the task manager and turn off each task after identifying the problem file after great difficulty...here is a program that makes it a lot easier...it is called Starter, (i picked this usefull information from the blog "Marcs Outlook on Productivity"

One of the books that i am reading Microsofts Secrets, It seems pretty interesting and then. It has a lot of sections focussed on development methodologies used within microsoft, while reading this i was remided of a blog by another microsofter, Chris Pratley - he has written a blog on schools of software development, here are some excerpts from the blog....

School 1:
The "wait until its perfect" school. This approach believes that software needs to be "done" before it is released to the public. Done is defined as having all the conceivable useful features, polished to a gleam, and of course "bug-free" (see my previous posts on that fallacy). These products tend to take a really long time to come to market, generally miss their opportunity since someone with a slightly lower standard than "done" has beaten them to the punch and worst of all, they spent so much effort on getting things perfect they forgot to actually try the product out on real people and make sure they weren't missing the boat and adding things no one cared about

School 2:
The "we'll just release a new build" school. This version develops software that sort of works, then sends it out for feedback as version 0.7.1.0145 or whatever. They get some feedback, make changes and make a new build with a slightly higher build number, like 0.7.1.0146. In fact, they make a change and produce an update whenever they hear about a problem. This software usually never actually ships - it just gets slowly better although often only in increments. In fact it may never make a great leap in innovation, since it is constantly in a state of trying to get closer to a specific goal. The response to any problem is simply "we'll just release a new build".

The "ship early, ship often" school. This is the one that most client software that Microsoft makes has followed. The theory goes that if you try to plan too much before you ship your first product (wait until its “perfect”), you will not be able build a truly useful product since you don't really understand who your future users are yet and what they will find appealing in the product. So the best thing is to get something out there, understand what is appealing and what isn't from the “early adopter” feedback, then ship another version that responds to that feedback as soon as you can. Typically, version 2 starts before the feedback from version 1 comes in, so version 2 is usually a polish of the partially misguided version 1, and version 3 is the real re-work to make the product what its prospective customer base really wants.

"The new software, an addition to IBM’s Workplace strategy, is a bundle that includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet and database products aimed at business users. While Microsoft’s market-leading Office bundle works only on Windows and Apple Computer's Macintosh operating systems, IBM's new software is designed to be accessed through a Web server, meaning its accessible from systems running Windows and Macintosh, as well Linux, Unix and handheld devices, sources close to IBM said." From Cnet

Right direction, Why is Open Office not coming out with something similar?

i really like the cool new look of blogger. - thanks!!!

Pretty Good Features.

i was just reading this piece from Joel on Software Blog on the book coder to developer excerpts from the blog
"
At my first job I noticed how many things there are that many Computer Science departments are too snooty to actually teach you. Things like software teamwork. Practical advice about user interface design. Professional tools like source code control, bug tracking databases, debuggers and profilers. Business things. Computer Science departments in the most prestigious institutions just won’t teach you this stuff because they consider it “vocational,” not academic; the kind of thing that high school dropouts learn at the local technical institute so they can have a career as an auto mechanic, or an air-conditioner repairman, or a (holding nose between thumb and forefinger) “software developer.”

I can sort of understand that attitude. After all, many prestigious undergraduate institutions see their goal as preparing you for life, not teaching you a career, least of all a career in a field that changes so rapidly any technologies you learn now will be obsolete in a decade.

Over the next decade I proceeded to learn an incredible amount about software development and all the things it takes to produce software. I worked at Microsoft on the Excel team, at Viacom on the web team, and at Juno on their email client. And, you know what? At every point in the learning cycle, I was completely convinced that I knew everything there was to know about software development.

“Maybe you’re just an arrogant sod?” you ask, possibly using an even spicier word than “sod.” I beg your pardon: this is my foreword; if you want to be rude write your own damn foreword, tear mine out of the book, and put yours in instead.

There’s something weird about software development, some mystical quality, that makes all kinds of people think they know how to do it. I’ve worked at dotcom-type companies full of liberal arts majors with no software experience or training who nevertheless were convinced that they knew how to manage software teams and design user interfaces. This is weird, because nobody thinks they know how to remove a burst appendix, or rebuild a car engine, unless they actually know how to do it, but for some reason there are all these people floating around who think they know everything there is to know about software development.
.."
may be i will buy that book.....

Google & Beyond ....continued

Competitor 4: Microsoft
HOw it works?
Piece 1: This software in the works promises to allow you to enter your questions in English and get direct answers back. Search users neednt have to worry about selecting the right key words and linking them together with the right boolean operator and scrolling page after page of search results. Natural Language processing is the BUZZ

Piece 2: Stuff i have seen - Right now when we want to search for something we stop what we are doing open a seperate application and start the search and then try to integrate the result into whatever we are doing ...in this piece microsoft wants to make search a part of the ongoing computing experience. It is an always available search box inside the windows task bar, Enter a query into the box and Stuff i ve seen will display an organised list of links to related email , messages, calender appointments, office documents , web pages etc in a single unified window.

Some of this capability is expected to come out withe longshot...oops longhorn.

Watch this space for more cool stuff on SEARCH.

Sasser Worm - How to deal with it?

How do you know you’re infected?
If your computer is infected with the W32.Sasser.worm, you may see a dialog box with an LSASS.exe error. Some customers whose computers have been infected may not notice the presence of the worm at all, while others who are not infected may experience problems because the worm is attempting to attack their computer. Typical symptoms may include systems rebooting every few minutes without user input.

Windows Server 2003 systems are not at risk from this Worm.

What does the worm do to the users system?
Our investigation is still ongoing; however the worm appears to infect a vulnerable system then immediately seeks to infect other systems. We are continuing our investigation to determine any further actions the worm may seek to take.

Is there a fix available?
Yes, install MS04-011.

Are there workarounds?
Yes, there are workarounds available including implementing firewall best practices, standard default firewall configurations and PYPC guidelines. Additional information on workarounds can be located at the following URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms04-011.mspx

Are there side effects of the workaround?
Side effects of the workaround can be found at the following URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms04-011.mspx

James gosling has put down his comments on the recent puch by IBM to open source java... must read

Excerpts of the article:

There's been a lot of churn lately over open letters from IBM and others calling for Sun to open source Java. Rather than try to respond to everyone individually, I'll try to respond to a pile of questions here:

Some have asked what IBM would get if Java were open-sourced: doesn't IBM already have the source? Again yes, they do have the source. It's also true that anyone can get the source. The major restriction is that if folks want to redistrubute their changes, they have to pass the test suite. Which means that about the only thing that they could get from liberalization is to be able to skip testing.

Some have asked when, given IBM's apparent zeal for open source, DB2 and WebSpere will be open sourced: ask them, not me - it does seem unlikely

Most of the comments I've heard from folks about open sourciing Java have been negative. Hmmm... Not so much negative as concerned: Developers value Java's cross platform interoperability and reliability. They're afraid that if Java is open-sourced then someone will try to fragment the community by creating incompatible versions of Java and ignore the community process, just like Microsoft did. Microsoft did a lot of damage to the community and many developers strongly do not want that to happen again

An idea for Gmail, rather for any webmail

This is from the blog of Dave taylor...

Excerpts from the blog

"RSS is a pretty elegant solution to many of the most annoying problems with the Web, not the least of which is that I don't want to visit any site day after day. As I was thinking about Gmail today, wondering whether to log in and check to see if I had any email to my address there (which is d1taylor@gmail.com) I realized that RSS could be a very cool solution to that problem, one that plagues all the Web-based email systems.
Here's how I'd do it...

While not discussed too much, RSS has the ability to embed account and password information into URLs (as does, of course, everything that uses URLs). Why not have an RSS feed that I could subscribe to that would be just the from and subject information?"

It is overall a good idea, I believe that there is a lot of scope for RSS in the enterprise too, may be we need to enhance RSS before we start seeing more uses to it.

An interesting article on Buddha by antu dey, written on the anniversary of Buddha - May 04...

excerpts from the article:

Today is the birth anniversary of the greatest Hindu ever. About 2500 years ago, a span of about 100 human generations, in the foothills of the Himalayas, Gautama Siddhartha was born who later on attained Enlightenment and became a buddha. He became 'awakened'. He walked the earth just like you and me. His profound realisation of the truths of impermanence and no-self is arguably the most exalted ideas that human mind has ever conceived and cannot be surpassed. It will take humanity another 100 generations to fully comprehend those two truths. We are, thus, temporally located somewhere half-way between when those truths were first enunciated by the Buddha and when humanity becomes enlightened as a collective.

Google & Beyond

With the google IPO impending, the geek talk is strongly focused on Search Technology of the king Google and with speculation about weather they are going to be able to retain their leadership position with some big guns (microsoft & yahoo) getting their act together in this space and the small tech focused startups. If interested in this discussion a must read is the technologyreview.com article/piece titled "Search Beyond Google", By Wade Roush.

Highlights of the article are:

Competitor 1: Mooter, a search engine from down under .
How it works?
Before dumping a long list of links, Mooter analyses the potential meaning and permutations of the starting keywords and behind the scenes ranks the relevance of the resulting web pages within broad categories called clusters. the user first sees an on screen start burst of cluster names.
Then comes the learning part...to develop a more precise understanding of what the user is probably looking for, the mooter engines notes which cluster or links get clicked and uses the information to improve future links.
Mooter will personalize the ranking to reflect the apparent pattern of interest. A refined set of results appear on every page the engine continues to adjust the ranking based on the users behavior.

Competitor 2: Teoma
How it works?
Before the Teoma engine present the results for a given set of key words, it identifies the associated communities and looks for authorities within them, that is the pages that the community members websites point to most often. Teoma tries to verify the credibility of these authority pages by checking weather they are listed on resource pages created by subject experts or enthusiasts, which tend to link to the best pages in the community. It then ranks the search results according to how often each page is cited by authority pages.

Competitor 3: Dipsie
How it works?
Minning the deep web, What is the deep web? - Content that is protected behind sing up forms or stored in databases such as product catalogues or legal or medical archives and only assembled into webpages at the time of user request.
Has built a nimble crawler that can get past forms and database interfaces to index the content.
It becomes publicly available this summer, its index will include 10 billion documents, triple the size of google.

About the giant (Microsoft) himself details in the next blog...

This is the first time, i have heard of this "The Not to do list" , but i think it is a pretty good concept, And should be used by one and all. And like the article suggests it is particularly good for those people who have just been promoted.

Excerpts from the Blog by michael hyatt on the topic

create a Not To-Do List. Here’s how:

Find a quiet place where you can think.

Look at your previous month’s calendar activities. Write down anything you’re not sure really fits your current job description.

Look at your upcoming appointments for the next month. Again, write down things that are questionable in terms of your current job description.

Go through your to-do list(s) and do the same thing. Write down the questionable activities.

You should now have a list of “not to-do candidates.” Good work! You’re almost done.

Now go through the list and put an asterisk beside each item that is significant enough that you want to add it to your official “Not To-Do List.”

Incubation platform, is an piece written in John Battelles Blog, here he is referring to the distributed platform created in google and how google can leverage this by throwing it open to application developers.

This is basically getting google to be an application server cum platform for business innovation,
what they can offer

entire web in RAM
mirror your data across the web to any location in real time
plug in services like search,email, social networking, and commerce clearing
shitload of bandwidth and storage, cheap

Well possible but is it probable????? But I think this line of thought just get stronger everyday.

Google as announced that its devoting 25% of revenues to capital spending, Where is all this expenditure going.

I just finished reading a blog by Chris pratley on Patents and open source software...quite interesting.

Side Bar: "What is the status of the open source movement in India"

I was just reading about the linux on the desktop option from Red Hat, Here are some of my thoughts on that.
I have been wanting to install linux on my laptop for the last couple of months but a few things make me put it off,

1. Outlook, I think this is the killer app for Microsoft. - not that there are not equals to it, its just that we are very comfortable with it.

2. Required applications running on it

3. Set up....I am worried that I will go ahead and install the operating system and then run pillar to post for the other drivers etc

4. Need to step out of the comfort zone

5. Need to take a back up of the data

6. Ignorance of how I can use the data I already have created in the MS platform.

...thinking of more

Lets see, what I plan to do today is find everything that is required to run Linux on my laptop. Lets see how far I go?

Is Euro going to replace the dollar as the currency of the world...Its possible.

What are the opportunities that will come India's way due to the EU unification...How does it impact the software industry in particular.... East Europeans have some of the best tech minds in the world the questions is do they have enough of them , this line of thinking brought me to a more important concepts that may be population is our strength.

a must read blog...here are thougths of thumper on blogging...and how it should /can be used as a PR or marketing tool to great streangth by organisations. i was reading a case study by HBR on blogging let me try and find that article and discuss the points highlighted.

Well I am back, was forced to take a couple of days off the blogsphere, due to a health condition which had me down and out for the weekend.

But now I am back and have to make up for lost time, first thing I noticed after coming back is "Information Overload" 4 days away from the blogsphere and when I come back today, I am struck by a barrage of information...my head is already hurting and I still haven't even finished my usual / daily list of blogs...well more as the day goes along....

One thing though it does feel good to be back.