Siddharth Abbineni

Recently, Opera browser makers sued Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer along with their OS. They say…

“We are filing this complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them, In addition to promoting the free choice of individual consumers, we are a champion of open Web standards and cross-platform innovation. We cannot rest until we’ve brought fair and equitable options to consumers worldwide.”

Their argument seems logical, but I seem to find it completely retarded. They are thinking about themselves and not the customers, I can say that for sure. Let me explain.

Let us assume, Microsoft (MS) is banned from bundling Internet Explorer (IE) with Windows (all Linux geeks (LG) and MS bashers (MSB) rejoice). Now a lame man, like say a middle aged man having his midlife crisis, installs Windows (At this point, all the Linux fanboys and MS bashers might go on to ramble that Windows sucks and say they’d rather install Linux. Imbeciles, no one wants to calculate 2xRAM = SWAP nor does anyone want to operate from the console.). All done, Windows installed well, he watches a couple of movies (Assuming he is not European, EU version of Windows doesn’t have WMP), listens to his favourite songs. All is well. The next step would obviously to browse the Internet, for Pr0n. He is all excited, but then he realizes his computer doesn’t have a browser! OH NO! DAMN IT TO HELL!

The only option available to him is to download a browser from the Internet and then start using it. LGs and MSBs might yell firefox, hardcore Internet freaks might say Opera and people like me would say IE7. He just has to download the browser he prefers and start browsing the Internet. It all seems very simple, but there is a catch. How in the world will that man download a browser of his choice if he cant browse the Internet? There is no way for him to view a web page on his system as there is no browser. So he can neither visit www.getfirefox.com nor www.opera.com nor download.microsoft.com. Then how can he install a browser (Op | FF | IE)? There are some options.

1. 1. He visits a friend who has a browser. Ask him to download the browser he prefers and then bring that file to his place on storage device. Pen drive etc. Install it and then enjoy the pr0n.
   2. If windows has something similar to wget, he can use that. But we are talking about about a 40year old man here. First of all I doubt windows to have something like that. Secondly, lets face it, he would rather hang himself than do a command line download.
   3. Bundle all available browsers with the windows installation.
   4. Magic.

All seemingly feasible but, unnecessary burden on the poor old man. He just wants to enjoy the pr0n but he is faced with a multitude of problems. Consequently he goes on to kill his loved ones and then finally commit suicide. Tragic.

One thing I don’t understand is, haven’t they thought of this? or am I missing something?

Operating systems are installed on brand new systems (reinstalling, formatting etc. are different). People buy computers for either entertainment, Internet or professional work, the first two being the most common uses. After installing, the first thing they want to probably do is to either watch a movie, listen to songs or browse the Internet. Thus a browser and a media player are bare essentials. If you strip them off, what is left is a car without the wheels, purpose lost.

I might faintly agree with..

“Microsoft abusing its dominant position in the browser market by tying Internet Explorer to Windows and by not complying with W3C web standards when it comes to how IE renders pages.”

.. but who doesn’t want to? They have the best OS out there and they want to make money out of it. If IE is removed from windows, then Firefox should be removed from Linux, that would only be the fair thing to do.

They say IE is not 100% compliant, but then neither is Firefox nor Opera. If a company wants people to use their product, they should make it stand out from the rest. Take Firefox, it has been my faithful companion since years. I being a huge Windows fan, still like Firefox for its features. The extensions make Firefox a browser with unlimited features and infinitely customisable/extendable. That is what made Firefox click among the Internet communities. Opera being third in race isn’t an unpopular browser. It has its own feature set, but the users who prefer that feature set are few. Opera in the early days was a nightmare, both with JS and standards. Even though it is the most compliant browser currently available, it still needs to be improved in usability, extensibility and other aspects.

Opera’s future is hanging by the thread. IE7 has been improved immensely from IE6, with tabs and add-ons like IEPro, it can also become a geek’s browser. Firefox on the other hand already is a geek’s browser and Firefox 3 aims to eliminate the 2 major problems plaguing it, memory leaks and speed. These two will share the whole market, IE used by casual browsers and Firefox by the rest.

One more thing, “Standards compliance” is not a feature looked for in a browser by the end user, at least not the important feature. Standards compliance is only for web developers, they are the ones who face the most problems than the end users because of incompatibility. With compatibility in the order Op>IE7>FF2>IE6, Opera might have a chance, but who knows?

Max Mosley punts for new Formula 1 rules in 2011
According to reports in today’s F1 Racing monthly magazine, the FIA is now making the first steps towards the introduction of 2.2-litre V6 turbocharged engines, running on biodiesel fuels, in F1 in 2011. The reports suggest that the engines will be restricted to 10,000rpm and that they will have to survive for five Grand Prix. The idea, which we suggested might happen back in November last year is being proposed to the automobile manufacturers. It remains to be seen whether the proposals will be embraced by the car companies. In addition the proposals include a number of other controversial ideas, such as traction-control, four-wheel-drive, power-boost buttons and identical bodywork for all the teams. Some of these are idea have been pushed by FIA President Max Mosley in the past and are probably included in the proposals to see what he can achieve by throwing the net wide and seeing what survives.

O H M Y G O D ! !

NO Mosley!! thats a BAD Mosley!

Turbochargers! in Formula one?! Bio Diesel! in Formula one?! There is going to be turbo lag!!. It just doesn’t make sense!! And whats wrong with the fuels used now! its not like F1 cars are fuel inefficient, they churn out 900bhp for crying out loud! Its not like there is smoke from the exhaust. What have the hippies done to you man! Mosley! The last thing I need today is to know that in future hippies will rule Formula one.

I just don’t understand. Turbos increase weight, yeah power to weight ratio will be more probably but one word “TURBOLAG”!!!! Bio diesel might have more octane but still! Common! Bio!? You want ‘BIO’ in F1, the pinnacle of automobile racing and technology?! 10K RPM? my Corsa revs upto 7K RPM for god’s sake. This just devastating. Go hippify NASCAR or INDY car racing, but not F1! FUCK!

I don’t know what I’m saying!
I don’t know what I’m doing!
I don’t know what I’m thinking!

All I was doing till now was to stare, yes just stare at the monitor for absolutely no reason whatsoever and sometimes drawing those square boxes on the desktop with the mouse. I feel like coding but no patience and no drive. Set up Flex and Eclipse yesterday and at the end of it, I got bored and slept. All the TV series ended, all at once and the worst time possible, summer holidays. If I go sit near the TV its either people crying in reality shows, Turks bombing masjids or some hippie American movie all the time and the worst of them all, those Bollywood concerts and festivals.

I’m passing most of the time by either by sms-ing, talking on phone or chatting. I know, I am a geek, or wait was I? I’m not supposed to do all that stuff but I seem to have no other option. I need something strong to work on, something which will keep me interested and occupied for a long time. Usually gaming did it, but I played and completed all the games out there and am bored of them. Unfortunately there aren’t any new interesting games out either. I actually am supposed to work on a project, but as I said before, no drive at all.

After a long time I was watching TV today, specially the news. It seems as though us Indians got fed up of a long peace period. The sand in the vaginas was accumulating for a long time now I guess, someone, of all places bombed a masjid. Well who ever did that was a genius. It was probably one of the toughest tasks to accomplish. Even the Home Minister of the State wasn’t allowed into the masjid after the incident, nor were the top police heads, and someone goes into such a “secure” place and plants a bomb in it. Amazing isn’t it. I wonder who did that. Who was daring enough to attack a Muslim holy site? It is not in us normal Hindus to plant bombs, our nature is to pelt rocks and shout that’s all. And Christians are probably busy converting everyone they find. Who could it be? I just can’t fathom the reason behind this nor who did it. Whoever did it, Bad Boy! Don’t do that again.

Now even if I want to roam outside from tomorrow I can’t. They said bandh already and the streets will be filled with protesting assholes who have absolutely no other work than to mess up the lives of others. So “going away from home” option is also now disabled. So no gym, no movies, no eating outside etc. Oh my god! I just realized I can’t do all these, shit. How could this get any worse? Damn.

Cartman: What’s wrong?? Has he been checked for bombs?
Mrs. Garrison: Eric, that’s enough! Not all Muslim people are terrorists!
Cartman: No, but most of them are. And all it takes is most of them.

I hate troubleshooting over yahoo messenger, I hate troubleshooting over the internet. I detest ignorance and ignorant noobs. I cant seem to tolerate ignorance these days.. at least from people who for their age shouldn’t be that ignorant in some aspects.

Ignorance is Bliss, yes, only for the ignorant. Not for the rest.

It goes like this…

High End Graphics on a Modest Budget
IF YOU’RE JUST looking to upgrade a low-end system and aren’t planning to blow your budget on a top-of-the-range card right now, the LeadTek WinFast PX7950GT TDH, based on NVidia’s GeForce 7 Series, is a sensibly priced option. Since this card is based on.. .blah blah blah..

—Jesse Sutton

In the end it says Price: Rs. 21,000.

Now,
1. What the hell!? in what way is 21,000/- a modest budget? Even a rich fella would hesitate to buy one at that price just for graphics.
2. “IF YOU’RE JUST looking to upgrade a low-end system… ” Upgrading a low-end system with a 7950GT, its just stupidity. Considering the graphics card and its power a low end system here would be a Core 2 Duo E6300 based system, which incidentally isn’t low end in any imaginable way.
3. I still cannot understand how the editor thought the 21000 price tag as “without breaking the bank”.

That most misleading title and the most confusing review I ever read. Who ever that Jesse Sutton is.. dude/dudini.. which country are you from? This was an article from the PCWorld Jan 2007 magazine.

I installed Fedora Core 6 on my monster. Finally… after 2 and half years since I bought this babe, I have a dual boot. At the expense of a RAID0 set though.

FC6 is almost same as all the other FCs but… it now has the AIGLX (Accelerated blah blah.. ) which makes it more Vista-ish. I tell you its just amazing. The window animations, the water/rain effects, the whole virtual desktop cube concept.. everything. I would recommend everyone to install it and check it out at least once. Downside though is that the installation and configuration process for AIGLX will take you through a complete Intermediate user tour, a boon and also a bane if you consider the time it takes.

Above all that, I had a serious problem, none of the apps, Yum especially seemed to connect to the internet, except luckily firefox. After hours and hours of troubleshooting, googling foruming, the I diagnosed it as a DNS malfunction on Linux’s side. Well Linux has problems with my Router being a DNS forwarded instead of a DNS Server. I took almost 8-9 hours altogether to figure the problem out and solve it. It was only after that I was able to setup AIGLX n other stuff.

I wanted to write a complete tut and a demo on that.. will do that soon ;) just gotta find time.. driving a lot lately…

Well this I had to write about, It was just too much to take.
Slashdot’s Vastu:
From the article:

“Thirty-year-old Smita Narang is rapidly becoming one of India’s hottest Web designers. Her method: applying vastu shastra, the Indian counterpart of feng shui, to the online realm. The process entails mapping page attributes – HTML, colors, graphics – to elements like fire, water, and air. ‘Any disturbance of these established elements can cause an imbalance in the site that directly affects its business,’ Narang says.”

A direct proof to prove that there are in fact a lot of fools in the world who believe in this kinda crap. Seriously, aesthetics is what is needed not vastu you fools. I know, I know there is always this butterfly effect but compromising a site design just for the sake of complying with vastu is just ignorant. Same applies to houses, I still don’t get the point with houses. I have seen many people build great luxurious mansions and later destroying them just because some jackass vastu shastry told them their house wasn’t compliant and that it would cause them bad luck or put them in grave danger of loosing their money.

I have seen my father getting pissed when someone suggested vastu in his contracts, I always wondered what the problem was. Since its reached my domain now, I understand perfectly how lame it is. I can go on and on about how stupid all this is but, if you wanna hear all that. buzz me :P.

Southpark resumed :) but only one episode was good, rest were boring, come on Matt&Trey you can come up with better ideas! make it another season 8 ;)

As Schumacher is now out of F1, my 8 year Schumi fan phase has ended. Luckily my next favourite driver, Kimi, is moving to Ferrari, so he is the man we cheer for next year. I just hope he doesn’t carry forward his bad luck from McLaren to Ferrari. 2008 Champ, Kimi, Alonso will never even be seen on the podium, pakka. I gotta get back to playing the RAMBIT scenario in AOE:TC now, the other bitches are waiting.

I read a bunch of books on psychology in the past week. They have a detrimental effect on the way we think. We start analyzing every reaction, every response and then try to relate them with the theory in the books. The analysis is involuntary, it doesn’t stop and can’t be stopped either. In the beginning it may seem a bit interesting but as we go deep it gets confusing and everything relates to everything and nothing. Somewhat like Kyle’s paranoia in the episode “Tooth Fairy tats”. On the plus side though, you get to understand people better and also, ourselves better. But in the end it all comes down to a person’s mental strength, a weak mind can turn totally paranoid or a sensible one can find his weaknesses and improve on them. If you are one of those whose thinking is most of the times influenced by other people or surroundings, don’t ever read these! However, if you feel you are strong enough, go ahead read them and see what you really are or aren’t.

What I observed is that Guilt is an inconceivably strong weapon. You can force, order or push a person into doing something but there is always a possibility that he might rebel. You can also plead, beseech, but again there is no guarantee that the deed will be done. But, if we bring in guilt into the picture and make the person feel guilty for not doing something, I assure you, that job will be done whatever the odds. I call this the “Guilt Trap”. When I knew about this and thought back, I found out that I was trapped into these guilt traps in numerous occasions. One might not realize it but it is true. The moment we are guilty we start hating ourselves and that is the catalyst for what follows. Some people use this to their advantage and get things done, in my opinion it is nothing but manipulation and cruel. This manipulation soon becomes a habit as it is the easiest way to get things done. So my advise would be to ask you people to think whether you have been trapped into feeling guilty or you are genuinely guilty. If you think you are being trapped into feeling guilty, reverse the whole situation, try and make them feel guilty or put all the responsibility on them or just ignore them.

What effect the books had on me? I started to worry about what people thought of me. I stopped caring what people thought about me long back, but it all came back for those three days, I was, you can say paranoid for a while.

Warning psycho alert!

Since school, I had many awful experiences, like being sent out of class for sleeping, almost everyday, at Ramaiah. They had no long term effect on me, but I slowly turned into an insensitive, anti-social, irresponsible, Para geek. Then my two years at the IIT changed me a lot again. I was ever more confident about my abilities. Although I wasn’t able to develop my ability to prioritize, I became stronger. I still had more negatives than positives but it was an improvement none the less. Still it proved costly as I was slow in developing myself. However since I don’t let drawbacks take me down, I was working on myself all last year. Frankly, I again have changed a lot and this time. I think I now have more positives than negatives. I now know what my priorities are; I now stand up for myself and what I believe. I now assert myself whenever I have to, which I never could before. I know a lot more about myself.

The most significant development is that I am now able to balance my academics with my passion for computers (or you can say obsession). I never had the balance before, that’s why I was forced be away from computers whenever I had to study. Since I was always forced, I never valued the balance and took it for granted. In the end I was kicked out of IITD. A painful experience, the worst part about this is, even though I and my family are over the disaster, outsiders aren’t.

And yes, I was this big a psycho even before reading those books.

As monster was taken away from me, I am left alone in the room to study. 45 minutes into a study session, my brain gets maxed out; it leaves the books and starts wandering. It was then the row over the reservation made me think and think I did.

What is wrong with this country? After analyzing what dad talks about and collecting data from all the “upper” meetings with friends, I came up with several reasons.

• Turning personal interests into public interests.
• Corruption
• Religion
• Lack of rational thinking among citizens.
• More, still to be discovered.

For example, consider the controversy over the OBC reservations. The Congress government is weak at this moment, that’s why the ruling party is the UPA and not Congress. As Sonia Gandhi has absolutely no chance of being the PM of India, their only figure is Rahul Gandhi, so next time around in the elections, the Congress need to be dominant so as to make RG the next PM. For that to materialize they need to increase their vote base. The OBCs constitute a handful in the Indian population, and they believe they can win them over by granting them reservations. Arjun Singh openly admitted to introducing the reservation solely for the sake Rahul Gandhi and to increase his popularity. I am astonished that no media channel seems to have elevated that statement. I am not just blaming the congress party; but there was not a single political party which opposed the bill, not even the BJP, all because everyone is afraid of losing their votes.

Its not only the politicians and their parties, its also the people, if the people were wise and voted for the best government based solely on what the government is willing to do for every citizen in the country, no one would have cared about the reservations. People are always preoccupied with their own interests. They vote for a party only if the party promises to give them something, like reservations for their caste/religion, etc. We are the ones who elect, and if we ourselves are biased and greedy, why should we expect the politicians to be fair and clean?

The Da-Vinci Code, an amazing book. As all of you know, its latest form is a Tom Hanks starring movie. I just confirmed some questions relating to the movie.

• Where was this movie made? – The USA
• Who starred in the movie and who were responsible for the making? – Prolly US or UK citizens.
• Where was this movie 1st released? – The USA.

The USA is a Christian majority country and I also believe there were numerous Christians involved in the making of that movie. Over that there are millions of Christians who watched that movie around the world, let it be Europe or the Americas. They all don’t seem to have a problem with the movie. But when it was about to be released here, a country where Christians are considered a minority group (no offence), everyone has a problem with the movie. They make a big deal; involved the censor board, the Supreme Court (WTF!! Who involves the Supreme Court, the highest authority, for a movie which isn’t even made here?) and politicians to make noise over nothing. There are only two logical explanations to elucidate this behavior, either they are nuts or this is an elaborate publicity stunt for the movie. Whatever the reason the may be, using religion in this fashion is immoral!

Politicians can get so confused at times that they don’t even know what is written in the constitution! After the TDP (Telugu Desam Party) was overthrown by the Congress, here in Andhra Pradesh, the Congress was being blamed for not fulfilling the promises they made before the elections (Free electricity being one, its been two years and I think they are yet to implement it). So to somehow nullify that, they introduced reservations for the Muslims at UG level, both medicine and Engineering streams. Unfortunately for them, the bill was struck down by the High Court, stating that India is a secular country and reservations based on religion are against the Constitution. A disgraceful experience, and yet they are still so blatant that they are taking it up again in the Supreme Court. Why all this? Muslims constitute another handful of the population in the state.

Reservations are deadly, if once approved, no one will ever have the guts or the balls to get rid of them. And if at all they do get rid of them, I guarantee that the party wouldn’t be elected again for at least the next 15 years.

The vote is so powerful that it makes politicians go haywire for it, and yet people have absolutely no idea how powerful their vote is and what difference it can make. People forego their vote just for the sake of miniscule privileges. It is like giving away a Vienetta Ice-cream in exchange for a lollypop.

Hippies!

OBC My ass! Stupid mofos.

Manmohan Singh to Bush – We are sending Indians to the moon next year.
Bush – Wow! How Many?
Manmohan Singh - 100
25 – OBC
25 – SC
20 – ST
5 – Handicapped
5 – Sports Persons
5 – Terrorism Affected
5 – Kashmiri Migrants
9 – Politicians and if possible
1 – Astronaut

I rarely show liking towards forwarded mails but this one shows how screwed up our country is at the moment. They are dumbing down an already messed up country. To clear my status on the reservations, I am 100% completely against them. Stupid mofo politicians, screw you, you fking SOBs.