There is a widely single sided debate going on the tech blogosphere regarding "brand dilution of Beta". http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2004/12/fresh_outta_def.html http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000374.html True techies are increasingly finding the (mis)use of the term 'Beta' objectionable. For the uninitiated - Beta is a term used for a 'pre-release' version of any software and most of the 'cool' Web 2.0 applications from GMail to Flickr started out as Betas. If software was an Indian Children's game 'Beta' would mean 'Kachhi Goti' :-P or 'Trial Over'. But the bone of contention is that most of these startups (some of which are now owned by major companies or themselves are big companies) are perpetually in Beta. For the techies who were groomed in the era of Desktop Suites and Mainframes (where stable release and quality control were critical), this means telling customers that you're not really committed to

Mr. Singh's government is now credited with another blunder - they seem to have forgotten that they are leaders of a Democracy and not a Communist country. There is no better evidence than this news that a Left supported government can only become more and more paranoid in its approaches. This unfortunately also hints towards a soft-reversal of India's foreign policy towards Tibet. Sad :-( - that the World's largest democracy should suppress a pro-democracy voice to please the Head of State of a Communist country. Where are democratic principles gone?? Link via: Gaurav Sabnis

US Senate votes 85-12 for India's Nuclear Bill : "In a major victory for the pro-India lobby, the United States Senate today voted massively in favour of the Indo-US nuclear deal" - reports Rediff.com. They report further that - "The vote is also a victory for US industry and the Indian American community, working under the banner of the Coalition for Partnership with India.... Reflecting the sentiment, Ron Somers, President of the US-India Business Council, which comprises the top 220 US companies doing business in India, praised the vote, stating: 'As a result of today's vote, the objectives of attaining international energy security, nuclear safety, and a cleaner global environment have today made a Himalayan leap forward.' " More Coverage: http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/nov/17msg.htm http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/nov/17ndeal14.htm Google News Updates

Life sometimes seems very unromantic – especially when memories of past strike back, when you remember the romantic and naive dreams of your own childish mind. The child that you once were, resides within you even today – you think about that child, that adolescent, that sophomore that you once were – who dreamt of doing lots of interesting things, who was in love with his dreams, who worked hard not to get into the 'typical' corporate life but something larger than this, a more beautiful and meaningful future – a world where he could bring about that much needed difference, a world where his energy and enthusiasm was all that was required for success, a world where there was no room for racism, favouritism, greed, and personal conveniences ... Was there no such world ever? Was it all a screen? Was it just a fairytale? Is the child inside me never going to realize its dream? Is the adolescent never going to reach the pinnacle of his desires? Is the sophomore never going to be

Aggreg8 is a new social networking site from Microsoft for IT developers - they have a cool, nerdy byline for their portal ' 127.0.0.1 for IT Pros '. (For the uninitiated 127.0.0.1 is the default address for localhost i.e. local webserver on your computer). However, to my horror, the Sign Up form does not have Indian Timezone - Indian Standard Time (IST) for registrants!! How can Microsoft commit such a horrible mistake of not having 'INDIA' on the sign up of a website meant for IT Professionalls !!! I hope M$ realizes its mistake ASAP and corrects it ... PS: I did not complete my sign-up in protest ...

An article in the morning Metro today says [Source: Metro.co.uk ]: "Hinglish has become one of the fastest growing hybrid languages in the world. For British Asians, it can enliven English. In India it is fast becoming a lingua franca." And finally there's this book on the language / dialect - The Queen's Hinglish : How to Speak Pukka by Baljinder K Mahal. Hinglish has been there for long enough - I remember hearing it even as a kid - but back then it was essentially a teen toungue - Bollywood movies then were more fond of Punjabi, Bihari and mostly Urdu based Hindi. Of course the street tongue dialogues like - 'Kuttte !! Main Tera Khoon Pee Jaunga' were also quite popular as were some supposedly Bambaiya addresses like 'Ai Sssaaaaaaaala'. However, as Bollywood moved to becoming more and more urbane and classy, Hinglish too has matured. Many words in Hinglish are a part of routine English vocab now, add to it the SMSish language there's a whole ne

My cousin, who was in class X, once sought some guidance from me to complete his computer assignment - to write a Java program for bubble sort. Having been out of touch with "classic programming assignments" since some time - I wanted to refresh my understanding of bubble sort. So I asked him to explain it to me - he started blurting out the code in Java. I stopped him "Hold on! Let's not get into the code. First tell me what you do in bubble sort?" To my surprise he couldn't tell me in plain English what he meant by bubble sort. When I delved deeper I realized that the problem was more fundamental - Java was the first programming language that he was learning and his study of programming started with understanding Objects and Classes rather than algorithms and logic. I had observed the same problem with some batch mates in Engineering. But their case was more accidental than by design because Computer Science was not a core subject in their schools. However

I wrote in my post 2.5 years ago: "Though Steve Jobbs might not have realized but he was not fighting for the Macintosh Project, he was fighting for emphasis on software and not hardware. .... Apple Corporation ... is not in the business of selling computers but in the business of selling the software inside it." Steve Jobbs has corroborated my views here : "... we became convinced that software was going to be the primary technology, and we're a pretty good software company. "We're a good hardware company, too, but we're really good at software. So that led us to believe that we had a chance to reinvent the music business, and we did."

Steve Jobbs remarks in the The Seed of Apple's Innovation : "I get asked a lot why Apple's customers are so loyal. It's not because they belong to the Church of Mac! That's ridiculous. It's because when you buy our products, and three months later you get stuck on something, you quickly figure out [how to get past it]. And you think, 'Wow, someone over there at Apple actually thought of this!' And then three months later you try to do something you hadn't tried before, and it works, and you think 'Hey, they thought of that, too.' And then six months later it happens again. There's almost no product in the world that you have that experience with, but you have it with a Mac. And you have it with an iPod." I would say the same for Google and Microsoft. As much as we may ridicule these companies for being (or trying to become) monopolies - the truth is we all use their products because they come up with stuff that works!! There isn'

The US is probably the world's leading country in adoption of technology and the world's second largest democracy. In spite of this it record in ensuring flawless elections has been dismal. During the penultimate Presidential Election and now during the current elections - too much technology has probably become the Achilles heel for the US. This is especially amusing considering that India - a much larger democracy, but a technologically a much primitive society manages to conduct its elections almost flawlessly (in terms of technicalities - social problems like Booth Capturing do continue to cast a shadow on democratic processes in India). T P Sreenivasan has quoted many appropriate examples of America's failure to be able to conduct flawless elections. I quote: "The last time I watched US election results back in 2000, the overwhelming thought was not the enormity of the change, but surprise over the sheer inability of the SuperPower to manage an election without sn