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Showing posts from January, 2008

OpenXML: Microsoft gets it right, will India too?

What does being an Indian meant to me till now? i think it has been assimilating various cultures in my personal value systems and being better than all of them.. the sum of all is greater than cultures added together.. OpenXML is the same.. it provides a culture new to us that promises efficiencies in the future.. it is upto us to take up all that is there and make a story better than each of them put together.. different cultures, different standards have been always beneficial for the world leading to choice & ensuring the survival of the fittest... if TCP/IP was not given a chance in the world dominated by Novell Netware's XNS stack , would Internet ever be around? OpenXML is the "opening" up of Microsoft Office. the earlier binary format of MS Office is now available for viewing & working upon by anyone. This has been a long way for Microsoft when in 2004 EU recommended that MS opens it Office formats. there may have been licenses granted to 3rd party dev

mySQL won't shine with Sun Acquisition

mySQL - the poster child of Open source DBs has being acquired by Sun Microsystems. this gives mySQL a shot in the arm as far as funding goes.. what remains to be seen is whether mySQL will continue on its own flavour of Open Source or change course as Star Office did? this also puts Sun in direct competition with Oracle & IBM with their own brands of DB they are trying to push in the market. the vendor competition is always strong in the Linux areas where Oracle & IBM both place their products. Sun has now directly engaged with Oracle & IBM (both with their Open source marketing tactic blaring loudly).. claims to who is a better open source advocate are bound to come up soon... This may not effect MS SQL market much given that organisations make their choice of platform earlier and choose database later on. Another glaring issue IMHO is the integration of cultures of two organisations.. from what it looks like, Sun has a very corporate culture while mySQL has a more fu

Low Cost PCs make their debut in India

With Tata's Nano starting the low cost revolution, it is time IT caught up with its own version :).. Today's papers are talking about HCL releasing a new laptop for INR 14,000/- or USD 350. A widely known project on similar lines has been OLPC that promises to deliver laptops at USD 100 or INR 4000. Indian govt. seems to have rejected that concept all together. The HCL PC has 2 GB flash based (solid state) drive instead of a  regular Hard Drive. Other features include 7" LCD, built-in wireless, USB, PC Card socket and runs Linux. Reference: http://www.ciol.com/content/15108102822.aspx In a similar news, Sify has been planning to create a thin client device that can serve as set-top box and connect with servers in the backend. It is using Windows CE to run this think client. This service will run on subscription model. What needs to be seen is would consumers buy crippled, single purpose devices (e.g. for browsing) from these vendors? while on paper, the low cost looks

Ready for the Delhi Blog and New Media Society Event

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I am all set to go to the first Bloggers Meet of any importance ( www.delhibloggers.in ). i am one of the organisers of the event.. the success of the event defined by its attendees and the objectives it set out to achieve at the start... having gone through the checklist of things to do, i am pretty satisfied with the effort each one of the organisers, partners, volunteers have gone through.. The juggernaut is rolling.. let's see how things turn up at the First Bloggers Event... And being one of the organisers, I got an early peek into the goodies for tomorrow.. take a look: I am looking forward to the warm sun in Delhi winters, the real Delhi food from Chandani Chowk and the bonfire tomorrow.. A perfect setting to meet the Bloggers and indulge in some interesting conversations.. Category: blog , delhiblggers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Models of Collaboration in Indian blogosphere

Blogosphere in the world has become a strong medium in itself. With various corporates encouraging their employees to blog (e.g. Microsoft), the trend has picked up in India. When it all started around few years ago in India, you could only hear of a handful of bloggers mostly from media industry. These bloggers in India had built their reputation due to their experience in the media industry and then went on to leverage the new media trend. mostly young or at the most middle aged, these individuals had one foot planted in India and the other in international arena. They picked up most reputation and knowledge working with other new media international journalists. IMHO, IT industry in India picked up the trend early on but was never able to reach the level or visibility the journalists were able to (probably 'cause of natural flair journalists had for writing & closer links with media industry).. as the fad of blogging matured, various collaboration models emerged. I have t

Performing Excorsism on my PC

Not real ghosts! But ghost applications that are not reported in the Add/ Remove Programs on the PC? this may happen with any program and then they just keep consuming memory and CPU.. how do u get rid of them? In one of my machines, i was seeing SQLExpress instances running when i had uninstalled the same already.. the research on the internet led to: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/09/13/465401.aspx here's the trick: Download msiinv.zip Extract the contents of msiinv.zip to the folder c:\msiinv on your system Click on the Start menu, choose Run, type cmd and click OK Run c:\msiinv\ msiinv.exe -p > c:\msiinv_output.txt Look at the output from msiinv.exe in a text editor such as notepad and locate each of the products that are installed that have SQL 2005 in the name Click on the Start menu, choose Run and type cmd For each of the SQL 2005 product codes found in the msiinv.exe output, run msiexec /x {Product Code} from the cmd prompt - this command will likel

Delhi Bloggers Event

Delhi Bloggers group is an aggregation of people who blog and share interest in blogging. the group consists of some very known bloggers and some newbies. What is distinguishing here is the fact that the group intends to ascend to greater heights by virtue of collaboration and shared leadership.. this is a community of bloggers.. The Delhi Bloggers Event is being conducted as per the following schedule: Date: Saturday, January 12, 2008 Time: 12:30 pm - 6:00 pm Location: Westend Greens Farmhouse, (Near shiv murti NH-8), New Delhi (More details on the location are located here ). The agenda of the event is as follows: 12:30 PM - Registration Starts 1:00 PM : Welcome and group Announcements 1:30 PM : Marketing your Blog 2:00 PM : Blog Monetisation 2:30 PM - 3:00 PM : TEA BREAK 3:00 PM : Webcast with prominent blogger 3:30 PM : Beginning with Blogging and Allied Services (Digg/ Del.icio.us) 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM : Open Forums Discussions 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM : Structured Networking We will be fin