Terror strikes Mumbai, India and rules Cricketers mind

Pakistan unsafe: Dhoni, Tendulkar told Board yesterday

Today, England’s cricket team has called off the remaining two games in the ongoing series

also Shane Warne plans to skip the upcoming Twenty20 Champions League.

[Source : Max Kellly's Blog]

Facebook won $873 million judgment for damages caused by Adam Guerbuez and his company Atlantis Blue Capital, who sent sleazy messages to facebook users. According to Kelly, this award is the largest judgment in history for an action brought under Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM). From various sources of web its understood that Adam Guerbuez, made money by selling videos of people beating the homeless in Montreal. Lets thank Facebook for the tireless effort made by their security experts, legal team and the other significant resources we’ve devoted to finding, exposing and prosecuting the sources of spam attacks.

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Don’t be suprised if you spot Google Chrome pre-installed in your new machine.

As reported by Times The search giant looks at pre-installing Chrome on personal computers in a bid to break dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The company is planning to make this move once Chrome is out of Beta stage , which is probable by Jan 2009. The company is also planning to release Mac and Linux version of Chrome by the mid of 2009.

[Source : ZDNET TIMES ]

The demand for PHP programmers are in raise as reported by oDesk.“Employers around the world who rely on mission-critical product development and building out their IT infrastructure have spoken,” said oDesk CEO, Gary Swart. “Open Source technology, led by PHP and MySql, is by far the skill set in highest demand today.” Check this link

I stumbled upon two good links to understand whats technical debt , its impact and the ways to measure it. These links would be helpful for software developers, architects and also for people interested in programming.

1. Design Debt
2. Measuring Technical Debt

Wiki is a page/site where the end-user can interact with the rendered page, change few settings, edit contents and so on. Now Google has come up with something called Search Wiki, where you can re-order or re-arrange your search results which helps Google to know your preference and priority. This info about your preference is used by the company to render you better personalized search results and the my guess is that the system would keep performing better as we interact more & more with the rendered results. You need to be logged in though to use the system.

Microsoft on the other hand has already a research prototype “U RANK” which works in the similar way, you can re-arrange, move up, re-order your rendered search results. You need to be logged in though.

This guy, USB 3.0 known as super speed USB is being built into devices. Earlier this year [aug 2008] intel came up with its specs for USB 3.0 and made it royalty free, so that it would speed-up the development of new systems world-wide. This next generation USB is capable of

Brazil

Brazil may be next I.T. outsourcing destination. Brazilians are known throughout the world for their football game,  but  also they are being recognized as an I.T. outsourcing destination. Brazil seems to have IT professionals with high degree of technical skills and business savvy.  São Paulo , a South Eastern city in Brazil, have the second-largest community of Java programmers outside of the United States. Brazil has an excellent infrastructure to support banking industry which can be leveraged to support other verticals too. Brazilians claims to be proactive, when it comes to meeting the deadlines on a project. But how well can the Brazilians (they speak Portuguese) communicate with their English speaking clients ? They may have the second-largest community of Java programmers but how much are they relatively strong when compared to Indian Java Programmers ? How realtively-depth is the Brazillians I.T.  techno skills ? These questions, are must but not limited to these alone, needs to be answered before they are considered as an alternative to Indian I.T. outsourcing.

Some good articles on the topic

India sees slowdown in IT, call center hires

I.T. Pay takes tiny leaps according to 2008 survey

Every dark cloud has a silver line -As the economic situation is not that good, companies will have low attrition rates as job hops by the employees would be low/minimal, which is a good factor, to appeal, for companies when they try to hassle a new biz deal. As companies try to bring down the cost on I.T. more work would be outsourced to the offshore side , which  is again a good factor for the industry.

Respectance.com is a site where people can pay tribute to their loved ones, who are no more. Social networking concept was put to use in a different style, making Web 2.0 to touch people’s heart emotionally. Respectance was founded by Richard Derks and Todd Wilkinson and has received Series-A funding from by Solid Ventures and Big Bang Ventures.

This video was played today at BCC2 [Bar Camp 2 , Chennai] by one of the presenter. It explains what is Web 2.0 in an excellent way, it cant get better than this.

Source : www.cio.com

Ray Ozzie

At Microsoft’s PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie unveiled the company’s much-anticipated cloud computing platform, dubbed Windows Azure.

Windows Azure plays host to the .Net framework, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, and an offering called Live Services which, according to Ozzie,Chief Architect for Microsoft, will extend Azure services “outward” to connect with locally running Microsoft software. Using this rich environment, developers will be able to build and deploy Web applications and services running on Microsoft’s worldwide infrastructure of datacenters.

Computer Worm turns 20 today.

Very first computer worm originated on Nov 2 1988, when Robert Tappan Morris tried to estimate the size of the internet by an self-replicating application. It was designed to propagate across Unix systems and exploited vulnerabilities to gain entry. But unfortunately his program had a bug and far more progation attempts were made , than it was necessary, causing the targetted machine to slow down or shut down, as his application consumed lot of system resources.

Right now Robert Tappan Morris is a  Professor at MIT and co-founder of Y-Combinator, a venture incubator that helps ignite promising startups.

Robert Tappan Morris

You can assume or claim anything like

1. This move ["This move" is explained below] is to spread Microsoft products better to counter attack open source products as they are shaping up greatly.

2. Make startups dependent on Microsoft

3. Compete or overtake Google and Salesforce on their Cloud Computing platform

Whatever,

Microsoft is giving away F R E E software to early stage Web start-up companies as part of their world-wide BizSpark program launched yesterday. BizSpark aims to help start-ups by providing production licenses and technical support for several Microsoft products. The licenses are free for the first three years, after which the start-ups must start to pay. The start-ups needs to spend [just] 100$ once they graduate from the program or at the end of three years.

Links to BizSpark

Microsoft

From ComputerWorld

[Source : ZDNet Blogs , ZDNet News]

faceforce

My friend Erush has his Skype quote as“Friends Are Worth More Than You Could Ever Imagine”. If you believe that the above quote is just a theory , you will change ur belief system atleast on this, when you discover that ur friend/contact in ur facebook friends list can refer you, for a particular position, to their company and automatically your profile will get listed inside the company’s recruiting app, which is built/run using SalesForce. Sounds Amazing ???

Facebook and Salesforce.com [Salesforce.com offers online tools for businesses managing their customer relationships] are going to follow Nokia’s motto “Connecting People”. Yes ! Applications running on Force.com infrastructure can be presented on Facebook pages.Through this merge there will be significant change on how business gets done in the enterprise and how people interact with each other.

faceforce screenshot

[ Picture Source : The Hindu ]

Bill Gates with Indian Prime Minister ManMohan Singh

Bill Gates visited India and met Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to discuss about the cooperation between his Foundation and the Indian Health Ministry.

Links to this news 1. The Hindu 2. SurfIndia

“That’s cheeky. A good question, but cheeky,” Ballmer said when he was questioned
“Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?” at the “Power to Developers event”, Sydney by one of his student constituents. After providing philosophically based answer to one he also said Microsoft may also adopt an open source browser engine. You heard it right, Microsoft might be open to Open Source

It may be a 1 year old news, but today a mail was forwarded to me with this below image which I am seeing for the first time, the message in this advertisement is simple, strong and clear. Being a engineer myself I strongly feel that most of us have an innovative trance embedded within our minds, by default , but which is never put to use to the fullest, by everyone. Guys like N.R.N are clear inspiring examples of achieving highness in life through sheer passion and focus towards our goals. I am glad that I worked for his passionate child Infosys Technologies Ltd.,

Narayana Murthy

[Picture Source : UnKnown, I tried to find whether the picture has a copyright, but I was unsuccessful. If you [the reader,reader's friend or reader's FOF] or ur company owns a copyright please let me know, so that I can give them the due credits. ]

MS Dhoni

Sachin Tendulkar

After an excellent test match , this is what the two captians said

MS Dhoni “We executed the plans well”

Ricky Ponting “India were the rightful winners of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy”

India won the Border-Gavasaskar trophy today by beating the mighty Australians by comprehensive 172 runs. India won the series 2-0. Indian victory was on the cards right from day one as Sachin made a terriffic century with his popular heavy weight MRF bat. This was Sachin’s 40th test century and 10th against Australia. Though Sachin’s contribution has a great impact on today’s Indian victory , I would say that it was a definite team effort, which made sure that India would stand on the winning side during presentation ceremony. Its always difficult to beat the Australians and I am sure that today’s victory is something special to every Indian player and ofcourse to every Indian. This test is also the last test match for the former Indian captian Ganguly, who scored his maiden Test Hundred against England on his very first test match at Lords.

Firefox

Mozilla firefox turned 4 on 9th November 2008. Even with just 4 years of development , firefox looks so mature and also captured 20% of the market globally and is the second most popular browser after Internet Explorer. Right now it supports more than 45 languages. Its available for most kinds of operating system Microsoft, Macintosh, Linux. Mozilla Firefox was initially called Pheonix and later as Firebird and later as Mozilla Firebird and finally it became popular to the world as Mozilla Firefox. Not yet tried firefox, download it here- Download Mozilla

Circuit city gets a mild heart attack at the age of 59.Circuit City Stores Inc, the No. 2 U.S. consumer electronics retailer, filed for bankruptcy on Monday just weeks before the start of the holiday shopping season, becoming the largest retailer to file for Chapter 11 since Kmart in 2002.