Microsoft

Many people say that Windows Phone 7 is a threat to iPhone because they are bringing in a super platform with a choice of multiple designs and multiple carriers with great Enterprise and gaming support and maintaining the lucrative integration that iPhone provides. Many also say that Windows Phone 7 is a threat to Android because it solves the problem of Apple’s draconian policies, gives choice to customers and all this without fragmenting the OS all over the place. [Read More]

This is a really sad day. Not only the organizers of National Conference On Free Software 2008 taking place at CUSAT seem to be utterly misguided when they decided to let Novell be on-board as their main sponsor, they even took the extreme step of bringing in police to silence the lone voices of the Boycott Novell protestors. They seem to be treading on the toes of not just free software but free speech as well, which is against the very ethics of the conference they are holding. [Read More]

Just read over at groklaw about a ruling made last night by the US Appeals Court. According to it, the patents granted for business practices would have to undergo specific and stringent testing procedures to check the worthiness of granting a patent to it. Essentially, they are aiming to mandate a passing of “machine-or-transformation test” as a pre-requisite for granting a patent. This means that a mere “idea in my head” doesn’t qualify for a patent until it is put into practice on a machine or can transform the state of an object for a specific purpose. [Read More]

If you are a student (this works for non-students as well but I expect you to be honest ;) ), you can download a whole bunch of software for free. How? Well, all you need is to become an ACM student member, and join the MSDN AA (Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance) ACM Student Benefit Program. Normally it takes around 19$ for you to become a student member but you can do it for free for a limited time by going to http://campus. [Read More]

A few people (e.g. Varun) told me my previous post differed from the way how google chrome / Microsoft IE8 handle Incognito (Private Browsing) mode. The main consideration was that while chrome/IE8 don’t write anything to disk at all, the firefox method is an after-effect, i.e., writing to disk and then clearing it up while closing the window. Well, true but nothing is non-rectificable :). So this is a post about a method that one can use to go “really” undercover with firefox. [Read More]