November 2002

Microsoft (2002) vs IBM (1982). An article on whether Microsoft will go the IBM Way. Microsoft’s ability to adapt and prosper hinges on meeting a third main challenge: creating trust.

Cute letters to Einstein from kids. Dear Sir, I probably would have written ages ago, only I was not aware that you were still alive. I am not interested in history, and I thought that you had lived in the 18th c., or somewhere around that time… Tyfanny Dear Tyfanny, … I have to apologize to you that I am still among the living. There will be a remedy for this, however. … ...

Gates beats Stallman in India. via RobotWisdom

Does education really pay? An interesting article on Forbes arguing that education does not cause higher salaries, but is merely correlated with it. The logic sequence is broadly: Labour markets want smart people. Smart people tend to want education. Hence labour markets appear to want educated people.

Stars of Amazon – Anita’s article on book reviewers at Amazon. via Anita

Interesting article on the Kelkar report on tax reforms. The point about simplifying tax and removing exemptions reminds me of a statement by George Winston in Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders: The purpose of taxes is to provide revenue for the country’s government so that the government can serve the people. But along the way we’ve created an entire industry that takes billions of dollars from the public. Why? To explain a tax code that gets more complex every year, a code that the enforcement people themselves do not understand with a sufficient degree of confidence to undertake responsibility for getting it right. ...

But then, I should also keep in mind that Mozilla is open source. So they’ll keep coming out with cool stuff like Mozilla’s Bayesian spam filter and type ahead find. via Boing Boing

Nice strategy, Microsoft. Users aren’t upgrading to your new products. So you decide to focus on security and force upgrades. And, in the meantime, sue open-source competitors and spend lots of money to beat Linux.

101 things you can do in Mozilla and not IE. But apart from 1. Tabbed browsing and 2. Popup blocking, I don’t quite use the other features. Mozilla (and Opera) still need some catching up to do. via New Architect

Omar Zabir’s portal. Let’s you use Windows XP without having Windows XP. Well, actually, it’s just a tour of Windows XP features, but you pretty much get to “use” XP. Quite a piece of programming! via MetaFilter Comments desi yazzie 6 Sep 2006 3:48 am: Good, wonderful, and would like to use it to troubleshoot S Anand 6 Sep 2006 4:05 pm: I wonder if it has any deep XP functionality, though…

Opera 7 Beta is out. It sports a new look, which one tires of quite soon. But it’s as fast as ever, and has better standards compliance. via Anand

Altavista’s new features are pretty good. What I liked best, though, is their new interface. Especially the bar used to open the search result in a new window. Good to know that I rank 3rd on their search.

Why am I the second hit on Google for queries like “arabic food’s pictures”, “wedding pictures in chennai in geocities”, and “iim grads future”?

Drinking bug juice. via RobotWisdom

Bill donated $100mn to fight AIDS in India. Interestingly, just contrast this photo of him wearing a ’tilak’ with his 1977 snap with Paul Allen. In the latter, he almost looks like a girl! via The Register

Another interesting piece related to complexity: a speech on the paradox of randomness by Gregory Chaitin. via missing matter

An interesting thread on Andersja’s about how McKinsey is blocking competitors from its site. I’m at the receiving end of it. And so far, it hasn’t affected my life in any way.

On figuring Google’s pagerank. It’s interesting to note that Google, and only Google, ranks 11 out of 10 in its pagerank.

Quantum information science: a convergence of complexity theory and quantum mechanics. via missing matter

Photoblogs and the Visual Thesaurus via Kribs