S Anand

I have a cold. And although some Chinese may say otherwise, it has nothing to do with cold weather.

The music industry has taken a step away from the ridiculous. Now, on pressplay.com, you can download and burn songs on a CD for a fee. (The big deal is that, earlier, you could only stream and listen. For a fee.)

This is a smart one. Sony Ericsson makes these mobile phones with cameras. To promote them, they’ve hired young couples, who’ll go to bars, etc and ask people to take a snap of them. If I were asked, I’d fiddle with the camera/phone a bit.

The Internet Archive has archived my page as of Aug 2001. The site hasn’t changed much since then.

The stock market falls when the Parliament is in session. Particularly if the Budget is discussed. Personally, I would attribute it to investor over-optimism. I don’t see how the politicians take bad decisions more than half the time, because in that case, we’re better off without them. Hmm…

China, which anyway has the largest mobile user base, has now beaten Japan to the second largest PC and Web base in the world. Wonder how they do it.

Project Gutenberg explains some proposed changes in answer to a question on Slashdot.

IBM acquires PwC Consulting. Or what would’ve been Monday. For $3.5 bn. I heard somewhere that the stock price of acquiring companies typically fall after such announcements. IBM’s didn’t. Does that mean they got PwC at a low price? Given that HP once refused them at $18 bn, maybe…

Since I was updating this site from home as well as office, I completely muddled up versions. I think I’ve lost a few days’ work – at least in the archives. Something like Blogger does help.

Here’s a good business model. Buy a free e-mail provider. Add spam. Then charge for eliminating spam. Good thing I got rid of my Hotmail account.

Some people have too many mousepads.

Companies like L&T, Ashok Leyland, Infosys are using digital signatures already.

Dr. Abdul Kalam. India’s President.

I’m starting a blog on Dr. Abdul Kalam.

PC Pit Stop. A good tune-up for your PC. I managed to improve my hard disk performance by enabling DMA, and my memory by reducing the video card shared memory.

A story dreaming for the semantic web.

A cool combination of the Amazon and Google APIs to BookWatch. (Incidentally, I downloaded the Amazon and Google APIs.)

I learnt mind mapping. Ref: 1 2

For a few tenths of a second, at the micrometer level, the Second law of Thermodynamics can be violated. The interesting thing is that it happens at such a large scale.

Yahoo’s been filtering e-mail viruses. Good, but they’ve been a little crude. So a Google search for medireview reveals a book on Middle Ages: that medireview chronology, and a treasure ride with medireview jewels, a medireview city and medireview treasures.