Author name: S Anand

Gates beats Stallman in India. via RobotWisdom

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.

Well, frankly, I thought Clancy was being naive.

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

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

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.

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

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

Drinking bug juice. via RobotWisdom

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.