:: rushabh ::

One for the finance geeks

Discounted flows of agony? Too good!

Portland's Experimental Rose Garden

Explosion


Originally uploaded by Rooosh.

I sometimes with that the West Wing (TV show) was real

Life imitates art

Updated:


From educatedguesswork.org:

Colbert: You co-sponsored a bill requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in the House and the Senate. Why was that important to you?

Westmoreland: Well, the Ten Commandments is not a bad thing for people to understand and respect.

Colbert: I'm with you.

Westmoreland: Where better place could you have something like that than in a judicial building or in a courthouse?

Colbert: That is a good question. Can you think of any better building to put the Ten Commandments in than in a public building?

Westmoreland: No. I think if we were totally without 'em we may lose a sense of our direction.

Colbert: What are the Ten Commandments?

Westmoreland: What are all of them? You want me to name 'em all?

Colbert: Yeah. Please.

Westmoreland: Don't murder. Don't lie. Don't steal. Uh... I can't name 'em all.

Colbert: Congressman, thank you for taking time away from keeping the sabbath day holy to talk to us.

Soar!

Soar


Originally uploaded by Rooosh.

Lazing around on the beach

Lazing around on the beach


Originally uploaded by Rooosh.

Mark's going to be doing this later this year

A perspective on head-butting

A brilliant analysis
.

Oh those Europeans

Seems like Microsoft is in for a huge EU fine for dragging its heels on providing documentation. After it has provided massive amounts of documentation which the consulting professor claimed was "totally useless". Fantastic. Someone should really recommend Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged to these EU lawyers. These are people who are not in the tech field who try to make legal sense out of what is essentially a technical problem. What kind of documentation do you want? And more importantly, what is the overall point of the whole exercise? Real is P.O.'d at Microsoft because their product is full of spyware and customers generally hate it and don't like to install it or use it. Apple is kicking their arse. Apple is kicking Microsoft's arse in this sector too, but everyone seems to be ignoring this for the moment. "Far from stifling similar systems from rival firms, competition in the media player market was thriving, [Microsoft lawyer Jean-Francois Bellis] said - pointing to the success of Apple's iTunes to back up their claims.". And never mind the fact that Microsoft gave in to EU's pressure and made a version of XP that ships only in Europe and doesn't have media center bundled in it. Its called XPN and I'm pretty sure you can't buy it anywhere. Ooh, Microsoft must have something to do with this, right? Wrong. No computer OEM will touch XPN. Why? Because XPN doesn't make sense. Having media player on a system doesn't prevent you from using Real or iTunes or whatever-the-heck-you-want. Aaarggh.

EU's response to all this: But Commission lawyer Per Hellstrom said Microsoft's arguments were irrelevant because consumers did not have real freedom of choice over the media software they are offered.
"Microsoft's pleas must be ignored," he told the court.
"This is the world according to Microsoft where it decides what is best for consumers."

Of course Microsoft decides what's best for its consumers! That's how companies work and that's how products are made. And the reason is simple - as a customer, you and I don't want to have to make every single simple decision. Delegate, delegate, delegate. The whole reason you pay hundreds of dollars to Microsoft or Apple is because they make these decisions for you - so you don't have to decide while PCI driver to use and which USB driver to use and whatnot. For the 0.001% of customers that actually want to change this stuff, the choice is present. And that's the key to this whole argument. Does Microsoft allow customers to get rid of Media Player on their OS? Nope. Does it allow you to use Real or iTunes or whatever the heck you want? Sure!

There is a case to be made that the default media player / browser / whatever wins the war. Hence IE killed Netscape, crappy product that it was. Not so. Or not so exactly, though this is partially true. IE 4 was an amazing product. In contrast Netscape sucked from 96 to 99. Media Player is a far better product than Real. I hate Real. With a passion. A company that puts spyware into its product cannot be forgiven. In contrast, iTunes has some serious performance issues and whatnot, but so what? I love it! Its intuitive and generally great at doing one thing - playing my music. And so I use iTunes rather than Media Player. Simple as that?

What's the point of this massive rant?
Real and other companies are using EU as their bitch to get at Microsoft and bleed Microsoft of a few billion dollars. Netscape used the DOJ - so the precedent has already been set. History shall be repeated (kinda), Real is going down (anyone use Rhapsody?) and Apple will win.

In the interest of full disclosure: I am currently employed by Microsoft but these thoughts and opinions are mine and mine alone and do not reflect anything about anyone (including Microsoft).

Mumbai (bombay) Bomb Blasts July 2006

Blasts in Bombay - nobody known hurt

Thanks to all those that wrote emails / calls to check whether the fam was okay and such. Luckily, my parents happen to be here, as in Seattle-here, and so they're fine and everyone we called seemed okay.

Got this touching email from Mike:
I guess it's sometimes good for a city to have a population of 1,20,00,000, because when you lose 160 of them there's only a .0013 chance that it was one of them.

Mike Hunter, ladies and gentlemen!

Test!

Trying to see if I can use SharpMT for posting to the blog instead of the silly web interface.

LA

Its been forever. I know, but thank you for pointing it out anyway.

In the spirit of resuming as if I'd been posting forever, here's where I was last weekend:
My cousing Niyati's wedding in LA. The link is the photographer's blog. Definitely worth a look.

Needless to say, it was a total blast! Haven't had so much fun in a while.