Official Gmail Blog: Say hello to Gmail voice and video chat

Official Gmail Blog: Say hello to Gmail voice and video chat

The peeps at Google just launched video and voice chat from within Gmail. I really am waiting to criticize them for this move. Turns out, the app would be using H.264 encoding so external apps can choose to speak to this service. The implementation would no doubt involve a flash player on the front end. Im yet to really see an implementation of the flash player which can capture both voice and video from the client side at the same time not making the app sluggish (which im sure Googles' newest product WILL be!) .

Rest in peace DVD?

Do you use DVDs to backup your stuff? How much can you backup in 4.5 GB of media? 4 movies (compressed)? or 2 average games?

Move over DVD, 'cause this is the age of the Blu-ray disc and the flash drives. With hard disk drives getting cheaper by the day, and the advent of the Blu-ray disc's the DVDs are set to do a vanishing act ala the floppies. It is said the Blu-ray discs can hold upto 25 GB in a single layer disc, or 50 GB in a dual layer disc. Whatever the case, all digital storage will be replaced by bigger , better , and faster media in the coming days.

Or, better yet by flash drives. You can get a flash drive these days for as low as $3, or 150 rupees. We are on the cusp of the digital age. This is when the information bubble bursts and all media, information is gonna be exchanged freely.

Better still, why do you need to backup something when its permanently available online?? What with operating systems such as you OS, coming online. You can store your music , movies and games (?) online. With the advent of megabit broadbands, all of us can expect this medium to spill over into the portable device scenario too.

What does Wikipedia want $6 million for??...Simply Outrageous!!!

I was a fan of wikipedia, and its open mind theology until 3 minutes ago. I saw a banner on the site which said "Wikipedia:Making life easier", with a Donate Now button. It also showed a progress bar marking $2 million and odd, and that its goal was to raise $6 million!!!

Please interrupt me if Im wrong here, but arent all of wikipedias' articles written by commoners like you and me? So, its a collective effort isnt it? They shouldnt be asking for donations unless to pay for server bills!! SO, WHAT DO THEY HAVE TO DO WITH $6 MILLION?? Are you donating to wikipedia? If so please STOP!! Stop this insanity in the name of free knowledge.

Wikipedia has 20 odd workers, all doing what.. building a CMS thats wikipedia. Sure, its a good source of information and all, but do they REALLY deserve $2 Million???

If your answer is YES, please check in to your nearest mental hospital. You are in need of medical attention.

Is Google really a leader in technology?

Its a common misconception that any company that does things differently is supposed to be leading a certaing segment of technology. This seems to be true in the case of Google. Now, it may be a technology giant, but the products they make are far from perfection. Each and every one of their flagship products except other than their propreitery search engine technology ofcourse, is still in BETA. Do you know what that means? The services may go offline anytime, and may be entirely scrapped if not for Googles' ad based exploits. Most of their products are plagued by inconsistensies, and lack of basic support for their other products.

Take Google Chrome for example. Its supposed to be a a "revolutionary" piece of software, and they havent yet integrated their own Google notebook with Chrome.Google offers better support for IE than for chrome right now. Now, does that say anything about their competancy, and their development practices?Clearly, Google is very farsighted in its business practices and would be outstaged and outplayed in the coming years for sure.

Blogger VS Wordpress

Last week, I decided to try out wordpress because of all the eye candy. The themes there are pretty good. The sign up page was enticing and a good experience I must say, but after that things started going downwards. The following is a list of things thats wrong with wordpress:

>Wordpress serves its own ads on your blog instead of letting you earn money by blogging. Who runs a blog just to pass time anymore,anyway?

>Doesnt let you edit your CSS unless you pay $26 per month.

>Doesnt stop serving ads until you pay for the hosting, and that too without your own domain. So, basically you'll be stuck with yourname.wordpress.com for the rest of your life!

Things blogger lacks(that wordpress revels in):

> Themes. OOO shiny blog.Me like shiny blogs!

> closeness to the user. The ambience around the site is well maintained, and welcomes the user to try out things out on his own.

Well, thats it! It also allows for importing your "OLD" blogger blog into your wordpres blog, but I wont mention that because of anomolies in the posts when importing them

Are we all ready for multimedia compression?

If you download pirated games, and warez, youll already be familiar with UWE HERKLOTZs' UHARC. If you arent, look it up on the web. Its the highest ratio compression technology ever! It can compress games of around 1 GB to around 150 MB. Thats why its called multimedia compression in the first place. I havent found songs, and other media compressed with this. I have been using it to compress data that I dont really need right now, and burning such stuff off to DVD's for later use.But you gotta ask, if its such a good compression technology, why wont WinZip or Winrar use this?

>For one, it takes a whole day to bring down 1.5 GB of data to 150 MB, not all of us may be THAT patient.

>It eats up all your processors' bandwidth to do its job.

>Compression sometimes depends on the amount of RAM available. Since Winzip and winrar are used by people who may choose to work on pentium 3's, its not gained importance...yet..

>There is absolutely no guarantee that the output would be the same as the input. Though it works for a majority of the cases, it may fail too.

Calling JavaScript functions from C#

There is perhaps no way available to do this, nor should there ever be one. This is because your C# code runs in the code behind, a repository of code to handle post backs, while your JavaScript is executing on the client side. If at all client side javascript was let to be executed from C# code, then it would be similar to AJAX RPC's! A better way to call Javascript functions is by using hidden fields. The following logic demonstrates how:


|
|-->set a hidden field


|
|-->check the value of the hidden fields for changes, if any write logic which has to execute.

Reverse the above logic, and put the javascript hidden field check so that it executes when the page gets loaded, and VOILA, you have an answer to your solution.

i = i + 1 : A ridiculous way to say increment I !

How many of you have coded in C, C#, Java or even JavaScript for that matter? If you have, then you'd probably know i=i+1 as one of your best companion when dealing with loops. Yet, I call the practice ridiculous...Why do you think that is?

For one, any programmer with a basic understanding of math would have puzzled over this question: isnt i->i+1 more meaningful than i=i+1 in a programming context? Why then do all programming languages follow the pattern of variable = variable +1?? I have no clue whatso ever, but I would reckon it is a reminiscent of the age when there were no standardized charecter sets for various programming languages and all vendors defined their own charecter sets, and standards.

And, to add to this mess, every programmer, no matter how experienced uses the counter variable named i, instinctively. Of course, he'd have to use an alternate variable to nest loops within other loops, he'd have to use another variable, and the second variable would instinctively be named j. I do not know if the collective conciousness of all programmers is at play here, for I have seen the same pattern repeating with every coder I have met over the past decade or so.. Even with me ! As we all pave way for new programming languages and techniques, I also hope that this hideous practice will be stopped, for all our sakes.

The environment?...Naah, who cares...

We humans are a filthy lot. I say this because from time immemorial, there hasn't been any one species which has filthed its own nest.. Until now. Humans are everywhere. With the unknown world shrinking and even the most remotest of remote places being explored, we arent far from colonizing every habitable patch of land on the planet. "Just because we can, we will" seems to be the attitude of our beloved fellow homosapiens.

Between all the colonization and resource exploitation, we all manage to turn a deaf ear to the environment which is literally crying for help around us. Utter stupidity if you ask me. If there is no earth, there are no humans.

We dont know half the things there is about earth that we ought to know, and yet, our kids know a lot more about alpha centauri than our earth. There have been talks of migrating out of earth and taking the human race with us, because by the time this plan solidifies, earth will be all but a nuclear waste ground. With all this knowledge and profoundness, we still continue to haunt the earth, and pollute the environment with reckless abandon. All this being said, even I myself am one of the filthy lot.

I don't use a public transport because I would then lose my convenience. I still travel to work everyday in a bike which guzzles up more fuel than the neighbors car. Im writing this in my blog because we humans will always be selfish. We never admit our mistakes and will surely not do anything to rectify what wrong we have done. All that being said, I wish all of us could switch onto more efficient means of energy such as solar / hydroelectric / Nuclear energy, all of which are limitless. But until our scientific communities can put their differences aside, and the pope can agree that physical attraction is not a crime, we will all just delay our days in cold hell...

Wow..what a life!!!

I just bagged myself a job in the .net domain... I landed a job in a company called Asclepius (name of the greek god of medicine) consulting. And I must say I was very overwhelmed by the work environment. Everyones very friendly, and people dont make a fuss of everything. This actually goes against conventional corporate culture where you are just a sheep in the crowd, and thus, no one knows you. When you enter a big company, chances are you would be oblivious as to what to do, or whom to ask...

That is just not the case with Asclepius. The timings are very flexible, and all the bosses(YES, there are three founders) are asking is for me to do my job and go home. Currently, the companies is expanding rigorously, so theres no doubt about job guarantee and some such thing. The bosses said they wanted me to be with the company for atleast 2 years. There is no concept of control at all in the company. All in all, Im very happy that the tech lead knows my name and is happy everytime I speak...

What more would you ask in a company when its your first job?

Alternatives to resource hungry programs

Who better at a job, to use a tool, than a man who created the tool right? WRONG! I have seen many cases of this.

>First off, is Adobe's acrobat reader. The resource hungry proggie does little to enhance readability, and takes long times to load images within a PDF file. Moreover, the reader doesnt even provide a PDF "document printer", that other open source proggies provide, which enable users to "print" into PDF files from any other format. I stumbled on a software called "Foxit Reader". Better than Acrobat Id say...

>This isnt an isolated case. I have found OpenOffice .org to be much more flexible than MS office, simply because it is free, and platform independent. So, I dont have to use an emulator on a virtual machine within my linux box to get the same environment.

>Adobes' Photoshop finds a worthy alternative in Gimp, which comes bundled with most Linux distros these days. Its free, as in freedom :) in addition to being very fast, and responsive..


So, tell me brothers and sisters of cyberspace, would you go about using a proggie that hogs up all of your memory, and is not free, as opposed to open source, FREE alternatives that are both fast, and compatible with their paid rivals' file formats?

Googles Chrome

Chrome? Nice nomencleature for a sub-standard browser Id say. What do you want in a browser? Not a funky GUI, not a browser integrated with an advertising campaign, to make the parent company richer by a million dollars, and certainly not a DOM inspector! Googles chrome is less of a browser and more of an advertising campaign if you ask me! It has Googles search engine built-in, and you get to search and type in URLs in the same bar, but whats the use? Its like re-inventing the wheel... Chrome doesnt have what firefox and IE or even Opera for that matter, havent had yet.. Google claims its faster than all other browsers, and even goes onto give a "task manager" option which shows the memory consumption, possibly per tab of both Chrome, and all other browsers that are open. But I could SWEAR that the chrome was a lot slower than Opera. Im not an opera fanatic or something like that, but yeah, Opera is simply THE BEST window to the world wide web around. It uses full bandwidth when browsing, and even has a built in download manager, and adding to this, is its bit torrent protocol support ! Opera even has an option to pause downloads, even though, rarely, the downloads dont resume properly, but a decent attempt has been made! Now, what would you equate Chrome to? Show of hands kids?? "JUNK".. very good!!

Just got myself a job in the Java/J2EE, AJAX domain!

I am elated that I found a job in a company called kingslake. Its based out of Sri Lanka and is looking for a foothold in India. It has major clients in Malaysiya and Singapore...

The US recession is nothing but hypothetical in a sense that not all software firms have run out of business, and not everyone is asking their employees to leave. I was appaled at the fact that Sapient didnt even ask us to go in for training, as it was running out of projects. And to think, I hadnt been recruited through some walk in interview. I had been recruited on campus. I didnt go to them, they came to me. This further testifies the appaling conditions of jobs in India, especially jobs in the software domain. BPO s have been the major winners in this race because a majority of people who find it hard to get into a software firm would get into the BPO jobs. Thanks a lot America!

My base salary might not be THAT good, but I have some hopes pinned on the future. I enjoy working with AJAX and this will provide me with an excellent opportunity to work with it, adding some weightage to my resume/ CV.

Time Scale theory: Are software companies producing obselete software?

First of all, I would like to thank IOLO for making a wonderful software (System Mechanic). But with new versions getting released everyday you have GOT to ask yourself. Is the software you're buying worth the money? Sure, you get future upgrades for free. Im not denying that. But what is it about the future upgrades that makes you WANT to buy the software so much? Possibilities:

> Better user interfaces

> Better functionality

> Faster (?) than previous versions

> Supposed "overall" upgrades

Personally, I just stick to the first version of any software I use (that is barring windows of course!). Similarly, I was very impressed with System Mechanic 6.0 when it first came out. Even though IOLO came out with System Mechanic 7.0 and version 8 is on the docks, I still love the UI in System Mechanic 6.0 . Why? Due to the simple fact that I found this software worthwhile, unlike its
successors. This isnt just the case of IOLO and System Mechanic. Its the same with Nero 8. The software is jam packed with features that I dont use, and these end up hogging memory, installing shell extensions that I dont use, and in turn, I have to labor hard to uninstall these to keep my installations to the bare minimum. So, Why not just stick to the previous versions?This goes for each and every software I have used.
There is a theory I recently made up. Its called the "Time Scale Theory".It goes something like this:

"There is a peak in every software company's production cycle. At this peak, the software company has built up enough reputation to sell its most endorsed product in quantities of millions. It makes a lot of money and repute. After this peak time is over, the company merely survives on its earlier reputation. Any software produced henceforth will be completely obselete and will add features to make users' experiences worse than the previous versions."

The same thing goes for IOLO(System Mechanic 6.0), MicroSoft(Windows XP-Current, excluding windows Vista), IBM(The peak time seems to be neverending!, but it will end nonetheless!), Google(In its peak right now).

Google? Hell NO!!!

I am sick and tired of using Google as my search engine. If you use it at all, I suggest you check out the others available on the net. Many of these are free services which will provide you with higher quality search results.

General
Alexa Internet
Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves)
Baidu (Chinese)
Cuil
Exalead (French)
Google
Live Search (formerly MSN Search)
Sogou (Chinese)
Sohu (Chinese)
Wikia Search
Yahoo! Search

Geographical limited scope
Accoona, China/US
Alleba, Philippines
Ansearch, Australia/US/UK/NZ
Araby, Middle East
Baidu, China
Daum, Korea
Guruji.com, India
Goo (search engine), Japan
Leit.is, Iceland
Miner.hu, Hungary
Najdi.si, Slovenia
Naver, Korea
Onkosh, Middle East
Rambler, Russia
Rediff, India
SAPO, Portugal
Search.ch, Switzerland
Sesam, Norway, Sweden
Walla!, Israel
Yandex, Russia
ZipLocal, Canada/US

Accountancy
IFACnet

Business
Business.com
Nexis (Lexis Nexis)
Thomasnet (United States)

Enterprise
See also: Enterprise search
AskMeNow: S3 - Semantic Search Solution
Dieselpoint: Search & Navigation
dtSearch: dtSearch Engine(SDK), dtSearch Web
Endeca: Information Access Platform
Exalead: exalead one:enterprise
Expert System S.p.A.: Cogito
Fast Search & Transfer: Enterprise Search Platform (ESP), RetrievalWare (formerly Convera)
Funnelback: Funnelback Search
ISYS Search Software: ISYS:web, ISYS:sdk
Microsoft: SharePoint Search Services
Northern Light
Open Text: Hummingbird Search Server, Livelink Search
Oracle Corporation: Secure Enterprise Search 10g
SAP: TREX
TeraText: TeraText Suite
Vivisimo: Vivisimo Clustering Engine
ZyLAB Technologies: ZyIMAGE Information Access Platform

Job
Main articles: Job search engine and Employment website
See also: Category:Job search engines
Bixee.com (India)
CareerBuilder.com (USA)
Craigslist (by city)
Eluta.ca (Canada)
Hotjobs.com (USA)
Incruit (Korea)
Indeed.com (USA)
Monster.com (USA)
Recruit.net (International)
SimplyHired.com (USA)
TheLadders.com (USA)

Legal
WestLaw
Lexis (Lexis Nexis)
Quicklaw

Medical
Bioinformatic Harvester
Entrez (includes Pubmed)
EB-eye EBI's Search Engine EMBL-EBI's Search engine
GenieKnows
GoPubMed (knowledge-based: GO - GeneOntology and MeSH - Medical Subject Headings)
Healia
Searchmedica
WebMD
PubGene
Nextbio (Life Science Search Engine)

News
Daylife
MagPortal
Newslookup
Nexis (Lexis Nexis)
Topix.net
Yahoo! News

People
PeekYou
Ex.plode.us
InfoSpace
Spock (website)
Spokeo
Wink
Zabasearch.com
ZoomInfo

Real property
Fizber.com
Home.co.uk
HotPads.com
Properazzi
Rightmove
Zillow.com

Video Games
GenieKnows
Wazap

By information type

Search engines dedicated to a specific kind of information

Forum
Omgili

Blog
Amatomu
Bloglines
BlogScope
IceRocket
Sphere
Technorati

Multimedia
blinkx
FindSounds
Picsearch
Podscope
SeeqPod
Veveo
YouTube
Pixsta

Source code
JExamples
Koders
Krugle

BitTorrent
These search engines work across the BitTorrent protocol.
Btjunkie
Demonoid
FlixFlux
Isohunt
Mininova
The Pirate Bay
TorrentSpy

Email
Nicado
TEK

Maps
Géoportail
MapQuest
Live Search Maps
Yahoo! Maps

Price
Kelkoo
MSN Shopping
MySimon
PriceGrabber
PriceRunner
Shopping.com
ShopWiki
Shopzilla (also operates Bizrate)
TheFind.com

Question and answer
Answers.com
AskMeNow
BrainBoost
eHow
hakia
Lexxe
Lycos iQ
Powerset
Live Search QnA
Uclue
Yahoo! Answers

By model
Open source search engines
DataparkSearch
Egothor
Gonzui
Grub
Ht://dig
Isearch
Lucene
Lemur Toolkit & Indri Search Engine
mnoGoSearch
Namazu
Nutch
OpenFTS
Sciencenet (for scientific knowledge, based on YaCy technology)
Sphinx
SWISH-E
Terrier Search Engine
Wikia Search
Xapian
YaCy
Zettair

Social search engines
ChaCha Search
Eurekster
Mahalo.com
Rollyo
Trexy
Wink provides web search by analyzing user contributions such as bookmarks and feedback

Metasearch engines
Brainboost
ChunkIt!
Clusty
Dogpile
Excite
HotBot
Info.com
Ixquick
Kayak
Mamma
Metacrawler
MetaLib
Mobissimo
Myriad Search
SideStep
Turbo10
WebCrawler

Visual search engines
ChunkIt!
Grokker
Kartoo
Pixsta
PubGene

Based on

Google
AOL Search
CompuServe Search
MySpace Search
Netscape
Ripple

Yahoo!
AltaVista
AlltheWeb
GoodSearch
Rectifi

Live Search
A9.com
Tafiti
Ms. Dewey

Ask.com
Hakia (semantic search)
iWon
Lycos

Defunct search engines
BRS/Search (now OpenText Livelink ECM Discovery Server)
Google Answers
Infoseek
Inktomi
Lotus Magellan
Overture.com (formerly GoTo.com, now Yahoo! Search Marketing)
PubSub
Singingfish
Teoma
WiseNut
World Wide Web Worm
Excite (now a metasearch)
WebCrawler (now a metasearch)


And you say you dont have a choice when it comes to GOOGLE?? WAKE UP!!!

Alt3rn4t|v3 s comment on Bux is scam post

I got a mail from blogger telling me that someone left me a comment on this post. I came to check it out, and found this, and the reference was with respect to a post I made earlier.
This post has "Alt3rn4t|v3"s comments in quotes and my comments in ">>>>"...Lets answer some questions.

"Hi.

Before I start, let me be clear on something - although I'm a staff at Bux.to, it doesn't stop me from being objective."

>>>>"Well ofcourse it doesnt...you, unlike the rest of us, are paid to scam others"

"As both a staff and a normal member, I do not condone the excessive waiting times nor the irresponsibility displayed now and then, but there's nothing I can do about it."

>>>>How can a staff be a normal member? Im willing to ignore that fact...for now. Of course you, being a bux.to staff member cant do "anything" about it. Who else were you expecting to make a change?...Pink Panther? Oh, did I forget?? BUX pays its employees to do NOTHING about complaints...We cant blame you,you poor thing.

"Having said that, I can only say that your post is filled with biased dejectiveness and dosen't serve as an objective (or even correct) understanding of your own situation."

>>>>"biased dejectiveness" ? YES, 'cause I had half the people I know joined Bux.to and they'r probably cursing me thinking I scammed them. Pardon me, but we are all simple minded citizens, who fail to understand how bux.to or any other company can refuse to pay, when we havent use autoclickers or used our technical mindset to scam them! (I run a technology blog afterall, and Im more than certain, I could up my earnings if I even tried!)

You make accusations like "though I cant imagine what that could be, other than PayPal refusing to support scam sites!", which is not true. Since you seem to have checked the forums before, you should probably do some searching before posting. That's the rule of the thumb for a blogger.

>>>>Yes, Paypal DID refuse to support scam sites and Pay per clickers such as BUX! Being a staff member YOU of all people should know that! Besides I just think you're playing naive though I cant think of a better explanation of what you have said. Thanks for the advise BUB!! But I think I have scanned the forums for possible explanations, and Im much more thorough with the forums than some admins....EXACTLY the reason I run a BLOG!!! DUH!!!

Now tell me, when was - "Next, they tell me they have a 'MAJOR' problem with the sites' script" - said?

>>>>The question is "When was it NOT said!!!". I hear that they were changing their scripts 3 times in a row over the span of a month. Their website went down, and some of the clickers found that their balances had MYSTERIOUSLY reduced to nothing..It doesnt take einstein to put 2 and 2 together.

"they even have a calculator for that, for crying out loud!!!" - For crying out loud, Bux.to doesn't have a calculator. Your post was made in late July. We abandoned the "calculator" (which wasn't even official in the first place) MONTHS ago.

>>>>IF you have visited the forums atleast once, you will find the admins "recommending" the calculator even TODAY!! This generally happens when some non-premium member asks when he's gonna get paid, and loads of "have patience" posts later.

"On top of that, they post fake success stories every now and then." is probably one of the worst accusations you made, though.

Oh? Then why would you be responding if I faked the fact that you were faking fake posts? :)

Don't be surprised if they manage to find this post that you made, see the fake accusations that you've made about them and use their "freedom to remove you at the outset of any circumstance" clause to deny you your payment. You don't have any reason to call Bux.to a scam then, because by then, it's self-pwn - no one's fault but yours.

>>>>This is exactly why I wrote this post...only one word describes it best....."hippocracy" !

To "Alt3rn4t|v3"...

> You're handle is lame.

> You stink.

> insert derogatory term here: _______________________

> Thank you as always for a patient read.

Opera 9 rocks!

I have been using Opera 9 since my last windows installation, and I must say, Im very impressed.Here are the features and why I liked them :

> The toolbar is better than menus in most browsers.

> Integrated email reader : You get to compose mail and send it, or read other mail without waiting for minutes to login to your inbox. This comes as a boon to many of us Gmail users, as it takes a long time to login. Whats more? You can specify multiple mail accounts to draw your mail from, all within your browser. You will be instantly alerted to any mail in your inbox.

> Opera uses full bandwidth : I have a dial-up connection. Surfing the web was a pain until opera came by. Unlike Internet Explorer, Opera uses my full bandwidth, and thus makes surfing a breeze.

> Built in bit torrent client, download accelerator : Opera can handle downloads and file transfers with ease. whats more? Forget your port forwarding worries if Utorrent conflicts with your firewall, cause opera identifies itself as a browser and thus doesnt get blocked.

> Lots of widgets to choose from.

> Write notes within your browser and set times to get alerted!

> And now, the greatest advantage of all : ITS FREE!!!

Get it here http://opera.com

Are older softwares better than newer ones?

with new versions of photoshop and flash coming out every 2 months, you have got to ask yourself, "Are the newer versions worth my money? Do I really need the newer versions when I have got used to the older ones?".

I recently switched back to photoshop 7 and I must say I have been very efficient with it.I found myself at home with photoshop with 7. The UI is simple and intuitive, and it doesnt take a genius to make out what the "accented edges" filter does.

I have always been a critic of new software, and have always advocated the older ones. Photoshop 7 continues to be the most productive tool in Adobes galleria, as I am told. This goes for windows XP too! How many times have you thought "Man, it really sucks that vista is running so slow on my 2 week old PC" ?

What is the need for you to use newer software when you're god darned efficient with the previous one?

Western Digitals 500GB external drive

I just brought a new external hard drive(Western Digitals 500GB external drive),and I must say, Im quite impressed! The drive doesnt make a noise, the transfer speeds are neat, and to top all that, its got a shiny blue LED lighting to show when the drive is working and when its not.

I think the external hard disk is an internal hard disk in a USB casing, or so it seems. I could be wrong. The coolant does its job flawlessly. There was barely any heat after 4 hours of data transfer and over 148 GB was downloaded into the drive. That makes it 37 GB per hour! Quite impressive!

Im completely impressed with the drives functioning, and would gladly recommend it to all my friends in need of a drive space. It provides 500 GB of space. And, believe me, its not as small as it sounds. You'll start running out of things to fill it with, but its only a matter of time before I get that filled up too.

WWW = World Wide Wait?

I have been working with the internet for a few years now..maybe 6 years or so. In all these years, I have seen the internet evolve from the equivalent of a fish to the equivalent of a whale in terms of speed and reliability. These days, the speeds that computers households get are in the average of 2-3 Mbps worldwide.

But in all the hurry to increase the speeds are we forgetting some of the basic concepts which were the founding principle of the internet?

The internet was born out of necessity. The US military was the first organized network. But why do we find people still connecting to the internet through 56k modems?why doesnt everyone have broadband? Even though broadband is affordable these days, there are millions who are still using dial up connections. I would say this is mainly due to corporate incompetence.

The "big" companies such as AT&T want to make profits by giving the customers nothing but crappy speeds. Until and unless there is a revolution in the way companies think, the equivalent of a 56k modem will always be around.

And, to add to all this, the service providers have started providing internet connectivity to mobile systems, whose speeds are even more pathetic. Suddenly, there seems to be a big leap of faith towards the mobile computing platform.

Internet downloads remain pretty much a dream to people such as myself. It takes a lot of time to download even an Mb...