Microsoft Foresaw Vista Problems - WSJ.com

A Microsoft Corp. executive last year said the software company made a mistake by lowering the minimum technical requirements needed to run Windows Vista, a decision he said was made to help Intel Corp. meet its quarterly earnings, according to internal emails disclosed this week.The emails provide a glimpse into how Microsoft executives and hardware partners grappled with technical glitches and other problems as they prepared the long-awaited Windows Vista software for market. The emails were released as part of a federal class-action suit alleging that Microsoft's marketing program for Windows Vista misled consumers.In several of the emails, Microsoft executives appear to be planning how they will explain to Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner how a branding program implied that certain PCs were technically capable of running Windows Vista operating system when, in fact, they weren't. The emails also show how Microsoft executives struggled to respond to complaints from a Microsoft board member about technical problems he had encountered.

Microsoft Foresaw Vista Problems - WSJ.com

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Predictable Irrationality - A Study in Human Decision Making

Interesting!! Why we try to 'keep options open'? When faced with a lot of choices, humans try to keep choices open rather than concentrating on a single choice which can maximize the returns...

The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.

The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors - New York Times

However, there is one difference in real human life - you are never sure that which choice would maximise the returns. A particular choice may give returns or may not, so we keep each door open 'just in case' we need them.

Creating Wealth By Giving It Away FREE!!!

Read on this Wired.com article -

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending. In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal...
...As much as we complain about how expensive things are getting, we're surrounded by forces that are making them cheaper. Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it's obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Even cocaine has pretty much never been cheaper (globalization works in mysterious ways).

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Now a Back-up of Life...

I strongly feel that the Disaster Management is going to play a major role in coming years. While we anticipate the disasters in traditional forms like natural disasters or wars, newer and newer forms will emerge as a massive threat to humanity. Here is a good news - Norwegian government is planning to cave in seeds that humans need in an Arctic vault. Though this a pretty old news, it is in light again because EU's president will be visiting this vault in coming week.

The Norwegian government will hollow out a cave on the ice-bound island of Spitsbergen to hold the seed bank.It will be designed to withstand global catastrophes like nuclear war or natural disasters that would destroy the planet's sources of food.Seed collection is being organised by the Global Crop Diversity Trust."What will go into the cave is a copy of all the material that is currently in collections [spread] all around the world," Geoff Hawtin of the Trust told the BBC's Today programme.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'Doomsday' seed bank to be built

Flock...

Ok...This is my first post from the inbuilt blog editor of Flock 1.1, the social browser. I have been using firefox for ages now mainly due to the enhancements available for Firefox. The extensions, skins and tweaks available for Firefox far exceed any of the other available browser today. Further Firefox is also good on the front of speed. On the downside,  Firefox is a memory-guzzler - it eats up most of my 1 GB memory when I am working with more tabs open inside the browser. Comparatively, Opera is also a good browser - light, sexy and speedy - but lacks the kind of buzz garnered by Firefox. I am not sure but a lot of customisations which are external to Firefox are already built inside Opera. Further, the Opera team goes on adding and inventing really cool features - a fete unmatched by any other browser development teams. IE7 is a fairly light browser but it lacks everything that makes a browser attractive. Only thing that goes to the credit of IE7 is that most of the webpages ARE compatible for IE - not a case with Firefox or Opera. Another name which caused ripples in the browser market was the beta release of Safari for Windows. Safari is a great-looking browser, but then there is nothing more to it. Sometimes ago, I also used Maxthon a browser based on IE platform. The peculiar thing about Maxthon is that there are some many features in it that you will never know if you know most of the things in Maxthon. In recent times, Flock is creating a lot of buzz as a browser which is meant for the social animals - those whose most of the online times is devoted to everything social - networking / bookmarking / sharing etc. Based on Firefox, Flock can offer almost all the things that Firefox has including extensions and skins. Let's see for how much time I will stay hooked to Flock, before possibly returning to Firefox...

Google Reader Vs. FeedDemon - 1 reason

Google reader - you work 'within' your main browser. With FeedDemon, you add another browser just for reading the feed and open the links in feeds. So I have IE7 and Firefox and FeedDemon - open at the same time (first 2 I can't skip).

FeedDemon - one thing which was decisive was Offline Capabilities of the reader. With the Google Gears, though you add offline capabilities to Google Reader, most of the time the synchronisation in case of Gears, is a painfully lengthy process. And even after waiting for long, you are really not sure of its completing in the end.