The FuNK Blog

I was reading Matt Mason’s book titled The Pirate’s Dilemma which, broadly speaking, narrates how pirates have changed our world in more than one way by their own altruistic ways (we’ll come back to that later). A while after I remembered reading a quote by Machiavelli in the book but couldn’t find a reference to it in the index. That’s when I realised how useful it would be to be able to search through a book much like the way we search through a virtual document everyday with our Ctrl + F. This got me thinking and I thought it would be quite easy to do that if I had the electronic version of the book.

I decided to search for a pirated version of the book (oh the irony) as soon as I was done with the chapter. When it came to it, I decided to look at the author’s website wondering if did actually practise as he preached and offered a digital copy of the download. And surely enough he did. The way Matt set it up was any website visitor is able to click on the link and download the book. In doing so the user is presented with an option to enter an amount he would like to pay the publisher. I of course selected zero because I had already paid for the book.

Later it got me thinking that what did in a way impress me (the digital download on the author’s website) should in fact become what Herzberg describes as Hygiene Factor, in the non business sense of course. Each purchase of a hardcopy of the book should be accompanied with a digital version of the book so the buyer is able to consumer the product wherever, however and whenever he chooses to. For those concerned with the issue of file sharing and distribution let me point you to Music Industry who has already, for most part of it, abandoned DRM and is still doing fine. The fact of the matter is those who wish who pirate, will pirate. I was going to have no qualms or difficulties in obtaining a pdf ebook version from one of many websites. But the fact that Matt and his publishers made it available to me was nice and got me thinking, why aren’t we given a digital copy with our purchases.

Microsoft has had ‘mixed’ success with Windows Vista. I say mixed because even though the newest operating system in the Windows family is the best so far, the company has fallen well short of reaching its target. The ‘credit’ for a large part of this can be given to Apple’s marketing team whose relentless bashing through the Windows v/s Mac ads have been tremendously successful in instilling fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of the average consumer. Websites like PCWorld with their less than neutral coverage of Windows Vista haven’t made things any better. I’m in Mumbai at the moment and I happened to speak to a cousin of mine - whose geekometer clocks just a tad bit higher than the average consumer - and we got talking about Windows Vista and XP. He told me he didn’t really like Vista and preferred XP as an operating system. I asked him why this was the case and he told me he had “heard from someone” that Vista had a lot of problems. I immediately questioned him on whether he had used the OS himself before making the judgement to which he defensively reacted he had, however for less than a day. He had seen a demo machine somewhere and spent a while tinkering with it. His biggest complaint was that he didn’t quite understand it. I told him him to come speak to me when he had given Vista a real chance.

I’ve personally been using Windows Vista since RTM and the number of crashes I’ve had since are less than the number of fingers on my hands, literally. While some early adopters may have been plagued with instability issues - mainly caused because of immature drivers - I have been considerably luckier. And with the arrival of the first Service Pack the system has become as solid as a rock. I keep my laptop on for days altogether and the uptime counter only stops increasing when I restart the machine myself to complete an installation or something of that sort. Add to that many of the simple improvements in user experience - breadcrumb navigation and search to name a few - and you have a brilliant operating system on its hands.

Microsoft has made attempts to lift Vista’s image with the Mojave Experiment which is part of the 300 million dollar budget it has allocated to promotion and advertisement. In my opinion this move is long overdue especially if it has to compete with a company whose strongest asset is its brilliant marketing and PR team. Should Microsoft be able to formulate a marketing strategy / campaign that does indeed cleanup the undeserved Vista mess, it can most certainly see itself winning back the market share it may have lost.

Tags: apple, microsoft, vista

The concept of cloud computing isn’t new new by any means. The idea of being able to view and process information / data regardless of what device we’re using,  has been around for a while. However it’s only recently that innumerable services and startups have come up offering ’solutions’ to these ‘problems’. But the recent downtime of Gmail serves as a stark reminder of how 100% availability simply cannot be expected of any online service. It doesn’t matter how grand the infrastructure is or how scalable the application is, it is the smallest of problems that bring down the biggest of setups.

I still insist on using Outlook for my email, calendar and contact needs. Most of the time when I need access to this information I am on or around my laptop so I have instant access to this data. In the off chance that I am not, I have my phone (Nokia E90) which syncs up with my desktop giving me the exact access (emails are only the recent ones). The situation is exactly the same with my RSS Feeds (Feeddemon) and Office Suite.

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Dell is hosting an event titled ‘Freedom from Business as Usual’ and is was expected to announce their netbooks and possibly even a phone. That didn’t happen though. Dell is really pushing the concept of a ‘Digital Nomad‘ (their term, not mine). They claim to have achieved a 19 hour battery life for notebooks and this will be included in their newest (4th generation)  Latitudes some of which will be available starting today on dell.com

Among other things the machines are expected to include Backlit keyboards, all day batteries, SSDs, Centrino2 processors, integrated webcam and microphone and even smart card security. Track lost notebook as well as remotely wipe data.

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It is all but confirmed Apple is launching the 3G iPhone on the 9th of June. What is expected is 3G(obviously), GPS, and possibly a bigger or a higher resolution screen. However Apple has known to surprise, which is why I have a feeling we might be seeing something more than just an iPhone launch.

I have a feeling Apple might deliver a new product to the market. To extend it`s development along the iPhone-esque lines with touch included would be quite possible. One could speculate Apple might release a UMPC of it`s own but that is highly unlikely as Apple usually enters a given market extremely late. While rumors of a rebranded .Mac service surface - with MacRumors providing the latest scoop - I can`t help but wonder what Mr Turtleneck`s new trump card will be.