ctrl.altered.mind

“This guy keeps pushing me and pushing me, I can’t take it anymore!”

Check this video out, it’s hilarious.

(clicking image takes you to the video site)

The caption on mouse-over is even better: “and she put sweet nothings in all my .conf files. It’ll take me forever to get X working again.”

xkcd rocks.

What’s the definition of a good computing experience? Booting up your operating system and staring at it, with no ability to smoothly run applications or games, according to Dell. I know Vista has elicited a lukewarm experience, and my biggest gripe about Microsoft’s latest OS offering has been that a ton of resources have to be sacrificed to the machine running it if any productive experience is expected.

An operating system should, ideally, allow maximum availability of resources to the applications intended to run on it. Configurations that essentially were used for small servers until a few years ago, are required to power Vista on a ‘home computer’, forcing average users to invest in an insane amount of computing hardware and resources compared to the tasks they would want to achieve.

I found a link to Dell’s product description page via a reddit news article, and quickly grabbed this screenshot to prove my point. Check out what Dell has to say about the uses of a ‘good’ system with 512 MB of RAM that can, at best, provide basic Windows Vista experience (with no Aero, aka resource hogging eye-candy window display system on board) - “Great for… Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games.” Seriously? You’ve got to be kidding me. This screenshot has not been modified in any way! Although, the description is likely to change on Dell’s website once Microsoft’s marketing team gets across to them.

It seems like Google Finance is getting started early on the Halloween celebrations for tech stock investors this year

I snapped this picture at a local grocery store, where a kiosk’s sole function of displaying catchy ads for coupons and new products was marred by a familiar Windows error, although not quite as attention-grabbing this time as the other one I had blogged about.

(click for larger image)

Interestingly, the command line reveals that the kiosk runs Laplink Everywhere, commercial software that allows remote access to a PC from anywhere. I guess all the kiosks from the store (and across the country) connect to a central machine that selects the advertisements to be run by the store, and thus rely on 24/7 internet connectivity for their operation. Given that the kiosk is using a capable machine with a complete Windows XP installation, I would have guessed that a better design would be to run local custom software and just provide daily (or even hourly) updates via the internet connection - which is also the way most Windows spyware work.

Of course, capital costs could have been cut significantly if the kiosk ran cheaper x86 hardware with a basic Linux installation - although I wonder if that was even an option considered by the company that designed the kiosk.

The photographer insists this is an original, unedited picture, and I have no real reason to disagree. I believe Coca-Cola would have received some additional attention than what they bargained for. The picture was taken at Piccadilly Circus in London.

(1600×1063 version)

Picture shared by Rosso (afka siamonesti) under a Creative Commons license.

Stumbling upon this cartoon reminded me of a rather bizarre incident a friend experienced, while vacationing someplace in the US of A that probably does not win the company of too many foreigners. My friend, who’s Indian, got told, “Go back to Arabia you Jew!” (correct me if this isn’t verbatim, M)

Each time a Mac versus Windows article hits the Web, a maelstrom of comments from each camp is whipped up on forums and discussion boards. It would be an interesting socio-psychological experiment to dissect the average fanboy mind, to understand how some people can, time after time, argue to virtually no limit about the virtues of the operating system of their choice - and enhance the pitfalls of the other in the same breath. Pick any Digg article on Mac OS X that also includes a comparison with Windows (or not!), like this one for example.

While I’m all for healthy debate, one observation cannot be discredited - significantly many (if not most) Apple OS X users are former and/or current Windows users, while very few people fighting the battle on Microsoft’s side have even used OS X for more than a few minutes. I’d guess that they are basing their beliefs about the adversary on hearsay. That said, here’s a picture that I stumbled upon, which sums up my argument on the topic as far as design philosophy for the two companies is concerned.

Mike found this Penn Masala video on Youtube, called The Facebook Skit. Its a parody of Enrique Iglesias’ Hero. Funny, and with complete desi authenticity as it features a Patel mentioned in the video.

Penn Masala is the world’s first and premier Hindi a cappella group formed in 1996 at the University of Pennsylvania. Their website even has a media player that features the most popular songs from the five albums that the group has produced in the last ten years. I didn’t realize that two of their songs were also featured in American Desi, a movie that most desis probably end up watching (through strong recommendation or otherwise), in their first week after stepping ‘off the boat‘ - well, I did anyway.

Penn Masala also has their newest song, ‘Aankhon Mein Tu Hai’, available as a free download. Its a good song with some north and southern Indian classical influence. Check it out.

If you can get this lucky with your photo subjects all the time.