The XBOX Unboxed

The Indian festive season kicked off with the launch of the XBOX 360 and it's younger brother the Core. On the Big Day, Mohit Anand, the man ultimately responsible for the XBOX in India, obviously hadn't slept for a month. His boss, Peter Moore, the international boss of the XBOX, hadn't slept either thanks to the vagaries of international flights. In between the questions and answers, Peter played a game of TT on the XBOX 360 with me and lost rather gracefully, saying he hadn't played the game for a while. Mohit kept talking about how he would beat me. With the launch in the evening and seeing how stressed he was anyway I didn't want to prove him wrong. What Mohit knows is that the stress is just beginning. Here's why: the XBOX 360 cannot be pirated, but there have been reports that the 360's protection has....

World War III: Microsoft vs Google

Two Billion Dollars More. That's how much more Microsoft will be spending in an all out offensive against Google. It's high time. At stake: billions of advertising dollars. And more importantly. You and me. Where we spend our time, and in Microsoft's case, where we spend our money. MS double teams us with Windows and Word to keep us trapped in a world where everybody else also uses Windows and Word. Google's problem (slash brilliant strategic ploy) is the lack of a lock-in. We go there. And we leave. But Google's got stuff that has Microsoft shit scared (pardon the french). Like Gmail. Like the recently launched calendar (which I LOVE) ... Like the innovation a minute machine they've got running in the Googleplex. Like the stuff they've bought. Like Writely.com -- like numsum.com And then there's the buzz surrounding everything Google does....

Wii all love Nintendo

Remember Mario. Or Super Contra. Long before I played with an XBox 360, I was renting the original Nintendo 8 bit system from the local pirated video rental store. For everybody not born in the nineties, these stores were all over the place. And yes, you actually had to go to a store to rent a pirated vhs cassette .. there was no internet in those days. My younger brother and me would spend anywhere between six and twelve hours playing continuously. After years of living in a world dominated by Johnnies-come-lately Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo is getting ready to release a new console which might upset the apple cart. Codename: Revolution. Real Name: Wii (pronouced like We) Gaming sites have been raving and ranting about Wii, or revolution as it was called till a few days ago. Here's what you can expect: a lot of....

Microsoft is gonna nag you ..

If you're reading this, I think it's safe to assume you're running Windows XP and you're connected to the Internet. Let's also assume that, unlike me, you're using a pirated copy of windows xp. Brother, you're in trouble :) Well, not immediately, if you're reading this in India ... but you will be ... soon. XP automatically updates itself with patches from Microsoft. Till now, MS has been giving security patches to everybody ... regardless of whether the os was real or not. But the next patch you download, could be the one which checks if your machine runs genuine windows or not .. and if it doesn't it's going to show you something like this: And you get another little image permanently part of the bottom right hand corner of the screen. And you'll be nagged regularly with this: ....

Tracking the blasts ... live

Railway Helpline Numbers
Varanasi: 0542 2505896 / 2509805
Lucknow: 0522 2234533 / 2234620
New Delhi: 011 23341074 / 23342954 / 23344128
Old Delhi: 011 23967332 / 23962389
Links From Wikipedia: More on Varanasi Govt of India's National Informatics Centre's site on Varanasi From Wikipedia: More about Improvised Explosive Devices You can email us at editor@ibnlive.com

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That's it for the moment ... As of 11:15pm here's what we know. Three blasts have been confirmed. Two at the Varanasi Cantt railway station. One at the Sankat Mochan Temple. There is an unconfirmed report of a fourth blast on a train that had left Lahota Railway Station - Varanasi's other station. Twelve deaths have been confirmed in the blasts. Twenty people are said to be injured. Unconfirmed reports suggest as many as twenty....

Ipod hacks

"iPod hacks have been created to aid users in using their iPod more efficiently, or to customize their product, making it more individual or for novelty purposes. Their creation has also been to create new features, possibly that Apple Computer wanted to disguise to aid sales of another product." Hello world .. here's how you can convert your iPod into pretty much anything that comes to your mind as long as Apple hasn't figured out a pre-emptive strike .. ala Bush. More here ... Oh, yes ... this channel and this s&t reporter are in no way responsible if you blow up your iPod using information freely available on the Internet ... though if you record it using your video camera .. we may do a story on it :) ....

"Microsoft vs Computer Security"

"Why the software giant still can't get it right" The headline and the tag above are both from the best article on the Internet today. According to aldaily.com and me ... It's on Slate ... go read it here. Continuing in the same vein .. here's my take, from a far more geeky perspective. The big secret (that everyone knows about) is that the biggest threat to data security comes from trusted employees, NOT pimply faced teenagers who think lack of sleep is a fashion statement. Which means everything you do to keep unwanted outsiders outside, is fairly pointless. Yesterday evening I was speaking to a gentleman who's trying to keep companies safe from their own employees (or recent ex-employees). . Before you think guards in blue uniforms let me add that he's into security of a completely different sort. He helps people....

Earthquake!

There have been five earthquakes off the US coast in the Gulf of California today. The weakest was 4.4 on the Richter scale. And the strongest was 6.7 on the Richter scale. Oh, and there was a minor earthquake in Latur as well. Slight tremors were felt around 4.30 in the evening. Earthquakes are absolutely fascinating. And they aren't all that rare. It is estimated that there are 500,000 detectable earthquakes in the world each year. 100,000 of those can be felt, and 100 of them cause damage. So there are around 150 earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 2.5 every week. Which works out to around a little over 20 everyday. That's almost one every hour. And while we are talking about cool earthquake facts. Here are some more: Before electronics allowed recordings of large earthquakes, scientists built large spring-pendulum seismometers in an....

The Google PC

So, is Google launching a PC of its own? According to the LA Times they are ... From the article: 'Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., among other retailers, to sell a Google PC. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not Microsoft's Windows, which is one reason it would be so cheap -- perhaps as little as a couple of hundred dollars.'" There's a lot of talk about an alternative to Windows. Having been a Linux user on and off and despite having enjoyed it, I have to admit that there is no credible alternative to Windows. If only because its so easy to get things done on a windows machine. And that's not because Windows is a great software. It's because someone who knows how to get it done is not more than a phone call away.....

Wanna be an adman/Santa Claus sued

Are you in the mood to be an adman The best browser in the world (according to me) is called Mozilla Firefox ... (get it here). It's open source, it's free and it does a lot of stuff that its main competitor Microsoft's Internet Explorer is trying to address with it's next browser version ... Now the Mozilla Foundation wants you to make a Firefox advertisement. You can find out more here or view user created testimonials here. SCO has sued Santa Clause ... for the original article go here I should warn you that if you know Santa but don't SCO read this before you click on out of here. Once upon a time (long before Microsoft Windows) the world was ruled by Unix .. an operating system that managed to do things that DOS and....