People all around the world have their own point of views, personal choices that dominates their minds and judgments. This nature makes human fanatic about something, something they do not want to lose; something they want to cling with forever. Taking examples from the Tech world, there is a huge fan following of the most revered operating system of all-time, the mighty Windows from Microsoft. On the other hand, Open Source movement is on full swing and it is assimilating users around the globe. These fanatics of either Windows or Linux (or for the matter of fact, Mac OS X) will die to support their respected OS. I am not a die-hard fanatic of this OS thingy yet can’t help it when I think I have to support my favourite.
And as a result of my antics, I flamed a 3 hour long war with one of my friends. Sitting before some dumb computer terminals we fought for that period only to achieve some greater results, unexpected at their best.
I am giving the whole conversation here, modified a bit to suit the world (just some spelling corrections and slang removals, that’s it). Be warned! The conversation took 3 hours to complete, so it is not so easy to read in 5 mins. The persons depicted here as ‘Friend’ and ‘Me’ are simply my friend and me respectively. Let’s have a look.
Continue reading ‘Redundant conversations between a Windows and Linux user’
I was sheerly disappointed when Apple introduced MobileMe with iPhone 2.0 upgrade. Not being an Apple customer, I could not get my hands on either of them. But in the meantime after realizing some firsthand user experiences I though that missing them is not so bad for health and pleasure. Although not sure about the exact time, I also somehow learned about the Dropbox, a little software for online backup and synchronizing user data last month; applied for the beta testing and forgot it completely. Why should not I, there are a truckload of new softwares releasing here and there all over the internet and I also got some bad number of advertisement mails in my inbox as spam. So why do I care ?
A week ago, I got a confirmation mail from getdropbox.com stating that my account had been approved and I could activate it. Curiosly, (actually it is the name of the software that attracted me) I opened the given link and activated the account. Following the process, I was left with a tiny installer for some software named Dropbox Beta. Till then I had absolutely no idea what should I do with it but some simple navigation through the parent site cleared the clouds a lot. I though Yet Another………….. and installed it in Windows Vista SP1.
The application actually started something in the taskbar and stayed there. I stumbled upon and found it created a new folder in the Documents folder named ‘My Dropbox’. In the folder I had two default folders for Photos and Public sharing and a test file stating “This is your dropbox’. I tried it’s uploading and syncing capabilities and found it quite good n fast and reliable too. I uploaded my whole Office files with some Word and Excel files in the Dropbox. Lets see it’s features and how it fares in the wild.
- Minimal Interface. Dropbox just uses a simple menu from the taskbar and user can just upload there favourite files and pics in 3 simple clicks.
- Very fast servers. It really has some kick-ass servers to play with. File upload and syncing is real fast.
- Integrated file context menus. User can take control of their files present in the local Dropbox folder in their PC from the respective file and folder context menus.
- Drag and Drop support. Want to upload and sync something ? Just Drag and Drop it into the ‘My Dropbox’ folder and you are done.
- Web Interface. Dropbox also has a regular web interface for the customization of the user account and browsing the files in their Dropboxes. It contains the central location of all user related things.
- 2 GB Space. It is not something amazing in these days but still it is 2GB and the product is still in it’s BETA.
I was using Windows Live Skydrive since it’s initiation as from MS. I like it’s features and reliability and speed but it is not something beautifully done as Dropbox. I really love the ease of use with Dropbox and great feature of using it locally just from Windows Explorer. Drag and Drop is really useful and time saving, neat and clean.
So for the final thoughts, their is no problem with the new Dropbox as of now, it is loaded with all it’s great features and so in a small place. Reliability is a matter though, as I have to taste it for some more days, at least a month to fully test how reliable it is. But as a whole, Dropbox can really sturdy and eligible enough to get 4.5 stars out of 5.
Grab the chance to try this nifty tool from here : http://www.getdropbox.com
After the phenomenal success of Firefox 3, mozilla is moving onto the next developmental version of the most popular open source browser. Firefox 3.1, codenamed Shiretoko is released in alpha stage and has the latest version of Gecko (1.9.1) included. Although initial checkout of this new version did not bring anything spectacularly new to the table, browser performance is top notch. When latest stable version of Firefox 3 scored just 71 in Acid Test 3, Gecko 1.9.1 manages to bump the score to 84.
Gecko Performance on Acid Test 3
Firefox 3.0.1 vs Firefox Shiretoko 3.1alpha
Javascript performance is increased and RSS loading is faster than ever, and astonishingly the alpha version is very stable, at least under 7 tabs open for 2.5 hours. Great memory management of Firefox 3 retains here, still no incident of RAM leakage in my PC.
Moreover, Shiretoko is going to add some real performance boosts to Firefox soon without creating clutters. Stay tuned for the alpha2 and next build information here. 
Knol, Google’s expert written challenger to Wikipedia, has finally been launched today. Check out @ http://knol.google.com
Much touted as the WIkipedia killer, Google Knol is supported by a group of experts who contribute to the articles published there, unlike the anonymous contribution feature in Wikipedia. When Wikipedia has the policy of neutral point of view of the subjects, Knol gives expert authors to air their personal opinions. There can be multiple articles in Knol on a single topic, giving users the choice to comment and rate each of the topics, the main difference with Wikipedia. Knol also has a commercial backend, it supports the inclusion of adverts according to the wish of the authors and a generous share of revenue generated from these ads will go to the them. Google will not edit any of the articles from there own (unless it violets their T&C) and put all the responsibility to the authors themselves.
Knol. intended to be a unique user-centric project rather than the community devoloped feature of Wikipedia is not a whole new concept to the table. It is much like the articles from Squidoo, Helium.com or About.com. It may be described as a complement to Wikipedia fixing several shortcomings of the later. The newly released Knol website does have a clean feel rather than the main page of Wikipedia but we need to keep in mind that it does not have so many articles till now. People can search for articles in there but again there are not too many articles to read. A simple search on Firefox brough just one result and ridiculuosly on some CEO features of Firefox addons! But as Knol is still in public beta and infact just released today, I am not going to blame it. We need to give some time to the quality content generators for their better articles to be published and I am really excited to see the Slashdot like comment feature at work in there.
Since the preview release (v0.9.3103.2) of Microsoft Live Mesh came to light on 11th of July, I was so excited about it. Although lately, I registered for it only yesterday and quite pissed of to see that it is just for the US citizens (damn you US, do you people thing rest of the world cant use cloud computing ? :X ). After applying some usual workarounds to get past of the US only thing, I completed the whole process and waiting for the MS Connect people to approve my account. I presume there is a huge demand for it thorughout the world, and it does have potential to be a worthy competitor to Apple ‘MobileMe’ service. Also waiting for Mozilla Weave, that can easily syncronize the bookmarks and settings of Firefox and save them in a account. That service too is down for huge demand and Mozilla decided to call back for some time now. Well I do not mind to wait, if only what I am going to taste will be a real nifty piece of code.
I will post some more info on the Live Mesh and Weave as soon as I get hold of these two. So, Stay Tuned!
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