Category Archives: Misc

Cortana – what she thinks about Microsoft, Apple and Google

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Cortana the new power booster of the Windows phone 8.1 works really well. Cortana is still in beta but seems matured. I asked questions from Cortana, plenty of them. But I wanted to know what she thinks about her Microsoft, Apple and Google. The answers are impressive and funny.

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What do you think about Microsoft ? There’s no place like home.

What do you think about Apple ? Their new headquarters looks kind of like a Halo. I’m into it.

What do you think about Google ? Impressive achievement. Still get everything I know from Bing

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Acer is not affected from ‘Heartbleed’

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This is the email I got from Acer couple of days ago.

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2013 in review

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

How to become Zeus, the great Greek God in less than $ 3,000

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Have you ever thought about this ? How much do you really have to spend to become like Zeus, the great Greek god. Zeus is a Greek god considered as the god of the gods. Among his many super natural powers one that’s very powerful that he can materialize the objects by thinking.

So, what is to do with the current technology, how we can get that power, if we’re to get that how much it would cost ?

I say it would cost you less than $ 3,000

What do you need ?

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EPOC neuroheadset – a device / gadget which is used to give commands to the computers just by thinking. This costs around $ 299.

MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer

MakerBot – A 3D printer for the desktops costs around $ 2,199. It comes with a software (MakerBot Makerware) to model the objects and you import other file formats as well.

What else do we need ? We might need the EPOC SDK for the development of custom software (a free version is available or we can go for a single license which costs around  $500)

We have to write our own piece of code which can get the model in our mind using EPOC SDK and transfer it to the MakerBot Makerware. Then the magic happens.

You’re Zeus, you can materialize objects just by thinking.

Deactivate Windows

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Hi, this is really a different type of post, could be considered as radical too. Because almost everywhere in the Internet you see the posts describing how to activate the Windows (either genuinely or using any cracked piece of software or some fake serial key). But this post in contrast describes how to deactivate the Windows.

First why do you want to deactivate the Windows ? Simple, you may want to deactivate the Windows for several reasons, but one main reason is to install another serial key with a different edition. You can always do this without deactivating the current one, but still in few circumstances you may need to deactivate the Windows.

Deactivating the Windows is quite simple, just a simple command line statement. Open CMD in the Admin mode. Then type the following slmgr.vbs –upk and enter.

This will remove the current serial key from the Windows and leaves the OS in the deactivated state.

Microsoft doesn’t embrace it own products

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I have noticed few things that makes me feel that MS doesn’t embrace its own products sometimes. For example when MS launched Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 there were massive marketing campaigns about the phone.

But in the Live / Hotmail (now Outlook) login page iPhone was in the middle as a highlighted smartphone which supports Hotmail / Live. Then thankfully someone noticed it and changed it. Later WP was in the middle.

Yesterday I came across a big frustrating problem when dealing with Windows Azure websites. MS has been doing a really great job with Azure and Azure websites deployment provides plenty of options to host the websites. We can pull the website files from various sources and Dropbox is also available. But they don’t have an option to pull a folder from Skydrive to Azure websites, they still have an option for Dropbox.

I cant believe this. Really confused.

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After few minutes I saw this tweet.

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I really don’t know what’s going on.  But I think this is the real problem in MS now. There’s no communication, everyone does something in their own. But MS is not a company which became big yesterday. They should have and I hope definitely they should be having processes for integration and a streamlined communication between products. I wonder whether they don’t have the processes or someone has forgotten it in the middle.

2012 in review

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 9,900 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 17 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Few words from Jobs…..

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This is an extraction of a set of exact words from Jobs, from his biography – by Walter Isaacson. I just made it available here. The note’s somewhat big and I can either offend this or defend this. But I just like the way it was.

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At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett-Packard for a long time. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think that it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it’s Apple and Google – and a little more so Apple.

I think Apple has stood the test of time. It’s been around for a while, but it’s still at the cutting edge of what’s going on.

It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance. They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been.

Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, it was his goal.

I admire him for the company he built – it’s impressive and I enjoyed working with him. He’s bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw Mac, they couldn’t copy it well. They totally didn’t get it.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM and Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on the revenues, not the product engineers or designers. So the salesperson end up running the company.

John Akers at IBM was a smart eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn’t really know anything about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened in Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer running it.

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