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I guess I never blogged about it. Did I? Well I bought a new MacBook this Feb. The new one. The specs are 2 GHZ Core 2 duo, 2 GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 9400M and DVD RW. Indian price was a bit on the higher side compared to other notebooks of similar configuration. However lets not forget its a Mac. The a$$hole at the local Imagine shop suggested installing Windows Vista and MS office. I dont understand why would anyone want to use Microsoft on a Mac. Microsoft is the only reason people switch form all other hardware vendors to Apple. The guy, without my permission was trying to install Microsoft office (Mac version). I had to explain him that Microsoft was the very reason I was buying this expensive beauty instead of a Dell or HP. Well you might suggest using OpenSource or in other words Linux as an alternative. But lets be honest how many people find proper drivers to use all the hardware properly on Linux. I wasa big fan of Lnux. I’m still a fan of the Tux. However for someone who is looking for a little Moive, browsing and occaisional Blogging its not worth the trouble. So here I’m writting this post on my MacBook, with a smile. 
Talks about the recession have spread all over the world. The media is going frenzy every single day over the same issue. Everyday I read news about another country going into recession. The US and the UK seem to be the worst hit. And of course as always the effects are being felt here in India too. People who’re employed also seem to be cutting down on spending, while the govts in the developed countries are encouraging people to spend more amid job cuts. In fact, recently when I was going to buy a new MacBook, I called up one my best friends who’d returned from the US to inquire about the price of the notebook. However, I was astonished by his reaction to the fact that I was buying a new MacBook when there are people who don’t have enough to eat. He was just back from California which probably has been one of the worst hit by the recession with photos of closed down shops printed on every news paper. India probably is the only country where the effect of the recession has not been so severe. Yes I know about these IT companies firing employees showing absurd reasons. Some other industries too are busy shedding some “Fat”. In fact, I being employed in this so called Indian Information Technology industry, can feel the wave of nervousness around the office corridors, while the companies are still making tons of profit and also declaring them quite proudly in their quarterly reports. Sometimes I just wonder about things happening around me and force myself to the conclusion that probably my brain is not yet properly equipped to understand all the dynamics of this complex world. May be I don’t want to. I still have fond memories of the Birmingham beer festival last year, when I was sipping ale lazily. In fact, as I write this blog I’m wearing the CAMRA t shirt I bought, perched lazily on my cozy office chair on a Friday afternoon. I guess its doing the job of providing me with inspiration, to follow my dream and open a bar of my own, where I can serve beer to people over rock music and may be, crack a joke or two..
I’m floored!! Its amazing.. Had never browsed the Net before using a hand held device over Wi-Fi. Came back form office few hours ago and thought of browsing the Net using our recently configured Wi-Fi access point. My shitty Compaq laptop gave up. It wouldn’t detect the network itself my roomie’s was browsing quite happily using his HP. Thats when I found the his iPod Touch lying on the bed. It instantly caught my eye. Wi-Fi on an iPod. Yippie.. There were no hiccups at all. It detected all the available Wi-Fi networks around and quite comfortably connected me to the Internet. Browsing is a piece of cake with this device. Although writing emails or posts could be a difficult task due to the touch interface. However I could browse almost any site using it. Including WordPress. I could read and write posts too. In fact I wrote one post, but something got screwed up while posting it. Anyway the Compaq is working fine after a few configuration change so writing the post using it. I wish I had posted this using the Touch. The screen has a brilliant display. Watching Youtube and following the Maps were a real pleasure to the eye. I can’t help it anymore. I’m ordering one for myself before I get a Macbook.
We have a varying number of laptops in our room at a given point of time.. Number of friends come in, go out.. We have a DSL connection from Indicom, pretty bad service but quite habituated with it now.. Anyway I’ve been thinkin about sharing the connection over Wi-Fi for quite long time. My tryst with Wi-Fi started 8 months back when two IITian dudes came to live with us. They had 2 laptops with Wi-Fi. I was able to set up a network and they could connect to it. I could even share and transfer files over wireless with one of them. However I never was able to share the internet connection using XP(I wish I had a mac). Today my rommie’s girl friend came in with her Vista based HP notebook and connected it to the Indicom cable. Thats when I thought of giving it a final try. I took her laptop and set up a network connection and shared the Internet connection over wireless. Of course I did use an authentication method (WEP), cuz today in the morning itself I was browsing the net over a wireless connection that was unprotected. Probably one those bunch guys living in the ground floor had kept his Wi-Fi on and was using an Internet connection. Poor guy probably has no idea what it is and how vulnerable his laptop is!! Anyway the Vista based set up worked like breeze and I’m actually writing this post using the Internet connection that’s been shared by another laptop somewhere around 6 meters from my laptop and is in another room!!! That gives me a lot of satisfaction.. Finally I went wireless on my laptop(legally) cuz anyway I’ve browsing the net on my E62 phone..
The free email service will always be a fight between the three biggies. Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. All big brands with loads of features. But off late I’m starting to hate Yahoo mail. I’m not able to read many mails because Yahoo’s ads cover one fourth of them. And no doubt its slow like Hotmail. But Yahoo has one thing that Gmail doesn’t have. The neat folder view. I’d been wondering why Gmail doesn’t have a handy way of organising emails into folders like Yahoo or Hotmail. But as always this time also Gmail has not just something but something better than the others. Yes after couple of minutes RnD on the Net I found out how to organize your mails without using folders. And the answers is “Labels”. What we normally do is create folders with names according to the content that’d be stored in it, following our Windows mindset or any other OS mindset. So if you have a folder titled “Honey” or “Darling”, you store all mails from your girlfriend there or use a filter to do so automatically for you. If there is folder “XXX” or “Bad” or “Censured”, you probably store all your dirty mails there. But what if there is a mail from your girfriend which is really dirty!!! You’re in fix now. Where to store it?? But Gmail has the answer. Create your own labels as you want as many you want. Your labels will show up just below the quick contacts on the left pane. When you apply a label to your mail the mail is shown in that label view. So you just use the label as a folder. Just apply both the “XXX” and “Honey” labels to your girlfriend’s dirty mails and you can now access the mail from both your “XXX” and “Honey” label ooppss Folder, if still have the old Windows mindset. Cool.
A lot of people in this world use the term “Hacking” to refer to some kind of crime involving computers. Which is absolutely BULLSHIT. Hacking is not actually a crime. A person needs to have very high degree of programming expertise to be called as a hacker. All cyber crimes are actually committed by “Crackers” and “Script kiddies”. They are not real hackers. They just download information and softwares from the internet posted by real hackers to cause mischief. The real hacker hungers for knowledge. They analyze operating systems, softwares to find out vulnerabilities in them. They don’t do it for money. The following is a text written by famous hacker guru “The Mentor” on January 8, 1986. Have look..
—– Start —-
Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…
Damn kids. They’re all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s techobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world…
Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…
Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.
I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms.
Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…”
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me…
Or feels threatened by me…
Or thinks I’m a smart ass…
Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.
And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is
found.
“This is it… this is where I belong…”
I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike…
You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.
+++The Mentor+++
—- End —-
This is in reference to the article (Escape – “Apple Whines”) in Digit. For your information Digit is a, or it describes itself as a technology magazine. The article (“Apple Whines”) published in Digit, describes Microsoft Microsoft as a very innovative company which cares a lot for its users. And that’s the reason Microsoft has been adding new features(or should I say BUGS) in every software it’s been releasing. Well that seems ridiculous… Because the whole world knows that, the only thing known to Microsoft is Copy-n-Paste. Since its inception it has done nothing but copying other innovative companies like Apple. It relies on its sheer $ power to do that. Everyone knows it. And this f**king Indian magazine seems to be on Microsoft’s payroll! One can cite many examples. IBM developed HPFS for its OS/2, Microsoft copied it to make NTFS for its Windows NT. Apple developed GUI, Microsoft copied it to make the infamous Windows OS. Sony developed the Play Station, and what Microsoft did is renamed it to XBOX. And these days I can hear some rumours about Microsoft making an mp3 player. SIGH!!!!! Obviously copied from the iconic iPod. Still this technology magazine is talking about innovations made by Microsoft… Yeah, they are releasing Vista(Longhorn) somewhere around 2007 with loads of features. Again a botched up copy of Mac OS x Tiger. This article also talks about the Mighty Mouse having a single button, while the PC mouse has 2 keys and a scroll whell!! SO WHAT??? After-all “The back of a Mac looks better than the front of a PC!!”.
Before everything else I must tell u that I am not a owner of any macintosh computer or the iconic iPod. Due to simple reason that I have never been able to afford them. But still I am fortunate enough to see them from a very close distance (physically) at an IT expo, as macs are quite rare in india. And I have very weird habbit of browsing through apple related sites like MacZealots.com, MacMall.com, MacRumor.com etc.. Needless to say I am self procalimed fan of apple products and of course Mr. Steve Jobs.
Few months ago apple made a transition from the IBM PowerPC architecture to the Intel X86 for its desktops and notebooks. What followed is it introduced a whole range of intel based Macs like iMac, MacMini, MacBook Pro and more recently the MacBook. I didn’t have much clue about what it means to apple users, but what I thought was that, It would spell doom to Apple, by abandoning suddenly its already very popular product line. But I think I was wrong, as I can see it generating a lot excitement among many more people. The cyber world is abuzz with talks about the new Intel based Macs. But what Bothes me is that most of this excitement is coming from the possibility of running MacOS X and Windows in a dual boot environment. I don’t find a reason why anyone would like to use a crippled OS like windows instead of MacOS Tiger. Most people from the windows world switch to Mac to have a better computing experience, better security, better stability with UNIX at its heart, better interface and of course due to the cool factor. But running Windows even on a mac will still expose them to the same risk of data loss, Viruses, spyware, malware, ****wares as on a PC. And on top of that Apple itself is providing a tool called BootCamp to enable dual booting. Must have gone crazy. I have PC at home. A cheap chinese or some taiwanese made fucking PC. It runs a pirated copy of windows 2000 and Linux. And honestly speaking, I rarely use windows. And I have no problem except for my modem (same f**cking chinese) which still not detected by by linux. But what’s the logic behind running Windows on a Mac!!! Another thing is that many people are comparing the prices of Macs to the likes of Del, Hp and Lenovo. They claim that for same price other players are offering notebooks with betterspecs. Phew!! U don’t buy a Mac beacause of its specs. U buy it because u want it. But hey.. why am I writting all this stuff. I don’t even own a Mac. It is painfull that I dont have Mac. But Someday with some money in hand I hope to buy a Mac……..
