blog dot kam

    I have never bought a single thing from Apple before, but, everything has its first "iTouch" :), and I decided to get an iPod for my friend’s birthday.

    So here I am on the Apple website filling out all the right forms, giving my extra-sensitive information, and all nine yards.

    Since I know that my friend’s b-day is four days from now, I am very concerned this iPod to be delivered as fast as possible and I see my choice of shipping methods Apple offers me which are:

     Great, I think, and choose "2Day shipping" - "I am willing to pay $10 for 2 days, time matters more, my friend will be so happy" - I am thinking. 2-3 minutes of clicking and typing go by and here it is "You order was successfully processed!" - splendid!

    Coming in to work next morning, opening my gmail, seeing "Apple Store Shipment Notification", having my "internal smiling" moment, and clicking a FedEx link to track this order. Wanna see what I saw? Be my guest:

    Did you notice anything interesting? Probably not, cause I did not tell you that I am ordering stuff from United States. Well now, as I told you, take a second look - see anything? My iPod is picked up at 6:16, which is nice - I paid my $10 for it, but wait.. The location does not seem to be familiar -> CN is definitely not US (well at least not yet ).

    I got so negatively puzzled to see that my iPod was shipped from China! Don’t get me wrong, China is a beautiful country, and I have been there less than a year ago, but common, Apple, can you keep your own warehouse with your own products in you own country!? What did I pay my $10 for?

    random thoughts:   Thought of trying "Mac OS X Leopard" some time this week, got so upset, will stick to my lovely Ubuntu

November 8th 2007 UPDATE: I received my iPod in exactly two business days - thank you Apple!

According to Ubuntu once Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) is out, there will be plenty to celebrate, whether you were directly involved in the release process or just rejoice because the next iteration of the best distribution is finally out.

    Thursday, 18th of October ‘2007 is the tentative date for Ubuntu 7.10. Many parties will be on this date, or you can pick your own date! Go ahead and put down your favorite pub, park or cafe and celebrate getting Gutsy Gibbon out of the door!

    get it while its hot

    Come and join Ubuntu parties all over the Globe! The schedule of already "Confirmed Parties" are here. 

Welcome to DELL Open Source

You asked, we listened. For advanced users and tech enthusiasts, we’re happy to offer a new open-source operating system, so you can dive in and truly enjoy a PC experience just the way you want it. In addition to the FreeDOS systems we already offer, we are proud to announce PCs with Ubuntu.

 
    So far only these three models are for sale with Ubuntu on them:

The Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) invested in designing a $10 laptop computer.

Until now, one laptop including labour charges is costing $47 but the ministry forecasts that the price will radically come down when the demand will rise to manufacture one million laptops. An official from HRD ministry said:

    The cost is encouraging and we are hopeful it would come down to $10. We would also look into the possibility of some Indian company manufacturing the parts

The final year engineering student of Vellore Institute of Technology in conjunction with researcher from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore has proposed two designs to the ministry.

In both of the submitted designs, according to Times of India, all components would be located on a single circuitboard. This would keep prices down and make it easier to find and repair problems.

The true estimate to launch a $10 laptop is another two years:

    We do not want to rush into it. Many issues remain to be resolved like royalty to the designer after the design is patented. Prototyping would also take time. We would even conduct destructive testing and create a proper maintenance network

HRD received several proposals from some big multi national companies, but none of them was willing to develop laptop for $10 bucks - greedy closed mind/source corpo-s.

According to forbes pirates don’t just plunder. In Sweden, it seems, they also believe in sharing.

As the world’s largest repository of BitTorrent files, ThePirateBay.org helps millions of users around the world share copyrighted movies, music and other files–without paying for them.

That’s illegal, of course–at least it is in the U.S. But when Time Warner’s (nyse: TWX - news - people ) Warner Bros. studio accused them of breaking U.S. copyright law in 2005, the pirates gleefully reminded the movie company that they didn’t live in America, but rather in "the land of vikings, reindeer, Aurora Borealis and cute blond girls."

Microsoft has released a new version of its Hotmail with 2Gb of space, AJAX looking, blah, blah, blah. Here is how it looks by the way

1.    First thing that I tried once I logged my self in is to use simple letters as shortcuts, well the same way we use shortcuts in Gmail, remember? "c" to compose a new mail, "n" for the next message, "p" for the previous message, and so on. Well Hotmail stays Hotmail no matter what - explicit shortcuts are NOT there

2.    Second thing is I tried to resize my inbox with mail, you know, if they make it so lame by default, I thought maybe I can do that. Guess what… well you guessed right - can’t explicitly do that too

3.    Then I clicked on that annoying huge "Windows Live" bar on top - got a completely empty screen with "http://www.getlive.com/" in my address bar. Hm.. annoying and empty - why?

4.    Clicked on "full message view" in a preview panel - gave me a good message view, but I spent at least 5-6 seconds figuring out how to go back to normal view (I had to close the whole window) - explicit? Human Computer Interaction problem? How hard is it to put "back to normal view" or something like that?

5.    Looked for labels, found them by logging to my Gmail, so.. no labels - is it patent by Google, or Hotmail is too cool for that?

Overall, it is much better than old Hotmail, but way far from being "Gmail compliant". Lots of colorful bars, ads, response time (I have a high speed connection), HCI (human computer interaction) principles used (and not used), etc.

I give it "C+". Well, yea - I am the user, means Hotmail is my student, and apparently Freshmen. So get to books Hotmail, and remember SIMPLICITY is the key - Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS), or is it not from Windows Bible?

Automatix2 now comes with Crossover Office Standard and Professional on Ubuntu 7.04 amd64 (which basically means you can run a ton of 32 bit windows software on Ubuntu 7.04 amd64). Also.. what really caught our attention of late was that, Michael Dell, Founder and CEO of Dell Inc., uses Automatix2 on his home computer.

^{The above came from Automatix official website}