.entrypoint

If you dont want to stand in the long queues to buy an iPhone, you can buy them off eBay for the paltry sum of $660 (upto to $1500)

Everything sold by Apple is way overpriced. I am not giving Steve Jobs any of my money.

Edit:

More on this outrageous hype from Information Week :

“Craigslist is running ads from people offering to either hold a place in line for iPhone customers, or to buy the phones outright.”

Read the full article here.

Edit # 2:

You can see the ‘internals’ of the iPhone here.

Edit # 3:

iPhone reselling seems like a bad idea

As of this 27th June, I completed 29 years of a mysterious journey called life. It kinda makes me nervous as I think about it. It is not that I am getting old, but the total lack of a worthwhile achievement so far makes me diffident. It makes me wonder whether my dreams in my younger days of becoming a successful adult has all been just a flight of fancy.

A million miles our vagabond heels
Clocked up beneath the clouds
They’re counting down to show time
When we do it for real with the crowds
Air miles are owing
But they don’t come for free
And they don’t give you any for pain

But if it’s all for nothing
All the roadrunning’s
Been in vain

Actually things are not that bad, Binil sent me an invaluable birthday gift.

This week’s poll results on CodeProject:

Unbelievable !

BTW, my favourite text editors are Textpad & Emacs.

Brokeback Mountain is a poem hidden away under beautiful prose. It is a short story, about 55 pages, yet it is profoundly heartwarming, with a subtle flow of true emotions and comes across as a refreshing, cool, light rain showering on your heart but comes back to haunt you and touches your soul in the deepest way.

I had seen the movie last year. It was kind of slow, but the beauty of the story was uniquely brilliant. So when I saw the book at the library I instantly grabbed it and read it within a couple of hours. It is all about 2 guys, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, coming to know each other while herding sheep on Brokeback mountain. It is the sad story of their difficult lives, separate yet entwined, and your heart reaches out to them. It is a remarkably enchanting story of forbidden love and longing.

The prose is astoundingly elegant and beautiful. Annie Proulx, critically acclaimed author and Pulitzer prize winner, writes as if painting a beautiful picture. The story flows like a serene river – quiet, beautiful, calm and exceedingly sure of itself. See a couple of excerpts to get a taste of her eloquent prose-

“They stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis’s pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis’s breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still usable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, “Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go”.”

“Without getting up he threw deadwood on the fire, the sparks flying up with their truths and lies, a few hot points of fire landing on their hands and faces, not for the first time, and they rolled down into the dirt. One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.”

Sure enough, I never get enough of stories as beautifully told as this. Never enough.

5 stars, if not more.

I couldn’t help laughing aloud reading some of the “hacking tips” on a blog post here.

Tip 3 is the most amusing:

There are a couple of commands in DOS for refreshing the BIOS password. These stuff stuff works only on windows earlier than XP where direct DOS boot was allowed. Sorry I don’t remember any of the commands now.

The blog is aptly titled “ignoramus musing“.

P.S. Yes, that was pretty mean. Sorry dude.

Most of the hits on my blog come from people searching about salary for jobs in the US. So finally, here is a list created by Salary.com from the data collected from the top 20 metros in US.

Quotes from an article on Information Week:

Google executives on Wednesday called on the U.S. government to raise the number of foreign worker visas — or H-1B status — by illustrating the plight of one of its founders.

In congressional testimony, Google VP of people operations Laszlo Bock cited the emigration of the parents of company co-founder Sergey Brin from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1979 as evidence that admitting foreign workers into the country benefits the U.S. economy.

…

Bock said that Google is not the only Silicon Valley company to benefit from immigration. “Intel, eBay, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, and many other companies were all founded by immigrants who were welcomed by America,” said Bock.

…

According to Bock, some 8% of Google’s U.S. employees are in this country on a six-year H-1B visa…

…

The current annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas isn’t enough, according to Bock, who urged Congress to increase the cap.

…

Over the last year alone, the artificially low cap on H-1B visas has prevented more than 70 Google candidates from receiving H-1B visas.

The full article can be read here.

There is a related post on the Official Google Blog  – What U.S. immigration policies mean to Google.

Modern Life (posted on Reddit).

So true !

From The Register :

As a hobby, Cansdale developed an add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio. TestDriven.NET allows unit test suites to be run directly from within the Microsoft IDE. Cansdale gave away this gadget on his website, and initially received the praises of Microsoft.

In fact, Microsoft was so pleased with him, it gave him a Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) award, which it says it gives to “exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who voluntarily share their high quality, real world expertise with others”.

However, his cherished status did not last. In December 2005, he started getting emails from a Microsoft executive called Jason Weber. The problem was that TestDriven.NET supported the Express edition of Visual Studio. Express is the cut-down version that anyone can download for free from the Microsoft website. It is limited in various ways, and is intended only for hobbyists and students. Everyone else is supposed to shell out for the paid-for versions.

…

and in the last few days has hit Cansdale with a flurry of lawyers’ letters, also available on his website [see here and here]. Cansdale now has until 4pm Wednesday 6 June to disable the Visual Studio Express features of his product.

We await the deadline with bated breath.

Read the full story here.

P.S.

This story was SlashDot-ed. It is fun to read the comments.

P.P.S

Another issue which rubbed the tech community in the wrong way was the licensing of the Ribbon UI which comes with MS Office 2007. Microsoft is not providing you any components to help you create the UI, but if you decide to create your own UI component which looks like the Office Ribbon UI (which is nothing more than buttons, drop down boxes and menu items on a tabbed container), then you need Microsoft’s permission. Funny old Bill ! Don’t forget to read the comments on this blog.

I feel we are going back in time.

From The Economic Times :

WHEN Infosys employees accept their annual hike letters this year, they will sign on more than just their annual salary rise. Alongside the hike letter, Infosys has also asked its employees to sign a non-compete agreement letter saying they will not join any customer or competitor for a period of six months after their job termination at Infosys.

The competition has been specified – Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Accenture, IBM Global Services, Cognizant Technology Solutions and Wipro. The letter also adds that the employees cannot accept a job offer from its clients (which they have serviced in the last 12 months) for a period of six months.

…

Despite the rising popularity of non-compete clauses, its execution and legal enforcement remains a grey area.

….

Under Section 27 Indian Contract Act, an employer cannot deny you the right to work for competitor. In high-profile lawsuits like Pepsi-Coca-Cola in the past, employers who sued have lost the case in favour of employees. But at large “these non-compete clauses certainly work as a big deterrent factor,” says Som Mandal, partner, Fox Mandal.

Read the complete article here.

P.S. I got the link to this article from a comment to this post. Thanks Suresh.