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Anando's spaceWhere the mind is without fear... June 01 http://www.anando.org/blogNovember 20 Happy 21st birthday, Windows !20th of November, 2006 marks the 21st birthday of Windows. Windows 1.0 was released on 20th November, 1985. I found 21 interesting facts about Windows here and i reproduce them as follows:
1. Windows 1.0 was released on 20th Nov 1985 and the hardware requirements were 256KB of RAM, DOS 2.0 and two floppy drive.
2. The retail price was $100, which is worth about $177 in today’s money - pretty much the same as Windows XP Home.
3. Microsoft sent out a press kit featuring a squeegee and a washcloth to announce the launch of Windows 1.0, a full two years before the product was launched.
4. If Bill Gates had got his way, he would have called it “Interface Manager”. 21 years later, I don’t think Interface Manager Vista, or Vista Interface Manager would have had the same ring to it….
5. When Vista was launched Microsoft were David fighting Goliath, and had to fight many court battles:
“We weren’t kidding that we bet the entire company on it,” Gates recalls. “The strange thing was we were a much smaller company at the time. We were competing to establish this platform with companies larger than ourselves.”
6. Windows 1.0 was only out for two weeks before it had to be patched to fix bugs.
7. Windows crashes an estimated 25m times a day.
8. Windows 1.0 included a large number of utilities that are still part of Windows today - Calendar, Notepad, Terminal, Calculator, Clock, Windows Write and Windows Paint, Control Panel, and the Reversi game.
9. Support for Windows 1.0 was weak, and even Microsoft’s own apps didn’t support it. In fact, Excel and Word didn’t work with Windows until 1987 and 1989.
10. Windows 3.1 was the first stable release, which led to many hardware manufacturers preloading it on their computers. This proved to be a major turning point in Windows history and world domination.
11. Windows 3.1 (Pre-release name Janus) was released in March of 1992. In its first few months on the shelf it sold over 2 million copies (including upgrades). The Windows 3.1x OSs were groundbreaking for their time and they paved the road for today’s modern Microsoft environments.
12. Between 1986 and 1996 Microsoft’s stock soared hundredfold and it was estimated that Microsoft had created 10,000 millionaires by 2000.
13. Bill Gates earns $250 every second, $20m a day and $7.8BN a year.
14. If Bill drops a thousand dollar bill, it’s not worth his while to pick it up, as he’ll make the same amount in the time it takes him to pick it up.
15. If Bill Gates was a country, he would be the 37th richest country in the world.
16. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the wealthiest organisation for charitable grants with assets of approx $65Bn.
17. Erik Noyes from Charles Schwab came up with the phrase Blue Screen of Death “BSoD” in 1991.
18. Bill Gates scored 1590 on his SAT. Paul Allen, scored a perfect 1600.
19. The Windows operating system has 50 million lines of code (a line averages 60 characters) and grows 20% with every release. It’s put together by 7,200 people, comes in 34 languages and has to support 190,000 devices–different models of digital cameras, printers, handhelds and so on.
20. An estimated 250-300K applications have been developed for Windows.
21. Over 5 million testers signed up for Vista’s release candidates November 13 RajghatTonight in the popular TV show, Heroes, one of the character remarks "What is the name of Gandhi's burial grounds ?" while solving a crossword puzzle. Another character quips back "Kanyakumari !" and the puzzle was solved correctly ! Come on guys !! Are you out of your minds ? How can someone get such a huge fact wrong ? The strongest leader the world ever had, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was cremated and the place is referred to as Rajghat, which is in the capital city of New Delhi, in India. Kanyakumari is the southern most coastal city of India where one can see three water bodies at the same time; Indian ocean, Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. These two places are thousands of kilometers apart and have nothing in common ! October 30 Windows Vista just about to RTM !Having been involved with the Windows Vista Beta since the very beginning, I am very excited that Vista is about to RTM. Some RTM related news.
Check out the new Windows Vista and Office 2007 packaging here
Check out the new Windows Vista system sounds by Robert Fripp here Windows Vista can go RTM any moment now ! October 25 Presenting Windows Vista and Office 2007 at GTEC OttawaGTEC is a conference targetted mainly towards the public sector. Big IT players show off their products to the government agencies and demonstrate how their product can help towards a better governance. This year GTEC was from 23th-25 October at the Ottawa Congres Centre. I was part of Microsoft Canada's crew and demonstrated Windows Vista and Office 2007 to the attendees there. It was a lot of fun and I was surprised at the number of people who had tried out the BETA versions of Windows Vista; everyone seemed to be so excited about the product ! Some of the pictures from yesterday follow.
 At work...  ...At play October 18 Irresponsible AppleImagine the audacity of Apple Computer Co. to ship a malicious worm in their flagship product and then blame Microsoft for not making Windows more secure ! Its like a burglar trying to justify his acts by blaming the home owner for not making his home more secure. I did not expect such an irresponsible statement from a respected industry bigwig like Apple.
My sentiments are very similar to that of George Ou of Zdnet. September 27 Air India flight# 18221 years ago, 329 people were murdered by brutal terrorists in the bombing of Air India flight# 182 off the coast of Ireland. Flight# 182 was bound to New Delhi from Toronto & Montreal. After 21 years the Canadian authorites have re-opened a public enquiry to find out the 'real' culprits and punish them. One would wonder why such a delay took place in a developed nation such as Canada. However, its better late than never. My heart goes out to the family of the victims and crew of MV Laurentian Forest, a commercial ship which was the first at scene for rescue operations. The crew members were also victims of terrorism as they are still haunted by the happenings of that fateful day. September 24 Alma MaterThis post comes very late...almost a month later than it was supposed to be, but here it is. I visited my alma mater when I was back in Dehradun a month ago in August. Some of the pics are here. Just one of the few things that makes me super-nostalgic and makes me want to go back home at that instant !  The new junior block  The temperature in hell is 32F today ! Yes, the horse shoe is gone !!!  Good old SJA !  The good old carefree days of innocene and fun !!! September 10 Downtown OttawaThe first week at work finally got over and being in a new city, I had absolutely no plans for the weekend. On saturday I got invited to one of my family friend's for supper. Good, better than spending the evening at home ! Today (Sunday) a bucnh of us (actually only 4 of us) decided to go visit downtown Ottawa. It was a small trip, but i must say that downtown Ottawa is absolutely so beautiful ! My phone camera does not do any justice to it !
 The Canadian Parliament !  Overlooking Ottawa river onto Quebec. This is the city of Hull. September 03 CognosMade a small trip to my workplace. Will be starting at Cognos from 5th September. Looking forward to it !  September 02 Changes...good or maybe badI havent blogged for about a month now. I can blame that partly on heavy school work and partly on my whirldwind, 2 week India trip. Lots of things have happened since then and life has taken a huge turn, I dont know for the good or for the bad.
More about the India trip. Was in India from 7th August till 23rd August. Met my family, loved ones and a few friends. By the time it sunk in that I was in motherland, I was already sitting in Air Canada flight# 879, heading back to Canada. Short trip, and as much as i want, maybe my last trip to motherland for a very very long time now. Coming back to Canada, I had to pack all my stuff and move to Ottawa for a 4 month internship with Cognos Inc. Today was my first day in Ottawa. A totally new city with not a single friend or family member...whoa ! New experience !! Now I know how it feels to be totally alone...yes, it feels very lonely ! I must say that I am fortunate to have a very friendly landlord and he is an awesome guy. I am looking forward to starting work on 5th September with Cognos. For my friends who read my blog, my email still stays the same so you can always drop me a line and my phone number has changed, which can be found as my MSN nick. Update: Some pictures from my India trip. August 02 150+ free software provided by MicrosoftWho knew that Microsoft provides more than 150, quality freeware utilities ? Well, technical evangelist, Blake Handler took the pain to list them all at one place Thanks Blake ! July 30 Stand up for your rightsSometimes you just gotta stand up for your rights. One of my sixth semester courses is being taught by a completely useless professors (yes, I am not gonna name him, but you all who study with me know who he is). His marker turns out to be an even bigger moron. So he marked one of my quizzes and deducts marks for no reason when it was a perfect quiz and i deserved a 100%. After much hunting around, I get hold of him and explain to him that my answers are perfect and i DESERVE 100% marks. Very casually, chewing an apple, he goes through my quiz for 5 minutes and mumbles something and finally says "Ok, i wil give you full marks." The damn guy had no arguements whatsoever to justify his actions. I am sure he must have done something similar in marking my previous quizzes but it was about time i stood up and asked for something i deserved. That 1.5 out of 20 i gained is very trivial and will probably account for a 0.54% increase in my final grade, but what matters is that I was wronged (and most of the students are suffering that course just like me) but someone ought to stand up and say something.
I havent blogged for a very long time becasue of extreme pressure due to studies. Final exams starting on 1st August and then I make a short and sweet 2 week trip to Motherland. Can't wait for that...its a special trip this time, for reasons that are very obvious for those who know me
 .See you all on the other side of the exams.  June 27 Fear Factor gives wrong infoOn tonight's Fear Factor, the host was heard saying "Tivo is the only program which allows you to burn your recorded TV program to DVDs". This is so not correct. I have been using Windows XP Media Center edition for quite sometime now and it lets you do this and much more ! For more info check out this link. Get your facts right fear factor ! June 23 Google Maps totally rocks !Google maps beats any mapping service hands down ! Its very easy for a mapping company/service to map a big North American city in 3-d etc etc, but Google has done what no other company has done. It has mapped even the tiny obscure city that i come from. Yes, i can see the roof top of my house in Dehradun, India ! Dont believe me, check it out using Wikimapia Yes, i wont tell you which house it is exactly due to security reasons  June 19 Fear of losing...We all have a fear of losing something in our lives. In all these years, I have met people, different kinds of people. Some fear losing their money, some fear losing their reputation. Some fear gaining weight and some fear losing grades. Some fear losing their fame and some hold their love very close to their life. Everyone fears losing their life.
What do I fear ? Having lost most of the above sometime or the other, I fear losing hope. Hope, something on which the human civillization has survived for thousands of years. June 10 Unquotable QuotesPassed on to us from some of the seniors in DalTech:
Disclaimer - Please Read This booklet contains a collection of Quotes made by Dr. Mo El-Hawary during his lectures on Modern Controls in 2001. Some of them contain great advice, some are rather funny, and some will never be understood by anyone other than Mo himself.
All of Mo's quotes are made in good faith and good fun. If you find some of these quotes offensive, please remember that you do not understand the context in which they were presented. Thank you and enjoy.- Electrical Engineering Society, 2001
"Before solving any problems, you should pray to the Gods of Numerical Errors" "Chances are you had some big fat juicy expressions that you had wrong"
"We need a Mighty Mo problem ... where the hits just keep coming"
"They ask me stupid questions, I give them stupid answers, I collect my paycheck."
"Let Tau = 0.5i.e. the lazy man's way of doing business"
"Poles are like competing ants of different sexes. They want to find zeros"
"Happy ones stay, others go off to New Zealand"
Spivey: "So in reference to my question....."
Mo: "The question is STUPID!" "Since it's 10:10, let's change this to a political class"
"Can I have the next 15 minutes for some sort of coordinated mayhem?"
"So did we kill the class yet? ... ... Good, good"
"Administration rots your mind."
"Dick Dorf [text author] had his head down and was checked into the boards head first"
"Lets try a general problem that I will cork myself out on, quit in disgust and stop teaching."
Wilson: "No ...."
Mo: "NO! YES! What do you mean No? YES! This is a dictatorship" "...forget the word 'Bash' ... If you 'Smash' it,... I do not like violent words 'cause it makes me violent. I haven't bashed a student before."
"Class is over. Why are you so mesmerized?"
"Just in case you were mesmerized and frozen in space, this is a BH curve!"
"This white noise... this humming in the back... that is why people die. As you get older the white noise is amplified and you die""Do you like this book by Perth? Do you know how old he is? 89! Do you know why he's still alive? He's deaf and can't hear the white noise!"
Scott Perry: "What is the root locus?"
Mo: [pause] ... "You appreciate that I'm trying not to tell you to...'RTFB' " "If you keep asking me these questions I'm going to meet my Maker fast!"
"If you are good at Electro-Magnetics Fields you are allowed to have 64 kids."
"I could do this question and after a few drinks and a few puffs, I could come up with an answer ... If I didn't croak."
"Sometimes you need to drink 12 bottles of beer and wake up in a snow-bank."
"Operate in the saturated region and your electronics will die and you'll spend the rest of you're life in jail."
"Get harmonics and miserable things happen to everything, but this is a practical thing and we aren't supposed to teach practical things."
"Give a complex number to a monkey and say 'Man, he looks like a monkey' and ask him to plot it. Then as t --> infinity, the monkey evolves into Mo El-Hawary and he will plot..."
"If your dearly beloved gets mad at you, you don't go get drunk. You just get a transfer function, plug-in 0.01, 0.02 ... and eventually she'll think you're crazy and come back."
"Nyquist discovered that everything he loves in life lies at the (-1, 0 ) point."
" ... someone smart, but he died anyway."
"Even if you open your mouth and plug your nose, you still wouldn't understand it."
"I'll bet you money to donuts."
"I've been doing this nonsense for 38 years."
"Get oscillations in your system and before you know it you'll have nuts coming down from heaven."
"... we could peal it and fry it and call it French fries or we could bake it and mash it and call it mashed potatoes.." [regarding sensitivity equations]
"It's 1:59 and all we've done is raise an old man's blood pressure."
"It's called 'Matta Proffessori' (death of the professor)"
"The negative sign in an OpAmp equation perplexed my generation"
"You take delight in torturing yourselves... you love it! That's why you are engineers!"
"Don't crack your knuckles! Only Arabs crack their knuckles"
"Back in the day it was the 'natural' thing to crack knuckles. People almost died!"
"Every time I try to think I frown."
"Everyone and their dogs were researching rockets."
"Three hour after breakfast you start sliding to the right-hand side of the s-plane and have to grab some food to stabilize yourself."
"It feels really good to sit by the beach and copy equations."
"A horse is just a donkey with feedback."
"Negative feedback is your level of agitation."
"Chapter 5 is about how mentally stable you are"
"You'll get crazy thoughts and talk to yourself and go koo-koo."
"With feedback you can sleep without drinking."
"Mortal humans can't measure outputs."
"All pigs are equal, but in the end the horse gets shot."
"Why can't I just teach them all these things about controls."
"Don't give me that hoodoo" [Johnny Cash lyrics] " You know?...the stuff about the guy who had his wife run away with his goat and all that nonsense."
Mo: "You should get yourself a beach umbrella."
Heckler (Scott Perry): "We are.. next Thursday." Mo: "Are you going to wear a bikini too!?" Heckler: "I already did!" Mo: "Let's have a show! Mo: "I should show you my pictures!" "Don't die when you are 93. Nobody will come to your funeral ... ... Your 120 year old wife would kill you first" "This is the paper world! Not the real world!"
"This is going to drive the old man koo-koo"
"Don't swallow without chewing cause I don't want any dead people in class."
"This big baby is a 300-pound gorilla!" [referring to an assignment problem]
"In my time they would hang you if you ever broke a tryristor."
"Let's Laplace transform this big baby!"
"I was asleep and the cat meowed. That meow is a unit step."
"After 5 time constants the seagull converges on the fish."
"A rowing team facing each other is as stupid as a positive disturbance."
"This problem is going to hurt."
"Parking lot attendant during the tutorial is not a valid part-time job"
"Older people don't want young people to have any fun"
"Doing state variables is like cooking turkey"
"For every turkey there is a Thanksgiving"
"Gamma in greek means 'homosexual'... so don't make fun of peoples' accents."[the letter is pronounced with a 'gra' sound']
"If someone is praying for you, they should pray for your poles to be closer to the origin"
"Old people have larger time-constants."
"Your boss would slap you if you asked to do a no load and short circuit test."
"Everybody is stupid sometimes."
"You minimize mistakes by reducing the number of steps where mistakes are made."
"Stay the course and get the stupid answer. That is the purpose of an engineering education."
"If I'm writing up the exam, I'm being masochistic. If you're writing the exam, I'm being sadistic."
"Oh El-Hawary, you're such a wizard. Now watch the wizard do his wizardly thing."
"The Fourier Transform is just an idiot bouncing up and down."
"If you hear me mumbling in an alien language, I'm just trying to take a derivative."
"When you go unstable, you yell and scream 'till the cops come and shoot you. This happens in Halifax so don't go unstable."
"That was just to distract you from the fact that I have no idea what I'm teaching." June 07 Windows Vista BETA2 public downloadWant to download Windows Vista BETA 2 ? Microsoft is about to make the beta available for public download. The following links are not yet live, but can go live any time now.
English x86 http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/en/x86/download.htm English x64 http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/en/x64/download.htm June 05 Windows XP Media Center Edition keyboard shortcutsI am no expert at Windows XP MCE. To find a expert in that specific field, you can find the guru's blog here. I was looking for a list of keyboard shortcuts to use when i am next to the PC and experiencing the 2' eXPerience. I found an awesome list of keyboard shortcuts for the MCE UI here. Enjoy MCE'ing May 27 Things I want to doThere are many exciting things that I have done in my past life; my past life being the good-old days of high school in India. Today I was in the bus and I saw two gorgeous healthy ladies, in their twenties, get onto the bus with fully loaded hiking rucksacks. I am guessing they are on a hitch-hiking tour. This catapulted me back into the past when i used to go hiking in the mighty Himalayas with my best buddy, Pranav. Loaded with camping gear in our backpacks, we would spend an entire week in the deep, un-inhabited himalayan terrains, sometimes reaching heights of 17,000 feet above sea level. We would be totally dependant on our compasses and good judgement. One wrong turn in the forests could get us lost. Survival was the key and it would bring out the best within us. A week away from the city, with mother nature would teach us humility and give us time to reflect on our lives.
I havent experienced such thrill and adventure for a very long time now. The sight of these two women today triggered something in me today, and now i really want to go hiking again...deep in the great Himalayas far away from human civillisation. May 23 Windows Vista Beta 2 JUST announced !Bill Gates just announced the BETA 2 of Windows Vista at the WinHEC keynote. May 14 Windows Media Player 11I just downloaded Windows Media Pleayer 11 BETA (its not available for public download yet) and i must say that i am loving the slick new interface ! Check out the screenshot:  Click on the image for a higher-res version. May 11 Back in HalifaxWell, there have been quite a few changes in my life since the last time i blogged. My co-op term with Nautel Limited ended on 28th April and they bid me farewell with a cake and a small speech. It was pretty cool to work at Nautel with some very intelligent people. Now i am back in Halifax and i am living on the 20th floor of a very beautiful apartment building in downtown Halifax with a fantastic view. Life has gotten busier now with schools and 6 tough courses. Its great to be back with my friends though.
Also, i acquired a Windows Mobile 5.0 powered smartphone which has made life much more easier and connected for me. More on that in a later blog post. |
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