by Sujoy on February 5, 2008
Yeah, I know. Yet another half fried post on the entire episode of Microsoft’s bid for the slumping Internet giant Yahoo for a whooping $44.6 billion. Clearly, Microsoft is desperate enough to acquire Yahoo. But amongst all this, the question that remains is, is Google worried? Let’s chase it point by point as to what this deal could bring to the table, if it actually gets finalized. What could a “Microhoo” actually mean?
It means that the 600 million combined user-base of Hotmail (Windows Live Mail) and Yahoo could well be way ahead of what Gmail has. But as Scoble indicates, is there any solid reason for Google to be really worried about this deal? Of course, officials at Google aren’t very happy with the hostile bidding of Microsoft over Yahoo.
David Drummond, Senior VP at Google Inc. writes what this deal could actually churn out if Microsoft continues its legacy of monopolising Operating Systems and Internet Browsers. What if Microsoft loses all business ethics, once it acquires Yahoo, and uses it solely for its good by forcing users to use its Web-Based Services, integrated into Mail, IM, PhotoSharing et al.
The war will still continue with OpenSource technologies adopting everything Google, but this deal is a clear indication of the challenge that Google faces. Clearly, Google with the Android campaign is steering its way towards finding a huge presence or rather dominance in the Mobile World. And with the presence of Web Applications like Google Maps and Youtube, I believe Microsoft even if they acquire Yahoo, will have a long long way to go.And now the second question that emerges is, what if..ahem! Google outbids?
Image Courtesy:johnnie.maneiro
by Sujoy on January 27, 2008
MySpace can be actually termed as the living room of the internet. It is one of the most visited sites across the world, and is still the market leader when it comes to Social Networking. We all know about the irritating scattered layouts with the invisible fonts and the translucent templates. But what was charming about MySpace was, anyone who wasn’t a friend/acquaintance could be denied permissions of having a peek at our private files, ie-photographs. The privacy settings in MySpace were one of the first ones to appear in Social Networking sites, well until Facebook ruined the day. But the party got totaly spoilt with the emergence of many hacks available online, through which pics of even private profiles could be viewable. [Continue Reading]
by Sujoy on January 23, 2008
This one comes in really handy when you design or redesign your site layouts. Specially with so many free WordPress layouts available, it is absolutely mandatory for all bloggers to keep in mind about the end user browsing experience, in terms of the layout being stable (Techkeyla had a few problems-the sidebars had all scrolled down to the bottom, as IE doesn’t believe in resizing the images to fit the width. Had to resize them myself). But then, we cannot install all the possible browsers available and of course, not test them on multiple OS-s as well. Now, here’s the perfect solution to a complicated problem. Browsershots.org. This site enables you to test your site/blog on multiple browsers and their multiple versions available across three OS-s,viz. Linux, Windows and Mac OS. Among the listed browsers are Firefox, Opera, MS IE, Kazehakase, Epiphany, Firebird, Flock, Mozilla, SeaMonkey, Phoenix, Safari, BonEcho, GranParadiso, Galeon, Konqueror, Minefield,K-Meleon and Navigator.Here in the picture above, I tried testing Techkeyla across multiple browsers and it seems to be quite consistent in display. [Continue Reading]
by Sujoy on January 8, 2008
If there was a Technorati-Indian edition, the top keyword search today would be CAT, IIM, CAT RESULTS or IIM CAT. This year, 2 lakh aspirants appeared for the B-School entrance exam. So considering an aspirant would have another 3 concerned people checking for their results (on an average comprising of their mom, dad and boyfriend/girlfriend ), it would total to approximately 8 lakh (800,000) people hitting the results site now as we speak, almost every second since they were officially announced at around 3 PM today (8th of Jan 2008) on the IIM websites. The irony however is the IIM websites cannot handle such traffic, and hence the people who want to check the results end up getting a server error page. This is something that we can term as CAT in a mouse-trap.
Let’s have a check at the technical details of the requirements. The result page needs a Date of Birth and an Exam ID for verification or mapping of the corresponding results. This page would be around 100 KB in size (including say the query data that is being handled to fetch the results), considering it has almost no graphics , and only static content, except for the displayed numbers. Considering 800,000 people accessing it by clicking their mouse buttons on the Submit button simultaneously, the query to fetch the data from the results database and display would definitely be handled by the server. This means a total data of around of approximately 80,000 MB or approximately 80 GB of data is being handled by the servers every second (of course assuming, all the users are hitting the website simultaneously). The question is why the IIMs don’t outsource this task to some third party WebHosting company who can handle this amount of data and bandwidth and avoid the inconvenience caused. Of course, there are other means like SMS alerts for results etc, but to check for the IIM call list, website checking is the only way out. If you already have an account at CAT forums like Pagalguy.com, you’re quite aware of it, else you’ll be surprised at the sheer size of threads that must be running today, with announcement of results. [Continue Reading]
