Ever heard this cuuuute song--Cuppy Cake

See the video of this song here

"You're my Honeybunch, Sugarplum
Pumpy-umpy-umpkin, You're my Sweetie Pie
You're my Cuppycake, Gumdrop
Snoogums-Boogums, You're the Apple of my Eye

And I love you so and I want you to know
That I'll always be right here
And I love to sing sweet songs to you
Because you are so dear"

ReactOS---Finally, a FOSS operating system for everyone!

This project doesnt seem to be dead....hope they revive it.

"The ReactOS® project is dedicated to making Free Software available to everyone by providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows® XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface.

Although Free Software advocates agree that free software operating systems improve the state of the art by fostering competition, ReactOS has practical benefit for others, too; ReactOS is the most complete working model of a Windows® like operating system available. Consequently, working programmers will learn a great deal by studying ReactOS source code and even participating in ReactOS development.

ReactOS components are growing more and more compatibile with equivalent, closed source alternatives, but ReactOS doesn't simply stop at an arbitrary line in the sand. ReactOS has and will continue to incorporate new versions of the Win32 API and so will track and sometimes even define the state of the art in operating system technology. Rather than using current technology as a limit on our activities, we are constantly incorporating features from newer versions as well.

In short, ReactOS is aiming to run your applications and use your hardware! Finally, a FOSS operating system for everyone!"

Why people buy Windows????

I came across an article "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson.

It tells you why people still buy windows........

Read this :

Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.

There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.

Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.

Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.

On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.

One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.

Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.

The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it's a fringe player.

The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"

Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"

Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"

Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."

Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"

Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"

Bullhorn: "But..."

Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"

The Rediff Interview/Sabeer Bhatia, Hotmail founder

The Rediff Interview/Sabeer Bhatia, Hotmail founder

What India's IT biggies are not doing

Sunil Jain | March 14, 2006

Sabeer Bhatia's on a roll. After a year or two of thinking he'd arrived once he'd sold Hotmail to Microsoft, and getting bored of the holidaying (in the south of France, in India. . .) and the fine life, and a project that didn't take off, he's back in the thick of things.

He's just launched a new toolbar that, evangelically, he tries to convince you is the best thing since, well, Hotmail; bombed e-commerce venture Aarzoo's going to be relaunched as a travel portal, but driven extensively by SMS and his Telixo venture that he hopes is also near takeoff, and he's thinking, as we savour some subtle bass, of launching a new peer-to-peer email service, writes Business Standard

Bhatia's a few minutes late since finding Ploof, one of the finest seafood restaurants in Delhi isn't easy, tucked away as it is in the soon-to-be-fashionable Lodhi Colony market (now that the Manish Aroras and A&Ts are setting up shop here).

He's floored by its high ceilings and old-world ambience. After a few moments of being polite and going along with what I recommend (red snapper and lobster), he decides he doesn't want lobster since it is very high in cholesterol, Bhatia rapidscans the menu and we order fillet of sea-bass and a Kerala fish curry, with some Mediterranean vegetables as a starter.

What's so special about this toolbar, I ask, in part as the news reports about it are sketchy and in part to get a conversation going once Bhatia's unsuccessfully asked the restaurant staff to get the construction workers next door to stop banging around for an hour.

His composure intact, Bhatia explains just how different his blogger-kit on the toolbar is from, say, Blogspot.

There are, it appears, 27.2 million blogs in the world as we speak, of which Bhatia reckons, rightly, at least 26.9 million don't have any readers. What he's doing is to give users a better chance to have their works read. By creating a parallel page of sorts, you get to blog about a particular page you've just visited.

So, on a Sony handicam site, you can blog what you think about the handicam, and Sony cannot edit you out since it has no control over the toolbar -- naturally, any one going to the handicam site will want to know what user reactions are and, hey presto, you're being read now!

There are other interesting functions to the toolbar, but what I want to know is how the KPIT Cummins software engineers who've developed this compare with, say, the US engineers who helped develop Aarzoo.

They're top-class and a lot cheaper, Bhatia begins with the standard spiel, but quickly gets down to, as anyone whose lived so long in the US would, what's wrong, and why. The biggest issue he faced was the attitude -- "Tell us what you want done and we'll do it."

He had to get them to be creative, to think on their own, add the bells and whistles -- and tell them that the next time he was addressed as "sir," they'd get fired. Part of it has to do with schooling, he reckons, and part to do with a society that's so structured.

When he'd gone to Caltech, Bhatia recalls, he'd just submitted his paper after reading up the four books prescribed for that particular course in philosophy, and he got a "D," his first ever "D".

Why, he asked, since he'd read all the books and dutifully cited them in abundance -- "that's the Indian way," he explains to me. I've read them, too, is what his Caltech professor told him, what have you done to add to that body of knowledge?

That, Bhatia says, is the big difference between Indian and US education. But, a few months of re-orientation and, he says, his Indian developers are on a par with those in the US.

The next subject of his ire are Indian software biggies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, the lot. Here he is putting in tens of millions of dollars of his own money to develop, in India, a product in the consumer space, and they're doing nothing but what he says is just labour arbitrage.

What about i-flex from Citibank and finacle from Infosys, I ask?

They've all emerged from the work the companies have been doing for clients, and what are they worth, Bhatia scoffs, and before I answer, $300 million is the answer he ventures, talking of i-flex's revenues instead of market cap.

"If we're successful, the toolbar has the potential of being a 10-, 20-, 30-billion dollar company," he says, by way of contrast.

He's not finished yet. "Companies like TCS are sitting on piles of cash, but they're not investing it in R&D, in products that will have no revenue stream for three to four years. . ."

Rounding errors. The kind of money he's investing, Bhatia says, is what India's software biggies will lose in rounding errors, but they're not investing -- and that's why they have no product in the consumer space that should be giving nightmares to companies like Microsoft and Oracle and even Google. His is the first product in the consumer space that's developed in India.

Part of the problem, he admits, has to do with big companies, but you have people like Steve Jobs who've proved big firms can innovate as well. When Jobs came back, he recalls, Michael Dell's advice was that he liquidate the firm and hand back the cash to investors -- at that time Apple had $6 billion in cash and $4 billion market cap. Well, Jobs created an MP3 player when there were already 50 in the market, and Apple's market cap is today bigger than Dell's!

But even US VCs in India are constantly looking for revenue models, I say, so that automatically limits innovation.

"They're Indians living in America, not Americans," is the reply, "and they're looking to make a quick buck . . . one VC has invested in a public limited company! I don't have a revenue model today, but the best piece of real estate is a toolbar and I'm aiming to own that -- the revenue just has to follow."

I ask Bhatia to demonstrate how his Telixo (telecom extreme organiser) works. Bhatia pulls out his ordinary Nokia phone, puts in his US chip and decides to find his friend Ajay Madhok's number. So, he SMSes .con (as in contact) Ajay Madhok and within 10 seconds, he's got an SMS with the number.

He does the same -- .not (as in note) Passport, and the passport details are with us! The idea, he says, is to be able to get any data that's on your Outlook to the phone without having to buy a fancy phone. Spice Telecom is already offering this service.

I end by trying to get him to talk about his personal life -- he's run the full marathon twice and is an outdoors person, but it's more the Aishwarya Rai story I'm interested in. "No, I'm not married yet . . . I will at some point, but such (business) opportunities don't come all the time," he says, anticipating where I'm going. I back off.