Microsoft Free World

The Linux computing crowd smells blood and wants to make a run at Microsoft’s Vista operating system.

Coinciding with LinuxWorld, IBM, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, Novell and Red Hat issued a joint statement promising “Microsoft free” desktops across the globe.

Well why I am not sad!!!! Let me tell you why. However user friendly it may look Microsoft Operating Systems never let you see what it's doing behind you. Facing a huge law suit in the EU for not making its source codes public, Microsoft is now coming on record about its code as far back as Windows 98!!!! So much for transparency!!!! So no wonder for the ones who doesn't so much like the very resource hungry OS Vista by Microsoft, the above news may sound like music.

Check out for a detailed update here.

Google Chrome

Once again google does it with its signature simplicity and elegance. Google has come up with its browser what they call "Chrome". I have come across many browsers, but when I tested Chrome, I was very impressed. Outwardly its very spartan in its looks (browsers should be like that, some of them cover half of your screen and you are so dazed with its look you cannot concentrate on the job at hand...which is browsing!!!).

It's still in Beta but two things you all must look out for in Chrome. One, its tabs are independent in a way that one doesn't lead other to crash and two, it runs V8, a high performance Java Script Engine.

Google Chrome is simplicity and efficiency nicely blended together. Highly recommended!!!

How to read Playboy and Penthouse in your computer

Surprisingly, you can read, Playboy, Penthouse, Lonely Planet, Reader's Digest ( all fresh from magazine stand!!!) in your computer over the web. All you need is a functional Internet Connection (preferably Broadband) and Firefox web browser. This is how you do it:

1. In your location bar type "about:config"

2. Enter "useragent" in the filter

3. Change the value for “general.useragent.extra.firefox” to “Mobile Safari 1.1.3″.

4. Open zinio.com/iphone inside browser and start reading.

Oh! don't forget to change back the value to "Firefox/3" or whatever you have. And for the people who have read this so far only for Playboy and Penthouse....pass it on to your spouses or girlfriend/boyfriends too. :) Good day.

MS Office 2007 sucks!!!!

I have a confession. I was never a fan of Microsoft. Microsoft's reach in personal computing is beyond question and for a long time user friendliness and Microsoft had remained synonymous...despite all that, I was never very charmed by Microsoft.

There are many reasons for my being circumspect about Microsoft. One great reason is affordability. Starting from its Operating Systems, office applications and even Chatting tools, Microsoft always charged heavily. It just makes me laugh that MSN, who started the concept of chatting once used to charge!!! And MSN Hotmail free Inbox size was 25 Mb....can you beat that? Thanks to Yahoo and Google...Microsoft is now running after us begging for registration to their Live Space!!! Quite a change of scenario, huh?

Another reason, and that brings us to this post, is lack of transparency. Microsoft's Office Suite ( I have yet to see an office that has all licenced versions of it!!!) or rather its latest version Office 2007 sucks!!!! It's resource hungry and offers nothing that open source programs like Open Office or Star Office don't!!! There is practically no reason why people or even offices will spend through nose to buy MS Office 2007. Naught.

If you are with me up to this, you may be warmly surprised that IBM, the one time looser to Microsoft is fighting back into the office productivity arena. They have started to offer Lotus Symphony which has a feature rich suite that contains word processor, spread sheet and presentation tools that combine all the functionality of Open Office, Star Office and even MS Office. This is a real platform-independent-program with an easy convertibility between .doc and .odt. And another great feature of Lotus Symphony is that you can open instances of word, spread sheet, presentation and even a browser sitting inside the same window and work back and forth in all of them (see picture).

This is from where you download Lotus Symphony absolutely free :