Tag Archives: google

Google Reader does evil; dumps Opera

One of the most favorite (and cer­tainly my per­sonal favorite) RSS read­ers is Google Reader. In cut-throat com­pe­ti­tion with Blog­lines, Google intro­duced Search func­tion­al­ity in Google Reader yes­ter­day. Read TechCrunch’s take here.
Unfor­tu­nately, this has made Google Reader stop work­ing with my favorite browser, Opera. Here’s how it looks in Opera v9.23:

Now, despite Opera being the most

Can an open GPhone kill the restrictive iPhone?

Imag­ine you buy a car that comes with a 2 year war­ranty on defec­tive parts and 3 free ser­vic­ing trips. But what if those were valid only if you filled fuel from a spec­i­fied provider — say Indian Oil or Shell? Or you buy a DVD player or home the­ater that can only play movies

Yearning for Sense Beyond the Earth

At the start of the day, I was almost sure I was going to write about how the world doesn’t seem like a place that I’m proud to be in.
Depress­ing Scene
The Indian Left wanted India to be Left behind. The Indian Right didn’t know what was Right any­more.
China, a com­mu­nist nation, seeks to achieve a nuclear deal

Techno-Social News Tidbits

Here’s some inter­est­ing news sto­ries from the past few days.
It’s not 42, like Dou­glas Adams thought it would be. It’s 26. BBC reports that research has proved that a Rubik’s cube can be returned to its orig­i­nal state in no more than 26 moves. A super­com­puter took 63 hours to crank out the proof which goes one bet­ter

Spooky Spock

This is the spook­i­est thing I’ve ever seen on the Inter­net yet. A rev­o­lu­tion­ary people-focused search engine, Spock, launched into pub­lic beta today.
About 30% of all search traf­fic is peo­ple related — about 20 bil­lion search queries per month. How is it dif­fer­ent from Google or other main­stream search engines? If you Google “boxer”, you’ll

Photoswap, not Photoshop

Photo edit­ing will never be the same again.
In what has been described as a Google approach to under­stand­ing dig­i­tal pho­tos, researchers at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity have come up with a rad­i­cally inno­v­a­tive idea to add or remove con­tent from dig­i­tal pho­tos. The idea is that if you have enough infor­ma­tion at your hands, you can act

Xerox trumps Google in Natural Language Search

Researchers at Xerox’s Euro­pean R&D Cen­ter have devel­oped a new type of search tech­nol­ogy, called FactSpot­ter, which can han­dle nat­ural human phrases, and search for related results that include syn­onyms and pro­nouns within a doc­u­ment.
“…typ­i­cal search engines dig through only 40% of rel­e­vant doc­u­ments in the course of a search query, sim­ply because the searcher

Pakistan’s Parliament condemns Sir Rushdie’s knighthood

From the Guardian:
Pak­istani law­mak­ers passed a government-backed res­o­lu­tion Mon­day demand­ing Britain with­draw the knight­hood awarded to author Salman Rushdie, con­demn­ing the honor as an insult to the reli­gious sen­ti­ments of Mus­lims.
In the east­ern city of Mul­tan, hard-line Mus­lim stu­dents burned effi­gies of Queen Eliz­a­beth II and Rushdie. About 100 stu­dents car­ry­ing ban­ners con­demn­ing the author

Orkut anti-Shiv Sena community flourishes after recent Sena violence

I had found 270 mem­bers in Orkut’s “I Hate Shiv Sena” com­mu­nity when I wrote about Cher­ish­ing Indian Democ­racy. Today, the same com­mu­nity has 555 mem­bers. In one week, the strength of the com­mu­nity has dou­bled!
This is what’s called the “The Streisand Effect”:
“…has become another vic­tim of the “Streisand effect,” an increas­ingly com­mon back­lash that occurs when some­one tries to muz­zle

Why India Should Not Ban Orkut

A com­ment on my pre­vi­ous post gen­er­ated so many thoughts in response, that I thought it fit to cre­ate another post. Text in ital­ics is from the com­ment on my ear­lier post.
Orkut is thriv­ing on pro­mo­tion of obscen­ity, defama­tion, anti India sen­ti­ments and other ille­gal activ­i­ties.
Orkut thrived in India much before it was used for obscen­ity