Mantra to survive in stock market
Mood:  caffeinated
Topic: Around me
Sandeep Shanbag, investment advisor from moneycontrol.com writes a fantastic article, giving tips on how to make the most out of investment.

I didn't knew the real power compounding can play in life, especially in investment, before I read this article.

The big market plunge
Mood:  d'oh
Topic: Around me
After touching the high of 12 K market, the BSE index, dipped below the 11 K figure and managed to settle down at 10,939 (4% loss), after touching a low of 10,799.

The index is down 10.5% in last two trading days and is down 11% during the week.

Apparently the volatility in the international market is taking its toll on the investors at BSE. Really guys .. the stock now needs a brrrrrrrreak.

Gaint of the Sky takes off
Mood:  energetic
Topic: General
Its the gaint of the sky, its the biggest commercial, passenger plane man has ever made. The all new double decker Airbus A380 hit the European skies when it made a test run out of London's Heathrow airport.

The plane has a maximum cruising speed of 660 mph and is considerably more fuel-efficient than all its predecessors.

This super jumbo airliner can carry as many as 840 economy class passengers, that is about one-third more than a Boeing 747 can. It has a wingspan of 50 feet, a little shorter than a cricket pitch, a length equivalent to eight elephants, but looks much squatter and more unsightly than an elephant.

It can also house duty-free shops, hair salons, jacuzzis, lounges, bowling alleys in its galleys -– like a mini flying airport -– depending on how much its future passengers are willing to pay for tickets. WOW what else you need in a flight.

Singapore Airlines plans to be the first commercial airline to use this plane, priced today at $295 million, when it incorporates 10 of them in its fleet later this year.

According to the Airbus site: orders for 159 Airbus 380s have been booked worldwide. Well we do have one Indian in the list as well. Its the Kingfisher Airlines with the order for 5 planes. I am just wondering where Mr. Maliya would park these gaints :)

Spammers win the War !!!
Mood:  sad
Topic: Computers
Spammers have finally managed to demolish one of its major opponent "Blue Security", an Israel based Anti-spam company. Blue Security made a courageous attempt of crackdown on the spammers by pumping back the spams back to the spammers and carrying out denial of service attack on spammer's websites.

Blue Security's operation code named "Blue Frog" got a massive response initially from e-mail users, with many subscribers signing up for the service. But the spammer community, under the leadership of a Russian spammer, retaliated by initially hacking into the Blue security subscriber database and sending target spams to the subscribers. The spams said that, "you have received this mail, because you have signed up for the Blue Security's anti-spam service. However this will cause you to get more spams". The spam mail to the users promised "safe passage" if the subscribers opted out of the Blue Security service.

The spammers didnt want to stop here. They carried out first distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on Blue security website on May 2, took off the database servers and managed to cripple the web servers for some time. This continued till Blue security decided to shutdown its services and made the annoucement in a press release.

As of writing of this blog, the Blue Security website is still offline.

Gartner : Competition and Innovation Will Come From India
Mood:  a-ok
Topic: Computers

Gartner Says Competition and Innovation Will Come From India — The near-term results of Gartner's view will be the assumption that businesses in 2006 are in the midst of implementing the virtual hardware and software technologies, SOAs, location-aware technologies, instant messaging, enterprise information management tools, and business-process focused software.

For IT managers to successfully provide rapid results, they must achieve three basic objectives: Eliminate, Consolidate and Focus. The IT industry is no longer arranged into specific categories. IT is being redefined to a level that has not been seen before. There will be continued consolidation creating super ecosystem vendors while equally resulting in a mushrooming of small, nimble non-conformist vendors. The location of these vendors will not be in existing centers of excellence, such as Silicon Valley. Competition and innovation will come from places such as South Eastern Asia and India.

Will Google and Linux make Microsoft yesterday?s company
Mood:  happy
Topic: Computers

Stan Beer   has some fantastic statistics on how probably Google and Linux can end the dominance of Microsoft in consumer business. This is a repeat of what happened in mid 1980s. History is repeating itself.

” Back in the mid 1980s, it would have been hard to imagine anyone breaking the IT market dominance of the mighty IBM. Big Blue was seven times as big as the number two player. Then along came Microsoft, changed the rules of the game and usurped the throne. Now along comes Google and the open source movement and the rules have changed again. In an era of open source, web services, wireless connnectivity and converged  communications, can Microsoft maintain its market grip going forward?  “

Linux zombies
Mood:  caffeinated
Topic: Computers

Richard Stiennon over at ZDNet describes a new trend in Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks that involve Linux machines. In one specific case discussed, a hacker used a common PHP misconfiguration to take over Linux systems and then proceeded to launch a DDoS attack.

The issue can be serious, Stiennon says, because Linux machines that are compromised are normally servers on high-bandwidth internet circuits, unlike the home or computer lab systems that are traditionally part of DDoS networks.

We Indians
Mood:  surprised
Topic: General
Summer time, Temperature : 88?F feels like 94?F, working on a heated metal pole in midst of a high traffic road, with out support or protection !!!. Indians can work in any conditions

Google exploring new search technique
Mood:  a-ok
Topic: Computers

Google has launched a new search project with an Australian university student, designed to let people view more information per search result without having to click open every link.

Ori Allon, a doctoral student at the University of New South Wales, was recently hired by Google to continue developing his Orion search engine, according to a university representative.

"Ori is an employee of Google, but this is still a university project," the representative noted, adding that Allon works out of the company's California office.

Orion aims to take a keyword and find pages most closely related to the topic and then deliver a portion of that particular page.

"The results to the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving you the relevant information without having to go to the Web site--although you still have that option if you wish," Allon said in a previous statement about his technology.

He cited an example of the keyword phrase "American Revolution." The search would not only provide extracts with the phrase, but also additional information on topics such as American history, George Washington and the Declaration of Independence.

IBM to dump Microsoft
Mood:  happy
Topic: Computers
A story on p2p.net reports that, IBM has cancelled its contract with Microsoft as of October this year  and will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July,  IBM employees will begin using IBM Workplace on their new, Red Hat-based  platform. Not all at once - some will keep using their present Windows versions for a while. But none will upgrade to Vista.

Also in another development IBM has been internally wanting to run Lotus notes on Linux for some time now and they might do it pretty soon by porting their C++ code using the new Workspace Client, built in Java on top of Eclipse and its speculated that they would start offering it to their customers as well.