Ravi’s Rants

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.” - Aristotle

What could you possibly excel at, simply by doing it consistently, repeatedly, and persistently?

“I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for perfection is God’s business.” - Michael J. Fox

From the Wikipedia:

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol. The protocol was originally designed and created by programmer Bram Cohen, and is now maintained by BitTorrent, Inc.

BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the whole of the corresponding costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources. Instead of the distributor alone servicing each recipient, under BitTorrent the recipients each also supply data to newer recipients, thus significantly reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source as well as providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence upon the original distributor.

From AP: BitTorrent to Launch Movie, TV Downloads

Bram Cohen on the BitTorrent Entertainment Network

BitTorrent main site

So is this the start of yet another monopoly?

Why hasn’t anyone else gotten into this? It’s not like there are major infrastructure setup pains involved - just buy a darn satellite and start broadcasting - it’s not like it’s hard to do for someone with a lot of cash and people - something that matches all media companies!

Content is the big challenge of course. So any of the big guys with content, could easily started a satellite radio service. So why hasn’t anyone done it?

When are they going to make it easy for you and me to start our own radio stations? Oh wait, we can do that already ….

Ok, now I get it. It is because On-broadcast (push) radio cannot compete with On-demand (pull) radio.

The consumer wins, after all.

Found this article about Sergey Brin - it covers everything from Sergey’s casual attire at work, to his electric massage chair, to his Russian-Jewish upbringing. Even if you don’t like Google or Sergey, you simply cannot pass up on reading about the founders of one of the largest corporations in the world.

Some highlights from the article…

• A typical workday finds him in jeans, sneakers and a fitted black T-shirt
• Sergey and Larry share the title of president
• Google’s workers enjoy such family-friendly perks as three free meals a day, free home food delivery for new parents, designated private spaces for nursing mothers, and full on-site medical care, all of which recently led Fortune magazine to rank the company as the #1 place to work in the country
• Dad: Michael, 59, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland; Mom: Eugenia, 58, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
• They had to leave Russia due to anti-semitism. For many Soviet Jews, exit visas never came. But, in May 1979, the Brins were granted papers to leave the U.S.S.R. They were among the last Jews allowed to leave until the Gorbachev era.
• At Stanford, he was known for his habit of bursting in on professors without knocking.
• His father once remarked, “I asked him if he was taking any advanced courses, and he said, ‘yes, advanced swimming.’”
• In the spring of 1995, during a prospective student weekend, Sergey met an opinionated computer science student from the University of Michigan named Larry Page. They talked and argued over the course of two days, each finding the other cocky and obnoxious. They also formed an instant connection, relishing the intellectual combat.
• Larry and Sergey shopped (Google) around to various companies for the price of $1 million. No one was interested.
• Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim (himself a Jewish immigrant from Germany) wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist—the company hadn’t yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money.
• He shops at Costco
• Finally, “Don’t Be Evil.”

Enjoy The Story of Sergey Brin

- Ravi Jayagopal / LinkOverLoad.com

As a follow-up to my original lusty iPhone rant, I decided to scour the web for a closer look at the iPhone.

The hype is dying. Real people have used it, some have heard about real people using it, but everyone definitely has something to say about it. So go on and see if you can cut through the hype yourself.

Here come the critics:
Between Scoble and Kidrosky, they’ve got a few valid points:

From Paul Kidrosky:

1) The touchpad. How do you operate a touchphone in your pocket, or under a table by feel at a meeting? You scoff, but you’d be amazed how often that is how business emailing happens. …
2) The closed system. Is Apple serious that it won’t let third-party developers build software for the thing? If so, and put simply, the device will fail. A closed-box consumer electronics mentality will work in music players, but the future of mobile devices is as a platform, and that requires…
3) The Cingular relationship. While every wireless carrier has its haters, Cingular has more than most (both for its service and for its Edge network). Tying up exclusively to Cingular forces some of the loudest among the digerati to wait for an unlocked iPhone before they can begin touting …
….

From Robert Scoble

6) Battery is only up to five hours and is not replaceable (if you play video). …. Watch a video and your battery is dead. Now your cell phone is dead too. So, you won’t want to watch a video on a plane flight with this thing like you would with your iPod.
7) It’s Cingular only and GSM. That automatically keeps more than half of Americans from considering this and for the rest of the world? They are laughing about the iPhone now.
8) The camera sucks. It’s a 2megapixel device without flash, without zoom. Nokia’s newest cameras…
9) No GPS. …

From Seth Godin: Inventing a new cell phone

Here’s a few things a reinvented cellphone might be able to do:

* Let me leave voice mail for groups of people all at once.
* Let me initiate conference calls with groups of people with just one directory entry.
* Let me call friends based on where they are at a given moment.

iPhone trashed by Robert Scoble and others:

Comedy: iPhone being used as a universal device - for doing, er, everything!

Two nerds:

iPhone quick demo:

Steve Jobs presenting a closer look at iPhone:

More links:

Pogue’s Posts: The Ultimate iPhone Frequently Asked Questions

From Engadget

The Uber Geeks: iPhone misconceptions corrected

- Ravi Jayagopal

What would happen if Microsoft were to design the iPod packaging?

Really witty, self-deprecating video, apparently made by ….. Microsoft employees!

- Ravi Jayagopal

The machine is us…

Digital Text is no longer just linking information…

HyperText is no longer just linking information…

The Web is no longer just linking information…

The Web is linking people….

Check out the oldest domains ever registered.

It’s very easy to see the long-term big guns here. See if you recognize the others.

Here’s the full list.

Ravi Jayagopal / CheapDomains.ws

Check out Steve Ballmer’s modest office.

What is it with corporate executives playing golf within the office? Are you somehow cool for being unprofessional and playing a game while someone’s trying to talk business with you? I just don’t get it. Let me know if you do.

- Ravi Jayagopal / LinkOverLoad.com

Everytime I come across a cool Firefox plug-in, I want to install it and use it right away.

This is even more true when I want to perform a task (like, say, grab the color code of a cool looking color from a web site), then search if a Firefox plugin exists to do that, find one, and then install it.

I almost always have at least 10 different browser windows open, with many of them having more than one active tab. So, unless I close all open browser windows (and tabs), and re-open Firefox again, I can’t get to use my newly installed plug-in.

So, here’s a cool trick that I came up with, that you can use to install a plug-in, and still get back to where you were, without losing track of the sites that you had open.

• Do just one of the following to get to the Task Manager:
  

  Press “Ctrl + Shift + Esc” to get the “Task Manager”
  - OR -
  Do a right-click on your task bar, and select “Task Manager”
  - OR -
  Press “Ctrl + Alt + Delete” and then select “Task Manager”

• From the “Process” tab, select “Firefox” (just click on any item first, and then keep pressing the “F” key till you get to “Firefox”
• Click on “End Process”, which will immediately and forcefully close all open Firefox tabs and windows, but worry not.
• Launch Firefox now and you will be asked if you want to restore the “crashed” session (see image below)
  
• Click on the “Restore Session” button
• Gwala - all previously open Firefox tabs and windows will re-open one by one (you may have to log back into some sites that don’t use sessions to remember your login)

So, you can now use your newly installed Firefox plug-in, and you also didn’t lose any open windows.

Enjoy.

- Ravi Jayagopal / LinkOverLoad.com