Have you noticed something? If you are logged in Orkut, you will have problems logging in Talk.. Its gets all confused and changes your display name a couple of times and even disconnects. I don't know about other connections, but it takes ages to sign in with my Airtel Mobile office connection... well much longer than Windows Live or Yahoo! Messenger.
Gmail has also become a slow recently. I know a couple of guys who have left GMail for some other provider.
Not something you would expect from Google. What's going on?
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Friday, December 8, 2006
oops.. sorry
Now that's a shocker.. Check out what i read in Slashdot today..
VOIP to be Made Illegal in India.
That's surprising.. I can swear I read the news of Yahoo and BSNL starting VOIP(read the previous post).
what is going on??
VOIP to be Made Illegal in India.
That's surprising.. I can swear I read the news of Yahoo and BSNL starting VOIP(read the previous post).
what is going on??
Sunday, December 3, 2006
VOIP in India
Well.. it seems Google's idea to integrate Google talk in Orkut is finally working. I never used to use Talk regularly before as most of my friends use MSN. But now, there are usually 4-5 people online on my Talk account at any given time. So Talk is finally gaining ground as an IM and VOIP platform.. but lets look what else is going on..
Yahoo! may have allowed users to add friends from MSN to their list but there was something more interesting in the news yesterday. Yahoo! has got permission to start providing VOIP services in India. BSNL, the PSU telecom provider is planning to VOIP calls to USA for as low as Rs 1.5 a minute.. which is the same roughly rate for calling a landline number from a mobile phone! AOL was also in the news recently as they are also planning to start IM and VOIP services in India in a big way.
So.. death of the landline phone? lets wait and see.
Yahoo! may have allowed users to add friends from MSN to their list but there was something more interesting in the news yesterday. Yahoo! has got permission to start providing VOIP services in India. BSNL, the PSU telecom provider is planning to VOIP calls to USA for as low as Rs 1.5 a minute.. which is the same roughly rate for calling a landline number from a mobile phone! AOL was also in the news recently as they are also planning to start IM and VOIP services in India in a big way.
So.. death of the landline phone? lets wait and see.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
(mis)use of technolgy (old post)
As you may have noticed, all my websites (except this blog) are offline… thanks to the fact that both the free hosting providers I was using have stopped providing free hosting. Really.. it isn’t a big problem for me any more. I am thinking of integrating the pages of my website munim.be in this blog and forget about the other sites. But I am not going to talk about that.. I am going to talk about why StoneRocket and Xeeblo have stopped free hosting.
You see.. this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Infact, it has happened THREE times. I make a nice website and upload it… and then after a few months, the host decides to stop free hosting. They say that they couldn’t financially support the servers. Unfortunately for them, the idea of their members visiting their forums regularly and clicking the PPC ads(read google adsense) didn’t quite work out as expected. That was their only source of income. They didn’t force any ads on their members websites. Its kinda sad really… the members who really used the hosting services provided were the ones who hardly participated in the forums(in most cases, if not all) and they were the ones who the first to complain if anything wrong happened.
But in the case of Xeeblo, something else happened. They weren’t short of money.. It seems many users had violated the Terms of Usage and had used their server space illegally. Infact, Xeeblo’s had recieved complaints from their server hosting provider about this. Xeeblo sent mails to their users and posted messages in the forum which of course didn’t help.. and finally they had to back down and stop free hosting. Someone is kind enough to give quality free hosting and people misuse it.. sad.
Something else happened in the case of Stonerocket. First of all, it started out with server overload which slowed down things a bit. A couple of members who never visit the forums start complaining loudly. The admins solved the problems in most of the cases.. and even decided to get a new server. Then their server was attacked which halted hosting for a few days. After hosting for restored, the admins quickly shifted paid accounts and moderator accounts to a different server. Things improved a lot.. but that didn’t stop the complaints and abuses. Some idiots actually wrote emails to the admin ranting about the hosting.. when nothing was wrong. I was one of the staff members in the forum and admin had posted a very touching message.. He was spending cash and time to provide free hosting to the members and all they could do was just complain. Finally he decided to put an end to it by stopping free hosting. Stonerocket still provides paid hosting and has a couple of projects at hand.
My point is why do people misuse something which is otherwise a great service or product? Even email: it started out as a great idea… but thanks to SPAMMERS, about half of the mail most people get is just unwanted junk.
Internet: Great powerful tool… but now you have problems like phishing, sites with fake information, pornography, scams.. not to mention the fact that most viruses spread through the internet. Now, an internet connection is actually considered as a threat or a liability in a network or an organisation, when it should be considered as a resource. Now internet is maybe the biggest problem to movie studios, musicians, software firms, etc.. thanks to rampant piracy.
Even search engines: Started out as a tool to search and find websites.. but it got somehow confused with advertising and SEO scams.
The list is endless.. networks, SMS, bluetooth, wifi, and even blogs.
It seems the next release of Windows (vista) will mainly concentrate on security of the computer agaisnt viruses, hackers, worms, etc. I mean.. just compare the speed of a computer with antivirus, antispyware, firewall.. the lot, with a computer with no such tools. If there were no such threats, all this computing power could be put to more productive use like better user interface, faster applications, more applications running together and so on.
Just imagine what it would have been like if no one would have thought of misusing anything. A world without spam, system clogging antivirus software.. Think about it.
You see.. this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Infact, it has happened THREE times. I make a nice website and upload it… and then after a few months, the host decides to stop free hosting. They say that they couldn’t financially support the servers. Unfortunately for them, the idea of their members visiting their forums regularly and clicking the PPC ads(read google adsense) didn’t quite work out as expected. That was their only source of income. They didn’t force any ads on their members websites. Its kinda sad really… the members who really used the hosting services provided were the ones who hardly participated in the forums(in most cases, if not all) and they were the ones who the first to complain if anything wrong happened.
But in the case of Xeeblo, something else happened. They weren’t short of money.. It seems many users had violated the Terms of Usage and had used their server space illegally. Infact, Xeeblo’s had recieved complaints from their server hosting provider about this. Xeeblo sent mails to their users and posted messages in the forum which of course didn’t help.. and finally they had to back down and stop free hosting. Someone is kind enough to give quality free hosting and people misuse it.. sad.
Something else happened in the case of Stonerocket. First of all, it started out with server overload which slowed down things a bit. A couple of members who never visit the forums start complaining loudly. The admins solved the problems in most of the cases.. and even decided to get a new server. Then their server was attacked which halted hosting for a few days. After hosting for restored, the admins quickly shifted paid accounts and moderator accounts to a different server. Things improved a lot.. but that didn’t stop the complaints and abuses. Some idiots actually wrote emails to the admin ranting about the hosting.. when nothing was wrong. I was one of the staff members in the forum and admin had posted a very touching message.. He was spending cash and time to provide free hosting to the members and all they could do was just complain. Finally he decided to put an end to it by stopping free hosting. Stonerocket still provides paid hosting and has a couple of projects at hand.
My point is why do people misuse something which is otherwise a great service or product? Even email: it started out as a great idea… but thanks to SPAMMERS, about half of the mail most people get is just unwanted junk.
Internet: Great powerful tool… but now you have problems like phishing, sites with fake information, pornography, scams.. not to mention the fact that most viruses spread through the internet. Now, an internet connection is actually considered as a threat or a liability in a network or an organisation, when it should be considered as a resource. Now internet is maybe the biggest problem to movie studios, musicians, software firms, etc.. thanks to rampant piracy.
Even search engines: Started out as a tool to search and find websites.. but it got somehow confused with advertising and SEO scams.
The list is endless.. networks, SMS, bluetooth, wifi, and even blogs.
It seems the next release of Windows (vista) will mainly concentrate on security of the computer agaisnt viruses, hackers, worms, etc. I mean.. just compare the speed of a computer with antivirus, antispyware, firewall.. the lot, with a computer with no such tools. If there were no such threats, all this computing power could be put to more productive use like better user interface, faster applications, more applications running together and so on.
Just imagine what it would have been like if no one would have thought of misusing anything. A world without spam, system clogging antivirus software.. Think about it.
GMail labels
Some of my friends still use email services other than GMail. I offered to send them invitations but they said they don't want to use GMail as it doesn't support "folders".
While it is true that GMail doesn't allow you to organize your mail in folders, it has a much more flexible and powerful feature, namely "labels".
The basic difference between filters and folders is: while a message can only reside in one folder, it can have more than one labels. Also a labelled message can exist in the inbox or the "All Mail" section, which contains all the emails, new and archived.
This in itself is pretty good.. but if you couple this with email filters, you get a powerful email sorting and organising system.
For example, I have created a filter which labels all emails with "slashdot" in the from field to the "slashdot" label, and I have also specified that these mails should be automatically archived(they must not appear in the inbox). So now, I can read all my slashdot newsletters by clicking on the "slashdot" label in the labels section. I can even use "label:" as a search attribute, as in google's advanced search options.
Another example: Sometimes I get very irritated when my friends email me "forwards"(hint hint ). So I have created a filter which automatically archives and applies the "forwards" label to all mails with "fw" or "fwd" in the subject line! This is very convienient for me as I can check my inbox for any useful emails, and I can always check the "forwards" filter when I am bored and to check if there is something interesting.
Another prominent feature that GMail has is free POP access. Other web based email providers usually charge a fee for POP access.I have also noted that the GMail spam filter is much more effective than Yahoo Mail (well.. in my observations!)
"GMail for your domain" is a new service launched by Google, where you can use GMail as the mail handler for your domain names. For example, if you have a website with a domain name as "mycompany.com", you can setup a GMail account to send and recieve emails from "me@mycompany.com". This is very useful as GMail's 2.7 gb(and increasing!) storage and features make it a good option for professional users who don't get similar facilities from their web host.
While it is true that GMail doesn't allow you to organize your mail in folders, it has a much more flexible and powerful feature, namely "labels".
The basic difference between filters and folders is: while a message can only reside in one folder, it can have more than one labels. Also a labelled message can exist in the inbox or the "All Mail" section, which contains all the emails, new and archived.
This in itself is pretty good.. but if you couple this with email filters, you get a powerful email sorting and organising system.
For example, I have created a filter which labels all emails with "slashdot" in the from field to the "slashdot" label, and I have also specified that these mails should be automatically archived(they must not appear in the inbox). So now, I can read all my slashdot newsletters by clicking on the "slashdot" label in the labels section. I can even use "label:" as a search attribute, as in google's advanced search options.
Another example: Sometimes I get very irritated when my friends email me "forwards"(hint hint ). So I have created a filter which automatically archives and applies the "forwards" label to all mails with "fw" or "fwd" in the subject line! This is very convienient for me as I can check my inbox for any useful emails, and I can always check the "forwards" filter when I am bored and to check if there is something interesting.
Another prominent feature that GMail has is free POP access. Other web based email providers usually charge a fee for POP access.I have also noted that the GMail spam filter is much more effective than Yahoo Mail (well.. in my observations!)
"GMail for your domain" is a new service launched by Google, where you can use GMail as the mail handler for your domain names. For example, if you have a website with a domain name as "mycompany.com", you can setup a GMail account to send and recieve emails from "me@mycompany.com". This is very useful as GMail's 2.7 gb(and increasing!) storage and features make it a good option for professional users who don't get similar facilities from their web host.
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