Essential qualities of an athlete

… and relevant to anybody who is a competitive arena - be it career, work, etc. When considering the stature of an athlete or for that matter any person, I set great store in certain qualities which I believe to be essential in addition to skill. They are that the person conducts his or her life with dignity, with integrity, courage, and perhaps most of all, with modesty. These virtues are totally compatible with pride, ambition, and competitiveness.

Why we keep lying to the sales people

Seth Godin puts it quite eloquently: People lie to salesmen all the time. We do it because salespeople have trained us to, and because we’re afraid. … Of course we don’t tell the truth–if we do, we’re often bullied or berated or made to feel dumb. Someone who chooses not to buy from you isn’t stupid. They’re not unable to process ideas logically, nor are they unethical or manipulated by others.

The Pale Blue Dot

The Pale Blue Dot You might need to dust your laptop or desktop monitor to see this one clearly. You see a tiny dot in the photo above? In the middle of that light colored line? That is Earth, how it looks from the edge of the solar system. This famous photograph, that I discovered only today is called the Pale Blue Dot (actually it is the representation of earth in the photo that they are talking about here, but you get my drift).

Ubuntu's ongoing UI meltdown

I kept reading and reading Mark Shuttleworth’s post of how Ubuntu plans to replace menus with something called HUD display. And all I could do is take deep sighs. To summarise, in the new “advanced” Ubuntu releases, instead of clicking the traditional menus, you have to type in a few words in a special screen every time, and select from a drop-down which pops down. 12.04 HUD concept (From Mark’s post)

Ubuntu Oneiric alternate install image is broken

Unbelievable how such a major issue got missed and is, according to the bug status, still not fixed. Thankfully, there is a workaround which worked for me. Just putting it out there so that people can find about this more easily than I did (fume). (Photo by Beate Firlinger)

Creepy data mining by retailers

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

Microsoft's existential threat

Very interesting point made out by this blog post by Patrick Rhone, about how Microsoft’s core business faces an existential threat: MS office on Flickr Microsoft for many years had convinced the world that, in order to get “real work” done, you needed Office. … Then, she explained, the iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done.

Amazing high-def images of Earth from outer space

Flickr has published two amazing high-def photos of earth from one of NASA’s earth observing satellite - Suomi NPP. The photos are created by joining several high def photos and joining them together, as explained here. Most Amazing High Definition Image of Earth - Blue Marble 2012 Eastern Hemisphere - Blue Marble 2012 The original photo on the left of the western hemisphere is available on Flickr with a resolution of 8000x8000 or 64 megapixels!

The Windows bundling racket gets a jolt in France

Finally a victory!. A French laptop buyer has won a refund from Lenovo after a four-year legal battle over the cost of a Windows license he didn’t want. The judgment could open the way for PC buyers elsewhere in Europe to obtain refunds for bundled software they don’t want, French campaign group No More Racketware said Monday. The first sane judgement against the fraud on consumers which has been happening for almost two decades - bundling the Windows OS with all new consumer laptops and desktops.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta on state censorship in India

Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s brilliant article brings out the troubling state of our country today. Everyone utters the platitude that they respect freedom, but they then use the qualifier that no freedom is absolute in the most mendacious way. … In fact, the claim made by politicians that this kind of content (i.e. Twitter, Orkut, Facebook) will lead to violence is insulting doubly over. First, it is just a plain lie to justify censorship.