Vinod Khosla has started Blogging recently. If you haven’t seen this already, check out his blog and his views on oil. Its a good perspective on how the oil companies are lobbying to continue to stay in power and how the whole world is centered around oil, and what the future of oil could look like.

 The 2006 US open championship increases Roger Federer’s tally to 9. I had almost no doubt that he was going to add this one to his cap of feathers, the only question was if it would take 3 or 4 sets to take down Roddick. Over the last 3 years, he has been a class apart from the rest, more than any sportsmen in any other sport. Some comparable names include Don Bradman  (99.94 average), Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods
(incredible domination until Vijay Singh showed up), Michael Jordan (Magic Johnson, Wilt Chamberlain etc come pretty close), Michael Schumacher (Ayrton Senna wasn’t far away), Jahangir Khan and Jansher Khan

Federer will probably break all tennis records ever set (except maybe the fastest serve or number of aces in match, he will probably leave that to mere mortals  ) and set new ones that won’t be broken in a long long time, like Pete Sampras’s 14 Grand Slam records or winning all 4 in a single year. Winning 9 Grand Slams while just 25 should say of what his man is made of. And most of all, his humbleness adds to his greatness. 

Another few years of such dominance, and he will be the greatest sportsperson any sport has ever seen.

According to Interbrand, Microsoft is now the second most valuable brand name in the world, next only to Coca-Cola. Check out the top 100 list for the year. Eligibility criteria to be even being considered to make the list, includes things like having a third of the earnings outside the US, and being recognizable outside its customer base. Brands like VISA, Walmart etc… did not qualify due to some of these reasons.

This is a surpising news. The House of Representatives have passed an act with an overwhelming majority asking Social Networking sites to be banned from federeal institutions in the US that have received funding for computers and net access via the US E-Rate scheme - primarily schools and libraries. Around two-thirds of US libraries apparently receive this funding. While I truly support the primary cause behind this act, I don’t think this is the right way to approach this problem. Putting this act into place would potentially mean sites likes MSN Spaces, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, and even sites like Digg and other blogging sites making it to the hit list.  The FCC will come up with a definition of what qualifies as a Social Networking Site.

There are a number of reasons as to why this is not the correct solution.

• This does not totally prevent children from accessing these sites.
• There are going to be a ton of sites that does not make this list.
• Not all institutions are a part of this ban.

Online Bank Fraud is a big problem in the US. To fix this problem you wouldn’t ban online banking features altogether.  Email Spam is another nagging issue. You wouldn’t ban email to fix this problem. While neither of these examples wouldn’t compare very well to problem at hand, we need to find a better way to fix the issue rather than just ban these sites. One way to do this will be at the website level, by coming up with a way to make sure whether the user signing up is an adult or a minor. The web services can then decide what content to serve to the user. Although this is possible in theory, it could prove hard to execute, and also will share some of the loopholes that banning websites have.

A better solution could be to do this at browser level instead of at the website level. Getting better parental controls into the browser and force-update such features into existing browsers already out there, without which it will be impossible to visit these sites.

It will be interesting to see how various companies react to this issue, particularly when its going to hit them from a business standpoint.

Almost a month since my last post. Lots of interesting things have happened since.

Gaurav and Ashish were here in Seattle just before the long weekend. It was great catching up with things, talking about old stories.

A bunch of us went down to Yellowstone on the long weekend for 4 days. It was a lot of fun. Took Gigs of pictures. I am still in the process of sorting and touching the pictures but I have uploaded a few of them on my MSN Space. I realized that sharing pictures is still a pain, and a lot of work needs to be done in this area. Almost all photo sharing services comprimise on quality. While its still OK with today’s technology, this is one area that needs a lot of improvement, especially with 7 MP camera phones lurking in the market for over an year now and the median MegaPixel ranges for digital cameras are already in the 5-8 MP range.

The Soccer World Cup, the biggest sporting event of the year just got over.  Argentina was my pick, though I felt they were a bit unlucky to lose the Quarter’s. Italy took their fourth, and they are now second, only to Brazil on all time World Cup Final Victories. It wasn’t a fitting finish to the Grand Finale, with things going down to Penalty Shootouts. I wonder why they didnt have the Golden Goal rule this time. Perhaps the should be do it the basketball way and have repetitive 15 minute overtimes until it gets over.

Our summer cricket league is also underway this weekend. We will be starting our pratice sessions today and looking for an unprecedented three-in-a-row Championship wins.

This is a good move by the Karnataka government and should help budding entrepreneurs realize their dreams. All the big successful software companies in India have their business models centered around servicing. Yes, it does bring in a lot of revenue, creates jobs, improves the economy, but eventually the fruits are harvested in other places. This needs to change and moves like this will take us one step closer.

There have been programs like this by other state governments, but IMO their objective is to attract more people and help improve the state economy. But something like this, in a place like Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, is certainly a move in the right direction. Although, it is to be seen what kind of benefits will be made available to get more people to adapt this program.

There will be a day when we will have more production units, than servicing centers.

Google recently struck a deal with Dell to ship new PC’s pre-loaded with Google Desktop and setting Google as the default search engine in IE. Now this is really interesting news.

Didn’t Google recently file an anti-trust suit against Microsoft saying it was using its Desktop monopoly to drive people using IE7 to use its Search Engine.  Now, although this was turned down, what does this tell about Google? I think its beginning to see the threat from Microsoft’s new search technologies. And then the hypocrite deal with Dell.

How valuable is this deal? When Google and MSN (Windows Desktop Search) came out with their desktop search tools, it was meant to improve the search on Windows XP. Search on XP was slow and these tools did add value to the Operating System. However, in Windows Vista, search has improved drastically, (it also happens to be my favorite core feature in Vista.) Why would someone need to install additional software when the inbuilt search in Vista really rocks!!.

This is what I work on. Now that Windows Vista Beta 2 is out, go check out all the cool stuff in it.