1. Windows 1.0 – Microsoft released the first version of Windows in 1985 and it featured tiled windows. From the beginning Windows was designed as a multitasking system. It was more of a GUI for the underlying MS-DOS operating system. It is interesting to note that Microsoft supported this operating system for 16 years (till 2001)!

2. Windows 3.11 – The next major release of Windows was in 1993 named Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It included networking and truetype fonts. Within months of release it sold millions of copies and Microsoft was named as the “Most of innovative company in US” by Forbes.

3. Windows 95 – Released in 1995, Windows 95 cemented Microsoft’s position as the solid leader in operating systems business. Microsoft integrated MS-DOS into Windows effectively putting all other MS-DOS competitors out of business. Windows 95 also introduced Internet Explorer 1.0. For optimal use Windows 95 required 8MB of RAM. The basic UI elements introduced in Windows 95 remains even today in Windows 7.

4. Windows 2000 – Windows 2000 was released in 2000 and the primary market was business laptops and server machines. Windows 2000 includes NTFS 3.0 and introduced encrypted file system. Windows 2000 was marketed as the most secure operating system, but continues to receive security patches in short intervals. Windows 2000 is supported till July 2010.

5. Windows XP – Released in 2001, Windows XP is the most used operating system even as of 2009 with more than 60% of market share. It offered a fresh user interface and a number of performance and stability improvements. Windows XP is supported till 2014.

6. Windows Vista – Windows Vista was released in 2007 and was not adopted quickly due to its high system requirements. To get a decent performance it required 1GB of RAM (Windows XP required 128MB) probably due to the fact that its engine core components were rewritten (audio, display, networking etc.). However it does have over 20% of the OS market share as of 2009. Vista is also notorious for its high prices (Ultimate edition costs over $300 almost matching hardware price).

There are a number of other Windows releases which are not considered in the above 6 generations. These include Windows 2 and Windows 3, Windows 98, Windows NT and Windows Me.

And then in 2009, Microsoft launches Windows 7 as the seventh generation Windows operating system.

HECToR contains over 5000 AMD 2.8GHZ dual core Opteron processors the peak performance is 63Tflops. The total memory of HECToR is 33TB (6GB per processor)!! The storage used is high performance RAID disks with a total capacity of 576TB. HECToR uses Unicos/lc as the operating system and has two components – compute node linux for compute nodes and linux distro(SUSE Linux) for service nodes. The communication network uses 6 sets of Seastar2 chip based system and each link offers bi-directional bandwidth of 7.6GB/sec!

HECToR (High-End Computing Terascale Resource) is a project funded by research councils in UK and this facility is available to researchers in UK Universities. The main use of this supercomputer will be in simulation of complex natural phenomena such as climate change prediction.

HECToR is composed of 66 individual units as shown below and each of the unit is as big as a large shelf!

You can see the current status of HECToR supercomputer here!

Another advantage is that your URL can be automatically inserted in the comment. For this to happen, use your blog or site as your OpenID identity. This doesn’t mean that you have to have your own OpenID provider. You can use other providers such as Verisign or Technorati and then delegate to it from your blog! This means that you can change your provider without affecting your identity (your blog).

Now it is not necessary that you should use a third party OpenID provider. You can be your own OpenID provider! For details, check Setting up OpenID.

How does OpenID work?

When you use OpenID, there are 3 players. You (Y), OpenID service provider(P) and the site you are trying to login(T) using OpenID. When you indicate your OpenID identity at the T, it will handshake with P to get a secret key. Then you are re-directed to the P’s Web site to login. After login, the same secret key is prepared using your password by P and it returns it to T. Now T can compare this with the original secret key. If they are same, that means you did authenticate at the P!  Simple isn’t it?

It is interesting to note that civilization in India is pretty old dating back to 80,000 years. But it was almost completely wiped of by the eruption of Mt. Toba around 74,000 years ago (probably reducing the population to as low as 10,000!!)

Yes, this may not be 100% accurate, but is backed up with the data we have so far.

Theoretically the second island is in US, but both are considered to be part of canada. Local guides and tour operators definitely want this to be known as “shortest international bridge”

Found via deputy dog..

This means that Google has such good infrastructure that they can do almost realtime crawling of Websites! But how do they do that? Obviously they can’t crawl all the sites every minute (which will take a lot of bandwidth from individual sites).

The secret probably is with blog pings and sitemaps. Already google blog search, technorati etc. use the pings to update the content. This means that only incremental data is crawled. Another feature that can be used is sitemaps which also will help google in doing incremental crawling. You can also add your blog/website sitemap in google by creating an account at Google webmaster tools.

Let us do some math here. According to Technorati there are over 100 million blogs. Now if we assume 1 post per day and an average size of 10KB per post we have,

Total content = 100 million x 10KB = 1 TeraByte of transfer!

This means that just to crawl blogs using incremental techniques, Google search engine will be using a minimum of 1 Terabyte per day of bandwidth! Here we assumed that only new posts are crawled. In reality, Google has to crawl old posts also to see whether they have changed! In Sitemaps, you can define that as daily/weekly/monthly/yearly crawl.

Check out my sitemap console screenshot below. As you can see, it is possible to reduce the crawl speed to save on the bandwidth. Now in that case you content will not be near “realtime”.

1. Cancer prevention is possible – It is estimated that 40% of cancers can be prevented. Scientists are not clear as to what exactly causes cancer. But it is found that chances of getting cancer can be reduced by adopting healthy lifestyle. This includes avoiding excessive drinking, not smoking and ensuring adequate physical exercise. Another possible factor for increased cancer rate is the excessive use of pesticides.

2. Cancer can affect any body part – Cancer is not limited to any specific body part. It can affect any organ, including brain,breast, liver, lungs, kidney, tongue and blood. When cancer becomes advanced, it can spread to other organs from the primary area. At this stage, treatment may not give any benefit.

3. Cancer affects elderly most – Ageing is a major factor in the development of cancer. It is found that incidence of cancer increases dramatically with age due to the cell weakness and accumulation of risk factors.

4. Cancer is curable, only if it is detected early – Many types of cancers can be cured if it is detected in an early stage. Typically this involves surgery on the affected body part.

5. Cancer treatment can be painful – Cancer treatment sometimes is worse than the disease itself as the treatment mechanisms such as chemotherapy and radiation is painful. Treatment of secondary stage cancers are not very effective and may prolong life at the cost of increased suffering. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy are associated with a lot of side effects. Newer drugs are more effective, but usually helpful only in prolonging life and are generally very costly.

Some cancer facts/figures

1. Cancer starts with a single malignant cell.

2. There are over 100 types of cancers affecting various body parts.

3. Of 58 million deaths worldwide in 2005, cancer is the cause for 7.6 million deaths.

4. Lung cancer is the biggest killer and causes over 20% of cancer deaths.

5. It is estimated that in 2030, 11.5 million will die due to cancer.

6. Enormous amount of money is invested every year in cancer research. For example, American national cancer institute alone spend over $4.8 billion in 2005.

Links on Cancer disease
Wikipedia article on cancer
American National Cancer Institute

2. The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

3. To “testify” was based on men in the Roman court swearing to a statement made by swearing on their testicles.

4. The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

5. The male gypsy moth can smell the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8 miles away!

6. It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

7. A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

8. Duelling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

9. The Ramses brand condom is named after the great pharaoh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.

10. Whenever a watch or a clock is displayed in movies/books, the time is 10:10.

But it is not easy to find out top 10 Indian blogs. One way is to use Alexa, but it may not give a true picture. For blogs, another metric that can be used to judge traffic is the FeedBurner subscriber count. Of course not all blogs display it, but many top Indian blogs do display FeedBurner subscriber count chicklet.

Without further “blah, blah”, here are the top 10 Indian blogs when it comes to FeedBurner feed count. This may not be perfect and if you know a blog I missed, I am only too happy to modify the list

1. Quick Online Tips by PCHere
10200+ subscribers

2. Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal
9800+ subscribers

3. JohnTp.com by John TP
1100+ subscribers

4. Tech Buzz by Thilak Raj
1000+ subscribers

5. Brajeshwar.com by Brajeshwar
700+ subscribers

6. India Uncut by Amit Varma
540+ subscribers

7. Domain Maximus by Sidin
400+ subscribers

8. Sree’s Tech Notes by Sreekandakumar
340+ subscribers

9. Ajay – on the road called life! by Ajay Dsouza
260+ subscribers

10. A Management Consultant’s Blog by Gautam Ghosh
250+ subscribers

As you can see almost all the top blogs are technology related. Also even the top blogs are way down when compared to blogs such as TechCrunch (369,000) or BoingBoing. But again almost all top Indian blogs are run by individuals not by companies!

Some of the blogs which would have appeared here if there was a subscriber count on them are gigaOM, desipundit, kiruba.com, indianpad, Emergic and many many more! It is surprising that most of these blogs are yet to use FeedBurner!

Do you know that Google gets over 3000 job applications per day? Check out the following video to know more about the Google workplace and why they are number one!

Attukal Pongala is an annual event at the Attukal Bhagavathy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala (Southern state of India). This event witnesses the participation of thousands of women devotees, who flock to the temple to offer Pongala.

Women gather in the early morning and boil rice mixed with other ingredients in the open field. This offering is supposed to please presiding deity.

Only women are allowed to participate in this festival. So on the pongal day, the city is virtually sieged by Women from far away places.

Check out the official site.

Rank – Date – Domain
1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM

You can see the complete list of 100 oldest domain registrations here.

Following is one of the best photos of Everest (according to the site) taken from outer space. Check out the NASA site for more Mount Everest photos.

Photo credit: NASA

The whole thing looks a bit weird to me. Normally, the reason I use bicycle is to ride it. This is like those fellows I have seen in UK, who will take the bicycle on a train to travel 3 kilometres

To backup mails, you can enable auto forwarding in Gmail and then forward all the mails to an alternate account somewhere else (Yahoo, perhaps?). Now what will you do with your existing mails? Obviously forwarding all of them is going to be time consuming.

That is where POP3 support in Gmail comes for rescue. You can enable POP3 access on Gmail account and then download all your mails to a desktop email client (I use Outlook Express). You can then backup the mail file created on a CD.

Step 1 – Enable POP3 on Gmail

Step 2 – Configure your mail client to download from Gmail
Please see this comprehensive configuration settings tutorial from Google. Google has also provided an auto configuration tool for Outlook Express.

Following are the important details about Gmail POP3 access,

• username: [yourgmailid]@googlemail.com
• pop3 server: pop.googlemail.com
• smtp server: smtp.googlemail.com
• smtp port(SSL enabled): 465
• pop3 port(SSL enabled): 995