So i heard this on the radio the other day. Windows Vista starter edition is retailing in Pakistan for Rs 2,600. Not bad, bravo Microsoft, now instead of a one time promotion, why dont you just make this the standard price for your OS? You will kill 70% of Windows OS piracy with one blow, which probably is the aim anyway. And if you make it cheaper for students, (at UT we used to get legal Windows, office and visual studio for USD $5 per CD, no jokes.) then no one will want to go to Rainbow center to buy software CD’s

In the wake of such rampant piracy of software which really has not gone down at all in the last several years at the consumer level, reducing prices to corner the market is really is the only option, and then offering a subscription based upgrade service to hold onto that market share would work…. Most consumers will not buy pirates software  if prices of the legal versions are reasonable for them.

Now, oddly,sadly,insanely enough a copy of Windows Vista will cost about as much as a full tank of petrol!!

Popularity: 100% [?]

In one word, yes. Alltop is one of those technologies that will seamlessly blend into your life, like your cellphone. Our parents used to (still do) read the paper every morning. We’ll read Alltop.

Check out the Pakistan page on Alltop, the relevance should hit home right away. This is like the cute litte buzz.pk but for everything. Alltop has lots of topics, such as Muslim Blogs, Going green, Marketing. A worldwide newsrack, only cleaner and easier to read than the real life version.

A big thanks to Guy and his team and to Atif for making pakistan.alltop.com  happen.

Alltop helps solve the problem of information overload, using a simple elegant UI. I just hope they don’t run out of nice colours for the cool looking Alltop bar!

Popularity: 89% [?]

For the geek in you : a Mac OSx Leopard VM running on my IBm T61 vista box. So, if I wanted, now I can run Leopard and Vista on an IBM T61 laptop. I call this having my cake and eating it too ;)  Mac fans do not accuse me of  blasphemy (yet), I am thinking of making the switch so I’m just playing with the OS to get an idea. Full post here.

Popularity: 76% [?]

…lootmaar.com this week. Jawwad is holding an auction for charity - (the auction is for lunch with Jawwad) and its at 50 bids, and its at 75,000 with the reserve price met and theres still 3 days left! . All proceeds go to the SMB Fatima Jinnah Girls school project.

From what I can see, this is also the hottest item on the site right now…  I did’nt know my boss was this popular!

Popularity: 58% [?]

Since the day I bought my iPod touch I’ve become a believer that the iPhone needs to be taken seriously as a mobile platform that competes with RIM and Windows Mobile. While the Palm OS (which still has the best todo list app ever) regresses, and Windows Mobile and RIM take center stage, the new kid on the block is poised to kick some serious behinds in the coming two years.

So, now ITT is available on the iPhone and iPod touch.  Bookmark this link to access the RSS feeds on the iPhone! Let me know if this works….

Popularity: 43% [?]

Well….could I ? Dump my Wintel laptop and MS office,  get linux, staroffice, dump Dreamweaver and Visual Studio and stick to just Eclipse and the command prompt? and still do my daily work+play+blog+etc ?

We love to talk open source, linux, openoffice,etc and how cool it is, and how everyone but US should be using it.But really, we DON’T ever think of using it ourselves, or in our companies. We dump everything and run to MS office at the first sign of trouble, while say, opening an excel file or making a chart.

but could you, as a daily user live on just open source tools? Do you really need microsoft? Or will a firefox browser on linux, running Google docs, gmail, facebook and wordpress do just fine?  Its almost a religious conversion. I still don’t think I could. I still believe in a mix of technologies. I know very few techies in Pakistan who actually walk the walk and talk the talk, so to speak. If I get may be enough people asking me through the comments stream (who cares about this anyway, so dont ask ), maybe I’ll take up the challenge.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Farzal, thanks for the comment , Just checked, seems like Youtube is back! yay! I dont know what prompted the unblock but right now its coming down on maxcomm (via DSL) and Farzal reported its downloading on PTCL DSL too. Thank you PTA and whoever in the government was forward looking and actually undid this!

We’re not in such bad hands after all!  I am brimming with cautious optimism!

Popularity: 33% [?]

In the Spirit of the SI series, here is a great article by the well know Joel Sposky on the link between Innovation, ebay, wikipedia and naval gunnery:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080201/how-hard-could-it-be-inspired-misfires.html 

Popularity: 39% [?]

I am SUPER pissed. I mean, WTF?! (excuse my french) Youtube has been blocked in Pakistan, leaving thousands of instructional, knowledge building , and great videos out of reach of 160 million Pakistanis. The PTA apparently (as per the news article) had blocked one objectional page on youtube, but ISPs have blocked out the entire site?!

http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=97814 

Once again, we, by our people, are locked out of progress and change. I’m just ticked off now. Several other video sites still work, for the time being. If you remember, they also blocked blogger.com for a long time as well. That didnt last. I hope this doesnt.

Popularity: 35% [?]

I dont know why really or what will be achieved out of this. Most of us get our comic kicks by reading Asterix, Tintin, X-men,etc. Microsoft has released a c omic series “Heroes Happen Here”. Here is an excerpt from the site : “The HHH Comic Series is a daily web comic that adapts tech stories from actual IT Professionals and Developers - a web comic that reflects the real lives of IT Hero’s such as you. Every business day we will release a new episode driven from suggestions from the IT community.”

Well, might be interesting. Here is the link to the comic:

http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/cool-stuff/comic/default.mspx 

Popularity: 28% [?]