MOHASIN'S WORLD

Retina Works Best When Bathed in Vitamin C

2011-07-23T22:58:00.000-07:00

Retina Works Best When Bathed in Vitamin C: "New research hints at a critical role for ascorbic acid in gamma-aminobutyric acid receptors functioning in the retina, and perhaps the central nervous system.
Medscape Medical News"

2011-07-23T22:57:00.000-07:00

Devi Shetty: The Henry Ford of Indian heart care business

2011-01-15T06:08:00.000-08:00

Devi Shetty: The Henry Ford of Indian heart care business: "In an interview with CNBCTV18’s Shereen Bhan, Dr Devi Shetty, Chairman of Narayana Hrudayalaya speaks about his unique invention of a factory model for heart care in India and the successful ‘Walmartising’ in healthcare industry."

Mac Troubleshooting Superguide book for new Mac users

2011-01-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

Mac Troubleshooting Superguide book for new Mac users: " We've distilled the Mac troubleshooting knowledge we've acquired over the past 10 years of putting together columns, and created the Mac Troubleshooting Superguide.

"

A Retrospective Analysis Of 100 Cases Of Secondary Glaucomas Presenting To Ophthalmology Department Of A Medical College Hopsital: Dr

2010-10-17T06:25:00.000-07:00

A Retrospective Analysis Of 100 Cases Of Secondary Glaucomas Presenting To Ophthalmology Department Of A Medical College Hopsital:Study by Dr Uma Kulkarni and Dr Mohasin and Paper presented at Karnataka Ophthalmic Conference By Dr Mohasin CKP.

Analysis Of Nd:Yag Laser Iridotomies-A Prospective Study: Dr Mohasin

2010-10-17T06:22:00.002-07:00

Analysis Of Nd:Yag Laser Iridotomies-A Prospective Study: Study done by Dr M Gurudutt Kamath, Dr Shahtaj Akhlaghi,Dr Mohasin, Dr Shibin Girish P and Paper presented at the Karnataka Ophthalmic Society Conference by Dr Mohasin CKP

Dr.Mohasin

2010-10-17T06:22:00.001-07:00

USBFlashCopy Automatically Identifies and Backs Up Your Flash Drives [Downloads]

2010-09-21T06:40:00.000-07:00

USBFlashCopy Automatically Identifies and Backs Up Your Flash Drives [Downloads]: "

Windows: If you know you need to be more diligent about backing up your flash drive but you never get around to it, USBFlashCopy makes it simple with automatic backups every time you plug your flash drive in. More »

TUAW's Daily App: Plex

2010-09-05T07:01:00.000-07:00

TUAW's Daily App: Plex: "

Plex's big tease last week turned out to not be an Apple acquisition, but instead a big release, of both a rewritten Mac client to keep all of your media together in one place, and also a brand new iOS app, available now on the App Store for $4.99. Sure, the app's a little pricey, but if you use the new Plex as your media center, it's actually a must buy -- not only does it work as a remote control, but you can actually stream media from your Plex library directly to your iPhone or iPad from wherever you are.

And with a little more tweaking (you need to have the server running and know how to set up port forwarding on your router), you can even stream Plex content out over 3G, so no matter where you are with your iOS device, you can watch anything stored on your Plex install. Now that's pretty cool.

The latest version of Plex is available as a free download from the website, and the app itself is available in iTunes for US $4.99. We Mac users have always been spoiled with terrific media management software, and Plex is another great solution.

TUAW TUAW's Daily App: Plex originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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DooID lets you easily post your contact details in style

2010-03-18T20:52:00.001-07:00

Sent to you by MOSYN via Google Reader:

DooID lets you easily post your contact details in style

via Download Squad by Erez Zukerman on 3/18/10

Filed under: Microblogging

DooID presents a slick solution to an all-too-common problem: it provides people who have accounts on multiple social websites with one single place to post all of their contact information. It strives to act as an online business card, and I must say it does the job quite gracefully.

Ideally, you would be able to meet someone new and give them a single, simple URL (such as http://dooid.com/perschmitz), and they would get a short bio of you, as well as all of your contact information and online profiles. It's actually very similar to Google Profiles, but so much nicer-looking (and it does not involve submitting even more personal information to Google).

DooID lets you easily post your contact details in style originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google - Download Squad - Google Profiles - Website - Uniform Resource Locator

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Become a Gmail Master Redux [Hack Attack]

2010-02-05T20:21:00.001-08:00

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Become a Gmail Master Redux [Hack Attack]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 2/4/10

Gmail is easily the most popular email application among power users, and with good reason: It's an excellent app. But if you haven't gotten to know its best shortcuts, tricks, Labs features, and add-ons, it's time you made Gmail sing.

Photo remixed from Google's own Become a Gmail ninja page.

Way back in 2006, I showed you my favorite tips, tricks, and tools for making the most of Gmail. A lot has changed in the Gmail world since then, so much so that it seemed like a good time to revisit our favorite tips, tricks, and tools for getting the most from Gmail. Most, if not all, of these tips and features will also apply to the Google Apps accounts set up by businesses and organizations, but your administrator may not have enabled everything you see here.

No one really needs to be sold on Gmail anymore. Either you like the threaded conversations, powerful search, built-in filters, and awesome Gmail Labs functionality or you don't. I love these things, and below I've attempted to put together my comprehensive guide for turning Gmail into the ultimate communication and productivity hub. (I'm focusing on covering territory that I didn't cover in my previous guide, so if you're looking for a more beginner guide, read that first. Much of it remains true.)

I've broken things down into sections, starting with keyboard shortcuts, then moving down into the best Labs add-ons, third-party add-ons, search techniques, etc. Ready to power up your Gmail? Let's get started with how to set up and use Gmail's robust keyboard shortcuts—my favorite Gmail productivity booster.

Beat Your Inbox into Submission from Your Keyboard

If there's one thing we love around Lifehacker, it's the productivity boost we get from keeping our hands glued to the home row. (Seriously, our love of keyboard shortcuts is almost pathological.) Anything that allows us to perform tasks from the comfort of our keyboards—without requiring us to drop everything we're doing, move over to the mouse, hunt for a link or button, and click—ranks high on our list of productivity boosters. If you share even a tenth of our enthusiasm for keyboard shortcuts, I've got good news: You can do absolutely everything in Gmail from the keyboard. Here's how:

First, go to your Gmail settings and make sure you've got Keyboard Shortcuts turned on. (That link should work if you're logged into Gmail—it won't work with a Google Apps mail account.) Be sure to save your changes after you've changed the setting.

Next, click over to Gmail Labs. Labs is full of experimental features capable of adding functionality to Gmail (which we'll get to in more detail below), but for now we're going to focus on just one, called Go to label. Find it, enable it, and save your changes.

Now you can do nearly anything you could possibly want in Gmail without once pulling your hands away from your keyboard. You can see a full list of shortcuts here, or view the shortcut help in Gmail at any time by typing '?' (a question mark), which will give you this shortcut pop-up:

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

That's all well and good, but it's also a little overwhelming, so let's break it down a bit.

Navigating Messages:
j and k go up and down: When you turn on Gmail shortcuts, you'll notice a small black triangle appears to the left of your messages. You can move this cursor up and down by hitting the 'j' or 'k' keys. Want to move down a message? Hit 'j'. Want to move back up? Hit 'k'. Simple, right?

o and Enter open messages: Now let's say you want to read the message next to the cursor. You've got two choices: either hit 'o' or Enter. (I prefer 'o' because it's less of a stretch.) Not bad, huh? When you're viewing an email, pressing 'j' or 'k' will move you to the next or previous email without going back to the list.

n and p move to next and previous messages: Once you're viewing an email thread, you'll notice the black triangle is still there, only now it's next to messages within a thread. You can navigate between different messages in an open thread with the 'n' and 'p' keys (think next and previous). Again, to expand collapsed messages, you just press 'o' or Enter.

Labeling and Moving Messages:
You use Gmail to do more than just read emails, right? Hopefully you're already taking advantage of Gmail labels (if not, this post describes Gmail labels in detail), and now it's time to learn to label to your heart's content from the keyboard. And—surprise—it's very easy.

l + label name adds a label: If you've already opened a thread, you can label it by pressing 'l' (for label) and then typing the name of the label you want to add. You don't have to type the whole label name—just enough so that one of your current labels is highlighted. Once it is, hit Enter to apply the label to the message. If you're looking at an inbox pane rather than an open message, you can apply labels to one or multiple threads at a time. To do so, you need to first mark the threads you want to label by ticking the checkbox next to those messages. Again, this is normally mouse territory, but you're a keyboard junkie now.

x ticks a message checkbox: Instead of moving to the mouse, again, press 'j' or 'k' to move between messages, then press 'x' to tick or untick the checkbox next to a message. You can mark as many as you want, and when you're ready to label, it's the same drill as above: 'l' + the name of the label.

You can also create an entirely new label using this shortcut. Just hit 'l' and type the name of the new label you want to create.

To remove a label that's already been applied to a message, you've got two options. You can use the same method as above, except rather than typing the name of the label you want to apply, you type the name of the label you want to remove; doing so when a label has already been applied will remove it.

y removes a label: Alternately, if you want to remove the label you're currently looking at (for example, if you searched for label:followup or clicked on your followup label in the sidebar), pressing 'y' will do the trick. From the inbox, 'y' will archive the message. ('e' will archive from any view.) From other labels, pressing 'y' will remove that label.

v moves messages: Last, if you prefer to think of your labels more like folders, you can move messages using the 'v' keyboard shortcut—which works the same way as the 'l' shortcut, except in addition to applying a new label, it removes the label you're currently viewing.

star, spam, and trash: When you're either viewing a message or have messages selected, you can press '!' to mark a message as spam, '#' to send it to the Trash, or 's' to star it.

Composing, Replying, and Forwarding:
You've got reading, labeling, and moving your messages down pat, but you do occasionally write email, too. These shortcuts are a breeze to remember. You can compose a new message at any time by pressing 'c', reply to an open email by pressing 'r' (or reply all with 'a'), and forward an email by pressing 'f'. Easy enough, right?

Update: Oh yeah, this always seems like a forgone conclusion for some reason, but to quickly send an email from your keyboard when you're finished writing, just hit Tab then Enter.

Search and Navigate Your Inbox:
The only major thing left to do is navigate your inbox and labels, which is part of why we installed the Go to labels feature above. Navigating anywhere in Gmail starts with pressing 'g', for Go. From there, it's a matter of knowing where you want to go.

g then i goes to your inbox
g then s goes to starred messages
g then t goes to sent messages
g then d goes to drafts
g then a goes to all mail
g then c goes to contacts
g then k goes to tasks
g then l then label name goes to that label. This also works to navigate to any of the other 'g' shortcuts that have quicker shortcuts; for example, you could press 'g' then 'l' then 'inbox' to navigate to your inbox rather than 'g' then 'i'.

This may have all sounded overly complicated at times, but trust me, all it takes a is a little bit of effort before it's all ingrained in your muscle memory—a task for which you'll thank yourself!

Note: Surprisingly, I wasn't exhaustive above, but I did highlight the shortcuts I use the most. For a more exhaustive rundown (minus the Go to label shortcut), see Gmail's shortcut help page.

Add More Functionality with Gmail Labs

You were briefly introduced to the the shortcuts feature above, but that's only the tip of the Gmail Labs iceberg. Gmail releases experimental features regularly in Gmail Labs, and some of them are must-haves for the true Gmail junkie. We rounded up ten of our favorites last year, so I won't go in depth beyond pointing out a few of my current favorites. (Remember, to install any of these Labs features, just point your browser to Gmail Labs and enable any you like.)

Multiple Inboxes: Turn your inbox into a dashboard capable of displaying up to five different searches (like, for example, your trusted trio of email labels)—in addition to your regular old inbox—by enabling Multiple Inboxes.

YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Docs, and Voice Previews: How many times in a week do you get an email pointing to a YouTube video or Flickr set? How about a new message notification from Google Voice or a shared Google Doc? Enable these features to view (or preview) the video, pictures, document, or listen to your Voice message directly inside your email without popping up a new window.

Forgotten Attachment Detector: Avoid sending yet another email missing an attachment with the Forgotten Attachment Detector, which will poke you with an alert message before you can send an email that appears to be promising an attachment.

Undo send: We've all accidentally hit Tab+Enter to send off an email the moment we also noticed a huge typo or other embarrassing problem. Undo send gives you five seconds after you hit the send button to retrieve your email.

Above I listed a few of my favorite Labs features, but if you take a few minutes looking over what Gmail Labs has to offer, you'll probably find others you like, too.

Beef Up Gmail with Extensions

If the functionality you're looking for still isn't available even after you've enabled your favorite Labs features, then browser extensions might be more your speed. You've got plenty of Gmail extensions to choose from, but I'm particularly partial to Better Gmail 2, a compilation of Gmail features put together by our very own Gina Trapani. Features include:

Add Row Highlights: Highlights the letter rows in the new Gmail when you hover over them with the mouse cursor.
Attachment Icons: See what kind of attachment an email has in list view.
Attachment Icons (Native): Same as attachment icons, but uses icon images native to your system.
Bottom Post in Reply (Plain Text only): Inserts cursor after the quoted message in plain text replies automatically.
Folders4Gmail: Lists labels in a folder-like hierarchy.
Hide Chat: Hides Gmail's Chat box in the sidebar.
Hide Invites Box: Hides the Gmail invites box on the sidebar.
Hide Labels in Message Row: Hides the labels that appear in a message row unless the user hovers over the message.
Hide Spam Count: Hides Gmail's Spam message count.
Inbox Count First: See unread message count first on Gmail tab title.
Show Unread Message Count on Favicon: Shows the number of unread Gmail messages in the favicon in your Firefox tab.

If you're partial to David Allen's Getting Things Done productivity methods, then you might be especially interested in GTDInbox for Gmail, a seriously cool Firefox extension that helps you turn your email into GTD-friendly action items.

Last, the rest of the crew at Lifehacker would have my head if I didn't mention Remember the Milk for Gmail—available as either a Firefox/Chrome extension or gadget—that connects the popular to-do webapp Remember the Milk with your Gmail account.

Dissect Your Inbox with Laser-Precise Searches and Filters

Gmail's philosophy from the get-go was "Search, don't sort," which is why they replaced traditional folders with labels despite the occasional complaint from new users. It should come as no surprise, then, that Gmail's search is excellent, and in combination with Gmail's filters (which allow you to execute actions on incoming messages that match a specific search criteria), the sky's the limit for how you can slice and dice your inbox.

I won't go in depth on Gmail's search operators or how to put together filters here because I've done so in pretty good detail here, and not much has changed since then. For the full rundown of Gmail's advanced search operators, hit up Gmail Help's search page.

Manage All Your Email Accounts from Gmail

Last, the great part about Gmail is that—apart from being a killer service—it's also a great email client, and whether or not you want to use your @gmail.com address, you can still use Gmail to manage all of your other email with aplomb.

Gmail can fetch email from other accounts, filter that email into separate labels by the account they arrived from or just leave them all in one inbox, and send email from any one of them from inside Gmail. In fact, despite all of the great dedicated desktop email clients out there, Gmail is still the favorite Gmail client among Lifehacker readers. Rather than detail everything here, I'll just point you to Gina's previous guide on how to consolidate all your email using Gmail.

A person could write a book on all the ins and outs involved in getting more from Gmail (this post somehow turned into a novella), so rather than do that I've tried to focus on some of the best and newest stuff above. If you've got your own favorite features or functionality that I didn't mention, or you just want to drop a "hell yeah" about a feature I mentioned, sound off in the comments.

Adam Pash is the editor of Lifehacker. His special feature Hack Attack appears regularly on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader, or follow @adampash on Twitter.

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Set Up a Computer for Kids with Qimo [Kids]

2009-04-11T16:33:00.003-07:00

Sent to you by MOSYN via Google Reader:

Set Up a Computer for Kids with Qimo [Kids]

via Lifehacker by Jason Fitzpatrick on 11/04/09

Looking for a simple way for a young child to use your computer without messing everything up? Qimo is a lightweight, kid-focused Ubuntu distribution you can install or boot from a CD or thumb drive.

Qimo was designed by a husband and wife team in Florida, for their charity Quinn Co. The charity specializes in refurbishing donated computers to serve low-income and special needs children. As a result, Qimo is designed to run easily on low end hardware: the minimum requirements are a 400Mhz processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 6GB hard drive if you choose to install it instead of booting from the LiveCD.

The included programs are organized on the application dock with large, easy to navigate icons. Included with the distribution are a variety of programs including TuxPaint, eToys, and GCompris. Qimo is an excellent candidate for giving some life to an aging laptop or desktop and helping the kids in your life get comfortable using computers. If you have your own tips, tricks, or operating systems to suggest for turning a computer into a kid-friendly play space, sound off in the comments below.

Qimo [via DownloadSquad]

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Set Up a Computer for Kids with Qimo [Kids]

2009-04-11T16:33:00.001-07:00

Sent to you by MOSYN via Google Reader:

Set Up a Computer for Kids with Qimo [Kids]

via Lifehacker by Jason Fitzpatrick on 11/04/09

Looking for a simple way for a young child to use your computer without messing everything up? Qimo is a lightweight, kid-focused Ubuntu distribution you can install or boot from a CD or thumb drive.

Qimo [via DownloadSquad]

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MEN ARE JUST HAPPIER PEOPLE

2009-03-17T17:06:00.001-07:00

MEN ARE JUST HAPPIER PEOPLE

NICKNAMES

If Laura, Kate and Sarah go out for lunch, they will call each other
Laura, Kate and Sarah.
If Mike, Dave and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each
other as Fat Boy, Godzilla and Four-eyes.

EATING OUT

When the bill arrives, Mike, Dave and John will each throw in $20,
even though it's only for $32.50. None of them will have anything
smaller and none will actually admit they want change back.
When the girls get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.

MONEY

A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs.
A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need but it's on sale.

BATHROOMS

A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush and toothpaste,
shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel .
The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 337. A
man would not be able to identify more than 20 of these items.

ARGUMENTS

A woman has the last word in any argument.
Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument..

FUTURE

A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.
A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.

SUCCESS

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.
A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

MARRIAGE

A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.
A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, but she does.

DRESSING UP

A woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the
trash, answer the phone, read a book, and get the mail.
A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.

NATURAL

Men wake up as good-looking as they went to bed.
Women somehow deteriorate during the night.

OFFSPRING

Ah, children. A woman knows all about her children.. She knows about
dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favorite foods,
secret fears and hopes and dreams.
A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
A married man should forget his mistakes. There's no use in two people
remembering the same thing!

Build an IKEA NAS On the Cheap [Weekend Project]

2009-03-07T18:12:00.001-08:00

Sent to you by MOSYN via Google Reader:

Build an IKEA NAS On the Cheap [Weekend Project]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 6/03/09

If last week's look at the five best home server software got you excited about setting up a home server but you're not keen on another unsightly PC in your home, check out this DIY IKEA NAS.

Using the stainless steel "Emu" box from IKEA ($7 for a set), Instructable user aarone created an impressive, headless Network Attached Storage system that looks more like decoration than hardware. And since he went with FreeNAS for his operating system, the home server software didn't cost him a dime (and it runs on very inexpensive hardware). It's not a project that just anyone might feel comfortable taking on, but if you are comfortable doing your own case mods, the results are pretty nice. If you're not quite ready to make that jump, check out our first-timer's guide to building a computer from scratch.

Build an inexpensive Ikea NAS [Instructables]

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Best Home Server Software [Hive Five]

2009-03-01T14:49:00.001-08:00

Sent to you by MOSYN via Google Reader:

Best Home Server Software [Hive Five]

via Lifehacker by Jason Fitzpatrick on 1/03/09

Media files, data synchronization, and remote backups, oh my! Home computing has advanced to a point where it's practical to run your own home server, and we're running down the five best tools for the job.

Photo by Rudolf Schuba.

Earlier this week we asked you to tell us what software you used to power your home servers and add that extra kick of convenience and power to your home networks. After tallying up the votes we're back to share the top five contenders for the home server championship belt. The following server implementations cover a broad spectrum of solutions ranging from install-it-and-forget-it to tinker-your-way-to-perfection and everything in between.

FreeNas

FreeNAS is by the far the most bare bones home server software in the top five. More specifically, FreeNAS is an extremely minimal distribution of FreeBSD. How minimal, you ask? You can run FreeNAS off a 32MB flash drive. Designed to be an absolutely skeletal operating system to maximize the resources devoted to storage FreeNAS is great for when you want a simple operating system that leaves every hard drive bay and disk platter wide open for file storage goodness. Despite being so slim, FreeNAS is still feature packed, including support for BitTorrent and remote web-based file management via QuiXplorer; it even serves as the perfect iTunes music server. You can boo FreeNAS off nearly any media: hard drives, optical discs, floppy disks, and flash-based media. It has support for both hardware and software based RAID, disk encryption, and management of groups and users via local authentication or Microsoft Domains. Even an old dusty Pentium III can become a headless file-serving powerhouse with the addition of a basic $20 SATA PCI card to pack it full of modern hard drives, thanks to FreeNAS's scant 96MB of RAM requirements.

Ubuntu Server Edition

Ubuntu Server Edition shares the ease of use that has catapulted its desktop-edition sibling to popularity. The automated LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) installation makes installing the core components of a robust server a walk in the park compared to manually configuring each component on your own. While configuring Ubuntu isn't going to be as easy as grabbing a pre-configured Windows Home Server off the shelf at your local Best Buy and plugging it in, there are a wealth of applications to help you integrate your Linux based home server with the rest of your network. It won't be as straight forward as using Windows Home Server or a Time Machine backup, but Ubuntu is more than powerful and capable enough to handle all your media streaming, remote back up, and file serving needs. We've covered using Ubuntu as the basis for a home media server before, so if you're considering trying it out check out how to build a Linux media server and build yourself an affordable media server to get an idea of what you're in for.

Apache

Apache is the only entry in the top five that isn't a completely stand alone server package. Apache is, however, open source and cross platform; it support a dozen operating systems; and it's the backbone of many of your fellow readers' home server operations. Because of its widespread adoption and extreme compatibility with a variety of platforms, we're including it here. No matter what operating system you throw on your home server, you're almost guaranteed that you can run Apache on it. Nearly four years ago we covered how to set up a personal web server using Apache, and it's still relevant and worth a look for getting an idea what the setup entails. While you're at it, you may also want to try setting up a home Subversion server with your Apache installation for keeping track of file revisions.

Debian

Why use Debian for a home server? There are over twenty five thousands software packages available for Debian, and the operating system supports 12 unique hardware architectures. There's a a slim-to-none chance you've got a computer that can't run it. Like Ubtuntu—a Debian derivative by the way—you can configure this flexible operating system to do nearly anything you can imagine, from serving media and remote backups to running your own web server with a wiki and running your own mail server. Like other Linux distributions, Debian can be used to run a low-power and headless server when run without a GUI and using remote administration. Along with FreeNAS, Debian is a prime candidate for turning an aging computer into a quiet, tucked-in-the-basement server.

Windows Home Server

If your home is filled with Windows-based computers—which the average American home certainly is—it's tough to go wrong with Windows Home Server. It isn't free, and until recently you couldn't even buy it separately from the home servers sold by Hewlett Packard and others—but even though it has the distinction of being both the only commercial and closed-source software package on the list, that doesn't mean you should dismiss it out of hand. Windows Home Server stands definitively as the most Average Joe-friendly server implementation on the list. Not only is it the only server package you can buy pre-configured and installed in a ready to go off-the-shelf server, but Microsoft has gone out of their way to make the experience of using Windows Home Server as transparent and painless as possible for the end user. In fact, many Lifehacker readers expressed the "It just works" sentiment when logging a vote for Windows Home Server. Once you have all your computers connected to your Windows Home Server, you'll have a centralized backup location that supports up to 10 remote PCs and indexed remote file storage. Printers are shared and there is easy to use remote server access to log into your archives from anywhere in the world. Files are no longer lost in a mass of drives, add a few terabyte drives to a Windows Home Server and you'll never wonder if that movie file is on the F, G, or H drive again. Windows Home Server spans drives using Drive Extender so that files are located in a single folder namespace, sans drive divisions. The most recent update of Windows Home Server even adds an option to backup the server itself to external drives for extra data redundancy. Since the Microsoft site for Windows Home Server is heavy on promotion but low on actual screenshots, check out our screenshot tour for more.

Now that you've seen the contestants vying for the title of best home server, it's time to log your votes to see who will go home with the belt—and the task of storing your mountains of media files and remote backups.

Which Home Server Software is Best?
( polls)

If you have tips or tricks for running a home server, sound off in the comments below. Many readers will be considering running a home server for the first time after reading over the top contenders above, so your experience (and accolades) could help them find a home server package that works for them.

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ON WORDS FROM THE ORACLE

2009-03-01T01:16:00.001-08:00

Sent to you by MOSYN via Google Reader:

ON WORDS FROM THE ORACLE

via *michael parekh on IT* by Michael on 2/28/09

THE LONG VIEW

As a Berkshire Hathaway investor, I like many had been looking forward to Warren Buffett's letter to shareholders, out today. The news as one might expect in these unprecedented times, was not good, but the long-term perspective as usual, was most welcome and refreshing.

The Wall Street Journal provides some context of the letter in this report:

"Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. reported Saturday morning that 2008 was the legendary investor's worst year ever. It also reported a grim fourth quarter, though it eked out a slight gain. (Berkshire's annual letter to shareholders.)

A common metric Berkshire uses to track performance, book value per share, fell 9.6% in 2008, its biggest decline since Mr. Buffett took over the company in 1965.

It was only the second year in more than 40 years that Berkshire posted negative results. In 2001, Berkshire's book value per share fell 6.2%. The company's performance in 2008 still far outpaced the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, which fell 37% last year, including dividends."

If pressed for time, I'd also recommend the WSJ's summary of the Highlights. A couple of sobering ones that they highlight is the following:

"In poker terms, the Treasury and the Fed have gone 'all in.' Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once-unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome aftereffects..."

"Local governments are going to face far tougher fiscal problems in the future than they have to date. The pension liabilities I talked about in last year's report will be a huge contributor to these woes. Many cities and states were surely horrified when they inspected the status of their funding at yearend 2008. The gap between assets and a realistic actuarial valuation of present liabilities is simply staggering.

Read more in Real Time Economics"

A highlight I'd add is his current view on how risk is being priced:

"The investment world has gone from underpricing risk to overpricing it. This change has not been minor; the pendulum has covered an extraordinary arc.

A few years ago, it would have seemed unthinkable that yields like today's could have been obtained on good-grade municipal or corporate bonds even while risk-free governments offered near-zero returns on short-term bonds and no better than a pittance on long-terms. When the financial history of this decade is written, it will surely speak of the Internet bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s.

But the U.S. Treasury bond bubble of late 2008 may be regarded as almost equally extraordinary."

One of my favorites from this year's letter was the following:

"Approval, though, is not the goal of investing.

In fact, approval is often counter-productive because it sedates the brain and makes it less receptive to new facts or a re-examination of conclusions formed earlier.

Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns."

Here's to more yawns for all of us, large and small.

The whole letter (PDF) is worth reading in it's entirety, especially this year over all others.

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Install Windows 7 Beta on Your Mac with Boot Camp [Dual Boot]

2009-01-22T18:23:00.001-08:00

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Install Windows 7 Beta on Your Mac with Boot Camp [Dual Boot]

via Lifehacker by The How-To Geek on 1/15/09

If you're on a Mac but want to know what the Windows 7 Beta fuss is about, the SimpleHelp weblog walks through installing Win7 using Boot Camp, Apple's solution for dual-booting Windows on a Mac.

We've already covered how to dual-boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista, and the good news is that installing Win7 on your Mac is just as simple: All you need is your Leopard installation DVD, the Windows 7 Beta, 10GB of free hard drive space, and a few hours.

What's your take? Are you willing to put a beta version of Windows on your Mac just to see if the eye candy is worth it?

Using Boot Camp to install Windows 7 on your Mac: The Complete Walkthrough [Simple Help]

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ZIRP!

2008-12-16T13:36:00.001-08:00

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ZIRP!

via Paul Krugman by By Paul Krugman on 16/12/08

That's zero interest rate policy. And it has arrived. America has turned Japanese. This is the thing I've been afraid of ever since I realized that Japan really was in the dreaded, possibly mythical liquidity trap. You can read my 1998 Brookings Paper on the issue here. Incidentally, there were a bunch of us at Princeton [...]

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Twenty 20 Malayalam Movie 2nd Part Fifty 50 / Uncensored Scenes.Trailer by Adarsh Ranjith.

2008-12-15T16:24:00.001-08:00

Awesome mallu movie hollywood style

2008-12-07T03:16:00.000-08:00

Obama Victory speech

2008-11-05T02:36:00.001-08:00

Battle of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems [Lifehacker Faceoff]

2008-10-27T16:38:00.001-07:00

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Battle of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems [Lifehacker Faceoff]

via Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy on 27/10/08

These days, it only takes an increasingly-cheap USB thumb drive and a program like UNetbootin to create a portable Linux desktop you can run on any computer that can boot from a USB port. But check out the list of distributions UNetbootin can download and install—it's huge, and the names don't tell you much about which distro is best for on-the-go computing. Today we're detailing four no-install distributions—Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, and Fedora—and helping you decide which might work for that spare thumb drive you've got lying around, or as just a part of your multi-gig monster stick. Read on for a four-way faceoff of bootable Linux systems.

Note: All but one of the systems tested here were created with UNetbootin, available for Windows and Linux downloads, and using the latest version available that could boot from USB. All were run on the same laptop, a 2.0 gHz Centrino Duo ThinkPad with 2GB of memory/RAM. Fedora 9 was run using its own live USB creator, as explained previously.

Damn Small Linux 4.4.6

Ultra-small (and efficient) Linux distribution using an older version of the Linux kernel (great for real old hardware, not so hot for the newer stuff).

Min. requirements: 486 Intel processor with 24MB RAM.
Image size: 50MB (forever, according to project leaders).
Boot time: 23.1 seconds.
Features: Firefox and super-slim Dillo browser both available. Access to tons of built-in, geeky tools like SSH/FTP servers; Built-in Conky display. Right-click access to nearly anything.
Needs improvement: Cluttered menus (necessarily so, perhaps). Hardware detection is tricky - missed, or just didn't set up, my ThinkPad's USB mouse, Intel Wi-Fi card, and integrated sound. Graphics are definitely old-school VESA, which might grate on some.
Who would like it: Anyone with really, really old hardware, or those who feel comfortable at a command line or in networking jargon.

Puppy Linux 4.1

This light bootable system can run from a USB stick, but if a system has more than 256MB of RAM, Puppy can move itself entirely onto a "ram disk," letting the user pull out their portable drive and keep working. Read Gina's walk-through of Puppy for details.

Min. requirements: Pentium 166MMX with 128MB RAM.
Image size: 94MB
Boot time: First boot: 43.5 seconds, with pauses for interface prompts; More if choosing better XORG video driver. Boot after session saved and configuration set: 32 seconds.
Features: Network connection wizard can get most decently savvy users online. Support for MP3s and other proprietary media (even Blu-Ray burning!) on first boot-up. Many unique tools (Puppy podcast grabber, PDF converter, custom Puppy distro maker) and good picks (GParted partition editor, password manager). Wizards offered for most hardware types not auto-detected and other tasks.
Needs improvement: The gauntlet of first-boot questions and video options can be trying (suggested video modes not working, choices not entirely clear). Wireless config worked when manually set up, then disappeared. Like Damn Small Linux, menus can be cluttered and hard to navigate.
Who would like it: Those looking to dedicate a thumb drive, or at least most of it, to a working, fast-moving, persistent desktop.

Xubuntu 8.04

Basically the Ubuntu platform, optimized to run the lighter Xfce desktop manager.

Min. Requirements: 128MB RAM for live session (192 to install); Pentium-class processor assumed.
Image size: 544MB
Boot time: 48.4 seconds.
Features: Ubuntu-specific apps and tools (Add/Remove programs, Firefox modifications, settings manager, etc.). Switch-able support for GNOME and/or KDE apps. Can install in Windows without partition changes (via Wubi). Network manager offers most painless wireless connections. Native support for NTFS drive access.
Needs improvement: No built-in persistence option. Systems near the low end of RAM requirements will feel the pinch with multiple apps open.
Who would like it: Basically, anybody who favors an Ubuntu system, but would like a slimmed-down version run from a USB stick, with a few of its programs remixed.

Fedora 9 Live

The Fedora Project has its own handy, Windows-friendly Live USB maker that makes adding Fedora to your USB drive—without damaging your other data—pretty simple. Read our Fedora-on-a-stick guide for more info.

Min. requirements: 400 MHz Pentium II, 256MB RAM.
Image size: Approx. 725MB.
Boot time: 45.5 seconds.
Features: Support for PowerPC hardware on even the newest Fedora releases. Customized "persistent overlay" for storing documents and data. Generally strong, updated GNOME and KDE desktops, with some new features added quickly.
Needs improvement: Enabling NTFS drive access and proprietary media playing would've been nice defaults. Occasional hang-ups when accessing certain system features. Bleeping and chirping system sounds get old very fast.
Who would like it: Anyone who has enough computer power, and USB space, to want a complete, up-to-date GNOME or KDE desktop running.

Our take (and yours)

After using each of the systems above to browse a few web pages, edit a Word document and check out a few music files on my Windows partition, I found myself liking Puppy Linux, on the whole, more than the others. It can work as either a fully-live system that start you clean each time, or give you a persistent disk space to store you stuff in. It's not a bad looking desktop either, and aside from a wireless quirk, I found it decently easy to use and really fast-moving.

That's just my take, of course. We want to hear which system our USB-booting readers prefer. Tell us your preference in the poll, and detail your "other" votes, or disagreements, in the comments.

What's your preferred USB-booting Linux system?
( polls)

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Buy an HDTV Like a Pro [Shopping]

2008-10-24T17:14:00.001-07:00

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Buy an HDTV Like a Pro [Shopping]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 24/10/08

Now may not seem like the best time to drop any extra cash on a new TV, but with the HDTV switch just around the corner and manufacturers desperate to unload the warehouses full of TVs they'd been stockpiling for the upcoming holiday season, now may be a better time than any. To help you out, the gadget nuts at Gizmodo have put together an excellent guide to buying an HDTV like a pro. For example:

The contrast ratio is the most important thing to look for in today's HDTVs. Take a dark scene, and cup your hands around a black area of the screen, blocking out all the ambient light from your view. What it's look like? Does it glow? Or is it really black? Next, how does it flow from dark to light? Is it a smooth gradation or is it a harsh step up? You want really deep, dark blacks and bright whites, but you want a nice even gradation between the two.

Whether or not this is your first HDTV, it's a good read if you're planning to do a little HD shopping in the coming months. If you're already a seasoned buyer, let's hear your HDTV tips in the comments.

Giz Explains: How to Buy an HDTV Like a Pro [Gizmodo]

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Pulmonary Function Tests Mini-Lectures on YouTube

2008-10-23T05:55:00.001-07:00

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Pulmonary Function Tests Mini-Lectures on YouTube

via Clinical Cases and Images - Blog by noreply@blogger.com (Ves Dimov, M.D.) on 20/10/08

O2Demand only joined YouTube in March 2008 but that did not stop him from recording and uploading 62 mini-lectures discussing topics from different specialties:

CNS Physiology
CVS Physiology
Resp Physiology
Hepatic Physiology
Renal Physiology
Electrolytes
Acid/Base
Acute Heart Failure
Shock
Pharmacology Videos

He uses an unconventional low-tech approach - pointing to lists and diagrams from his own hand-written notes.

The 3 Pulmonary Function Tests videos are embedded below:

Pulmonary Function Test 1/3

Pulmonary Function Test 2/3

Pulmonary Function Test 3/3

I have written about physicians using YouTube for medical education before:

Case Presentations on YouTube

Echocardiograms and Cases on YouTube

544 Histopathology Videos on YouTube

We even did an assessment of the perception of usefulness of the renal histopathology video by the Cleveland Clinic nephrology fellows -- they felt the videos offered variety and educational value.

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Upgrade Your Laptop with External Hard Drive Swap [DIY]

2008-10-23T00:26:00.001-07:00

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Upgrade Your Laptop with External Hard Drive Swap [DIY]

via Lifehacker by Jackson West on 21/10/08

If you've got a MacBook past warranty and are looking for more hard drive space, Seattlite Tim Molter offers a detailed step-by-step guide to a do-it-yourself upgrade with photos. His method is particularly clever because rather than buying a blank drive, Molter just buys an inexpensive USB external drive, which allowed him to both create a fully bootable backup from his original drive and provided an enclosure for his old hard drive—all for less than half the cost of an upgrade from Apple. The old drive makes for a handy complete backup or, properly formatted, can be sold on classified ad or auction sites for the equivalent of a cash-back trade-in. The same general idea will work with any laptop with a ~~3.5"~~ 2.5" hard drive (which is most of them), and doesn't involve any tools more complicated than a small screwdriver.

500GB MacBook Harddrive Upgrade for Under $100 [Obscured Clarity]

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Free Alternatives to 10 Popular Commercial Mac Applications | MakeUseOf.com

2008-09-20T09:50:00.000-07:00

This is makeuseof.com free mac apps. Reproducing the page from the site

This is MakeUseOf’s edition of Software for Starving Students.
Commercial app #1: AppZapper $12.95

AppZapper is an uninstaller. Mac applications are very simple to install: it’s a straightforward click-and-drag over to the ‘Applications’ folder. Uninstallation is supposedly just the same, dragging the application to Trash. But there are always remnants of the application in System and Preferences folders. An uninstaller finds these remnants and removes them as well. AppZapper is the best in the game.

Free counterpart: AppCleaner
There are hardly any noticable differences between these two applications, even if you put them side by side. AppCleaner works just as well as AppZapper.

appzapper mac
Commercial app #2: Parallels Desktop for Mac $79.99

Parallels Desktop for Mac is a virtualization program which enables installation of multiple operating systems in a virtual environment. Use this to install Windows, Linux or any other OS while running Mac OS X at the same time.

Free counterpart: VirtualBox
Jason has covered this program in great detail. Check out his post to learn more about using VirtualBox and what it has to offer.
Commercial app #3: Xslimmer $12.95

Xslimmer is a program which removes unnecessary architecture from Universal Binaries. Because of Apple’s transition to Intel, developers had to make their programs cater for both PPC and Intel processors. It will also remove unwanted localization (language) files to drastically reduce the amount of space used by the application.

Free counterparts: TrimTheFat, Monolingual
TrimTheFat will only remove the PPC architecture from applications leaving the Intel side of it. Then use Monolingual to remove unwanted languages. Monolingual can also remove unneeded architecture but this feature is very unpolished and there are some reports that Monolingual causes severe damage to Intel Macs. Do not use Monolingual for that purpose, although removing languages works without a glitch. So, two free apps to replace Xslimmer’s functions. Using these two applications, you can very well free up several gigabytes.

xslimmer mac
Commercial app #4: CoverSutra 14.95€

CoverSutra is an iTunes controller and Last.fm scrobbler which provides a beautiful album art jewel case on the desktop. But 14.95€ is too much money to pay for something which will only help me control my music.

Free counterpart: GimmeSomeTunecoversutra mac
Although GimmeSomeTune is free, in many ways it could possibly be better than CoverSutra. GimmeSomeTune can automatically fetch album artwork and lyrics, scrobble to Last.fm and has global hotkeys to control almost every aspect of iTunes.
Commercial app #5: TextExpander $29.95

TextExpander allows you to use customized abbreviations to “expand” frequently used phrases and text-strings. This application is valuable when you are always finding yourself typing the same line of text repeatedly such as in HTML editing.rapidowrite

Free counterpart: RapidoWrite
I honestly can’t tell the difference between TextExpander and RapidoWrite. To pay or not to pay?
Commercial app #6: Awaken $12.95

Awaken is an iTunes alarm, when it goes off, it will play a preset playlist. It can also be set to sleep your Mac after a certain time period is over, allowing you to listen to music while drifting off into slumber.

Free counterparts: iTunes Alarm, iTaf
I’ve covered this topic of alarms for iTunes before. iTunes Alarm and iTaf are very capable to perform the same tasks as Awaken, perhaps even more! Check out my older post to learn more about these little gems.

itunes alarm clock
Commercial app #7: iWork $79, Office 2008 for Mac (Home and Student Edition) $149.95

I’m sure we all know what Office 2008 is. iWork is the Mac productivity suite which comprises of Pages (word processor), Numbers (spreadsheet) and Keynote (presentation).

Free counterpart: NeoOfficeneooffice for mac
NeoOffice is a full set of office applications and is a port of OpenOffice created specifically for Mac OS X. Some may argue that the interface is not as polished as it could be but we’re looking for productivity here. NeoOffice has just been recently updated and performs quicker among other enhancements. If what you’re looking for is a capable word processor (which is the most often used application within a productivity suite), why bother paying so much when NeoOffice is free?
Commercial app #8: Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X $39.95

If you are in a community where you’ll get exposed to a Windows NTFS formatted hard disk (like student life), you’ll definitely need to have NTFS support on your Mac. One method to do this is to buy Paragon NTFS. The other way is completely free!macfuse

Free counterpart: NTFS-3G with MacFUSE
I’ve explained how to use NTFS-3G in my first Macnifying OS X post. The NTFS-3G project has come a long way since it first started. The driver is pretty stable now and there is even a ublio version for better performance.
Commercial app #9: Photoshop CS3 $649

Photoshop is an image editing tool which is incredibly successful because it is simply so capable.

Free counterpart: GIMP.app
Right, this is a very touchy topic. So, let’s get this straight: No free application will ever be good enough to completely replace Photoshop. There are always alternatives if you’re not looking to spend $650 to touch up your photos. This is one of them. GIMP.app is specifically ported to Mac OS X so don’t mistake it with GIMP. Before this, running GIMP.app requires X11 to be installed but there is now an experimental native version which doesn’t need X11 to run. I’ve tried it, takes a little long to launch but it works. I don’t mind waiting a bit and saving $650.

Commercial app #10: Cha-Ching $40, MoneyWell $39.99

These two applications are personal finance managers, and pretty good ones at that. But they cost a bomb. I don’t know about you but I’m hardly willing to spend $40 to manage my finances.

Free counterparts: Cashbox, Mini$
Simple, easy-to-use, straightforward, free. That’s all I need. Granted, Mini$ and Cashbox are not as fully-featured as Cha-Ching and MoneyWell, they don’t have the fancy frills of schedulers and buckets styles but they still manage to help me keep track of my finances.

So I hope that this list prevented the major hole in your pocket which could have been if you paid for these applications. Are there any other applications you use which I didn’t list? Maybe you would like to find out if the application you were thinking of buying has a free alternative? Shoot away in the comments!

Rohos Mini Drive Encrypts Your USB Drive Files [Featured Windows Download]

2008-09-05T21:12:00.001-07:00

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Rohos Mini Drive Encrypts Your USB Drive Files [Featured Windows Download]

via Lifehacker by Jason Fitzpatrick on 3/09/08

Windows only: Encryption tool Rohos Mini Drive secures the files on your flash drive—but unlike our favorite encryption utility TrueCrypt, it creates partitions you can access even without administrative access on the computer in question (like a coffee shop workstation). Creating a drive is simple: Install Rohos Mini Drive on your primary workstation, plug in the USB drive you wish to secure and the wizard walks you through the rest. The only hiccup you may experience is if you have multiple USB drives plugged in when you run the wizard; just make sure you specify which drive if the auto detection picks your camera's SD card instead of your USB drive. Rohos Mini Drive has an autorun feature which can launch applications when it opens the partition, and a virtual keyboard for an added layer of security. The application uses AES 256 bit encryption and currently has a partition size limit of 1GB. Rohos Mini Drive is a free download for Windows only. Thanks, Pavv!

Rohos Mini Drive [Rohos]

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Freeware PDF Unlocker Enables Copy/Paste Functions Without Passwords [Passwo...

2008-06-19T17:49:00.001-07:00

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Freeware PDF Unlocker Enables Copy/Paste Functions Without Passwords [Password Recovery]

via Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy on 6/19/08

Windows only: Freeware PDF Unlocker, a free Windows utility, doesn't do everything that commerical packages like those from Elcomsoft do, but it will help if you just need to unlock copy/paste and editing restrictions on a PDF. Simply drag a copy-protected PDF onto PDF Unlocker's icon, and a new, non-protected copy will be created. You can also strip PDF files of passwords needed to open and read them, but you, uh, need the password to do so. For simple restrictions, however, it does the job. Freeware PDF Unlocker is a free download for Windows systems.

Freeware PDF Unlocker [via gHacks]

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Ultrasound-guided Central Line Placement: Embed Several Videos in One Frame

2008-05-26T18:23:00.001-07:00

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Ultrasound-guided Central Line Placement: Embed Several Videos in One Frame

via Clinical Cases and Images - Blog by noreply@blogger.com (Clinical Cases) on 5/22/08

Video: Ultrasound-guided Central Line Placement

Google Docs is a free web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application.

You can include YouTube videos, images, and text captions into slides to condense and display a "deck" of graphical content in a concise format in your posts.

For example, instead of publishing several videos on one page, you can insert videos and pictures in an embedded presentation slideshow -- see the example above.

I picked the topic of Ultrasound-guided Central Line Placement because this modality is of proven efficacy and safety but is still underutilized. A colleague of mine and I published a A Step-by-Step Procedure Guide with Photos for Central Line Placement with Ultrasound Guidance in an attempt to popularize the approach. A free PDA version of this procedure guide is available from MeisterMed.

References:
Multiple-size Embedded Presentations from Google Docs. Blogger Buzz.
Central Line Placement with Ultrasound Guidance: A Step-by-Step Procedure Guide with Photos
Central Line Placement: A Step-by-Step Procedure Guide with Photos
Ultrasound Guided Vascular Access (USGVA)
SiteRite Video
Ultrasound-guided Central line insertion

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UltimateDefrag Moves Apps and Files for Quicker Access [Optimization]

2008-05-25T06:32:00.001-07:00

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UltimateDefrag Moves Apps and Files for Quicker Access [Optimization]

via Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy on 5/23/08

Windows only: Put your high-priority programs and files in the most easily-accessed parts of your hard drive with UltimateDefrag, a free Windows utility. The program does all the normal data-ordering of a standard defragmenting app (and probably runs at roughly the same speeds), but lets you choose which data to place on the outer, or faster, portions of your disk. You can also ask UltimateDefrag to analyze your drive and see which files have been most recently accessed, which works best for drives or partitions set aside for data, or automatically try to improve ease of access. UltimateDefrag can also run as your default defrag tool, and run only when a screensaver is active. UltimateDefrag is a free download for Windows systems only.

UltimateDefrag Freeware Edition [FreewareGeeks via gHacks]

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Fedora 9 Puts Your Desktop on a USB Drive [Linux On A Stick]

2008-05-18T06:56:00.001-07:00

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Fedora 9 Puts Your Desktop on a USB Drive [Linux On A Stick]

via Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy on 5/16/08

This week's release of the Fedora 9 Linux distribution makes putting a full-fledged desktop on a portable USB thumb drive a three-click affair. Even better, you don't need Linux installed to create it, you can leave the data on your thumb drive untouched, and any files you create or settings you tweak remain in place the next time you boot up. After the jump, let's create a fully-functional desktop-to-go using a simple Windows program and a 1GB or larger thumb drive.

Why Fedora?

Turning a live CD ISO into a bootable USB image has been possible for some time now, but it usually involves some heavy lifting with the command line, and almost always in Linux. Fedora's liveusb-creator program makes USB imaging dead simple, and the Fedora distribution itself has a lot going for it. The latest "community" version of Red Hat's Linux package benefits from the same updates to the GNOME desktop that Ubuntu's Hardy Heron includes, and KDE fans get a pretty full-featured version that runs on the customizable KDE 4. You can see a full list of updates and improvements to Fedora 9 here, but it's best to check it out for yourself. Here's how.

Make your live USB

First we'll need to grab Fedora's liveusb-creator tool by grabbing the zip file listed under "Download," extracting it and running the liveusb-creator.exe file found inside in Windows.

The top options on the window let you choose to use a live Fedora CD image you've already downloaded or have the tool grab a copy of the standard Fedora 9 disc itself. If you'd rather grab the file yourself or download it through a torrent, use one of the links listed under "live media" at the Fedora Project. Plug in your USB drive if you haven't already, and make sure it's selected in the "Target" field. Don't worry about files you've got on there—as long as the tool has space to put Fedora on there, it won't touch your other files.

The slider to the right is the most important part—"Persistent Overlay" is the space on the thumb drive you want to use for storing your files and settings. The Fedora system itself is going to take up roughly the size of a stuffed CD; using an empty 1GB thumb drive, I chose 205MB for the overlay, which left 63MB free, but you can scale that up for larger drives or down if you want more free space. Keep in mind that any files you store on the drive itself can be accessed from inside your USB-booted system, so a bigger persistent overlay isn't always necessary.

Hit "Create Live USB," and watch the creator do its thing. Once it's done, your stick is probably ready to get plugged in and booted up.

Fix booting problems

I say "probably" because there's a chance, especially if you've done some formatting or other live-booting experiments, that you'll get an error at boot-up stating there's "No partition active" or something similar. If that's the case, head to your Start menu's "Run" command ("Start search" box in Vista), type in diskpart and hit Enter. You'll get a "DISKPART>" command prompt, where you should follow these commands to mark your USB drive as "active."

list disk (Note the number that corresponds to your USB drive, usually "1")

select disk 1 (Assuming "1" was your USB drive

list partition (If you multi-partitioned your USB drive, select the right one, otherwise we'll assume "1")

select partition 1

active

exit

Customize your persistent desktop

Now you should be set to boot into Fedora 9. You'll see a splash screen counting down from 10 when you boot (hit Enter twice to speed it up), and you'll land at a desktop that's pretty much a fresh Fedora 9 install. You can access to your USB drive's files from here, connect to a wired or wireless network with the icon in the upper-right system tray, and you've got a solid set of built-in applications—Firefox 3 Beta 5, the GIMP, Pidgin, the Transmission BitTorrent client, and a pretty nifty Bluetooth manager, to name a few.

Want to add Thunderbird or OpenOffice.org? Head to the upper-left menus and click to System->Administration->Add/Remove Programs. Anything you install goes into your "persistent overlay," so as long as you've got space for it, you can add whatever you'd like.

Now it's time to explore and get familiar with a GNOME-based Linux system (or KDE 4, depending on which image you grabbed). Here are a few suggestions on helpful tweaks you might want to make once you're set up:

Enable your NTFS drives: If you've loaded a USB Fedora on a system with Windows installed, you'll want to open up Add/Remove Programs, search for "ntfs-config," and install that package. From the System menu again, choose NTFS Config, and you can select the drives you want to have access to.
Sync data with your Windows apps: Once you can see your NTFS drives on your desktop, you can use your established settings in Firefox 3, Thunderbird, Pidgin, and other apps if you're booting on the same system as Windows. Check out our guide to dual-booting with shared data; if you're using Firefox 2 in Windows and only want to replicate bookmarks in Fedora, the GMarks synchronizer has updated to support versions 3 and 2.
Turn off annoying system sounds: One misstep Fedora makes, at least in my opinion, is enabling by default a slew of little chirps and whistles every time you click or do something. To silence them, head to System-Preferences->Hardware->Sound, click the "System" tab, and un-check the "Enable system sounds" box.

You've now got a portable system that's great for rescuing un-bootable computers, bringing your favorite work apps on the go, or just testing out Linux with realistic performance and custom options. What apps and tweaks have you made to your own live USB system? Share your tips, and questions, in the comments.

Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker, wrote this feature from inside his USB drive. His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, appears every Friday on Lifehacker.

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Battle at Kruger

2008-05-11T20:57:00.001-07:00

Amazing video at Kruger natl park

Easily Create MP3s for Your Phone with ToneShop (iPhone Included) [Featured ...

2008-04-03T16:38:00.000-07:00

Sent to you by MOSYN via Google Reader:

Easily Create MP3s for Your Phone with ToneShop (iPhone Included) [Featured Windows Download]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 3/31/08

Windows only: Freeware application ToneShop creates ringtones from a variety of formats, for a variety of formats supported by most popular mobile phones (including the iPhone). To use it, just point ToneShop to the WAV, WMA, M4A, or MP3 file you want to use as your source, and then use ToneShop's simple editing tools to choose the start and end time of your ringtone. Choose the output format supported by your cell phone, hit convert, and voilà—you've got a new ringtone. ToneShop could use a bit of polish on the interface, but as young as it is, it still makes it dead simple to create ringtones for your phone in just a few clicks. ToneShop is freeware, Windows only. If you've got a preferred ringtone tool that puts ToneShop to shame, let's hear about it in the comments.

ToneShop [via FreewareGenius]

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Completely Uninstall Programs with AppCleaner [Featured Mac Download]

2008-03-28T23:26:00.001-07:00

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Completely Uninstall Programs with AppCleaner [Featured Mac Download]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 3/27/08

Mac OS X only: Freeware application AppCleaner completely uninstalls applications from your Mac. As most of us know, the process of "uninstalling" applications on the Mac is generally as simple as trashing the application, but many programs leave behind settings and other small files that continue to take up space on your hard drive. AppCleaner identifies these files and takes them down with the application they belong to. To use it, you can either drag and drop the app you want to uninstall onto AppCleaner or click the tabs to select what you want to uninstall from the list of apps, widgets, or plug-ins AppCleaner finds. If you'd rather not run AppCleaner every time you want to uninstall an app, check out previously mentioned AppTrap. AppCleaner is freeware, Mac OS X only.

AppCleaner [via MacApper]

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Electrocardiogram (ECG, EKG) Learning Tools

2008-03-18T16:50:00.001-07:00

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Electrocardiogram (ECG, EKG) Learning Tools

via Clinical Cases and Images - Blog by Clinical Cases on 3/8/08

To provide some background, I am a teaching attending at Cleveland Clinic and have multiple rotations during the year with our residents and medical students. We record all topics discussed during a particular rotation on this blog and I know from the feedback which one the residents and students like the best. This month it was the session about using 2 mnemonics as a systematic approach to interpreting EKGs and web-based tools for EKG training. All senior medical residents at Cleveland Clinic have to take an EKG exam in their second year and they found the EKG learning tools listed below especially helpful:

- ECG Wave-Maven by Harvard Medical School is a fully-fledged ECG-trainer

- EKG World Encyclopedia by McGill University

- Arrhythmia simulator by SkillStat with a play, pause and quiz mode

-ECG Palm Brain is a useful online and PDA reference

- Systematic Approach to Reading Electrocardiograms by Using 2 Mnemonics

- EKGs with Dr. Koch: It's Not Only Educational It's Also Fun -- a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist will guide you through the interpretations of several EKGs

References:
Topics Discussed During the Internal Medicine Rotation at Cleveland Clinic in February/March 2008
Image source: Atrial fibrillation (AFib) with rapid ventricular response (RVR) due to triple lumen catheter (TLC) placement

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Make an XP Install CD with Every Patch Since SP2 [Updates]

2008-03-11T16:21:00.001-07:00

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Make an XP Install CD with Every Patch Since SP2 [Updates]

via Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy on 3/11/08

As anyone who's reinstalled Windows XP knows, there have been a lot, and I mean a lot, of updates issued for the operating system, and waiting for them to install (/restart/install/restart) can be laborious, to say the least. Luckily, one helpful soul has done the good work of compiling all the patches made to Windows XP since Service Pack 2 was released and creating a tool to make an XP install CD that contains all those changes. You download the roughly 50 MB file, point a utility at your install CD's i386 directory, then wait for it to make you a new folder you can burn to disc. We've pointed out other offline updaters in the wake of the dearly departed AutoPatcher, but this one seems to grab more than just security updates and could save some serious time.

RyanVM's Windows XP Post-SP2 Update Pack [via Digital Inspiration]

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Recover Lost Wi-Fi Passwords with WirelessKeyView [Featured Windows Download]

2008-03-11T16:20:00.001-07:00

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Recover Lost Wi-Fi Passwords with WirelessKeyView [Featured Windows Download]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 3/11/08

Windows only: Freeware application WirelessKeyView recovers the wireless network keys saved to your computer by the Windows Wireless Zero Configuration service of XP or the WLAN AutoConfig service in Vista. As with any password-finding tool, this can be put to use both for the powers of good or evil, but we trust you'll stick to good—say when you're doing tech support on your parents' laptop and they can't remember what their Wi-Fi password is. WirelessKeyView is freeware, Windows only. Got more password cracking needs done? Crack your Windows password with Ophcrack, roll up your sleeves on your network passwords with Cain and Abel, and so much more.

WirelessKeyView [via Shell Extension City]

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How to Perfectly Tie Any Kind of Tie [Etiquette]

2008-02-17T23:49:00.001-08:00

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How to Perfectly Tie Any Kind of Tie [Etiquette]

via Lifehacker by Tamar Weinberg on 2/17/08

Dress for success with a perfectly tied necktie. The Kinowear blog teaches you how to tie any type of tie from the Windsor to the Four-in-Hand to the St. Andrew Knot, complete with video demonstrations and step-by-step photos. Further, learn which ties better complement the shape of your face. The article states:

If you have a strong, angular face you look better in striped ties. Dotted and paisley printed ties go well with a round or baby face. Solid colors can be worn by everyone.

You can also discover how your height factors into your tie selection in addition to getting the right tie length wherever you go.

How to Tie a Tie: The Pursuit of the Perfect Knot [Kinowear Blog]

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Shah Rukh Khan as popular as Pope: German media

2008-02-10T03:29:00.001-08:00

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Shah Rukh Khan as popular as Pope: German media

via Sify.com on 2/10/08

As German fans drooled over Shah Rukh Khan, the national media shed its perceptions of "bullock cart India" and trained its attention on the Bollywood superstar when he landed here, with one journalist even saying "he is as popular as the Pope".

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Yahoo/Microsoft Photoshop contest winners [Contest]

2008-02-09T01:41:00.001-08:00

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Yahoo/Microsoft Photoshop contest winners [Contest]

via Valleywag by Jordan Golson on 2/8/08

Last week we hooked up with Fark.com to run a photoshop contest: "What are we likely to see as the result of the Microsoft-Yahoo takeover?" Here are our favorite submissions.

Image above: shilrobot

~Latka

~Anonymous

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★ Keynote Roundup

2008-01-18T08:23:00.001-08:00

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★ Keynote Roundup

via Daring Fireball by John Gruber on 1/16/08

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations from yesterday's Macworld Expo keynote:

Office 2008

I was interested to see whether Microsoft would get some demo time during the keynote to show Office 2008. The Mac BU hasn't always gotten stage time, but, I think, they have always gotten stage time in keynotes when they have a brand-new major version of Office. Not this year.

Jobs did mention the Office 2008 release, but there was no demo, and, in fact, much of what Jobs actually said about Office was negative — emphasizing that they were "finally" native for Intel, and that they were the last of the major developers to do so, even later than Adobe.

Maybe it's a result of competition in the office software space with Apple's own iWork. Maybe it's resentment over the time it took for Office to go Intel-native. Maybe it's a sense, by Jobs, that Apple is no longer in a position where it needs to reassure the press and its own customers that Microsoft supports the Mac. I think it's a little bit of all those things.

'Four Things Today'

Jobs actually talked about more than four things; what he did, really, was break the keynote into four sections. The third "thing", for example, included both iTunes movie rentals and the new Apple TV 2.0. I think the "four things" idea was a great framework for the keynote, though, and a subtle change from Jobs's traditional keynote structure.

Time Capsule

I love the idea of Time Capsule, and, assuming it works as billed, it's going to accomplish something awesome: it will save data that would otherwise have been lost, because there will now be more people backing up their data regularly. I think you can really make an argument that Time Machine is the most important feature Apple has added to Mac OS X in years, maybe ever, and support for doing it over the network makes it better.

But, when I predicted something like this would be announced, I assumed it would coincide with the restoration of being able to back up to any USB hard drive attached to an AirPort base station. That capability was billed as a feature of Leopard and Time Machine right up until mid-October, and was present in developer seeds of Leopard.

The word I heard was that very late in the beta testing of Leopard, Apple discovered some sort of bug or security problem with the feature, and that while it was pulled from 10.5.0 (because it couldn't be fixed in time), it was scheduled to come back in a future Leopard update.

But so now Time Capsule is here, and there's no word from Apple about backing up to hard drives attached to base stations. Which in turn is leading to the suspicion that perhaps the reason hard drive/base station Time Machine backups were pulled from Leopard was to make the feature exclusive to Apple's own Time Capsule hardware. Check the comment thread on this article at Macworld to see some angry customers — people who bought hard drives and base stations in advance of Leopard specifically in anticipation of this feature.

Again, I think Time Capsule is a great idea and a great product. But if Apple has pulled support for hard drive/base station backups to eliminate Time Capsule competition, that's shitty, pure and simple. To be clear, though, it's still an "if" at this point.

4 Million iPhones, 4 Billion Songs

Those are big numbers. Assuming sales continue to grow, and that Apple will release new iPhones with lower prices for next year's holiday season, their stated goal of selling 10 million phones in 2008 looks like a sure thing.

As I expected, there was no word on DRM-free music from the other three major music labels. But I think Jobs's aside that they sold 20 million songs on Christmas day alone was sort of a message that iTunes music sales are still growing strong. Even at just 10 or 15 cents profit per song, when you're talking billions, that's a lot of money.

The $20 iPod Touch Update

There were audible groans in the keynote hall when Jobs announced that the iPod Touch update costs $20. That's an interesting difference between the Touch and the iPhone. One reason, I think, is that unlike with iPhones, Apple is not accounting for iPod Touches on a subscription basis — so they have to charge something to add features in order to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. But they could charge something less than $20. I wonder how frequently Apple plans to offer $20 feature upgrades to Touch owners.

But, on the other hand, if Apple is charging for the iPod Touch upgrade to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, why is the Apple TV upgrade free? As far as I know, they're not accounting for Apple TV sales on a subscription basis. I'm left with the feeling that they're charging $20 for the iPod Touch upgrade simply because they can.

Update: I was wrong, Apple is accounting for Apple TV on a subscription basis, just like with the iPhone. That explains the free upgrade.

Cost aside, it's an utterly compelling upgrade for the Touch; it's hard to imagine any Touch owner not wanting it. But it seems weird to pay $20 for a bunch of apps that already existed. Apparently the apps are already there on the 1.1.3 Touch OS, because the upgrade itself weighs in at just 9 kilobytes.

Apple TV 2.0

There's an old saying about Microsoft that, historically, their products always have terrible 1.0 releases, better 2.0's, and then finally succeed at 3.0. The idea being that they stick with a product idea for years and don't give up after early failures.

I think Apple is taking this sort of dogged, determined approach to Apple TV. The big problem Apple faces with Apple TV isn't technical — it's content. They're constrained by what the TV networks and movie studios will allow them to do. The most obvious limitation is the way that they're forbidden from ripping movies from DVDs the way iTunes rips music from CDs.

The movie rentals at the iTunes Store should do as much to sell Apple TVs as any of the actual changes to Apple TV itself in the new software. But the software update is very nice — the UI is improved, and the Flickr photo integration (even though the demo crapped out on-stage during the keynote) is very nice.

Cutting the price to $229 strikes me as a little strange for Apple. They usually stick to nice, round $50 price increments — most everything they sell has a price that ends in 99 or 49. My only guess is that they've cut the price as low as they can to help the product gain traction — that if Apple TV were selling better, the new price would be $249.

Multi-Touch Gestures With MacBook Air Trackpad

It'll be interesting to see how useful this is in practice. The only apps that support it out of the box are Apple's own — iPhoto and Preview for image zooming and rotation; Safari for text scaling. To take advantage of this, apps need to handle new event notifications. Something more or less like "the user is pinching at these coordinates". No existing apps other than Apple's handle these events yet. It'll be interesting to see when (or if?) the other MacBooks get similar trackpads.

The UI for the gesture-related settings in System Preferences is really quite clever: big QuickTime movies showing exactly how to perform the gestures and what effect they cause. I've never seen a prefs UI like that before, but I think it's very appropriate — it's a lot easier to explain them visually than with words. It's a clever way to allow the UI to serve as documentation.

Randy Newman

Randy Newman's keynote-capping scathing anti-Bush administration song was quite a thing. I loved it, and it seemed like everyone around me in the press section was enjoying it thoroughly. But, quite obviously, for humorless Bush supporters, it must have been infuriating. The song is chock full of "I can't believe he just said that" lines.

It's certainly hard to imagine any other major corporation in the U.S. that would invite Randy Newman on stage to perform a song like that.

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Ryles Tube Misplaced Into Cranial Cavity

2008-01-14T04:21:00.001-08:00

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Ryles Tube Misplaced Into Cranial Cavity

via Sumer's Radiology Site by Sumer Sethi on 1/7/08

Here are some images of a polytrauma patient referred to us for a CT scan interpretation. One look at the images make you feel scared, just look at the way Ryles tube is coiling in the cranial cavity. probably he had a cribiform plate fracure through which the tube got accidentally pushed into the cranial cavity. We present the Scout film and CT sections. 35 cases of intracranial nasogastric tube insertion have been reported in the international literature. A complex craniofacial fracture is the most common predisposing factor.

Similar Case on Radswiki

Case by Dr Sumer Sethi-MD, Dr Jaya Shanker,MD

Teleradiology Providers

From Sumer's Radiology Site http://www.sumerdoc.blogspot.com -The Top Radiology Magazine

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Singapore's Quiet Giant

2007-12-21T20:15:00.001-08:00

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Singapore's Quiet Giant

via Portfolio.com: Top 5 on 12/21/07

For the emerging sovereign wealth funds of the Persian Gulf and China, Temasek Holdings of Singapore is looked to as the model.

A wholly owned investment company of the Singapore government, Temasek has spent $8.5 billion on 18 deals this year. A $5 billion investment in Merrill Lynch may be its next.

Temasek is a secretive company whose executive director and chief executive is Ho Ching, the wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

Until recently, Temasek has focused its investments in Asia. It is said to have assets of nearly $120 billion, which have been increasingly deployed overseas, mainly in China, where Temasek has been particularly active, buying stakes in several big government banks: China Construction Bank, Bank of China, and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. It is also planning to invest $1 billion in a Chinese private equity fund run by prominent dealmaker Fang Fenglei.

Temasek has put nearly $3 billion in India, and is also invested in Indonesia and Australia. It has a 17 percent stake in Standard Chartered, the British bank whose main business is in Asia.

The company says that its return to shareholders—compounded annually since Temasek was founded in 1974—has been 18 percent. Many analysts in Singapore say that even that impressive rate of growth may be understated.

"Temasek was deliberately incorporated as a company, with the government as its only shareholder, so that it has the operational and financial discipline to be run commercially, away from the policymaking and regulatory roles of the government," Ho Ching said at a Morgan Stanley conference last year. "When we invest, we invest strictly for returns."

Part of Temasek's success can be attributed to shrewd investment choices. For decades, Temasek has helped grow some of Singapore's most successful companies, including Singapore Airlines and the telecommunications company SingTel.

"In Asia, we have four basic investment themes: belief in the growth of Asian economies, the growing middle class as the primary driver of consumer demand, deepening comparative advantage, and companies which are emerging global champions," Manish Kejriwal, Temasek's managing director, said in an interview earlier this year.

Asked about Temasek's investment strategy concerning both India and China, Kejriwal said, "We view both countries as the twin engines that will drive the Asian economy as a whole in the next few decades. Each country provides different opportunities and poses different challenges. As an equity house, with the mandate to maximize long-term returns on our investments, Temasek is keen to further deepen its connections with India, even as we look at opportunities in China and the rest of Asia.... We are a very flexible and long-term investor."

But Temasek's investment record has not been entirely without blemish. Its purchase last year for $3.8 billion of 49.6 percent of Shin Corporation from former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra led to Shinawatra's downfall and to a paper loss of more than $1 billion for the Singaporean company.

And in neighboring Indonesia—a country that Singapore bailed out during the Asian currency crisis of 1997—Temasek was "legally and convincingly proven to have violated Article 27 of the antimonopoly law," according to Syamsul Maarif, chairman of the Business Competition Supervisory Commission. Maarif said that two Indonesian telecommunications companies partially owned by Singaporean companies—which are in turn controlled by Temasek—had colluded to make Indonesia's mobile-phone rates the most expensive in the region. Indonesia's mobile-phone market is said to be worth $6 billion annually, of which the Temasek-associated companies control 85 percent.

Maarif fined Temasek $3 million and gave it two years to sell either SingTel's 35 percent stake in market leader Telkomsel or ST Telemedia's 30 percent of Indosat, the No. 2 wireless carrier.

Temasek is now involved in a debate shaping up in India. Ho Ching took the unusual step of writing personally to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to help resolve a dispute over mobile-phone bandwidth that could hurt the industry's growth. With more than six million new subscribers being added monthly, most of the leading mobile-phone operators have exhausted the bandwidth they had been allocated.

India's telecommunication ministry wants to auction additional bandwidth, but many mobile-phone companies, especially those operating GSM networks, say that what is being made available is too little and too expensive.

In her letter to Singh, Ho Ching wrote, "The latest proposals risk making private operators subscale, when they have a real window of opportunity to be global champions.... As a long-term investor in India, it is my sincere suggestion that you invite your regulators to consider the best practices and strategies around the world."

Temasek holds a 56 percent stake in SingTel, which in turn owns about 31 percent of Bharti Airtel, India's largest mobile-phone service provider by subscriber base.

India's defense ministry controls most of the remaining frequencies that could be made available for mobile-phone services and is not willing to release as much bandwidth as the telecommunications ministry wants.

"We would be happy to play our part to help facilitate any exchanges with other regulators," the Temasek C.E.O. wrote. "We also believe that the private sector players are a rich source of market knowledge. An open dialogue with these excellent operators should help develop a consensus which would be advantageous to India's interest."

The directness of her letter was typical of Ho Ching's management style. She joined Temasek as a director in January 2002 and became its executive director in May 2002. On January 1, 2004, she became chief executive, sparking talk of nepotism because her husband was Singapore's prime minister.

Ho Ching—who holds a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University—started her professional career with Singapore's Ministry of Defense, where she held various positions in the Defense Science Organization and the Defense Matériel Organization. She next served in the Singapore Technologies group, where she was chief executive.

Ho Ching has long emphasized that the key reforms in the island-state of 4.5 million people included the opening up of its markets and a determination to maintain fiscal discipline.

At the Morgan Stanley conference last year, she shared some of her thinking: "We look for sectors like infrastructure, transport and logistics, banking services and financials because these are broad-based reflections of the economic opportunities. A second theme is to focus on services, products, or companies that serve the middle class. This includes consumer banking and telecommunications."

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Citi's Near Miss in Abu Dhabi

2007-12-07T15:57:00.001-08:00

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Citi's Near Miss in Abu Dhabi

via Portfolio.com: Top 5 on 11/27/07

An investment by Abu Dhabi is being hailed today as a huge boost for Citigroup, but it might nearly have been a missed opportunity.

About a month ago, Chuck Prince, then the chairman and chief executive officer of Citigroup, was invited by Abu Dhabi to participate in the biennial Festival of Thinkers, which brought 18 Nobel laureates and some 175 top business leaders, scholars, media executives, and artists to the oil-rich Persian Gulf state for four days of celebrating and conviviality.

The participants had access to top decisionmakers in Abu Dhabi, whose proven oil reserves are estimated to last for another 300 years.

The invitation to Prince—first conveyed in June—came from Sheik Nahayan Mabarak al-Nahayan, the festival's founder and the minister of higher education and scientific research of the United Arab Emirates.

The 52-year-old Sheik Nahayan also happens to be the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Group, a private investment fund that is one of the largest investors based in the United Arab Emirates.

The market value of Sheik Nahayan's investments—in banks, telecommunications, real estate, media (he owns a majority stake in CNBC Pakistan, for example), and financial services, among other sectors—is well above $10 billion, and the Oxford-educated sheik is reportedly on the lookout for more opportunities, particularly in the United States.

Prince, however, never responded to the invitation. After some inquiries, a spokesman sent an email just days before the festival began on October 21 saying that the chief executive had prior commitments, according to people briefed on the situation.

The C.E.O., to be sure, was struggling with a bank in crisis. After taking a write-down of $5.9 billion in October on investments tied to subprime mortgages, the bank was estimating it would need to take billions more. Prince resigned on November 4 after having lost the support of backers like Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.

Still, had the embattled Citigroup C.E.O. been able to travel to Abu Dhabi for the festival, he almost certainly could have obtained assurances of badly needed funds—a lifeline that might have saved his job as well.

Abu Dhabi officials have long been considering such investments as rising prices for crude oil yield unprecedented wealth for their state and other OPEC members. Indeed, the six countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council expect their combined budget surplus in 2007 to exceed $700 billion.

And although Sheik Nahayan's invitation to Chuck Prince had not hinted at an investment by Abu Dhabi, the complex web of decisionmaking in the United Arab Emirates is such that Prince most certainly would have found interested investors had he attended the Festival of Thinkers.

This became clear late Monday night, when Citigroup announced that the investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government had agreed to pump $7.5 billion into the bank. This will give the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority—the government's investment arm—a 4.9 percent equity stake, slightly more than that held by Prince Walid.

Abu Dhabi's cash infusion at once strengthens Citigroup's capital base, which has thinned on account of costly acquisitions, the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, and the resulting turmoil in the credit markets.

"This investment reflects our confidence in Citi's potential to build shareholder value," said the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority's managing director, Sheik Ahmed bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

Founded in 1976 by the late president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Zayed al-Nahyan, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority is one of the largest institutional investors in the world. It has some $900 billion in investments and another $1 trillion available in cash from oil income.

Abu Dhabi is the wealthiest of the seven principalities that make up the federation of the United Arab Emirates because it possesses virtually all of the country's crude oil and natural gas. The U.A.E. pumps 2.2 million barrels of crude oil a day.

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, with 1,400 employees, has in the past invested in real estate, cement, and banking in countries from Egypt to Sweden. Now it is becoming more active in finance.

Earlier this year, A.D.I.A. bought a small stake in Apollo Management, the New York-based private equity firm run by Leon Black.

Another Abu Dhabi government entity, Mubadala, owns a 7.5 percent stake in the Carlyle Group, while Istithmar, an arm of the Dubai government, recently bought Barneys New York.

The Dubai government-controlled Borse Dubai took Nasdaq's 28 percent stake in the London Stock Exchange off its hands not long ago, gaining a 19.9 percent share of Nasdaq in return.

These investments underscore the growing role that Middle Eastern investors are taking outside their home turf. Also yesterday, an investment company owned by the ruler of another United Arab Emirates principality, Dubai's Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, bought a stake in Sony.

The investment company, Dubai International Capital, a private equity firm, comes under the overall supervision of Dubai Holdings, Sheik Mohammed's umbrella organization for economic development, real estate projects, and media acquisitions. Dubai Holdings is headed by Mohammed Abdullah al-Gergawi, who holds the title of Dubai's minister of state for cabinet affairs, and who, far more significantly, is Sheik Mohammed's most trusted lieutenant and friend. Gergawi's wife, Mona al-Marri, is chief executive of Dubai's media conglomerate, Media Services Group. She plans to start a business daily that would be circulated around the world, as well as a speakers bureau.

Sheik Mohammed also holds the title of prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, but Dubai and Abu Dhabi regard each other as rivals, especially in the global arena, where Dubai's skills at public relations have obtained voluminous publicity for its construction, tourism, transportation, and financial-services projects.

Abu Dhabi is a more conservative emirate, although far wealthier than Dubai, whose modest oil reserves are expected to disappear in less than a decade. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority manages much of Abu Dhabi's oil income, and reportedly has cash reserves of more than $1 trillion.

The head of the investment authority, Sheik Ahmed—one of 19 sons of the late Sheik Zayed, who helped create the U.A.E. in 1971 from what had been the British-administered Trucial States—is a friend and cousin of Sheik Nahayan. Moreover, Sheik Nahayan's father, Sheik Mabarak bin Mohammed al-Nahayan, served as an influential minister in Sheik Zayed's cabinet, and is widely regarded as one of the most revered figures in the Gulf.

In this part of the world, such relationships and reputations matter. Indeed, one of Sheik Nahayan's brothers leads Abu Dhabi's national carrier, Etihad Airways. One of Sheik Mohammed's brothers heads Dubai's highly successful Emirates Airline Group.

Manners and protocol also matter very much in this part of the world. Had Chuck Prince responded differently to the personal invitation from Sheik Nahayan, it still might not have been enough to save his job. But what was seen in Abu Dhabi as a breach of etiquette certainly raised a question in the minds of Persian Gulf decisionmakers about his leadership abilities.

The lesson for C.E.O.'s: When Abu Dhabi calls, respond immediately.

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The 20 Best iPod Utilities [Feature]

2007-12-04T17:27:00.001-08:00

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The 20 Best iPod Utilities [Feature]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 12/4/07

With a new generation of iPods on the market this holiday season, your reliable old iPod may not seem as shiny as it once did. But with the help of third party applications and utilities, you can unlock tons of useful functionality you never knew was there and revive that aging iPod so it doesn't look quite so bad next to its successors. Whether new or old, the following 20 iPod utilities can help you get the most from your iPod.

Transfer (and Play) Music to and from Your iPod

While syncing music to your iPod has always been a breeze, pulling music off your iPod isn't quite at easy—unless you're using one of these handy apps, that is.

Ditch iTunes with Floola (Windows/Mac/Linux): Floola is a freeware, cross-platform application that makes it easy to copy music and videos to and from your iPod from and to any computer. In all, Floola can actually work as a full-on iTunes replacement that can run from your iPod's hard drive. And because it's cross platform, Floola makes for an excellent all-around iTunes replacement if you're not a fan of iTunes. For another cross-platform solutions, you might give YamiPod a try. (Read more about a self-sustaining iPod)
Recover Your Library or Transfer New Songs to iTunes with Senuti (Mac): The freeware, Mac OS X only Senuti integrates tightly with your iTunes library to extract music from your iPod to your iTunes library and works particularly well for importing music that isn't already in your iTunes library. Of course it's also a godsend if you've had a hard drive failure and your only music backup is your iPod, but its playlist support and ability to scan your existing library so you avoid importing duplicate songs. (Read more)
Dead Simple iTunes Library Recovery with iPod -> Folder (Windows/Mac): If all you want to do is recover your music library from your iPod back to your computer, iPod -> Folder is probably the simplest way to do it. Just fire it up, point it to your iPod, point it to a folder on your computer, and let it rip. It even has a "Include MP3 files only" option in case you're borrowing tunes from a friend's iPod and you don't want their DRM-infected files. (Read more)
Sync Podcasts to Your iPod from Any Computer with myPodder (Windows/Mac/Linux): Whether you're a lover of podcasts who can't wait to get to your home computer before getting your latest podcast fix or you just know you'll need a few new podcasts to listen to for the commute home, myPodder can automatically download, manage, and sync any podcast to your iPod no matter whose computer you're using. (Read more)

Converters: Video and Audiobook

Yes, you could purchase TV shows and movies from iTunes, but if you've already got the DVD or you've downloaded a video that happens to be in the wrong format, why should you shell out more cash to Apple—especially when you can easily convert them for your iPod using free apps?

Rip DVDs for Your iPod with HandBrake (Windows/Mac/Linux): The cross-platform freeware application HandBrake is the go-to application when you want to rip a DVD for your iPod or iPhone (or PSP or PS3 or AppleTV...). Just pop in your DVD, pick what you want for your iPod, and start ripping. (Read more)
Convert Videos for Your iPod with Videora iPod Converter (Windows): If you've got a video file on your computer that your iPod doesn't support, fear not. Just plug it into Videora and let it do the heavy lifting for you. It even transcodes YouTube videos—all you need to do is give it the URL. (Read more)
Convert Videos for Your iPod with iSquint (Mac): Make any video iPod-compatible with iSquint. Just drag the videos you want to convert into the iSquint queue, choose the encoding quality (which will also determine file size and time required to encode), and let it rip. You can even tell iSquint to automatically add the video to your iTunes library once it's done encoding. (Read more)
Convert YouTube Videos for Your iPod with Zamzar: Web site Zamzar is probably best known for converting pretty much any file format to any other file format (and it can be used for pretty much any iPod video conversion if you prefer it), but you may not have known that it also provides a simple method for converting any YouTube video for your iPod. Just enter the URL of the video, choose to convert it for your iPod, and it'll email the finished product to you once it complete the conversion. (Read more)
Monitor Folders and Automatically Convert Videos with iPodifier (Windows): iPodifier transcodes files just like Videora and iSquint, but if you're a frequent video downloader or you're rolling your own DVR, iPodifier can be set to monitor a folder for new videos—like your BitTorrent downloads folder, for example—and automatically transcode them for your iPod. (Read more)
MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter (Windows): If you love a good audiobook but your book isn't in the right format for your iPod, this handy little app will convert your MP3s to the iPod audiobook format (M4B) so you get all of the audiobook features like playback speed adjustment and "start from last position" functionality without the tedium of doing it yourself. (Read more)

Miscellaneous iPod Utilities

Integrate Your iPod with Last.fm with iSproggler (Windows) and iScrobbler (Mac): If you're a fan of the music recommendation service Last.fm and you happen to do most of your music listening on your iPod, you can automatically upload your iPod listening habits to the site with whichever application matches your operating system. Just install, enter your Last.fm username and password, and forget it. (Read more)
Take Control of Your Shuffle with iPod Shuffle Database Builder (Windows/Mac/Linux): Add songs to your iPod shuffle by simply dragging them to your shuffle without touching iTunes—making it much more like a non-iPod MP3 player that lets you manage your music using your filesystem. (Read more)
Backup Your Home Folder to Your iPod with iPodBackup (Mac): iPodBackup saves an encrypted image of your Mac's home folder to your iPod with incremental, secure backups—great for those of you who iPod have several spare gigs of storage leftover even after you've synced your iTunes library. (Read more)

Upgrades for Older iPods

A number of third party applications and utilities exist to expand the functionality of your existing iPod by modifying or installing new software onto your iPod. For example:

Upgrade Your iPod Video to an iPod classic (Windows): When Apple released the iPod classic, they gave it a simple visual refresh that one would think could easily be retrofitted to older iPods, but for whatever reason Apple's not letting your run the fancy new interface on your older iPod. A replacement firmware for your video iPod brings the splitscreen interface of the updated iPod classic to your older video iPod. Read more)
Put Wikipedia on Your iPod with Encyclopodia: (Windows/Mac/Linux) The open source Encyclopodia project brings the giant repository of knowledge that is Wikipedia to your iPod. Searching Wikipedia on the iPod is a bit of a chore (you have to type out your words with the clickwheel), but once you get used to it it feels pretty good to carry Wikipedia in your pocket. This one's for decidedly older iPods, since it won't work on 5G iPods or above, nanos, and, of course, shuffles. (Read more)
Install Linux on Your iPod with iPod Linux: Had enough of the default iPod interface and want to jazz things up a little bit so you can do things like install and play games for free on your iPod? Replace the default iPod firmware with iPod Linux (or hell, use the graphical dual boot interface and run both). iPod Linux is supported on mostly older iPod generations. (Read more)
Replace Your iPod Firmware with Rockbox: Supporting every iPod through the 5.5G video iPods, Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement for the iPod (and other MP3 players). Rockbox can sport everything from Last.fm support, album art, a port of the video game Doom, a Game Boy emulator, video player, and tons more. (Read more)

iPhone and iPod touch Only

Okay, so if you do happen to have one of the fancier new iPods, you do have access to a few other fairly exciting third-party developments.

Install Applications on an iPhone: This video demonstrates how to "jailbreak" your iPhone or iPod touch running the current firmware (1.1.2) so you can install third party applications (many of which are really impressive). If you're still running 1.1.1, installing applications only takes one click.
Wirelessly Stream Music from Your iPod touch or iPhone to Any iTunes Library: Assuming you can install apps on your iPhone/iPod touch (see above), you can also stream your 'Pod's music library wirelessly to any computer on the same network. That means next time you want your friend to listen to a new song on your iPod you can ditch the headphones and do it on a proper set of speakers.

Did we miss a favorite of yours? Let's hear what iPod apps and add-ons make your iPod—new or old—sparkle.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who can't leave well enough alone when it comes to iPods. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

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Steel czar Mittal still the richest Indian: Forbes

2007-11-15T02:21:00.001-08:00

Sent to you by MOSYN via Google Reader:

Steel czar Mittal still the richest Indian: Forbes

via IBN Top Headlines by IBNLive.com editor@ibnonline.com on 11/14/07

The four richest Indians are worth an astonishing $180 billion.

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birth of a baby

2007-11-02T07:02:00.000-07:00

The Official Formula 1 Website

2007-10-21T16:51:00.001-07:00

The Official Formula 1 Website

Raikkonen wins in Brazil to clinch drivers' title

In one of the most dramatic climaxes to a Formula One season, a gripping Brazilian Grand Prix saw rank outsider Kimi Raikkonen burst through to snatch the world championship on a day when favourite Lewis Hamilton's hopes were eroded right from the start.

Ferrari's Felipe Massa made a great start from pole position and defended himself against Hamilton's McLaren on the rush to the first corner, as team mate Kimi Raikkonen squeezed alongside and then ahead of the Englishman in the famed Senna S.

As Hamilton had to back off to avoid colliding with Raikkonen, McLaren's Fernando Alonso spotted his chance and squeaked through on Hamilton's left to grab third place. The points leader's efforts to regain the position saw him run wide further round the lap, and drop down to eighth.

At the end of the lap, extrapolation of the points scoring positions revealed that Raikkonen, running second to Massa, had 108 points. Alonso, in third, had 109, Hamilton, in eighth, 108. And that balance was to see-saw throughout the afternoon, especially as Hamilton gained and lost places during three pit stops.

Massa pitted for the last time on lap 50, but crucially Raikkonen went three laps longer. That enabled him to take the lead, and now only retirement could stop him as he amassed 110 points. He and Massa had easily outpaced Alonso, whose third place gave him six points and brought his tally to 109.

Hamilton's feisty recovery from his off-road moment, and then a gearbox problem when the system momentarily stuck in neutral on the eighth lap, brought him up to seventh place, thus giving him 109 points too. But with one second place more than Alonso, he got the nod for second place overall over the Spaniard.

Between the two team mates, fourth place was a pitched battle between Nico Rosberg's Williams and the BMW Saubers of Robert Kubica and Nick Heidfeld. They finished in that order after some gripping racing. Behind Hamilton, Jarno Trulli took the final point for Toyota ahead of Red Bull's David Coulthard and Williams rookie Kazuki Nakajima, who collided at one stage. The Japanese driver also clobbered two members of his crew during his pit stop. The other finishers were Toyota's Ralf Schumacher, Takuma Sato (who had a tight battle with Super Aguri team mate Anthony Davidson early in the race), Toro Rosso's Tonio Liuzzi whose nose was damaged in a first-corner fracas, and Davidson himself.

Neither Renault finished. Heikki Kovalainen was shoved off in the first corner, and later crashed there; and Giancarlo Fisichella is under investigation by the stewards after going off the road and rejoining in such a dangerous manner that Sakon Yamamoto ran straight into the back of his R27. Neither of the Hondas finished, both succumbing to engine failures, leaving Rubens Barrichello pointless at the end of a season for the first time in his Formula One career.

Mark Webber's chances of helping Red Bull to catch and pass Williams in the standings evaporated with a engine/gearbox interface problem; Sebastian Vettel's Toro Rosso had hydraulic failure; and Adrian Sutil had several incidents and six pit stops before retiring with a brake problem.

As he celebrated becoming Finland's third world champion, Raikkonen said: "We were not in the strongest position but we always believed that we could recover and do a better job than the others, and even with the hard times everyone was sticking together and we did not give up.

"I was not really 100 percent sure if someone would stop but there were people who needed to finish and we did not know 100 percent and it took a long time to hear that we had finally won it. It has been a good finish of the season and I am really happy. An amazing day!"

Hamilton was philosophical in defeat.

"It's been a crazy year, but I can't really say that I'm gutted or that I feel I was robbed," he said after losing by a single point. "It was just unfortunate. We've all of us had some bad luck this year; it's just a shame that mine seemed to come all at the end of it.

"All along I said to myself that, whatever happens today, who would ever have thought that I would lead the world championship? It's been a great feeling, having the possibility to win it. The team have done a fantastic job for me all season, and of course I wanted to win. But I guess it wasn't our turn after all this year. But I will come back next year stronger, for sure.

"The start wasn't that great and I got boxed in behind Kimi, then Fernando came past me and I locked up a bit behind him and lost some ground. But I knew that we had the pace to get that back. But then when I was downshifting for Turn Four the gearbox just went into neutral. And I coasted for an awful long time. I still don't know how but I managed to coax it back into operation and get going again, but I had to be careful to manage the engine because the revs were very low.

"When that was happening, coming so soon after China, I just found myself thinking that for sure somebody didn't want me to win the championship!

"Even after that, though, I refused to believe that it was over. The first time I thought that was when I saw the chequered flag. I never stopped thinking it was still possible.

"Our pace wasn't bad today. Not quite the same as Ferrari's, but we could have been a little bit quicker with more luck.

"After my mistake in China it was tough to have this luck here, but that's racing. I've gone from GP2 to being ranked second in the world and I have every confidence that in 2008 I will come back even stronger, do an even better job and win. I'll be better prepared and I have the experience of the whole thing.

"At the end of the day I'm second in the world championship, and I beat my team mate who is a double world champion. That's a great result. I said I would be a winner, whatever happened today.

"I think that, apart from the start, I drove one of my best ever races today, so that's why I say I don't think I was robbed."

Fashion Model slips into a hole

2007-10-18T18:24:00.000-07:00

Quote of the Month--Where do we stand in Medicine now?

2007-10-15T10:03:00.001-07:00

Sent to you by MOSYN via Google Reader:

Quote of the Month--Where do we stand in Medicine now?

via Sumer's Radiology Site by Sumer Sethi on 10/12/07

2000 B.C. - Here, eat this root.
1000 A.D. - That root is heathen. Here, say this prayer.
1850 A.D. - That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.
1940 A.D. - That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.
1985 A.D. - That pill is ineffective. Here, take this antibiotic.
2000 A.D. - That antibiotic is unhealthy. Here, eat this root.

Read this somewhere i don't remember but surely makes a lot of sense.

From Sumer's Radiology Site http://www.sumerdoc.blogspot.com -The Top Radiology Magazine

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Rich Man, Poor Country

2007-10-15T09:55:00.001-07:00

Sent to you by MOSYN via Google Reader:

Rich Man, Poor Country

via Portfolio.com: Executives on 10/15/07

The House

Altamount Road in Mumbai is a shady lane that meanders up a steep hill, elevating its residents above the din and chaos of the city. Its addresses are those of India's corporate elite: The official residence of Ratan Tata, the chairman of the Tata Group, is here, and Naresh Goyal, the founder of Jet Airways, lives in the neighborhood. But even here, the new house belonging to Mukesh Ambani stands out.

Right now, it's a pile of concrete and steel, but once construction is complete, the building, estimated in the Indian press to cost $1 billion, will be the primary home of India's richest resident—its first rupee trillionaire. Reportedly inspired by the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the house will be among the tallest structures in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), at the equivalent of 60 stories—although there will be only 27 livable floors inside, each one with an outrageously high ceiling. Leaked plans for Antilia, as the future glass tower is named, reveal that Ambani and his family will keep their cars—there are spots for 168 of them—on six parking floors and have them repaired in an in-house garage. They'll entertain as many as 50 friends at a time in a plush movie theater ideally suited to showing Hindi films—an Ambani passion. Above that, a health club and a sparkling pool beckon; there the family can swim laps, secure in the knowledge that a "refuge" area occupies a nearby floor, in case a sudden evacuation of the building is warranted. The guest apartments and four floors of living quarters for Ambani, his wife, their three children—and his mother—are near the top, with views of the Arabian Sea. The roof has three helipads, and several levels throughout the building are dedicated to gardens and terraces. A domestic staff of 600 will run the place, which was designed by Chicago architecture firm Perkins & Will.

Mumbai's jigsawed skyline is one of the last parts of India that Ambani, 50, has left to conquer. As chairman of Reliance Industries—India's version of General Electric—he's emerged as the country's premier capitalist, directing sprawling business operations that include petrochemicals, oil refining, textiles, retail, and biotechnology. Ambani's father built Reliance up from a handful of textile mills into an industrial conglomerate that represents about 3 percent of India's $4.1 trillion economy, with annual revenue of more than $27 billion, almost as much as the better-known Tata Group. While the Ambani family directly controls 46 percent of Reliance, its stock is held by one in four Indian investors, according to the company. "I'd go so far as to say that he's pretty much running India," Shobhaa Dé, a bestselling novelist and cultural observer, says of Ambani. "Policy decisions, the direction India is taking—his ambition is to be the most powerful man in the region."

Everything about Ambani is over-the-top: He's moving into the world's most expensive house; he's constructing the world's largest oil-refining complex; he's trying to remake India's scattershot retail industry. Yet despite all of his almost absurdly big plans, Ambani is anything but a publicity-seeking social climber. In fact, he's a semi-recluse: awkward, shy, a traditional Hindu who practices strict vegetarianism and abstains from drinking alcohol. With his mix of hubris, business savvy, and personal eccentricity, he may be a modern-day Howard Hughes.

His wealth is in the same league as that of Indian steel baron Lakshmi Mittal, though he has little of Mittal's flash and swagger. Nevertheless, Ambani is a source of endless fascination to his fellow Indians, his every move tracked by the local tabloids. Within a new culture celebrating money and success—especially in Mumbai, where ostentatious shows of wealth are de rigueur—he's a hero, a Bollywood-worthy representative of the country's prosperity and self-confidence. But he's also one of India's most polarizing figures, a businessman famous for bulldozing anyone who resists his intentions to expand his old-line industrial companies and whose extreme riches conflict with the country's Gandhian leanings. His success with pushing his epic projects through in a place that's infamous for its crippling bureaucracy prompts questions among his countrymen about his close ties to government officials. Controversy over his many plans—from the new house to his displacement of farmers to establish free-trade zones—highlights the costs of endless expansion and whether Ambani's approach can be reconciled with the more traditional, understated "Indian" way.

Securing face time with India's richest resident requires patience, as Ambani's world is padded with layers of minions to shield him from public scrutiny. Scheduled appointments mysteriously never take place, and phone calls are rarely returned when expected; Ambani is big enough to make people wait.

Indeed, it's a marvel that Ambani can accomplish anything at all, given the chaos swirling around him. He is known to stay up until late into the night, tapping out emails and holding meetings—and watching Bollywood movies. He frequently rolls into his headquarters well after noon, and there is rarely any fixed daily schedule; the staff is perpetually scrambling on its own unpredictable Ambani time.

On a recent evening in the middle of monsoon season, Ambani paced around his South Mumbai offices, receiving confidants, supplicants, and guests. He is known for an obsession with personal safety, and the suite of offices that forms his company's nerve center is said to be layered with security hardware that is state-of-the-art. He rarely goes outside for fear of being mobbed.

With a stocky build and the same shiny, unnaturally jet-black hair favored by Indian movie stars and politicians of a certain age, Ambani seems restless and agitated, bobbing his head from side to side when he talks, his gaze flitting around the room. "I speak by my actions," he declares. He sits in a white armchair, not far from the life-size painting in the entryway of Mohandas Gandhi—against whom he strikes a marked philosophical contrast.

Despite Ambani's casual attitude toward time commitments, he is exacting when it comes to what he'll talk about: He doesn't like to be pinned down with inquiries about his business or the effects of his actions on his developing country. The sight of a tape recorder will send him into a fit. Rather, he speaks elliptically about lofty big-picture issues, such as India's greatness and its place in the world. "We are in the midst of many expansions. These are in different industries, with different interests. We are crossing many bridges," he says vaguely. Alluding to the controversy surrounding him, he says, "Whenever we cross one bridge, there is lots of friction."

India is often described as a land of extremes, and the characterization now seems particularly apt. The country is experiencing an extraordinary period of economic expansion—a turbocharged state of change that can be baffling to an outsider and that makes its claim to superpower status seem slightly ahead of itself. While it's true that the economy grew 9.4 percent last year, empowering a rising middle class, much of that wealth is concentrated in small pockets of the country. Outside of those bubbles, poverty and simmering class tension are as pronounced as ever. "There is an astonishing amount of wealth creation going on in India, but it's disproportionately accruing to a few, which is creating a crisis in the system," says Ravi Venkatesan, the chairman of Microsoft India. "If 780 million people don't share in this wealth-creation process, in a democracy, can this continue? The answer is no."

Ambani galvanizes both sides of the wealth divide. In a sign of how difficult it is to reconcile two competing forces—enjoying incredible, almost preposterous material success while wondering how Indian it is to do so, especially in a city where more than 6 million people live in slums—Ambani seems to be struggling. "A lot of us think the world is flat," he said in Washington during a June awards ceremony sponsored by the U.S.-India Business Council. But Ambani disagrees. "I think the world is spiky . . . because 15 to 20 percent of people in the developing world live in plenty, while 80 percent live in scarcity." He went on, "We have people who have to survive on $2 a day.... We cannot have islands of prosperity surrounded by oceans of poverty."

Despite Ambani's professed concern about inequality, his actions attract attention for their extravagance. Published details about his new house were quickly followed by reports that the land he was building on had been acquired under unusual circumstances from a Muslim charitable trust that had operated an orphanage on the site. City bureaucrats have since been sniping over whether the sale should be allowed to stand. Ambani isn't known for charitable giving in the way his fellow countryman Tata is, which makes his preoccupation with economic disparity a curiosity. Ambani says that he helps his country by growing his company, offering cheap cell phones, and enabling farmers to sell groceries to the masses.

The Countryside

Mumbai is a tangle of puttering black-and-yellow taxicabs, listing buildings, gnarled train tracks, endless traffic and smog. More people than one could ever imagine occupy the space, and the corrugated metal and blue plastic tarps that are so distinctive of developing-world slum architecture stretch for miles. But drive an hour and a half south of the city and the sky opens up over green hills, farmland, banyan and teak trees, and glossy black bullocks pulling carts. It is here that the full extent of Ambani's empire-building dream is most apparent, as he angles to take over a tract of land stretching along the coast to establish the country's largest special economic zone. It's also where the contrasting fates of India's towering industrialists and everyone else are thrown into stark relief.

The economic transformation of India is one of the most remarkable stories of the past 20 years, although the reality is more complex than its breathless media coverage would suggest. Two-thirds of India's citizens live in rural areas, subsisting primarily on agriculture, and their lot has hardly improved during the recent boom. Tens of thousands of farmers have been driven by debt and poverty to commit suicide. According to one government report, more than 17,000 killed themselves in 2003 alone. Thirty-five percent of India's citizens live on a dollar a day, only 61 percent of the population can read, and at least 100 million people don't have access to clean drinking water. In certain areas, the country is almost regressing: Some states now have large gender disparities—as few as 800 females to 1,000 males—due to the practice of gender-selective abortions, and though discrimination based on caste has been outlawed, in many respects it still maintains a suffocating hold on people's lives. In spite of all that, corruption may be the biggest problem India faces. Just about everybody is thought to be on the take; partly as a result, the business environment has acquired a lawless feel, with everything and nothing happening at once.

One of the government's biggest ideas for promoting investment is special economic zones, areas where firms can operate tax-free under liberal labor and import-export laws. Introduced in 2000, S.E.Z.'s—made up of large swaths of land sold to manufacturing firms—are now being established around the country. The concept was borrowed from China, where it gave rise to that country's manufacturing hub, the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. But its implementation has proved to be significantly messier in a democratic country with a tradition of civil disobedience and very little unoccupied land. Many of the projects have met resistance from villagers who don't want to give up their homes. Plans for S.E.Z.'s in West Bengal, Orissa, and other states have resulted in violent clashes.

Hundreds of applications have been filed for S.E.Z. sites all over the country, many of them by domestic conglomerates like Ambani's. Initially, the government took a central role in buying out farmers and selling their land to the corporations; but populist outrage quickly motivated politicians to declare that they were getting out of the land-transfer business. Now companies must negotiate directly with people living in the areas they're interested in colonizing, while their applications for special tax-exempt status wend their way through the bureaucratic machine. Inhabitants of these areas complain that even if they don't want to sell, they're forced to, as land all around them is swallowed up and earmarked for chemical plants and new housing. Then there are concerns about pollution. (Any visitor to China's economic belt will understand that they're well-founded.)

Ambani has several ambitious S.E.Z.-creation plans in the works; one involves a parcel of land encompassing 45 villages (home to approximately 250,000 people, by one estimate) just south of Mumbai. Its proximity to the city suggests that it will only increase in value over time as Mumbai's population swells. Its proposed size (24,000 acres) is double the maximum permitted by the government, and the project is stalled: Ambani and the bureaucrats seem to be locked in a stalemate over whether the government will grant him an exemption. A recent visit to the site revealed miles of bucolic farms and paddies, where women in colorful saris dotted the landscape, planting rice. There was little hint of the battle playing out over the region's future.
While opposition to the zones has been mild in some parts of the country, the Ambani project has been met with anger, protests, and hunger strikes, including one by a group of female farmers in July. They say that people purporting to be Ambani representatives have conducted coercive land purchases, and they have asked the government to intervene on their behalf.

Seated in an office in one of the affected towns, Dutta Patil, a former opposition leader in the Maharashtra state government who is fighting the S.E.Z.'s on behalf of the farmers, whips out a map and gestures over a broad area. "All these are thickly populated by agrarian people," he says, raising his voice. "All this community will be wiped out. Where are we to go? The minute this land is taken by Ambani, Ambani is going to build a castle on the land. Ambani will not allow me to get in this land without having a visa."

Ambani will not discuss the points raised by his detractors. Reliance officials insist that they offer jobs or job training to people displaced by their development plans. Inside these S.E.Z.'s, Ambani says, "we can create infrastructure to attract the world's best companies."

The Family

The rags-to-riches story of the Ambani family is something Reliance loves to promote. Mukesh's father, Dhirubhai, was born into a poor family in the state of Gujarat, rising from a scrappy textile trader into a mogul who initiated one of the country's highest-profile initial public offerings, in 1977. A Bollywood movie, Guru, is loosely based on Dhirubhai's life; its main character, Gurubhai, is depicted as an outsider, a masterful businessman and ruthless mercenary who's skilled at targeting his enemies and manipulating politicians.

Australian journalist Hamish McDonald profiled the Ambani family in his book The Polyester Prince. According to McDonald, Ambani's father began as an importer of polyester yarn at a time when cotton was still politically symbolic in India. His strategy was to move back along the supply chain and make the components that went into the production of synthetic textiles, building polyester mills and expanding into chemical manufacturing and petrochemicals. (The book has spawned numerous conspiracy theories because it was never published or sold in India, due to fear of legal action by the Ambani family, though it was published in Australia. Smuggled photocopies are passed around among business junkies in Mumbai like contraband cigars.)

Young Ambani learned the family business at his father's side. He was shipped off to the United States to attend Stanford business school and upon graduation set up one of Reliance's polyester factories. He also supervised one of the most ambitious construction projects India had ever seen—the $6 billion creation of the Reliance oil refinery, in Jamnagar, Gujarat, in 1999.

In many ways, Reliance exemplifies the unrestrained atmosphere in India right now: the mad rush among the country's largest companies to enter new businesses, the transformation of its retail industry as national chain stores are introduced, a new focus on India's energy security, and firms' ambitions to expand beyond the country's borders. Of all this, Ambani's mission to double the Jamnagar refinery's capacity, embarked on in 2005, could well define his legacy.

Once the expansion is complete, the refinery complex will be the largest in the world, for the first time exporting gasoline, diesel fuel, and other petroleum products to America and Europe. More than 50 percent of the crude oil consumed in North America is imported, but the United States hasn't built a new refinery since 1976, largely because no one wants to live near one. In shifts that stretch around the clock, 80,000 workers toil to meet Ambani's aggressive goal to complete it by March 2008. Chevron, which is partnering with Reliance on the project, has invested $300 million for a 5 percent equity stake in Reliance Petroleum, with an option to increase its share to 29 percent by 2009.

With labor costs running at about 200 rupees ($5) a day per construction worker, the expanded refinery will cost a fraction of what it would have been to build in North America. During the June ceremony in Washington, Chevron's executive vice president for global downstream, Mike Wirth, said that Reliance's refinery would be "completed in less time than it would take to permit and construct a minor modification to one of our U.S. facilities."

The refinery itself is spectacular—and a reminder of why such projects have been outsourced to countries where air quality is less of a political concern. A heavy, acrid smell hangs over the place, and a coat of haze softens the horizon—although Reliance officials like to point to all the trees they've planted nearby. The 7,500-acre refinery grounds are adjoined by a 1,600-acre greenbelt, where, the officials say, wild boars, antelopes, and peacocks scamper. Instead of being dumped into the ocean, the refinery's wastewater—a combination of water, cadmium, magnesium, and other heavy metals—is treated and then used to irrigate 1.8 million hardwood trees; a mango plantation with 110 varieties destined for export sits nearby. A jetty extends 3.4 miles into the Arabian Sea for tankers to load up on gasoline.

The petroleum unit is the largest subsidiary in the ungainly conglomerate that is Reliance. As chairman, Ambani serves as the group's figurehead, chief political lobbyist, and idea man, while trusted deputies manage the day-to-day operations of the individual business units. Since he took over for his father, his overarching goals have been relentless growth and expansion into new areas: Last year, Reliance announced plans to open Wal-Mart-style mega-retail outlets across the country, and its new life-sciences unit is investing in biofuels as well as biomedical and plant research.

As if managing all this didn't keep him busy enough, Ambani also has to contend with an ongoing family psychodrama that threatens to flare up at any moment and disrupt his business. A feud has been simmering between Mukesh Ambani and his younger brother, Anil, since their father died in 2002 without a will and left them to scrap over the family empire.

Reliance Group, the company their father founded, was ultimately divided in two, with one part going to each son in the same way that children might be handed separate toys in a kindergarten. As the result of a truce reportedly brokered by Kokilaben, their mother, Mukesh got the industrial businesses and Anil the communications and power-generation properties (now renamed Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group)—although that has hardly quelled the sibling rivalry. One of the most recent skirmishes to make headlines—over whether Mukesh had to honor the fixed prices he'd agreed to charge his brother's company for natural gas extracted from a field on India's east coast—had significant economic implications. Both brothers took to holding dueling press conferences and made frequent trips to New Delhi to prostrate themselves before government officials who were mediating the conflict.

Anil is the more flamboyant of the two, prettier and more of a partyer, a marathon runner who's married to a glamorous former Bollywood actress. The agreement that outlined the division of the company was said to be only three pages long, leaving room for petty disputes; the boys' mother remains a critical buffer between the two. Some members of the business community remember the days when the melodrama caused Reliance's share price to go haywire and shudder. "The theory is that if the mother dies," says an executive based in Mumbai, "then the gloves will come off."

It's a muggy summer day in Washington, and Ambani stands before a packed ballroom. "Today, even at the beginning of the 21st century, 15 percent of the world's population has 85 percent of the world's income. This is a highly skewed world," Ambani says, wheezing slightly and clutching the podium. His teeth are gleaming white, and he is out of his usual poly-blend shirt, wearing a suit and sporting slicked-back hair—perhaps in preparation for his upcoming meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is the luncheon's keynote speaker.

The night before, he'd been honored at a gala banquet following a concert by the Indian classical musician Amjad Ali Khan—although the second the pecan-crusted lamb was brought out, there was a kerfuffle in the dining room. Several Reliance executives jumped out of their chairs and scurried into the hallway to place calls to limousine drivers and restaurants before Ambani, his wife, and his daughter were spirited away for a proper vegetarian Indian meal.

Ambani's wife, Nita, who looks after Reliance's corporate-responsibility program, explains that she and her husband make a special effort to keep their children grounded, citing the family's trip to Washington. "Our daughter flew with us in the private plane, while our sons stayed behind in New York," she says. After the other family members had left, the boys got lonely and wanted to join them. "We both decided not to send the plane back to get them. They took the train! We're striving very hard to make them live a normal life."

In addition to helping direct the Reliance foundation and working with various charities, Nita started one of the most elite private schools in Mumbai, the Dhirubhai Ambani International School, where hundreds of well-groomed children can be seen traipsing through an airy, modern complex an hour from the center of the city. A window of the school looks out on a classic Mumbai scene: a shantytown spread along the banks of the Mithi River.

"I think we are making steps, but today it's important that we talk about humanity at large. I don't think it's 'India this and that,' " Nita says when asked whether India is moving in the right direction in terms of evening the disparity between rich and poor. "Look at Africa. There are huge belts of people who live on less than $1 a day. We have to address this issue, without getting into 'country.' Every one of us is responsible for all of humanity."

Says Tom Simons, a vice president of Chevron, "There were the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts, huge companies that were family owned. That's where India is now. It is a bit of a Wild West thing here, but they'll get through it. I wish they'd build some roads, though."

After finishing his talk about the "young and confident India that is engaging with the world," Ambani—Mr. India himself—pauses to enjoy the applause before coming down off the stage. Pressing business awaits him at home: the annual shareholders meeting for Reliance Petroleum, the battles with his brother, the fight over his new house. As he steps into the crowd, his entourage engulfs him, Nita, and his kids and hustles them out into the sweltering Washington air, where they can be seen waiting for a town car to take them away.

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Featured Windows Download: Make Any Application Portable with MojoPac Freedom

2007-10-11T07:04:00.001-07:00

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Featured Windows Download: Make Any Application Portable with MojoPac Freedom

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 10/10/07

Windows only: Carry any application with you on your thumb drive with freeware virtual PC software MojoPac Freedom. Back when we showed you how to build your own PC-on-a-stick with MojoPac, the application had a $30 price tag, but it has since launched several versions, and MojoPac Freedom is the freeware version. Even better, MojoPac Freedom supports all the data and application support of the rest, lacking really only customer support (aside from other premium features most regular users will never need). It still supports taking Microsoft Office, iTunes, video games, and virtually any other app portable. MojoPac Freedom is freeware, Windows only.

MojoPac [via CyberNet]

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Stats: Apple is, once again, big man on campus

2007-10-06T06:40:00.001-07:00

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Stats: Apple is, once again, big man on campus

via Valleywag by Jordan Golson on 10/5/07

Apparently college kids are warming up to Macs again. While Apple's share of the overall computer market is about 5.6 percent, lots of students are picking up Mac notebooks. 40 percent of Princeton students have Macs, up from 10 percent four years ago. 55 percent of Dartmouth freshmen are using them, up from 30 percent two years ago. The study also mentions that The University of Virginia and Cornell are seeing upticks in student Mac users. This is a complete turnabout from the situation a decade ago, when Yale told incoming freshmen not to buy a Mac. Why the dramatic comeback?

The iPod, of course. AdAge cites a study of college students' preferred brands -- the iPod is a 65 percent favorite, which actually seems low to us. The iPod has been touted as having a "halo effect," reminding users of Apple's other products. You buy an iPod and like it so much that when it comes time to buy a new computer, you pick up a MacBook instead of a Dell. The third calendar quarter for student purchases ended last week. We'll see if the trend makes a difference when Apple reports earnings on October 15.

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Quicksilver: Get to Know Quicksilver from Its Maker - Lifehacker

2007-09-28T04:58:00.000-07:00

Quicksilver: Get to Know Quicksilver from Its Maker - Lifehacker

New India's New Heroes

2007-09-26T07:51:00.001-07:00

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New India's New Heroes

via Newsman by editor@ibnlive.com on 9/25/07

On the face of it, Wanderers 2007 is Lords 1983 all over again. As Mahendra Singh Dhoni lifted the ICC world 20 20 trophy, the beaming smile brought back memories

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The Great Laptop Forward

2007-09-24T03:12:00.001-07:00

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The Great Laptop Forward

via Portfolio.com: Executives on 9/17/07

We're in a Hyundai Sonata with seats covered in spotless white cloth; two P.R. guys, Americans, are fidgeting in the backseat as Beijing National Stadium, nicknamed the bird's nest, looms over us. The centerpiece of the city's 2008 Summer Olympics looks like a condo for a giant pterodactyl, but the P.R. guys are in no mood for sightseeing--they're getting more nervous as each minute passes. We're on our way to meet Bill Amelio, the U.S.-bred C.E.O. of Lenovo, China's biggest technology company, and we're running late. Amelio cultivates an image of being an impatient, no-nonsense boss. In less than two years, he has whipped Lenovo into shape, or at least that's what a 625 percent profit increase this past fiscal year indicates. As Andrew Hu, who runs China operations for the software company Red Hat, says of Amelio, "His style is simple. He'll tell you, 'I have five minutes, and if I like what you're saying, I'll give you another 20.' I know what kind of driver he is in traffic."

So ...making Amelio wait is probably a bad thing.

Our Chinese driver, trying to squeeze up to a tollbooth, plays chicken with Volkswagens, Citroëns, buses, cement trucks, and slender Chinese-made microvans that would get nothing but black dots in a Consumer Reports rollover test. We could walk faster.

We nudge past the toll station-, a -salute to China's abundance of labor. At least 20 workers in orange vests stand around doing nothing but looking at the cars. We gain a bit of speed as we pass another reminder of the nation's unfathomable mass of humanity: construction cranes assembling nearly identical 40-plus-story apartment buildings and hotels from here to as far as the eye can see--which is not all that far, thanks to Beijing's persistent white smog.

Turning off the highway, we mix with bicycles, cars, and scooters, passing a watermelon stand (Beijing has excellent watermelon) and a building with a large sign that reads, in English, wool spinning city. We're 10 minutes late, going on 15.

We swerve around a bus sporting an advertisement that translates as "Change your habits. Wash your private areas." The Hyundai turns into a cluster of buildings that could be a clone of a Silicon Valley corporate park, if American employees rode to work on their grandfathers' bikes. We're now nearly half an hour late. One of the P.R. guys frantically text-messages our position to headquarters.

Finally, the car pulls up to Lenovo's front door, and we pile out like commandos. Go, go, go! We scurry through the glass-and-steel lobby, past a fountain, across an oasislike campus of grass and more fountains, go up in the elevator and into an open space of low cubicles, around a corner, into a tidy conference room set aside for the interview--and Amelio's not there.

"He's in traffic," a petite young woman apologizes. "There was an accident."

China desperately wants the world to respect its economic prowess. It wants respect for its brains and class, the kind you'd give Bill Gates or Frank Sinatra--or, for that matter, the ancient Chinese, who invented paper, gunpowder, and spaghetti. Right now, China is respected mainly for its massive size and cheap manufacturing, which feels vulgar, like the deference paid to Mike Tyson in a barroom. And recently, cheap manufacturing has actually cost the country lots of respect, on account of China's selling the world tainted toothpaste, toys with lead paint, and pet food that kills pets.

So China needs a corporate hero--a global breakout brand. Sony did it for post-World War II Japan. Samsung led the way for South Korea two decades ago. Nokia put Finland on the map.

China is betting big that Lenovo can make the great leap forward. The computer maker will be a top-level sponsor of and the sole hardware technology supplier to the Olympic Games that are coming to China in August 2008. Between now and then, Amelio and his team will plow hundreds of millions of dollars into making sure the Beijing Olympics are Lenovo's golden moment. So much has to go right for the company for this to happen--hot new products, smart branding, a U.S. retail presence that doesn't yet exist, and two weeks of Olympic events that come off without a technological hitch.

What would that mean to the United States and the rest of the world? Like Sony in Japan, Lenovo could lead an entire nation toward global competitiveness, creating a new threat to other computer companies. In the short term, it means Western consumers are about to see a river of products and TV commercials from Lenovo.

The two still-very-nervous P.R. guys and I have been waiting in the conference room for 20 minutes when Amelio finally strides in. His cell phone instantly rings. He answers with the standard Chinese greeting ni hao but continues in English. (He does not speak much Chinese.) He's back off the phone in about two minutes and gives me the look that says "You've got five minutes . . ." Since Beijing's traffic didn't appear to faze him, I ask if the burden of carrying China to a new level in the global economy stresses him out. Amelio doesn't flinch.

"I don't feel any pressure about that," he says, looking slightly amused, his eyes confidently fixed on me. "One of the exciting reasons I took this job is that this hasn't been done before."

Some might argue that Lenovo is as Chinese as a P.F. Chang's China Bistro.

A little history: Lenovo was founded as Legend, in 1984, by Liu Chuanzhi and soon began distributing Hewlett-Packard products in China. Legend evolved into a PC maker and, in 1994, went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The Chinese government's Academy of Sciences at that time owned 50 percent of the company; it still owns approximately 27 percent. "Legend was like China's version of the H.P. garage in Palo Alto," says Red Hat's Hu.

In 2001, Liu named his protégé, Yang Yuanqing, as C.E.O. By then, Legend was China's biggest technology company, a position it retains today. China's Ministry of Information Industry ranks Lenovo as No. 1, followed by Haier Group (whose revenue is 22 percent less than Lenovo's) and Huawai Technologies (which is half Lenovo's size).

In the wake of China's dotcom crash in 2000, growth in the country's PC market slowed, so Lenovo diversified into cell phones and MP3 players. "The end result was not very successful," Yang told me in 2005. Lenovo couldn't beat Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung, so Yang shifted strategy, expanding Legend's PC business globally. The company changed its name to Lenovo because Legend couldn't be trademarked in the West. Then, Yang said, "I.B.M. knocked on our door."

Since 2000, I.B.M. had periodically been looking to sell its money-losing PC division to Lenovo. Lenovo at first wondered if I.B.M. was trying to dump a clunker of a business on the Chinese. But then Lenovo's former chief financial officer Mary Ma took a hard look and decided that I.B.M.'s PC division came with two valuable prizes: ThinkPad, a powerful laptop brand in corporate markets, and a cadre of well-trained American managers who could teach the Chinese a thing or two about global business--such as how to manage a multinational corporation and market products around the world. In 2005, Lenovo paid I.B.M. $1.3 billion for its PC group, the biggest buyout of a U.S. operation ever by a Chinese company. After the merger, Yang appointed I.B.M. executive Stephen Ward to be C.E.O. Yang became chairman and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where Lenovo has its U.S. headquarters.

Ward--who spoke often about values and vision--was probably the right guy to handle the delicate melding of Chinese and American business cultures. "He was much more collegial, with a slightly higher-level approach to problems," says Peter Hortensius, who has run the ThinkPad unit since coming to Lenovo from I.B.M. at the time of the merger. But analysts and Lenovo executives say the company faltered under Ward. It wasn't growing much. Supply chains broke down. Costs were too high. The product line lost focus.

In December 2005, Yang pushed Ward out and brought in Amelio, who had previously run Dell's Asia-Pacific operations. "He is a very intense, focused man who wants to win," Hortensius says of his current boss. Amelio puts a few items on a to-do list; then he does them. He will zero in on a problem and hound executives until it's fixed. Amelio, Hortensius says, is "exactly what Lenovo needed."

For now, Amelio's Lenovo has reclaimed its No. 3 spot among the world's PC makers, behind H.P. and Dell. (In the U.S., Lenovo has a minuscule market share, behind even Toshiba's.) By the end of the second quarter of this year, Lenovo had pulled ahead of Taiwan's Acer, according to the I.T. consultancy International Data Corp., though Acer's merger with Gateway, announced in late August, may vault the Taiwanese firm back in front.

Amelio consolidated Lenovo's suppliers and factories and narrowed the product line. He signed up resellers to hawk Lenovo desktops and laptops in Europe, and for the first time, the company made money in every geographic region in which it does business. Lenovo's net profit for the fiscal year ending March 31 shot up to $161 million, from $22 million the year before.

But PC manufacturing remains a tough business, thanks to constant price cutting. One sign of how intense the competition is: In April, with yearly profits up 625 percent, Amelio laid off 1,400 workers to further streamline operations.

China is betting on Lenovo, but not all Chinese think it's a lock. Tech entrepreneur Jack Zhang, who runs the Chinese equivalent of Facebook, has his doubts. We meet in a restaurant in a tiny courtyard deep in an old Beijing alleyway, a place chosen, apparently, for its atmosphere. The customers dine at folding card tables, seated on plastic stools in primary colors. Zhang uses his chopsticks to pull a chunk of flaky white fish out of the metal chafing dish on the table. The spicy vegetables and peppers smothering the fish could make one's tonsils combust. After noticing the sweat beading on my forehead, Zhang points at pieces of something red and says, "Yeah, don't eat those."

Zhang's site, Zhanzuo.com, has 3 million members, he tells me. It is funded, in part, by the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. In a loose white shirt and jeans, with tousled hair and a Clark Gable-esque glint in his eye, Zhang has the air of a business swashbuckler.

His generation, he explains, thinks of Lenovo the way Steve Jobs thought of I.B.M. a couple of decades ago. Lenovo is big and slow and makes commodity hardware that, these days, is about as thrilling as plumbing fixtures. "The real excitement in China is not Lenovo," Zhang says. "It's companies like us, or Baidu"--a Chinese internet search firm. He could have added Chinese internet game company NetEase or local instant-messaging giant Tencent Holdings. These ventures attracted outside investors, took wing with the hypergrowth of China's internet industry, and went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange or Nasdaq.

Zhang doesn't sound all that interested in whether Lenovo will have an Olympic breakout. And that raises a legitimate question: Can any firm ignite consumer lust--or can that only happen when a company strikes a new market at the right moment? Sony nailed miniaturization; Nokia, mobility; Toyota, small cars in the wake of an oil crisis; and Google, instant information. Lenovo addresses only existing, mature markets. Even Amelio admits that PCs, desktop computers, and corporate servers are treated mostly as tools--necessary gear for life in the 21st century.

Although there have been exceptions: Starbucks didn't invent coffee.

Amelio used to wrestle for Lehigh University, and at 49 he still has the bearing of a guy who might enjoy pile-driving an opponent into the mat. He has a short, neat beard and eyes that lock onto whomever he's talking to like a sniper's laser sight. On this day, he's wearing a light-blue dress shirt--no jacket--with a wild red tie that could've been designed by Pablo Picasso and Jerry Garcia. He always seems to speak in an even, friendly tone, yet it's one that conveys absolute certainty.

He has that same burnished-steel confidence in his voice as he talks about Lenovo's current challenge: pushing consumer PCs and laptops into the U.S. market starting in early 2008.

Lenovo does well in the United States selling ThinkPad laptops directly to businesses, but the company sells no consumer-oriented computers in the U.S., and there's no indication that retailers are dying to clear shelf space for them. The big gorilla of computer retailing, Best Buy, has "no immediate plans" to carry Lenovo consumer PCs, though "the door is always open," says spokesman Jeff Dudash. Forrester Research analyst Simon Yates, who follows Lenovo and the rest of the PC industry, says, "You've got to have a stomach of steel to go into the U.S. consumer retail market." Lenovo is still negotiating with sellers and will have to offer them unique products, deep discounts, consumer rebates, and some reason to believe its PCs will move off shelves faster than those of established brands. Forrester's research indicates that Lenovo probably has the money and savvy to gain a retail foothold in America, but probably not in 2008.

Lenovo also runs no consumer ad campaigns in the United States and has little brand recognition. Consider the potential for confusion: In Western markets, some versions of the Lenovo ThinkPad X60 still have an I.B.M. logo in the bottom-right corner. As part of the merger, Lenovo acquired the right to take up to five years to complete the transition from the I.B.M. brand to Lenovo--which means that many ThinkPad owners have no idea who really made their laptops.

In China, the situation is flipped. Lenovo owns more than 30 percent of the market and sells a broad line of consumer desktop and laptop computers under the Lenovo label. ThinkPad is the stepchild brand.

Yet if Lenovo wants to use the Olympics to vault its name to world-class status, it must have products widely available in America by the time the Games begin. To win consumers away from existing PC brands and make a splash in the West, Lenovo's PCs will have to be, as Amelio says, head-turners.

"We are going to get people excited," Amelio promises. As a fresh U.S. brand, he says, "we have an opportunity to take a position that nobody's been able to take other than Apple." He describes offerings such as a $5,000 luxury laptop--with a hand-stitched leather shell--that comes with access to a "concierge" V.I.P. help desk for fixing problems and setting up software. In India, Lenovo is selling a laptop that uses face recognition instead of a password for security.

At Lenovo's R&D center, some of the products on display stretch boundaries. A tablet-style laptop called Yoga has a leather cover and a screen that can be opened into more positions than a typical model's--hence the name. The -futuristic-looking Victory desktop unit is reminiscent of Apple's Mac Mini--a brick-size computer with a funky swivel screen. A cute red laptop, co-branded with Coca-Cola, is covered with the word Coke in dozens of languages.

Here's Lenovo's plan: Its computers will start trickling into U.S. stores in early 2008. A broader line will be available in time for the Olympics blitz. The marketing is supposed to drive people into stores to swoop up the company's offerings and make Lenovo a well-known name.

"If it all comes together by the time we hit the Olympics, it will be a real crescendo for us," Amelio says.

But American tech consumers light up over groundbreaking gadgets like Apple's iPhone and Nintendo's Wii--not so much for desktop and laptop PCs. Lenovo's products look cool and have interesting features, yet they don't pop out as radically new. For that matter, Lenovo is not likely to be the only computer company trying to grab a bigger market share with better designs and service. A 2007 Forrester report, "The Age of Style in Consumer PCs," forecasts that just about every major PC maker will be doing the same thing in the next few years.

Some observers doubt Lenovo has the product line and branding muscle to become an industry leader. Carlos Bhola, a tech investor with Celsius Capital in Shanghai, says, "Even with the boost of the Beijing Olympics, it's a stretch for Lenovo to think it will be on the same level as Sony or Nokia."

Late in the afternoon, our Hyundai with the white-covered seats and the two P.R. guys leaves Lenovo behind and crawls back into traffic. A breeze carries away the smog, and a blue sky appears. We pull up to the headquarters of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games. The homely tower has the dull sheen of cheap silverware.

Inside, we enter a room the size of a basketball court, chopped into dozens of cubicles, each lined with 20 or so Lenovo desktop computers and monitors. A sign above each cubicle shows an image of a sport: swimming, cycling, soccer. This is the test site for Lenovo's Olympics technology, which will store everything from scores to athletes' medical records.

The Olympics will be a Lenovo showcase, using about 15,000 of its computers tended by 400 of its technicians. With the Games practically in its backyard, the PC maker will wine and dine potential customers and resellers and let them see how its products can run a complex operation. That means the Games have to come off without a technological hitch. I.B.M., after all, got a boatload of bad publicity when its computers failed at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Lenovo, which does not have the kind of reputation that helped I.B.M. survive its Olympics crisis, would be knocked out of the ring if its technology crashed in front of a few billion TV viewers globally.

"I'm lighting candles," Amelio jokes. "We had a great run in Torino." Lenovo's computers powered the 2006 Winter Games in Italy. But those Olympics had less than half the scale and complexity of the Summer Games. "We're humble. We'll have checks and triple checks to make sure it doesn't blow up in our face."

Aside from providing technology, Lenovo is a top-level sponsor of the Beijing Games--the first and only Chinese company in that position. The amount paid for Olympics sponsorship, which -included the last Winter Games, has not been revealed, but estimates put the figure in the $100 million range. Lenovo is buying its way into an exclusive club; other top-level sponsors include Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Samsung. "We're learning a lot from the other sponsors," says Alice Li, Lenovo's vice president of Olympic marketing. "We're making friends with global executives. They're all being very nice to us."

Lenovo is still a company of two cultures: the China-Lenovo culture and the Raleigh-I.B.M. culture. In this case, the firm is taking advantage of its Chinese-ness and letting a Beijing-based team run the Olympics marketing. "For the China team, there's a lot of national pride in what they're doing. It's emotional," says Hortensius, the ThinkPad executive. "For me, it's a brand-building opportunity."
Leading up to the Games, Lenovo will air Olympics-themed ads worldwide. As part of its sponsorship, it gets to slap the Olympic rings logo on its products and ads. Lenovo won a competition to design the Olympic torch, and that will fuel a round of marketing and publicity during the 130-day torch relay leading up to the opening ceremony. During the Games, Lenovo logos and machines will be seen in the broadcast booths with TV sportscasters from many nations. The brand will appear on signs at numerous events. "You won't be able to go on any street corner without seeing Lenovo plastered somewhere," Amelio says. "It will be ubiquitous."

Lenovo won't say what it is spending on all this marketing, but keep in mind that the company is a fraction of the size of its top-sponsor brethren. "It's hard to give exact numbers. Everything I do in marketing will have the Olympics infused in it," says Deepak Advani, Lenovo's chief marketing officer. But, he admits, "we're really not matching dollar for dollar what others are spending."

Lenovo looks at the numbers this way: About 4 billion viewers around the world watch the Games on TV, and 1.7 million visitors will come to Beijing to see them live. They will all be repeatedly exposed to the Lenovo logo. And during the Games, Lenovo will host 800 international and 2,000 domestic guests.

"Barring some unforeseen disaster, it should pay off for Lenovo," says Forrester's Yates. "If it flops--well, then that would be a major flop for Lenovo."

Sometime after the last gold medal has been awarded, the last national anthem has been hummed, and the Olympics-themed ad campaigns end, Lenovo will be...what, exactly?

"I'd like us to be seen as a full-fledged I.T. company--desktops, laptops, workstations, servers in every market segment," Amelio says. "A household name, from the consumer point of view, all the way up to being a premier name in commercial markets."

In other words, like Dell, Amelio's previous employer. The breakout company China is counting on sounds a lot like one that already exists in Round Rock, Texas, run by an American. That bit of corporate imitation might bring success in the technology business, but it will probably not bring China the kind of respect it so desperately craves.

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Step By Step: Mirror Your Mac on a Bootable External Drive

2007-09-21T06:48:00.001-07:00

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Step By Step: Mirror Your Mac on a Bootable External Drive

via Lifehacker by Gina Trapani on 9/17/07

If and when that terrible day your Mac dies finally catches up to you, you can be back up and running with all your applications, settings and data in under 5 seconds with a bootable system clone. By mirroring your entire Mac's hard drive to an external FireWire drive, you can boot from that disk using any other Mac and have your entire system at your fingertips, no tedious software installations, System Preference setting or desktop wallpaper hunting required. Using the excellent free version of SuperDuper and a regular old FireWire drive, here's how to mirror your Mac onto a bootable disk.

For more on backing up your Mac using this method plus plain old document backup, see Complete, Free Mac Backup. PC users, the process isn't quite as simple for you (with free software, anyway) but here's how to partition and image your hard drive with the System Recovery CD.

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Email: Merlin Mann presents "Inbox Zero"

2007-08-02T01:24:00.003-07:00

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Email: Merlin Mann presents "Inbox Zero"

via Lifehacker by Gina Trapani on Jul 25, 2007

King of the empty inbox Merlin Mann did an hour-long presentation for Google employees this week on dealing with the daily onslaught of email, and the video's now available to the rest of us. Hit the play button to see Merlin's full presentation (slides available here) which is based on his excellent Inbox Zero series at 43 Folders. His system inspired most of the empty inbox proclamations here on Lifehacker, so this is your chance to hear it from the horse's mouth. Thanks to Merlin and everyone at Google for making this one available to the public.

[via 43 Folders]

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Email: Merlin Mann presents "Inbox Zero"

2007-08-02T01:24:00.001-07:00

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Email: Merlin Mann presents "Inbox Zero"

via Lifehacker by Gina Trapani on Jul 25, 2007

[via 43 Folders]

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Free your music from iTunes with iTunes Export

2007-08-02T01:05:00.001-07:00

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Free your music from iTunes with iTunes Export

via Lifehacker: Geek to Live by Gina Trapani on Jul 20, 2007

You just put together the iTunes playlist of your life, and now you want to slap it on a thumb drive to give your sweetie. You've got a dozens of gigabytes of iTunes music on an external drive at home, and you just want to copy your Top Rated songs to your laptop for listening on the go. Out of the box, iTunes can't transfer the song files of individual playlists out of your library for playing anywhere other than your iPod. But a previously-posted open source Windows utility, called iTunes Export, can do just that. Whether you're abandoning iTunes entirely or just wanting to copy the contents of your meticulously-created iTunes library to another computer, drive or device, iTunes Export is for you.

What iTunes Export buys you

iTunes Export generates a universal playlist file that's readable by your media player of choice. iTunes stores its playlists in a proprietary XML file that no other music player can read. Further, if you've got "Keep my music organized" checked inside iTunes, it automatically manages the folder structure where your music is stored (/iTunes directory/Artist Name/Album Name/Song Title.xxx.) So if you've got the Ultimate Mix Playlist of songs from many different artists and albums, it's impossible to automatically copy those songs to another location, or play that mix with another media player.

iTunes Export reads iTunes' proprietary XML file and generates an M3U playlist file - which pretty much every music player on the planet can read like WinAmp, foobar, and VLC, to name a few.

Additionally, iTunes Export copies the actual music files out of iTunes' managed folder structure entirely, which means your MP3's are completely separate and playable by your media player of choice. iTunes Export offers both a graphical interface and a command line interface. Download iTunes Export here - unfortunately the GUI is Windows only, and it requires the .NET runtime. (However, the command line interface works on Linux with Mono - but iTunes doesn't run on Linux, so that's probably not that useful.)

The iTunes Export GUI

iTunes Export's graphical interface is a piece of cake to use. Simply launch and walk through the wizard's steps to choose the iTunes playlists to export, where you want your playlist and song files to end up. Its got an impressive set of options, though, like playlist format (EXT and WPL are supported as well as M3U) and the ability to automatically include or exclude protected or unprotected AAC files. For a preview of what iTunes Export looks like, check out the screenshots below:

Using iTunes Export

The iTunes Export command line

iTunes Export also has a command line interface that can specify all the options available in the GUI. You might want to use the command line to schedule batch exports of, say, your Top Rated songs to your laptop hard drive once a week. (Here's more on scheduling batch file operations with Windows Task Scheduler.)

The iTunes Export homepage runs down the command line options in great detail, but to give you a taste, this command would export the "My Awesome Mix" playlist to the C:\iTunesEscape\ directory with an M3U playlist (no line breaks):

iTunesExport.exe -dir="c:\iTunesEscape" -include="My Awesome Mix"-copyWithIndex

Got any tricks for freeing your songs from iTunes' claws? Let us know in the comments.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, now uses foobar2000 full-time on Windows. Her weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

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Featured Download: Advanced Google searches with Google Hacks

2007-07-11T17:04:00.001-07:00

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Featured Download: Advanced Google searches with Google Hacks

via Lifehacker by Kyle Pott on Jul 11, 2007

Windows/Mac/Linux: Free open-source app Google Hacks is a GUI-based query builder designed to help you find free media on the web. Google Hacks is split into five sections so you can easily search Google for free music, books, video, product keys, and tools. Google Hacks throws a GUI around many of the advanced Google querying we've introduced in the past like finding free music on the web and using Google as your personal (free) Napster. Google Hacks even has a portable version you can take with you on your jump drive. It's not called Hacks for no reason, you can even use GH to test the security of your domain. To be used for good or evil, Google Hacks is a free download for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Google Hacks [Blue Shirt Studios]

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Apple pushing for multi-touch trademark

2007-07-06T20:23:00.001-07:00

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Apple pushing for multi-touch trademark

via AppleInsider on Jul 07, 2007

Apple Inc. wants to guard its name for the iPhone's signature interface through a trademark, but has ventured outside American borders as part of the process. On the same day as its first touchscreen devices were rolling into stores, June 29th, A...

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Featured Windows Download: New Quicksilver for Windows app Skylight looks very promising

2007-07-06T02:08:00.001-07:00

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Featured Windows Download: New Quicksilver for Windows app Skylight looks very promising

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on Jul 05, 2007

Windows only: Freeware application Skylight is a file and application launcher of the Quicksilver ilk, providing quick access to programs, files, and then some.

Anyone who's spent much time with Quicksilver on the Mac knows what a huge productivity boost the wildly extensible Quicksilver can provide. Hell, I've covered Quicksilver from beginner to advanced and then some, and I'm quite happy to say that--though it's still very young--Skylight looks like the most promising Quicksilver-for-Windows app I've seen yet.

My favorite features of Skylight so far include:

The ubiquitous Alt-Space invokes Skylight (it's pretty much become the standard for all launchers).
After you've found the item you're looking for, hitting Tab cycles through available actions for the item (I'd still prefer Quicksilver's paned interface, but this isn't a terrible alternative). From what I can tell, actions available so far include Open, Edit, Browse in Explorer, and View (available actions are dependent on context). The Browse in Explorer action (like Quicksilver's Reveal action) is a favorite of mine.
Skylight makes several actions available through launch shortcuts. For example, to view an item in Windows Explorer, you can hit Ctrl-Enter (rather than launching it with Enter). Likewise, Shift-Enter performs an alternate action and Alt-Enter is supposed to show the selected item's properties.
While Skylight doesn't have a lot of application integration yet, it does integrate nicely with Windows Live Messenger, which allows you to search contacts and choose to send an IM to a contact from the Skylight interface.
Like Quicksilver, the spacebar moves back and forth between results, which is a great way to cycle through your search results without leaving the home row (Shift-Space moves back up).
The interface is very attractive, not to mention snappy. In fact, the look and responsiveness of Skylight is pretty impressive.
Like any good launcher, Skylight learns what apps you launch most commonly with a search.

That's not to say there isn't a lot of room for improvement. Here's a few things I'd love to see from Skylight:

The ability to customize scanned folders
More plugins, of course! And more customization in general of folders and filetypes scanned.
It looks like Skylight is supposed to have folder browsing capabilities like Quicksilver, but so far it doesn't seem to be implemented. The documentation says navigation up and down a folder structure will use the arrow keys, and I'd love to see Skylight incorporate the backslash like Quicksilver uses to navigate up and down a folder structure.

At this point, I probably wouldn't recommend ditching our current favorite, Launchy, in favor of Skylight--mostly because of Skylight's current lack of customization. However, if Skylight continues to develop in the same direction as it's currently heading, it looks to be developing more quickly in the direction of a strong Quicksilver-like app for Windows than any alternative I've seen. Keep an eye on this one, folks. Skylight is free, Windows only, requires .NET 3.0. Thanks Dustin!

Skylight

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Banking on Faith

2007-07-02T00:33:00.001-07:00

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Banking on Faith

via Portfolio.com: Executives on Jul 02, 2007

With his pink shirt, gold ring, and posh accent, John Weguelin seems as if he's been sent over by central casting to play the role of a London investment banker. And the room where he sits--with its carpeted hush, pale polished woods, and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a bustling street in London's financial district--is blandly elegant, exactly what you might expect from a banker's office. But neither Weguelin nor the European Islamic Investment Bank are exactly what you might expect. As managing director of E.I.I.B., the West's first investment bank to comply with sharia, Weguelin is a central player in Islamic finance's transformation from exotic niche market to mainstream investment.

A 30-year banking veteran whose résumé includes two decades at Bank of America, Weguelin was recruited two years ago by E.I.I.B. chairman Adnan Ahmed Yousif in 2005. Though Weguelin had no experience in Islamic banking--or even extensive experience in the the Middle East--he found the project too exciting to turn down. "The opportunity to establish a bank?" he grins. "How often in your working life does that come along?"

Not often, particularly when the job involves heading up Europe's first independent Islamic investment bank. Though established in 2005, the E.I.I.B. received authorization from Britain's banking regulators last March and floated on the London Stock Exchange with a £75 million initial public offering a couple of months after that.

Deft steering was required during last spring's I.P.O., since it came at a moment when Middle Eastern equity markets were correcting by about 50 percent. "It took a bit of the gloss off everything that had been achieved," concedes Weguelin who watch as E.I.I.B.'s stock went from 25 pence to half that within the week. The stock's continued to sink, but Weguelin insists that the core busines is "sound." Over a year on, the bank already has a market cap of $380 million, and a client base of sophisticated asset managers, hedge funds, and private banks buying for investors. In September, E.I.I.B. will launch a private equity fund with assets under management of about $125 million.

So far, so traditional. But for a clear sign of what makes E.I.I.B. different, just turn to the bank's first annual report, in which briefings from the chairman and company secretary open with "In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful" and calculations of shareholders' zakah, an annual charitable donation required of all Muslims, are supplied. The cornerstone of the bank's Islamic nature lies in its transactions and ventures, which are guarded by its Sharia Board--four Islamic scholars who vet funds and deals to make sure they don't contravene Koranic bans on earning interest and making profit from alcohol, pork, or unethical activities. Before the bank undertakes a new investment, emails between the sharia scholars and the London office fly, allowing for what Weguelin says are ultimately "very relaxed" meetings that occur once every six weeks. "We've got one of the strongest sharia supervisory boards in the business," says Weguelin.

That's a feat. Fast growth in the Islamic banking industry--about 20 percent annually over the past few years, to an estimated $500 billion--means that competition for top sharia scholars with financial knowledge is stiff. "There are about 150 scholars who are globally accepted in the finance world," says Rushdi Siddiqui, director of the Dow Jones Islamic Market Index. "About 20 of them are the rock-and-roll stars." Suddenly, Islamic scholars are becoming consultants for world-class players like Deutsche Bank, which last year started a sharia-compliant mutual fund, and Credit Suisse, which this spring launched Islamic banking services. E.I.I.B. has snagged a clutch of leading sharia experts, including Sheikh Nizam Muhammad Seleh Yacouby Yacouby, who also advises Citigroup, A.I.G., H.S.B.C., and others.

In this brave new world, more-bullish analysts speculate that Islamic banking could someday even overtake conventional banking. Both the German state of Saxony-Anhelt and a Texas oil company have already issued sukuks, or Islamic bonds. "Islamic banking is in its infant stage, but it's been born, it's alive and kicking, and maybe even crawling," says Sheikh Yacouby.

Ask Weguelin about the biggest change he met in moving from Bank of America to E.I.I.B. and he won't mention the finer points of sharia or the popularity of juice rather than wine at business lunches. What impresses him is the agility a startup has. "If you're a small organization, you have to solve the problems yourself, and that's very exciting," he says. "At Bank of America, if you had a computer problem, you'd call the IT department and you'd have 20 people around your desk. Here, you do it yourself." In hiring his 42-person-strong team, he's taken care to pick "entrepreneurial-minded people," pioneers who won't be fazed by working in a new industry and a young bank. The growing sophistication of the Islamic banking infrastructure is welcome, but it hasn't necessarily made his life simpler--at least, he says, "My wife and family certainly don't think so." He's still on the road a good deal of the month, traveling to the Middle East, Switzerland, and even the United States, where the interest in Islamic finance is growing.

For Weguelin, one of the perks of his job is watching the industry toddle to its feet and into the mainstream. Until recently, making Islamic investments has largely been a Muslim practice. But if Weguelin and the E.I.I.B. have their way, sharia-compliant investing will break out of the bespoke-banking category and become another option for rich and savvy investors regardless of their religion. Though conventional banks like H.S.B.C. have set up sharia-compliant banking services, E.I.I.B., as the only entirely Islamic investment bank based in the West, is at the industry's cutting edge. It's a good place to be, insists Weguelin: "Islamic banking is the fastest-growing sector in the high-net-worth industry in the world at this time." Already, around 80 percent of investors in sukuks are non-Muslim, says Weguelin, citing last year's Dubai Ports flotation as an example of a sukuk that attracted money from non-Islamic sources. "When you figure that the Muslim population will be in the region of 30 percent of the global population in the next 10 years and then you say that there's no reason conventional investors won't buy the products, then you can see the potential," Weguelin says.

The British government certainly does, having set out to make London the global Islamic financial capital, cutting tax rates and red tape in last year's budget to do so. A report this spring from Standard & Poor's cited the British capital's "large and international reach" and "deep and effective markets" as key in its bid to be the world's Islamic financial center. For Weguelin, London's growth as an Islamic banking capital makes it easier to draw together Persian Gulf investors and City expertise, a weave that will only serve Islamic investments and mainstream investors: "Islamic banking sits very comfortably next to conventional investments."

Weguelin is tight-lipped about E.I.I.B.'s private equity fund, but he is proud of the bank's Pan European Islamic Real Estate Fund. It launched this spring and is the market's only sharia-compliant property product. Muslim investors have traditionally favored private equity and real estate investments, not only because they offer competitive returns relative to mainstream investments, but also because their Islamic credentials are easier to verify. When buying a building, it's simply a matter of making sure that your tenants aren't, for example, brewing whiskey, producing pork, or creating pornography. "Real estate is an asset class with which most Middle Eastern investors feel comfortable," observes Weguelin. "But many are overexposed in Middle Eastern real estate, so this helps to diversify the risk."

Europe, of course, isn't Weguelin's final destination. He's now eyeing a variety of investments in the U.S. He admits, though, that it will be a challenge, especially since Muslim investment in the States dropped significantly after 9/11. But Islamic investors are starting to regain interest in America, says Weguelin. "If you're going to run a diversified portfolio, you're going to look at the U.S." And with plenty of wealthy, return-hungry investors of all faiths and a growing Muslim population, Weguelin may find a ready and willing market.

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Quote of the week, Bonus Edition: Socrates on the "book"

2007-07-01T21:20:00.001-07:00

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Quote of the week, Bonus Edition: Socrates on the "book"

via blog.pmarca.com by Marc Andreessen on Jul 02, 2007

From Thomas West's Thinking Like Einstein:

Long ago, Socrates described some second thoughts he had about the new and questionable technology called a "book". He thought it had several weaknesses. A book could not adjust what it was saying, as a living person would, to what would be appropriate for certain listeners or specific times or places. In addition, a book could not be interactive, as in a conversation or dialogue between persons. And finally, according to Socrates, in a book the written words "seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever."

[Socrates then went on to say, "It's been five weeks since the book was introduced, and I don't see that many people using it -- books are so over."]

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Steve Jobs Arrives at Palo Alto Apple Store [Third Screen]

2007-06-30T00:04:00.001-07:00

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Steve Jobs Arrives at Palo Alto Apple Store [Third Screen]

via Business 2.0 Blogs by Michal Lev-Ram on Jun 30, 2007

No more than 15 minutes after the doors to the Palo Alto Apple store opened to sell the first West Coast iPhones, none other than CEO Steve Jobs himself arrived with his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, by his side. Judging by the cheering and incessant noise of clicking camera shutters, you'd have thought it was Paris Hilton -- not the head of a computer company -- who'd arrived. Jobs was dressed in his signature nondescript outfit: black shirt and faded baseball hat, and had a faint smile on his face as he walked into the store.

It was quite a day for Apple and the man at its helm: The nationwide media coverage, the camped-out customers, the countdown (second by second) to the launch.

But what about after the iPhone glow wears off? What will the next batch of reviews (not just the first, carefully handpicked four) say about the all-touchscreen device? How will tech-savvy consumers react to a 2.5G phone they just paid $500 for?

These are questions that, for the moment, don't seem to be on Steve Jobs' -- and happy iPhone customers -- minds.

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North laps up every minute of Sivaji

2007-06-29T23:57:00.003-07:00

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North laps up every minute of Sivaji

via IBN Top Headlines by IBNLive.com editor@ibnonline.com on Apr 30, 2001

Sivaji managed 98 pc occupancy in the first week for the 39 shows it ran in PVR cinemas.

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Rajinikanth is The Boss, from South to North

2007-06-29T23:57:00.001-07:00

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Rajinikanth is The Boss, from South to North

via IBN Top Headlines by IBNLive.com editor@ibnonline.com on Aug 31, 2004

Sivaji hits it off with Hindi belt despite being screened without subtitles.

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The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: From our good friends at iPhone Matters

2007-06-29T05:27:00.000-07:00

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: From our good friends at iPhone Matters