Asus PadFone

This video made me say "Whoa!" as I was watching it. It's about 01:45 in the video. Make sure you watch the video before you read the whole article and you might say "Whoa!" too. Or may be you are the one to go for "Wow!"?

http://www.cultofandroid.com/5026/the-asus-padfone-to-be-available-this-april-mwc-2012/

Oh, btw, notice the domain name on that link. It's nice that we are finally getting our own cult. LOL.

Smartphone Marketshare in 2011 Q4

It is interesting to see that Android (50.9%) is doing more than double of iPhone (23.8%)

The full report here:
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/44428/android-half-smartphone-market-q4

But don't forget the old dictum you can use statistics to prove just about anything. 

Why ipad2 sucks

The picture speaks for itself. Don't forget to shift-click on the image to enlarge it.


Compiled by: Investintech – PDF to Excel

Samsung Galaxy Note vs. iPhone - Street Challenge

This particular Samsung ad has pissed off a lot of Apple fanbois so I feel like I must post it. Make sure you read the comments from fanbois below the video, they are hilarious. I laughed out loud when I read how they were badmouthing the poor girl for not knowing that the iPhone could do these things, what these idiots forgot was that no iPhone ever came out a stylus so it definitely canNOT do any of those things. Enjoy. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2gjn12QS9I

At any cost

Here I was watching this film that had turned out to be surprisingly entertaining regardless of my low expectations and suddenly the girl beside me says, "Haw! How can he do that?"

The film was Desi Boyz and Akshay Kumar had just decided to be a gigolo in order to avoid losing his "son" (his deceased sister's son in fact), in the film. It was this decision that had made the girl in the next seat exclaim incredulously. I turned to her and wanted to correct her but refrained. Not because I didn't know the girl, I did, she was my friend. You don't think I would just correct any strange girl, do you? Well, actually I would. No, the reason I stopped was because it would take too long to explain and much as I like to lecture, I didn't want to miss the film.

So, my lucky readers, you get the lecture instead.

Here's the situation. Akshay loses his job, so he cannot take care of his son properly and misses a couple of payments on the school fees. He gets a warning that if he cannot come up with the money for the fees the child will be put up for adoption and put in foster care. This he cannot allow at any cost and tries very hard to get a job. The economy is very bad and he can't get a job despite all his efforts. And during this Sanjay Dutt, owner of a male escort service comes across Akshay and John Abraham and offers them employment. John only has a fiancee to take care of so he passes on the offer but Akshay is willing to go to any lengths to avoid losing his son and takes the job.

At this point my friend exclaimed, "How can he do that?"

This is the trouble with our thinking. Notice that I used a certain expression in that long paragraph. At any cost. It's very often that we want something badly and want to have it "at any cost". It's not very often that we really mean it. I am quoting from an old Hindi film dialogue, "When people say at any cost what they really mean is that they would like to have it at their own convenience at what they think they should pay for it."

In my own words, and I have repeated this many, many times, "When people say they want something, they just mean that they want to achieve that result, it doesn't mean they are willing to put in the hard work needed for those results."

When we want something we are vehement about it, "Oh yes, I want to save the child, at any cost!" But when it comes to paying the price for it, we are not so emphatic, "Um..you see...I can't really do that...it's against my...I can't do it."

When you want your friend to be there, it's, "Tere liye jaan haazir hai, yaar." (My life is yours.) But if the time comes when the friend does need you, "Yaar, tu to jaanta hai, main baal bachchon wala aadmi hoon." (Well, you see, I am a family man.)

Way of the world. But not just for others, for yourself too. So, if you ask me whether I think Akshay's character was right in taking up that dirty job in order to save the kid, my answer would be an emphatic YES. And I say this knowing the true nature of what a gigolo does, not the choreographed dancing and singing that is shown in the film.

His decision does turn out to be bad in the long run and even though he saves the kid for the time being, later he's hauled into court because of his job. Be that as it may, I still think he made the right decision. It was his decision at that moment and we always need to take a decision at the moment, not much later when all the essential facts become known. The human race survives by taking unreasonable and unexpected risks!

So when you want something, make up your mind, do it wholeheartedly or don't bitch about it. Put up or shut up as the expression goes.

How many Windows 32 (bit) or 64 (bit)?

These days I am editing a film (I'll tell you about it later) and I have been having problems. I used to think that running Second Life client was the most resource hungry thing to do on a laptop but now I found that video editing is the most resource hungry thing you can do on a computer.

So when I play an edited scene without rendering it, it moves slowly, skips frame or doesn't sync audio and video. Sometimes it just doesn't play until I render it first. Which can be annoying when you want to make a 1000 little changes and rendering every time disrupts the creative flow.

Like any other normal user (which I am usually not) I checked and re-checked my laptop specs. It's a Dell Studio 17 inch laptop with a 1GB Intel Radeon graphics card and 4GB RAM. The processor is Intel Core Duo with 2.53 GHz speed. In this world where tech specs change overnight, this is by far not the fastest machine not even in laptops. But it's a good spec. I like to change my laptop every year, but I have had this one for 2 years now because it's absolutely amazing. It suits me in every way including performance. Until now, that is.

I didn't really want to change the laptop just for this, for two reasons. One, I like this laptop as I said. And two, when I change I want to upgrade to a super-expensive Alienware model with astronomical specs. Which I can't afford right now.

But there are things you can do short of buying a new laptop. Like PCs you can upgrade a laptop's hardware too, in a limited way. I decided to upgrade the RAM. It already has 4GB installed in the form of two 2GB memory modules. It has only 2 memory slots (it's a laptop after all), so I could replace one 2GB module with a 4GB getting a total of 6 or replace both. I checked that memory is cheap from Dell, only 22 GBP for a 4GB RAM module. So, I decided to buy one and bring my total RAM to 6GB..except for one thing!

Every time I check the tech spec's by right clicking on My Computer and clicking Properties, it shows RAM as 4GB (2.99 GB available.) It's the figure in the bracket that puzzled and perplexed me. What do you mean 2.99 GB available, I asked it, have you loaned the other 1 gig to the neighbour or what? It didn't answer.

You can guess that I wouldn't leave it at just that. I escalated the matter. I called Chauhan Sir (remember Chauhan Sir?). He set me straight. This poor little computer is running on Windows 7, 32 bit version and as such is limited in its use of RAM. Even though the hardware has 4GB of RAM the OS can only utilize 3GB of it. How annoying!

My further course of action was like this. I copied a lot of data off to external USB hard drives and made more than 100+ GB of free space on both my internal drives. Then I downloaded Windows 8 Developer Preview and installed that.

Why Windows 8, you ask? Well, for one reason, I had been very curious about it for more than 2 months now and if I was going to rebuild my laptop I was going to take the chance to try it.

Windows 8 installed fine, quite fast and it looks cute, but I soon found out that it was not for me. For one thing, it looks more like something for tablets than a computer to work on. For another thing, it still uses only 3 GB of RAM out of the 4. Only one thing left to do.

No, I wasn't going to download Windows 8 64-bit version. I had already decided after 2 hours of exploration that Windows 8 is not for me, not in this incarnation and probably never.

But I had the Windows 7 DVD which contains both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. In fact, since my laptop is 64-bit architecture it had come installed with Windows 7 64-bit but I had downgraded it myself to 32-bit because not all my programs were available in 64-bit versions.

Now, I installed 64-bit with a view to having 2 OS on my system, one for video editing and a 32-bit boot partition for other things. Still, to be safe I downloaded something called Microsoft Virtual PC so I could run some 32-bit programs as well.

64-bit installed fine and is running well. Not only can I see the performance improvement in video editing but so far all my programs are running under 64-bit without Virtual PC. Fingers crossed for later. One thing that I could do with 64-bit was to install the latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro. Adobe, in their infinite wisdom (grrr!) have released their latest video editing suite Premiere Pro CS5 only in 64-bit flavour, so I had been using CS4 for my work. But now I can use CS5 64-bit, which looks and works the same except for one important difference.

Now I can use Adobe After Effects CS5 as well which has one new and very useful feature - the Rotobrush tool. More about that some other time.

So, this was the short (??) story of my Windows upgrade to 64-bit flavour. I hope you enjoyed it. Hehe.

Does this remind anybody of Apple?

A Funny Moment from Angoor

There are some things that are just too amazing for words. Like Hrishikesh Mukerjee. That one director could make so many really fantastic films is like a record in the Hindi cinema. One of his films is Angoor. The movie is based on Shakespeare's play "Comedy of Errors", no, it's not "inspired", Shakespeare has been given full credit for the story.

The story as you probably know is based on 2 pairs of twin brothers who separate when they are babies, one brother with his servant lives in one city while his twin brother lives in another city with the first servant's twin brother. When they are all grown up and middle-aged men, one brother visits the other's city with his servant. Both the masters have the same name - Ashok, both the servants have the same name - Bahadur. And the fun starts...

This 1983 movie is not just hilarious it's a gem of Hindi cinema. The beauty is not in the story or the suspense, the beauty is in the fact that each scene, each shot is so great that you cannot help enjoying yourself. The performances are fantastic, especially Sanjeev Kumar who won the Best Actor Filmfare award for this but others are just as good.

I have watched it so many times that I have lost count. Every time I start the film, just yoon hi to watch a scene or two to refresh myself I can't help but watch it to the end. Even if I have watched it last month or yesterday. It's just so easy to watch and so hard to stop in the middle.

The scene I have posted here is amazing because of its simplicity. I don't think this kind of detail was written by Shakespeare but the film has many, many such moments. I just can't praise it enough. I think if I were stuck on a desert island. I would want this movie with me. (And a portable media player and lots of batteries of course ;) )

I hope you enjoy the scene, I didn't do any hard work in selecting it, the film is FULL of such amazingly simple but really hilarious scenes. 

iPhone has the *bang* factor - Exploding iPhones

I have to admit, none of my Android phones have ever had this feature. A phone that overheats, melts, develops a red glow and sometimes even explodes. Fantastic way to capture the limelight, don't you think?

And if it happens aboard a flight, you can be sure everybody will be looking at you, just hope that the Marshall on the plane doesn't wrestle the poor passenger to the ground thinking him a dangerous element.

Here's the story by our own Daily Mail in the UK.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2068638/Ayla-Motas-iPhone-explodes-Device-emits-smoke-sparks-charging.html

Most iPhone users are not taking the threat seriously that it's possible that it might explode while they are using it next to their face. If it were up to me, I would be very afraid seeing how I am a coward and I have only one face.

Here's a video. This one looks like it's not staged. The poor guy seems to be making a video of his house covering each room when his iPhone suddenly explodes. I'd rate this as PG13, it contains some strong language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RODLum5RfnI

Update: I don't like to hoax my readers and I don't like to use fake evidence to make my point. Therefore, in the interest of full disclosure...I have examined that video I had posted in much detail and there's a 50-50 chance that it may be fake. Just before the explosion, on the very left corner of the frame the sparks that come out could be the sparks from the fuse of a firecracker. However, because the video is related to a real issue not a fake one, I am leaving the video up. 

Apple/iPhone jokes

Q: Why is the Apple still reporting record profits?
A: Because iPhone users are just as oblivious to the looming recession as they are to good technology.

Q: What is written on Steve Jobs tombstone?
A: iCame, iSaw, iConquered, iLeft, iCameBack, iThinkDifferent, iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, iCloud, iRIP

Q: Why did Steve Jobs live his last moments in regret?
A: They say your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. Unfortunately for Steve Jobs, his iPhone 4S didn't have a Flash player installed!

Q: How many Apple Iphone early adopters does it take to change a light bulb?
A: 3001. 1 to do the work and 3000 to go online and bitch about the lack of any useful features!

Q: Why is it so sad that Steve Jobs died?
A: Everyone at Apple are crying their i's out!

It was reported this week that Google would soon launch its own cellphone as a challenge to the iPhone. Also a challenge to the iPhone? Making phone calls. (Saturday Night Live)

Steve Jobs‘ funeral will be held next week, after which he will be reburied every six months in a slightly better coffin. (Twitter)