Instant disposable Gmail addresses

You can creates website specific addresses and sets up filters for them to catch companies who spam or sell email addresses of its customers.

Let’s say you need to sign up for a mailing list that interests you, but you’re afraid spammers might get your address. We’ll call the list “WindowsVistaSellers”. Sign up with the list using the address “billgates+WindowsVistaSellers@gmail.com”. Email to that address will still come to your “billgates@gmail.com” address even though the “To:” will include that “+WindowsVistaSellers” in it.

Thanks, lifehacker.

Indians Have Funny Accent !!!

"apu"

If I look at Media’s Portrayal of Indians typically form USA. I can not resist but to ask?

Why is it that Indians are always portrayed with a definitively funny accent?

As I understand “English Language” is just few of many gifts (Laws, Bureaucracy and a really screwed political system and family), which our UK Administrator (Read: Colonial Rulers) left for us before leaving India totally helpless… well that’s a story of another day let get back to the topic now.
My observations are our “English” accent is as funny as any Americans “Hindi” isn’t it? Well it’s a logical to compare each country’s most popular language and then see who’s funny

When Richard Gere come to India and Kisses some B Grade Actor and Say’s “Namaste” its still really funny

What’s in an accent anyways its about the language right, then we have stronger case. Zurumi says that Hindi has (497 million users) and English(508 million users) and at the rate at which Indians are procreating(I mean praying to God(s) for Immaculate Conception, as you know we Indians don’t have sex) we’ll beat any language soon enough.

Common guys so here is my request

Indians: In the name of … stop faking an English accent, makes me think what all you would fake. and Yes everyone laughs behind your back.

Americans: Common Guys … We work for you. If Hindi grows we wouldn’t want to make fun of you and yes well you can, mail me if you want me to do the taxes or marketing campaign

10 Reasons Why NOT to Use MSIE (Internet Explorer)

Am I a Internet Explorer hater; No, but close. Consider This:  If you have ever worked on a design or a particular cool feature for your web application and all went well people loved it and even your boss loved it. All to find out the ##*@@ IE, dosen’t work the way you expect. Knowing myself well I wouldn’t even bother. However we live in a strange world where inspite of the best avilable browsers being free, we still use IE. I am a big fan of Firefox, yes Opera and Safari are also really great.

Now comes the tricky part I can respect anyone using anyone of the listed browser above but, Why still people use IE. It just escapes me. I request all of you to please download our fav browser and use it instead of the Stupid, Unresponsive, Technical Blunder, and Arrogant IE.

Here are my reasons “Why NOT to use IE”

10.

The Architect is Unhappy

9. CSS Support: A good example of this is the inherit value, which according to the spec is supported by all CSS properties. A little over a year ago, David Hammond’s site that rates browser standards compliance generated an uproar on Chris Wilson’s blog when it counted the lack of support for inherit as a point against IE for each and every CSS property.

CSS features that can honestly list as having ‘full’ or even ‘partial’ support in IE are few and far between (color is one, css font is not). Most of them are ‘buggy’, even in IE7 … and we expect even more IE bugs to come out of the woodwork.

8. No more Secure: Using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser to surf the Internet has become a marked risk — even with the latest security patches installed. This is too vast to be covered in a point however, enough to on a IE you are not secure for any transaction Credit Card or Password. Better prospective on security.

7. Unhealthy Practice: Over at ZDNet, Microsoft employee John Carroll makes the case that his company’s monopolistic tactics over the past decade have in fact benefited our industry, and cites Internet Explorer as an example. Without preinstalling Internet Explorer, he says, how would anyone download Firefox? How would open-source markets grow?

So let me stop here and say, on behalf of Firefox users everywhere: thank you.

I also have a note here from the pop-up ad industry. They would like to thank Microsoft for allowing their market to boom while the IE team sunbathed in Maui for the past four years.

Sarcasm aside, the truth is that many people, I among them, never really took issue with the idea of preinstalling a browser on Windows. It would be pretty silly to buy a computer today that couldn’t access the Internet. We take issue with how Microsoft flagrantly strong-armed OEMs to leave out or marginalize competing browsers, such as Netscape. As far as I know, Netscape also allowed people to…download things.

From gratitude

6. Standards : The absolute worst browser when it comes to supporting the standards is Internet Explorer. Page after page of every good Standards book reveal features supported in other browsers, but not in IE. Why a company would choose not to support standards that benefit everyone? The way I see it, it’s for precisely one of two reasons – either they are unable to, or they don’t want to or they are “lazy”.

5. Customization : We didn’t anyways expect any customization from MS anyways live with the IE or pray for a new feature. Whereas we have Tons of new feature in Firefox, Opera and Opera which can be chosen at will

4. ActiveX: ActiveX controls are little pieces of code placed in web pages that download Windows compatible programs onto your computer. While some ActiveX controls download useful programs (like the mortgage calculator), hackers can also use ActiveX controls to turn your computer against you.

In the wrong hands, hackers can use malicious ActiveX controls to infect your email, sending viruses, Trojans and worms to every person whose email address you have.

Or even worse, a cracker could use an ActiveX control to turn your computer into a “zombie”. Hackers accumulate huge armies of zombie computers and then use them to launch DOS (Denial of Service) attacks on large corporate or even government networks. Attacks of this nature are strong enough to shut down entire networks and bring corporations to a stand still. In the past, these attacks have been aimed at entities like Cisco Systems, CNN, the FBI and even NASA. Your computer could be part of it and you wouldn’t even know.

And once an ActiveX control is installed on your computer, it is always available to your browser, even without any interaction from you. An installed ActiveX control has every capability within your PC that you do (and sometimes more). So, from a hacker’s standpoint, anything goes once a malicious ActiveX control is installed.

3. Requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher!

List of such supid sites

Have you ever viewed a web page designed solely with IE in mind in another browser? They are hideous, non functional, clunky pages in every case, on every other browser. Safari does the best job of “fixing” the looks of an IE page, but it can’t do much to fix the way they work (or don’t). Thinking the web still has to be hard to use and ugly is just wrong. The moment you switch to any other browser, your mind will opened to a beautiful looking, easy to use, functioning web.

2. IE is not supported on Vista

1.) Internet Explorer doesn’t care about an the user at all. IE came first in 1995, its been more than 10 years, if they wanted to correct it they could have, they don’t care and neither should you.

Now Some Fun

Crash IE at will

Please put this link in the IE http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/etc/crash-ie.html or click here if you are using IE. Please save your work before crashing the IE.

Internet Explorer tab within Firefox

Download

Whenever I come across a site prevented from displaying video, other media by all the various ad-block add-ons I’ve installed, all I do is simply switch to Internet Explorer using this cool tool to view it immediately without aving to deal with any white list/black list configurations of the Firefox add-ons.

Play Browser Wars

For some strange reason “Make Firefox Look Like Internet Explorer “

Yes, it’s true. There are some people that prefer the look of Internet Explorer to the way Firefox looks (though I’ve never met one). Simple How To guide that shows you just what needs to be done to get Firefox looking just like IE.

1. Please get this theme Theme .
2. Download the Firefox Internet Explorer Icons Pack and unzip it to your Firefox program directory (typically C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ for regular Firefox of PortableApps\FirefoxPortable\App\firefox for Firefox Portable). It will create the necessary directories within the chrome directory and copy the icons to them.
3. Look and feel
   1. Right-Click on the toolbar and select Customize
   2. Click Add New Toolbar and call it Address Toolbar
   3. Drag the address bar and Go button from their normal position onto the new (blank) Address Toolbar
   4. Drag the Search Box off of the toolbar onto the buttons window to remove it
      Drag the stop button to the left of the refresh button
   5. After the Home button, place a seperator,then the Bookmarks button, then the History button, then another seperator, then the print button
4. Change Window Title
   1. Install the Firesomething 1.8 Extension and restart Firefox
   2. Go to the Firesomething options window (Tools – Addons – Extensions – Firesomething – Options)
   3. Delete all the Vendors, Prefixes and Names (right-click Select All, right-click delete in each field)
   4. Enter Microsoft in Vendors and click Add (or enter Mozilla for fun)
   5. Enter Internet Explorer in Names and click Add
   6. Check off “Use the same generated name in…” and click OK
   7. Close the extensions window
5. If you are really really mad
6. You can even add in the default links from Internet Explorer to fully complete the look if you’d like. Just create bookmarks to each of these links and place them on the Links toolbar in the following order.
   1. Best of the Web
   2. Channel Guide
   3. Customize Links
   4. Free Hotmail
   5. Internet Start
   6. Microsoft
   7. Windows Media
   8. Windows Update
   9. Windows
   10. You can also set www.msn.com as your homepage… and the transformation is complete.

Original article by John Haller

8+1 Bomb Blasts rock Bangalore, Unknown Number killed

WTF, I mean what is wrong with the people who do this. This is wrong in name of anything. It doesn’t justify you killing people to promote your propaganda. May be its Jobs, salary, political rivalry, may be religion,may be for corporate profits or may be its conspicuous consumption.

Whoever may have done thing, Please understand though I am sure you have lost that capacity long back. YOUR KILLING IS NOT JUSTIFY, FOR WHATEVER REASON YOU MAY HAVE. I have my friends and family IN Bangalore and I wish them well. Phones aren’t working hence this post.

This is the response we get as tax payers.

Bangalore Police Commissioner Shankar M Bidari said, “We are monitoring the situation and request all residents to continue with their normal routine. The bomb squad and explosives experts are on the spot. We will deal with the situation.”

Updates:

1. Helpline No: 080-40312706
2. Address of the Hospital:St.John’s National Academy of Health Sciences
   Sarjapur Road
   Bangalore
   Karnataka State
   India
   560 034
3. Use text Messages Phone lines are Jammed by the Operators
4. Media Mindlessly Started portraying this as an Terrorist Attack. Its can be any reasons but media has to mislead people to increase the TRP.
5. Places Affected: Sirjapur Road, Nayandhalli, Madiwala Checkpost, Adigudi, Rajaram, Mohan Rai Circle, and Koramangala.
6. Media wants you to know only Three People are Dead, which i doubt severely.
7. DO NOT GO TO ANY MALLS Please don’t resume life as usual, Prevention is better.
8. Blasts on Friday, Media Trying to Paint it Muslim:
   1. March 12, 1993: Mumbai bombings were a series of thirteen bomb explosions that took place in Mumbai). The single-day attacks resulted in up to 250 civilian fatalities and 700 injuries.
   2. April 14, 2006: Twin blasts took place in Delhi’s Jama Masjid injuring at least 13 people on Friday evening at around 1730 hrs IST.
   3. September 8, 2006: 31 killed, 297 injured in Friday’s twin bomb blast in Malegaon.
   4. November 23, 2007: Multiple blasts in Faizabad, Varanasi, Lucknow within five minutes of each other killing at least 12 people in Uttar Pradesh.
   5. May 18, 2007: Eleven people were killed and more than 50 others injured in a bomb explosion inside Mecca Mosque located near the historic Charminar in Hyderabad.
9. SIMI, LeT may be behind Bangalore blasts: IB
10. 7 blasts rock Bangalore; two killed, 20 wounded
11. Police is having no clue.
12. 7 blasts rock Bangalore, one killed
13. Police is still bloody clueless or being very secret.
14. BANGALORE: Following is the sequence in which the seven bomb blasts rocked the country’s IT hub on Friday.
    1. 1st blast: 1.20 pm, Madiwala bus depot
    2. 2nd blast: 1.25 pm, Mysore road
    3. 3rd blast: 1.40 pm, Adugudi
    4. 4th blast: 2.10 pm, Koramangla
    5. 5th blast: 2.25 pm, Vittal Mallaya road
    6. 6th blast: 2.35 pm, Langford Town
    7. 7th blast: Richmond Town
15. We heard a deafening sound
16. Another one at 5:10 PM (IST) Speculation is there are 12 Bombs
17. Serial Blast in Bangalore (Bengaluru)
18. Politicians have woken from their slumbers and started condemning Bangalore blasts(As if this helps), and some more promises…Bha
19. Major breakthrough in Bangalore blast case
20. 
    

The Mozilla CEO on His Firefox Strategy, His Google Gambit, and Working With Apple

When Mozilla released the Firefox browser in 2004, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dominated the market with a whopping 95 percent share. Now Firefox has 18 percent of the market and Apple’s Safari has another 6 percent. Along the way, Wall Streeters began pressing Mozilla to go public (it won’t) and Mozilla CEO John Lilly wowed scores of suits with his talks about how the open source project became a successful business. Just before the launch of Firefox 3 in June, Wired sat down with Lilly at his company headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Wired: What are the biggest changes in Firefox 3?

Lilly: It’s got 15,000 improvements. It’s more secure and easier to use. But, most important, it’s two or three times faster. Think about all the programs we run in our browser now — like office software. When Firefox 2 was developed three years ago, we ran those applications on our desktop. So in Firefox 3 we improved the JavaScript engine and changed the way the browser handles and allocates memory.

Wired: Why did Firefox catch on in the first place, and how has it stolen users from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer?

Lilly: When Firefox came out in 2004, there wasn’t much browser innovation happening at Microsoft. People used Firefox, saw it was really fast and liked the tabs, and stayed.

Also, people now understand what we stand for — the participatory and open Web — and they like that. It’s why we launched Firefox 3 in more than 45 languages. The idea that people worldwide can feel a sense of ownership about software that’s initially only in English — like IE7 — is bogus.

Wired: That’s nice, but it’s not exactly a long-term strategic plan. Do you worry about competition from Apple now that it has enabled Safari on Windows?

Lilly: I used to work at Apple. I have an iPhone. But there are other ways of developing software. Instead of relying on individual brilliance, we rely on enabling a network around the world, like Wikipedia does. That’s a different aesthetic.

Wired: Is it an aesthetic or a rationalization for not producing well-designed products?

Lilly: It’s an aesthetic. Apple is great if you like the way it comes. Firefox is great if you like to customize things. The focus is on how it lets you do what you want, not how it looks.

Wired: Roughly 85 percent of your revenue comes from Google. What happens if Google decides to build its own browser?

Lilly: It’s kind of a sucker’s game to speculate about what Google’s going to do. That said, it was the Google guys who approached us — not the other way around — because Firefox was a good browser. Our relationship will be just fine, as long as we build something that people give a damn about.

Wired: Mozilla is a nonprofit foundation but also a for-profit startup. How does that work?

Lilly: We’re like a university. We have a public mission — keeping the Web open — that we’re supporting with economics. It’s just that our competitors are all for-profit companies.

Wired: Does the browser still matter now that users access the Net with different, non-browser- dependent devices, like Amazon.com’s Kindle?

Lilly: That’s a bogus argument. People have been saying for 10 or 15 years that the PC is dead. Even with a good mobile device, I’ll sit at my laptop when I’m near it because it’s a better experience.

Wired: But still an imperfect one.

Lilly: There are huge problems left to solve. If your data is in the cloud, how do you access it when you’re offline? How do you display video without using proprietary technologies? And then there’s the whole mobile Web; I think it’s not at all clear that it will look like the actual Web.

Wired: Are you going to develop a version of Firefox for the iPhone?

Lilly: No. Apple makes it too hard. They say it’s because of technical issues — they don’t want outsiders to disrupt the user experience. That’s a business argument masquerading as a technological argument. We’re focusing on more important stuff. The iPhone has been influential, but there’s not that many of them. We’re part of the LiMo Foundation — Linux on Mobile. The Razr V2 is a LiMo phone, and you’ll see more in the next year or so.

Reblog from Wired Interview

Restore Text

Francisco's Money Speech by Ayn Rand

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor–your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions–and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made–before it can be looted or mooched–made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.’

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, not wounds–that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade–with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality–the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth–the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money–and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another–their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich–will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt–and of his life, as he deserves.

“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money–the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world? You are.

“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood–money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves–slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers–as industrialists.

“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money–and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being–the self-made man–the American industrialist.

“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity–to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide– as, I think, he will.

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns–or dollars. Take your choice–there is no other–and your time is running out.”

The above is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand.

Francisco’s Money Speech by Ayn Rand

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor–your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions–and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made–before it can be looted or mooched–made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.’

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, not wounds–that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade–with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality–the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth–the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money–and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another–their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich–will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt–and of his life, as he deserves.

“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money–the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world? You are.

“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood–money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves–slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers–as industrialists.

“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money–and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being–the self-made man–the American industrialist.

“If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity–to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide– as, I think, he will.

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns–or dollars. Take your choice–there is no other–and your time is running out.”

The above is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand.

Virtualization – A Quick Tutorial

Just the mention of the word “Virtualization” in a Technical meeting or IT seminar will get you enough attention and interest from the people around you. Even then I have not found a basic tutorial on the subject of Virtualization which just explains it and lets me choose where to go from there . So, I have written one, this is what I will call “Pre-Reading before you go onto bigger concepts in VIRTUALIZATION“.

What is Virtualization? (Quick and Dirty)

Wikipedia Says: Virtualization is a term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources. Virtualization hides the physical characteristics of computing resources from their users, be they applications, or end users.

EDTB Says:

Virtualization is a concept of putting servers, storage, applications and users on different logical places which reduces dependencies on each others. This Indeed provide a  higher probability that one doesn’t screws up another.

This is done to create an illusion of interoperability and save [money,physical space, time and environment mostly in the same order] where user does not care where application is stored and application does not care where it is data is stored as long as its accessible, storage is logical and can be scaled up or down and server are for a change used for all its worth.

A Brief History

Virtualization is actually, a concept has been around for almost 50 years and real life implementation proofs of virtualization techniques have existed for close to 45 years. Virtualization is fairly mature technology. It just that the right time for Virtualization is -Now. Virtualization has been in the mainframe markets for quite some time now.

IBM started to explore virtualization in and round 60’s as a way to implement “time-sharing” on the IBM 7044. By creating multiple virtual images of the main machine (7044) they were able to allow multiple users access to the same memory and resources of the main machine through their virtual images.

This led to the development of the VM/370, a major advancement in the mainframe arena for their System/370. It allowed for multiple “copies” of the hardware that ran as virtual sessions while the virtual machine monitor (VMM) ran directly on the real hardware. The VM/370 was one of the most successful offerings in IBM history. The concepts and techniques established in the late 60s and early 70s are still used today on their large mainframe systems. These same concepts we have for the virtualization techniques we use today on our Intel and AMD based servers.

Due to the declining cost of servers and storage and the drift from the mainframe systems, virtualization lost its value for a while 1980s and early 1990s. Distributed computing and client-server applications were the hot topics of the time, and many companies saw huge cost savings in switching to low-cost x86 based systems.

Even though the cost of hardware was falling fast during this time period, few companies looked at the whole TCO (Total cost of Ownership) of having thousands of separate servers running for different application and huge amounts storage being wasted (underutilized) because of this. Finally we had to pay salaries and save the environment also.

Then came along  VMware ,VirtualBox and Xen !!!

Virtualization Split Wide Open

Virtualization is a performed on various resource across the system ecosystem. Here are a few.

Server Virtualization
Running multiple logical servers on a single physical machine is a popular way to saving on hardware costs and makes backup and administration easier.

Why Virtualizes Server?

Several market and technology trends have converged to create “ideal conditions” for virtual server adoption. CPU underutilized: Server hardware performance continues to increase faster than the ability of applications to use it. Blaming Microsoft’s DLL hell: Most System Administrators do not run multiple applications on a single system image because they dread DLL conflicts and other incompatibilities will cause systems to crash. With wide Market adoption of Microsoft ® Windows ® servers with x86 CPUs has radically driven down the cost of computing.

Storage Virtualization: SAN (Storage Area Network) solution is used to provide storage for virtual servers, rather than depending on the hard disks in the physical server.

Why Virtualizes Storage?

Storage systems suppliers are addressing these challenges by introducing layers of logical abstraction between the physical ports on an array, the blocks of data on specific sets of disks, and the volumes or files that servers and applications need to access.

With the use of NAS storage with its own file system is a form of virtualization that uses files rather than blocks as the basic virtualized element. Virtual tape libraries represent another form of virtualization that is widely used in mainframe environments and, more recently, in the open systems world as well.

Note: “Storage virtualization will become key to greater adoption of server virtualization soon server and storage lines will blur. We are moving from server centric infrastructure to storage centric infrastructure”

Desktop Virtualization: Running client operating systems in a VM for training purposes or for support of legacy software or hardware not to forget playing the Mario, islander, Contra…. Also Time to time using Microsoft office from Apple Mac !!! Virtual testing environments, which provide a cost-effective way to test new software, patches, etc., before rolling them out on your production network.

Application Virtualization: Separate application configuration layer from the operating system so that applications can be run on client machines without being installed. This is good for Demo’s , trial runs etc but no more 30 Days period .

Presentation Virtualization

You can run an application in ‘A’ location and control it from ‘B’, with processing being done on a server and only graphics rendering and inputs captured at the client end. Virtualization programs are available, depending on exactly what you need to do. You might want to run a virtual machine on top of your desktop operating system, running a different OS, either to try out a new OS or because you have some applications that won’t run in one of the operating systems.

Have Fun!!!

Look Maa No Windows Only
There are many virtualization technologies and many of them run on operating systems other than Windows. You can also run non-Windows guest operating systems in a VM on a Windows host machine. VMWare can run on Linux, and Microsoft previously made a version of Virtual PC for Macintosh (but did not port it to the Intel-based Macs). Parallels Desktop provides support for running Windows VMs on Mac OS X. Parallels Workstation supports many versions of Windows and Linux as both host and guest. Parallels Virtuozzo is a server virtualization option available in both Linux and Windows versions. Other virtualization solutions are Xen (now owned by Citrix), Q, an open source program based on the QEMU open source emulation software, for running Windows or Linux on a Mac, Open VZ, for creating virtual servers in the Linux environment.

Roll Back the – Blue Screen of Death
Backing up virtual machine images and restoring them is much easier and faster than traditional recovery methods that require reinstalling the operating system and applications and then restoring data. The VM can be restored to the same physical machine or to a different one in case of hardware failure. Less downtime means higher availability and greater worker productivity.

Mount Wikipedia
You can mount the Wikipedia as a virtual filesystem. Download WikipediaFS . This is a mountable Linux virtual file system that enables you to deal wikipedia as any other Drive [View and Edit Wikipedia (or any Mediawiki-based site) articles as real files].

Caveat

Licensing requirements: As far as licensing is concerned, most software vendors consider a VM to be no different from a physical computer. In other words, you’ll still need a software license for every instance of the operating system or application you install, whether on a separate physical machine or in a VM on the same machine.

Make sure your applications are supported : Issue that needs to be addressed is whether the application vendor will support running its software in a VM. Because VMs use emulated generic hardware and don’t provide access to the real hardware, applications running in VMs may not be able to utilize the full power of the installed video card, for example, or may not be able to connect to some of the peripherals connected to the host OS.

RAM it up: It its obvious, but the more virtual machines you want to run simultaneously, the more hardware resources you’ll need on that machine. Each running VM and its guest OS and applications will use RAM and processor cycles, so you’ll need large amounts of memory and one or more fast processors to be able to allocate the proper resources to each VM.

Can Operating Systems currently detect if they’re running in a VM?
Yes, they can. Right now they do it through a couple of techniques – direct hardware fingerprinting and inferred hardware fingerprinting.
Direct hardware fingerprinting is pretty straightforward. Virtual Machines have predictable hardware profiles, so you can just query for “virtual hardware” that’s only available in VM’s and can’t easily be changed. The Virtual PC Guy describes this approach here

After this, Please read the logical next step : What is DeDupe.

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Resources

Gartner Identifies Six Best Practices Companies Should Consider Before They Virtualize Their Servers
Virtualization Overview
Virtualization Technologies Overview
State of the Storage Virtualization Market 2008
The Storage Virtualization Landscape
Open source and virtualization: Twin trends to drive customer Value
Server Virtualization and Trends and its latest trends
Trends in Data Protection and Restoration technology
Seven disadvantages of server virtualization
Virtualization Defined – Eight Different Ways
Virtualization Jobs Blog
Virtualization: What’s In It For You?
VirtualBox
ClassicGaming
Virtualize AND dual-boot the same Windows on your Mac
Windows on Mac, Simultaneously
Virtual Appliance Marketplace
5 reasons why you should use VirtualBox, instead of VirtualPC or VMware
Microsoft Sets Virtualization Free
Convert Physical Machines to Virtual Machines – Free!
Virtualize Windows on Linux? Microsoft Says Servers First
MacIntel in a VMWare Session
Xen

Adam, Eve and Wallstreet – What should I do to marry a rich guy?

What should I do to marry a rich guy?

I’m going to be honest of what I’m going to say here. I’m 25 this year. I’m very pretty, have style and good taste. I wish to marry a guy with $500k annual salary or above. You might say that I’m greedy, but an annual salary of $1M is considered only as middle class in New York. My requirement is not high. Is there anyone in this forum who has an income of $500k annual salary? Are you all married? I wanted to ask: what should I do to marry rich persons like you? Among those I’ve dated, the richest is $250k annual income, and it seems that this is my upper limit. If someone is going to move into high cost residential area on the west of New York City Garden (?), $250k annual income is not enough.

I’m here humbly to ask a few questions:
1) Where do most rich bachelors hang out? (Please list down the names and addresses of bars, restaurant, gym)
2) Which age group should I target?
3) Why most wives of the riches is only average-looking? I’ve
met a few girls who doesn’t have looks and are not interesting, but they are able to marry rich guys
4) How do you decide who can be your wife, and who can only be your girlfriend? (My target now is to get married)

Ms. Pretty

Awesome reply:

Dear Ms. Pretty,

I have read your post with great interest. Guess there are lots of girls out there who have similar questions like yours. Please allow me to analysis your situation as a professional investor. My annual income is more than $500k, which meets your requirement, so I hope everyone believes that I’m not wasting time here. From the standpoint of a business person, it is a bad decision to marry you. The answer is very simple, so let me explain. Put the details aside, what you’re trying to do is an exchange of “beauty” and “money”: Person A provides beauty, and Person B pays for it, fair and square. However, there’s a deadly problem here, your beauty will fade, but my money will not be gone without any good reason. The fact is, my income might increase from year to year, but you can’t be prettier year after year. Hence from the viewpoint of economics, I am an appreciation asset, and you are a depreciation asset. It’s not just normal depreciation, but exponential depreciation. If that is your only asset, your value will be much worried 10 years later.

By the terms we use in Wall Street, every trading has a position, dating with you is also a “trading position”. If the trade value dropped we will sell it and it is not a good idea to keep it for long term – same
goes with the marriage that you wanted. It might be cruel to say this, but in order to make a wiser decision any assets with great depreciation value will be sold or “leased”. Anyone with over $500k annual income is not a fool; we would only date you, but will not marry you. I would advice that you forget looking for any clues to marry a rich guy. And by the way, you could make yourself to become a rich person with $500k annual income. This has better chance than finding a rich fool.

Hope this reply helps. If you are interested in “leasing” services, do
contact me…

signed,
…

Its a hilarious story, I am not sure of the source. If you do please let me know.

I am calling from so-and-so bank …Do you want a Home Loan?

For that matter any loan or Credit Card ? Are you all just as much pissed as I am over these tele-callers/ Telemarketing People. Given its there job but what ever happened to “permission based marketing ” and my privacy. These are my way to deal with these pesky telecallers.

1. The silence. Dont hang up, but just put the phone down and keep working, by the time they figure out that you are not there you will have wasted good amounts of their time.
2. Counter-Pitching: You offer your services to the telemarketer on the other end of the line. eg: As I am in Storage Hardware and Software industry- i ask them what is the team size, how many servers, scope of storage.
3. Ask them their name, company name, salary…..
4. Ask them to repeat everything they say, several times.
5. Play dumb, Simply act like a moron, let them speak and when they finally ask a irrelevant questions.
6. Keep saying “Yes” and “No” based on the question.
7. If its loan pitch ask them interest and then haggle.
8. Follow this awesome script.
9. If it is a credit card tell them you are not having a Job for past 6 months and could really use a card

Funny as these are, try to remember that telemarketers are actually real people just doing a job and being cruel to them isn’t right(may be). So try to be relatively polite to them. Telling them ” Please put me on your Do Not Call list.