It's Rishi

Businessweek Interview

The truth is what Google is doing now is transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders into Google. So media companies around the world are all threatened by Google. Why? Because basically Google is telling you how much of your ad revenue you get to keep.They better get some competition. Us. Yahoo! (YHOO). Somebody better break through or you can short all media stocks right now. As long as there are two, you can hold onto media stocks.

Worth reading…

What’s an “Install Fair” you ask? Well apparently Microsoft is more serious than ever about making sure users upgrading their Windows install to the new version, in this case that version is the soon to be released Vista, have a smooth and successful experience. Microsoft invited volunteers to come to their Silicon Valley campus and install the latest build of Vista (RC2) and report on their experience during and after the Vista upgrade. Several Microsoft engineers were on hand to assist and observe.

How was my experience? Well, not so great. I arrived a little late and combined with the fact that the Vista Upgrade process took FOREVER, my laptop was still grinding through the upgrade even as the event wound down. At one of the points when the setup process required a reboot, I shut the laptop with the intention of continuing it back at home. However, after talking with some MS folks about application compatibility with apps like Apache and MySQL, I realized that I was better off first dual-booting Vista on a separate partition and check for compatibility before I make the leap with my primary environment.

Luckily, Vista has an awesome setup rollback feature. At any point of the upgrade, you can quit the upgrade process and rollback to your prior XP installation. Since I was about 90% done with the upgrade process, I was really wary about trying the rollback. I had a bad feeling that I might end up with no Vista and a defunct XP install. I did some quick searching on the Web and found that many people were reporting that the rollback functioned flawlessly. So I crossed my fingers and went for it. Maybe 5 minutes later, I was back in XP like nothing ever happened. I was blown away.

When I get some time in the coming week, I’ll dual-boot Vista and check it out. I must say the new Aero UI in Vista is slick as hell. Unfortunately, you need 128MB of dedicated graphics memory to run Aero at resolution of 1280×1024 and above. My laptop only has 64MB. I’m definitely going to look into whether an upgrade is possible…

People who know me well know that for the past couple of months, my computer’s been messed up. All of a sudden, IE and several other Internet-based apps like AIM and Outlook would, immediately upon being launched, start sucking 100% of the CPU. The problem manifested itself one day and I spent hours upon hours trying to fix it. Those that know me well also know that there is rarely a Windows problem I can’t fix. But, I just couldn’t figure this one out even after going so far as to running the problematic apps in my Visual C++ debugger to try to pinpoint the issue.

So for the past couple months I’ve been working around the issue. IE not working wasn’t a big deal since I use Firefox exclusively. But workarounds like using Meebo instead of my AIM client was becoming very irritating. The fate that I was almost ready to accept was re-installing Windows. That was until a couple days ago when I was randomly poking around the options panel in IE7 beta that I had recently upgraded to (in hopes of it possibly solving the issue). Low and behold, I came across this button in the Advanced tab:

A Reset button! Note that this is different than the “Restore Defaults” button, which was present in previous versions of IE, that simply resets a few advanced settngs. Upon finding this Reset button, I quickly said “what the heck?!” and clicked it. After a few seconds of churning, magically IE was no longer sucking up 100% CPU. I fired up AIM and Outlook and I practically jumped out of my seat when I confirmed that they also stopped sucking up 100% CPU.

Now that IE is actually usable for me, I’ve played around with this new version and I must say that it is very impressive. Because of the various customizations I have in my Firefox, I won’t switch back to IE7 but this is definitely going to slow – if not halt – the exodus of IE users to Firefox.

If you’re having problems with IE and want to try the Reset button or simply want to get a sneak peak at the next version of IE, go to the Microsoft IE7 page to download it.