Saturday, October 28, 2006

Nobel Prizes

Nobel prizes are the symbol of achievement for any person in the six fields, physics, chemistry, biology, peace, literature and economics. Nobel Prizes, started by Alfred Nobel who didnt give a dime to his children but bequeathed all his fortune to these prizes (well except Economics which is given by Bank of Sweden in the memory of Alfred Nobel) have had lots of eminent winners down the years.

Still I feel the Nobel Prizes missed out on lots of people who deserved it notably Mahatma Gandhi and also gave prizes for wrong reasons like the one given to Einstein for Photoelectric Effect not for relativity saying(unofficially of course) that relativity was way out whereas gave the prize to Bohr, whose theory was way out and proved wrong eventually.

The Prizes are hyped due to their heritage, the money and the past winners. I strongly feel its the winners who have made Nobel Prizes the most coveted medal for scientists and other people.

Also I feel science is moving away from the common man especially the science prizes. Earlier science was much closer to the common man especially Physics where a common man could comprehend what was going on. After seeing the citation for this year's winners one will say "What the HELL is going on!!".

In this way IG Nobel prizes are much better. Cool inventions, cooler ideas and much much closer to the common man!!

Thursday, October 26, 2006

IE 7 vs Mozilla 2.0

The war of browsers is back again! And Microsoft for the first time is defending its share of Internet browser market against Mozilla. Mozilla, an open source project is continuously eroding Microsoft IE's market share. IE 7 is the first fresh release from MS since 2001 and incorporates lots of features of Mozilla (Yawn!! Do SOMETHING new guys!!!)

Im an avid IE fan. The reasons being the speed with which IE opens and its tight integration with windows.

So after working on both the browsers i feel IE 7 has been beaten to pulp by Mozilla 2.0. Since on my XP IE 7 is not integrated with the windows shell so its lost its primary advantage of speed. It will be a plus point in Windows Vista but most of us are not changing their OS so soon for Vista which requires higher configurations.

Where Mozilla scores is the amazing collection of add ons. Man i was bowled over by the number of add ons and various stuff developer community has made. From utilities that show how many websites you have surfed, how much time you have wasted online to plug-ins that ask questions, the range is amazing.

Also Mozilla has a HUGE developer and testing community and hence bug are fixed rapidly and precisely.

I feel with Mozilla 2 and IE 7 we can see the power of open source software. I really hope that when Mozilla 3 is released Mozilla has a 80% marketshare and IE is dead.