Today I downloaded Pirates of Silicon Valley using torrents. Pirates of Silicon Valley is a famous film which is based on the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. The film is based on the birth of personal computer through the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft. Basically, the movie is the story of two greatest business rivals of their time, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Within 30 years these two became the richest persons on the earth. Here in this movie, you can see the initial struggle of software startups, business rivalary, apetite for success, successes and failures, innovations and new ideas, big initiatives, risks, competition etc.
The film begins with Steve Jobs (Noah Wyle) talking directly to the audience about the film “I don’t want you to think of this as just a film, some process of converting electrons and magnetic impulses into shapes and figures and sounds. No. Listen to me. We’re here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We’re creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. We’re rewriting the history of human thought with what we’re doing. That’s how you have to think of this.”Almost every scene is based on actual events. Some of the interesting scenes include Bill Gates going jail for rash driving, Bill Gates’ bulldozer races in the middle of the night and Steve Jobs’ bare feet going on the table while taking interview for the post of a programmer.
Some of the important points I noted about two biggest technology giants, Apple and Microsoft.
- Jobs enrolls in Reed College in Portland, Ore. He drops out after one semester in 1972. Bill Dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to pursue a career in software.
- They both started business with a co-founder. Steve Jobs was initial supported by Steve Wozniak who built the early Blue Box whereas Paul Allen helped Bill Gates adapt BASIC for the Altair and bought QDOS from Tim Paterson for $50,000.
- Both believe in Picasso’s famous saying “Good artists copy, great artists steal”.
- Both took their GUI ideas from Xerox.
- Gates business is in software market, while Jobs business is mostly into hardware with a compatible software.
Both Bill and Steve are pioneers of their fields. They completely dominated the company they founded. Their habits are reflected in the work culture of company, methods of working, the products they make, the type of staff they employ etc. In my opinion, Bill Gates’ vision was more successful than that of Steve. Bill used to say “A computer on every disk in every house, running Microsoft software” and that made him focus on Multi language interface whereas Steve Jobs considered simple and easy to use rather than supporting other languages which affected the business of MACs.
This week, Accenture has published a report on job opportunities in different parts of the world. According to the report, India has the more job opportunities than that in US, which is on second place. The report of accenture is based on a global survey of 286 graduating students in India and a total of 2,464 in eight countries including India, US, UK, Australia, Germany, Singapore, Mexico, China, Brazil, Russia and Thailand. Around 87 % of Indian students who are about to complete their college have already started job search whereas 51 % have already got a job.The benefits that Indian students seek from their employers (companies) are compensation/salary (82 %), interesting and challenging work (77 %), opportunity for global experience (63 %) and company brand name (59 %).
Uptill now you have read the first and second parts of popular Indian actresses series on abhisays. Now the time has come to present you the list of top heroines during the period of 1970 to 1980. This period saw the decline of romantic and musical movies and birth of violent films about smugglers, gangsters and bandits. Amitabh Bachchan, the star known for his “angry young man” roles, rode the crest of the trend with violent movies like Zanzeer, Deewar, Sholay etc. During early seventies the bollywood got its first super star, Rajesh Khanna. After 2-3 years he was replaced by Amitabh Bachchan and the angry young man from Allahabad became the hot favorite for the top banners in bollywood. His pair with Jaya/Rekha/Zeenat Aman/Parveen Babi produced some of the biggest super hits of this period. The pair of Dharmendra and Hema Malini also became popular with movies like Sholay, Sita or Gita etc.
If you are from India, then you must be fan of Hindi films. Today I am talking about the most successful hindi film, ever made. Yeah, you are right it is Sholay. It is the biggest hit in the history of Indian Cinema. Sholay was released in 1975, starred Dharmendra, Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Sanjeev Kumar, Jaya Bhaduri and Amjad Khan. It is the still highest grossing film of all time in India. It has earned around Rs. 2,36,45,00,000 which is equivalent to US$ 60 million. It is the only film in the history of Indian cinema which celebrated silver jubilee (25 weeks) at 234 movie theatres across India. Sometimes, I think why it became so big hit. What is special about this movie ? Actually this movie was a inspired from different hollywood movies. It was a mixture of some of the most selling trends (in movies) of its time.
Veeru — Dharmendra
Why we need Firefox ? With windows xp or Vista, we have Internet Explorer and with Macintosh we have Safari. They why we need Firefox, a third party software for browsing internet. It is the fastest browser, when you compare with IE 7 and safari. It has a big number of new and improved features which make it better than IE, Opera and safari. Let’s start the experiment, just type any word or phrase into the address bar, your firefox browser will automatically search your history and bookmarks for all possible matches. This will save your typing time. It includes tabbed browsing, spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user’s desired search engine. You can also enhance the functionality of Firefox with the help of around 2,000 add-ons created by third-party developers. Some of these add-ons are NoScript (script blocker), FoxyTunes (controls music players), Adblock Plus (ad blocker), StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! (download functions) and Web Developer (web tools).
One of the biggest antivirus companies of world, McAfee has released its annual “Mapping the Mal Web” report today. In this report you can find information on which high-level domains (HLD) you should take extra precaution while surfing on internet. The web sites which provide facility for download of videos, mp3s, ringtones and screen savers are big source for spywares and malwares. They test sites for the presence of risky behaviors such as browser exploits, adware/spyware/Trojans/viruses, high likelihood of receiving spam, affiliation with other risky sites, and aggressive pop-up marketing.
These days Photo Galleries have become integral part of big portals. There are many open source PHP scripts that you can use for integrating photo gallery with your website. For example, we have Gallery, Coppermine, 4Images etc. Out of these I prefer to use CopperMine Photo Gallery. It is the best Photo Gallery PHP script available on internet. For proper installation, it requires PHP, MySQL, and ImageMagick or the GD Graphics Library, and web server software such as Apache. It can be easily integrated with Coppermine Photo Gallery has interfaces with other popular content management systems like e107, Invision Power Board, Joomla!, Mambo, phpBB, PostNuke, PunBB, Simple Machines Forum, vBulletin, Woltlab Burning Board, and YaBB SE. It is an open-source software and is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
This time Forbes magazine has come with a new list. It has released a list of the world’s top 20 “Hottest Young Royals”. For this list it has used “winning combinations of looks, money, and popularity on the Web” and only unmarried royals below the age of 35 has been considered for this list. Prince William is on the top of this list. According to Forbes, “international intrigue and unparalleled media attention” and “graceful public persona” are reasons for his top position. His younger brother, Prince Harry, is on second rank with their cousins Zara Phillips and princess Beatrice of York ranking third and fourth, respectively. Charlotte Casiraghi of Monaco, the granddaughter of princess Grace Kelly is on number five position due to her “impeccable taste in fashion and her good looks”. Check out the complete list of 20 hottest Young Royals of the world. 
Today while browsing internet, two news from India caught my attraction. First one was CBSE board results of 2008 and the other one Bihar’s Super 30 cracking 100 % result in IIT-JEE. If you are not from India, they you will ask what is CBSE and IIT-JEE. Actually, CBSE stands for central board of secondary examination. CBSE conducts two major examinations in India, the All India Secondary School Examination (AISSE) for Class 10 and the All India Senior School Certificate Examination (AISSCE) for Class 12, which is a school-leaving examination. It also prescribes the syllabi for these examinations. The scores in these examinations are necessary to gain admission colleges for higher education. The Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) is an annual college entrance examination in India. A total of nine colleges of India use JEE for admission to their undergraduate programs. The nine colleges are seven Indian Institutes of Technology, IT-BHU Varanasi, and ISM Dhanbad. It is the toughest engineering entrance exam in the world with a success rate of around 1 in 50.
What is the relation between these two news ? If you see from one side, you will think, India is producing Young talents with great energy, hunger for success and courage to excel. But I am sorry, I don’t think so. We Indians, always feel proud in following the common trends. Let us take an example, when a child starts going school, the parents try their level best to motivate him or her to secure first rank in class. Then during the time of board examinations, they want not a single number less than 90 %. After completing Xth board examinations, the child was forced to prepare for engineering or medical entrance examinations. The parents never care of the hidden talents of their children. They don’t want to make their son ShahRukh Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, M.F Hussian. They just force him to become a part of the big crowd of India. After some years, the child becomes a adult (a part of big crowd) and then an employee having duty from 9 in the morning to 6 in the evening. This is what happening in 99 % of middle class Indian families. This is the basic reason that we are still known as a developing nation.
