Facebook May File A Lawsuit Against Mark Zuckerberg! What The Hell?

Mark Zuckerberg may be a misfit of sorts, but he wasn’t THE misfit at Harvard. For the record, the man in consideration doesn’t sport hoodies and wasn’t born with this known-to-all name either. AnIsraeli entrepreneur, Rotem Guez, of late claimed the Facebook founder’s name. Lulz! Talk about making your own identity! I told you this guy is a misfit of sorts! The new Zuckerberg’s website, MarkZuckerbergOfficial.com, says that he first filed a lawsuit challenging Facebook in January, since the social network shut down his site and blocking any admission to his profile.

Say Hi to Zuckerberg!

This guy, let’s call him the New Zuckerberg, is also the co-founder of a social marketing companyLike Store, which sells “Likes” to their company on its page. Here’s what their website had to say-

“Are you sad no one’s visiting your Facebook Page? We have a solution! Need 1,000 Likes? We’ll get them for you. Need 5,000 Likes? We’ll get them for you. Need 10,000 Likes? We’ll get them for you.“

The new passport that he created!

In one word- PATHETIC!

Facebook’s law firm had even launched a lawsuit against Like Store for selling brand fans, thus breaching their Terms Of Service. The threat asked of the New Zuckerberg to shut down his company and never be seen in the social network again. To avoid any more legal action against him, he officially changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg on December 7th 2011, and plans of change his family name are down the line too. When Facebook recently filed a lawsuit against the all-the-same active Live Store, they were in for a shock to know that they were jeopardizing their own master.

As if he somehow knew all the hype and hoopla that he’ll be generating, the New Zuckerberg has arranged for the extra spice that he can add on the internet- A facebook page and a twitter account with the handle @iMarkZuckerberg. All latest photographs of his new passport and ID card have been uploaded in these pages.

Such comedy of errors to happen are very rare, and when they do, you just like pointing your fingers at them and do a Lulz! Let us know what you all think about this new Zuckerberg — A miserable identity, or a smart-as-a-whip marketing genius?

Which search engine is best suited for you?

I came across this link on TechCrunch. (Actually, came across it as a retweet of the TechCrunch story by someone I follow on Twitter since I’m not subscribed to that site’s RSS feed.) It’s called the Blind Search Tool. (BTW, the site was made by a Microsoft engineer.) Basically, you search for a term and it shows you three different sets of results in column from three search engines – Google, Yahoo!, and Bing – in a random order (columns are shuffled randomly). Have a look at the search results, and then ‘vote’ for a search engine by click on the button for whichever result set you like best. Blind Search Tool then reveals which set is from which search engine.

To my surprise I found that I almost invariably found Yahoo!’s search results to be the best. But then again, your preferences of what is a ‘good search result’ could be different from mine. What this tool does is that it cuts out all the crap and makes you find out which search engine you really want. I mainly focussed on the top five search results, because quite frankly those are the ones which really matter. Which search engine did you find the best? Leave a comment!

(In case you choose Yahoo! Search too and want a lighter search page, then bookmark search.yahoo.com.)

The dust has settled regarding the news that Microsoft is buying out Yahoo!’s search division. In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft’s Bing search engine is going to replace the backend for Yahoo! search for a period of ten years; in return, Yahoo! Search Marketing will handle ad inventory for both the companies on their search properties. Yahoo!’s current CEO Carol Bartz has confirmed that front end will still be Yahoo!-branded.  Details are still not clear on what will happen to services such as Yahoo! BOSS,Yahoo! SearchMonkey, Yahoo! SiteExplorer, etc. Carol Bartz is taking seemingly good financial decisions for now; I wonder though whether being out of the search engine game for ten years will stunt Yahoo!’s growth a decade later. (I don’t think they’ll sink money into search R&D for the time being.) Unlike Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz’s heart doesn’t bleed purple and gold.

Yahoo! really screwed up under Terry Semel’s leadership. What else could you expect out of a former Hollywood exec? When Jerry Yang came back as CEO, Yahoo! gained back a lot of its technological advantage…but Yahoo! has failed at marketing its products properly. You may disagree on whether you find Yahoo! Search better or Google Search better, but as you’ll see on Blind Search Test, Yahoo! is at least better than Bing. Despite that, Bing traffic grew by leaps and bounds after its launch purely on the foundation of Microsoft’s marketing.

Personally, the only bit I liked about Bing was the preview of the destination page which you get on hovering over a result. The photos on the front page are nice – although nothing you can’t get on Flickr. Oh, and their logo looks as if it was made in Microsoft Paint. :P

‘the plot to get bill gates’ by gary rivlin

Most people of my generation would be aware of Bill Gates and why he is so popular – perhaps less so these days after he has stepped back from the limelight – only vaguely. He is that Scrooge-McDuck-ian level rich guy, isn’t he? Within the tech community there is a lot of hate for Bill Gates and Microsoft, especially among free/open source software supporters.

Yet, it struck me that I hardly know anything about Gates as a person. From my previous years I know of what he wrote in his books The Road Ahead and Business @ The Speed of Thought – without ever having read the books; I know about his temper tantrum; stories about speeding violations and dates that went downhill. I have seen countless documentaries about him and the tech industry, not counting the ‘faction’ film Pirates of The Silicon Valley.

So when I came across an old copy of Gary Rivlin’s The Plot to Get Bill Gates: An Irreverent Investigation of the World’s Richest Man…and the People Who Hate Him at a book sale, I pounced upon the bargain. The book, published in 1999, is refreshingly free of the retrospective analysis post-dot-com-crash; celebrating The World as Brave and New. Rather than focussing on just a single individual as biographies do, Rivlin turns the spotlight instead on Bill Gates’ larger-than-life contemporaries Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs too. What he excels in portraying is how these men and Gates fed off each other in obsessing “cutting off a competitor’s air supply” and making “supergreat” products.

Rivlin, for sure, is a technology-beat journalist who may not understand the intricacies of software development but to his credit – beyond the perfunctory introductions to any technical topic – he politely steps aside and lets people who do understand express their opinion. This approach might appear biased to you, depending on whose Kool-Aid you have drunk; ultimately though you have to admit that he does a good job of balancing stories from highly polarised camps. Those who demonize Bill Gates will cry out that this book borders on trying hard to restrain itself from fawning over him – but then I think it’s a carefully calculated result arising out how people envied and hated Gates (and still do). In that sense, the tone of the book mirrors reality a lot.

The amount of research put into the book clearly shows. I have heard many wildly unbelievable tales over the years – so has Gary Rivlin, of course, and he tackles this by chasing down the ‘original’ source of each apocryphal story, often with results that tend to indicate that they were manufactured. Again, Rivlin shows great restraint in hardly ever calling anyone a liar outright, preferring to let the reader draw his own conclusions based on the evidence presented.

Over the years, I personally have come to admire and respect him a lot more, moving away from Stallman-esque rhetoric. He is prominent philanthropist and whatever he may have done in the past, he is doing so much more for disadvantaged people in developing countries. I am saddened these days, thus, when I came across the same attacks against him (again, especially in the FOSS community) that should have gone out of fashion a decade ago. The Plot to Get Bill Gates reveals the flaws in his character, but so does it also trace the journey of an incredibly intelligent person who matured over the ages. By comparing his contemporaries with him, it highlights how they probably wouldn’t have acted much differently, had they been in Gates’ position instead.

C.O.Я.E 2010

C.O.Я.E 2010 was organised by Delhi Public School Dwarka. It was one hell of an event. From Domino’s Pizza to the Programming language LOGO, it had everything. One of the best events I have been to this year. The overall was bagged by DPS RKPee (yet again) while New Era Pulic School secured the 1st Runners Up and DPS noida emerged as the 2nd Runners Up for the Overall. One thing worth mention here is that NEPS (go figure if you haven’t already) won only because of the quizzes and the Crossword. They won nothing anywhere else.

It all started from here.

For DPS Sushant Lok it was a sad event. I went for Surprise Event and Audio editing. Couldn't do audio editing properly because I turned up late for that event as i was busy waiting for my school bus to pick me up. I did pretty well in the Surprise Event as me and my partner(Ashish Gupta) were at the first position till the last 10 mins of the event but in the end it was DPS RKPee's Participants who took it all from us because we had to do something weird in LOGO Programming. And we ended up coming 2nd Runners up for the event.The school did relatively well though. We came first in Video Editing, first in PowerPoint Presenatation and First in Gaming.

Exun 2010 | The Craziest of them all

It’s been a very bittersweet day for me. It’s my penultimate day at my final Exun. Don’t ask me why I’m getting sentimental – it probably has something to do with the fact that the last Exun means almost as much to me as does the last Code Wars.

I’ve been coming to this symposium for the past 3-4 years, and I’ve always taken away something special – usually memories and trophies, but a good number of both. And it saddens me to think that this’ll be the last time I’ll get the opportunity to do that.

I participated in 4 events today – creative event, senior quiz, crossword and group discussion. I was able to get myself registered for GD only because this time, there wasn’t too big a clash between the quiz and GD. Usually, this is a problem which plagues most symposium schedules.

I’ve been feeling very guilty over the last few days before Exun – usually, the days preceding the event are marked by frantic flipping through archives and scanning news sources. I’ve managed to do none of that. 

I was at DPS RK Puram. I was sporting the nCRYPT T-shirt under my sweater – Rashmita ma’am had agreed to this when we placed the order for the shirts during nCRYPT Symposium. She only agreed to this because Exun is a weekend-only event, meaning that we don’t need to turn up at school before the event.

We had arrived quite early and soon, the others showed up as well, and we proceeded to the AVH to take our reserved row (left of the aisle, second from the stage). It’s not really reserved, it’s just that it’s our lucky row – we tend to win Exun quite a lot when we sit there.

The intro video was amazing, as always. Ah well, there’s only so much one human can do in two days.

                                   The Exun 2010 Intro Video

After the ceremony, I took aside the team for creative event and told them the plan for the day. Basically, the event was about designing material for an auto expo. We were supposed to put together a two-side one-page brochure and a website. Today, only the brochure was to be made. I told the guys to get started on a 2-crease folding pamphlet. Anyway, I’d be joining them after giving my crossword, so I instructed them to get started after lunch, when I would be busy at the crossword.

The senior quiz was fun enough – 20 questions + 1 bonus question. We answered around 12-13 of them. The pattern was unlike earlier Exun papers – it consisted of long passage-based questions, including the identify X types, as compared to short one-liners seen in earlier editions of the event. But a good workable quiz overall. Kudos to Anuj Bhardwaj, who I believe is the brains behind this one. (? I think)

After this, I dashed to the AVH for the GD. When I arrived, only the second of the four rounds was commencing – I was in the fourth. I sat around to observe the debates and to mentally prepare myself. I was going for a GD after a gap of several years, and I didn’t trust myself to be able to sound convincing on stage. However, my topic was quite predictable – iOS v/s Android. I was defending Android, as was everybody else on the stage, which led to a very interesting GD with the judges/moderators taking up the gauntlet for the iOS.

I was relieved to find out that I’d qualified for the finals of the GD. The final debate was an extended one – almost 30 minutes, and the topic was intriguing as well – if I was Manmohan Singh, and had to do something with the 10,000 crore rupees that the government received from the the 3G spectrum auction a few months ago, would I spend it on creating a country-wide fibre optic network, or set up ~300 hospitals in rural areas.

I went for the latter, as I felt that it was something that I could defend convincingly, and provided a reasonably good argument for my case, without being obnoxious or interrupting anybody else too much. This resulted in my winning the 2nd prize at the GD. Now this is a first for me – I’ve participated in one GD in the past, at Modem (I forget which year), but I didn’t make it past the preliminary stage. This time however, I’m reasonable happy with myself.

Next came the lunch. We had Domino’s – which is now officially the staple lunch for all participants at Exun. Unfortunately, the food was not made on-the-spot, as is preferred. Instead, it was pre-made pizzas, shipped in vehicles, which were being distributed to the participants. Nevertheless, as we were munching through those personal pan pizzas, I realised that the Exun Clan must’ve had to forego their tradition Exun T-shirts to feed us this stuff. I made it a point to thank Aditya for that later.

Next up was the crossword, which was not easy. Eshaan and I spent half of our time solving the clues, and rest debating whether we would qualify for the finals or not. Eventually, we managed to answer only about 14-15 of the 29 clue crossword, and our hopes were pretty low.

But I had no time to ponder about the crossword, as I was soon scurrying towards the computer labs for the creative event. I found that after more than an hour without me, Nitin and Vaibhav had only managed to get somewhere close to finishing one of the two sides of the pamphlet. I replaced Vaibhav and started to work with Nitin, who I have to say, is remarkable at working in the Photoshop environment. It’s evident that he knows his way around, as he nimbly plays around with the keyboard shortcuts. So, we managed to get together the entire pamphlet on time.

With that, I come to the close of Day 1 at Exun. DPS Sushant Lok is in a decent position at the moment – qualifications for crossword, senior quiz and gaming, along with a win in group discussion. Got rest of creative event on day 2, not to mention finals for a the three events.