Arun’s Blog

After trying several ways to beat Google in the search engine war, Microsoft is now back to old ways of bribing people to use Live search. The program is called SearchPerks. You have to download a small tracking program which will track your search usage. You get 1 ticket for each Live search query with [...]

Microsoft has released their second beta of Internet Explorer 8 and is available for public download here. IE8 has lots of improvements to tab functionality. Tabs are grouped and colored differently based on the groups. IE8 also includes smart address bar, similar to Firefox 3.0. Typing in the Smart Address Bar searches across Favorites, History, [...]

Microsoft, a company that screws people who infringes on their copyrights, had announced a competition in Britain as part of the marketing campaign around Windows Live Image Search, with Nikon as the prize partner. The competition invited entrants to search for other people’s online pictures, then
submit the ones they felt were iconic British stuff, [...]

IBM is expected to announce expanded backing for Ubuntu in a desktop and collaboration software deal to challenge Microsoft’s Windows and Office. Canonical, Ubuntu’s commercial sponsor, has agreed to re-distribute IBM’s Lotus Symphony productivity suite with its public Linux repositories. The news follows IBM’s decision earlier this year to offer a version of its Open [...]

The number of machines shipped with Linux preloaded on them has multiplied a whopping 28 times since Microsoft launched its Vista operating system in January 2007 in U.K. The Linux share of this route to market has edged up ever since the Vista launch. Then it broke the two per cent barrier in May after [...]

A new study released by Net Applications indicates that a decreasing percentage of the Internet population is using Windows as their operating system. Mac OS X is the major gainer followed by Linux. Windows might soon fall below 90% mark (still high) and Mac will enter the double digit. Linux might soon reach single digit [...]

The Wall Street Journal has an article describing the power struggle between Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in the last few years. Here are some excerpts from that article:
It was early 2000, and Bill Gates had relinquished the chief executive’s job at Microsoft Corp. to Steve Ballmer - Mr. Gates retained the power, triggering a [...]

Acer is planning to push Linux aggressively on it’s laptop and Netbooks. Netbooks are smaller version of the laptop, similar to ULPC. Acer has already started selling Linux on Media PC business and netbooks and they are planning to add laptops to the Linux lineup.
Acer’s vice president of marketing Gianpiero Morbello said the shift towards [...]

According to an analysis from ThreatFire, 58,000 PCs running Vista were compromised by at least one piece of malware over the six months to May 2008, equivalent to 27 percent of all Vista machines probed.
In total, Vista suffered 121,380 instances of malware from its 190,000 user base, a rate of malware detection per system is [...]

Watch this video where a student threw eggs at Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer when Ballmer was delivering his speech at Corvinus University, Budapest. It was funny, but that’s not the way you treat people. The student also wore a T-Shirt with the wordings Microsoft = Corruption.
Thanks to my brother for the link.