Windows Vista launched!

 Yesterday, Noush, Yash & I were invited for th official launch of Windows Vista at Mer Rouge. We attended the presentation, delivered in a dynamic & proactive way… They mainly showcased the visual aspects of Vista, with the transparent windows, widgets, dynamic wallpapers and other animated features. The interface, named Aero, is curiously very similar to that of Mac OS X (hmmm strange indeed..). Well, am not insinuating that Microsoft has copied on OS X, but let’s say they were deeply inspired by it

It is obvious, even to the lay-man that all those make-up features cost a consequent amount of live memory and processing power.. which somehow explains the high hardware requirements for Vista. Apart from being visually appealing, Vista claims to be more stable (which implies better error handling) and more secure (more resistant to malware and attacks). The new Windows can also diagnose network malfunctions and bears troubleshooting mechanisms to investigate and attempt to solve other conflicts. Funny thing though, the network diagnostic tool failed during the presentation and the Microsoft guys came up with a dumb excuse: “C’est pas grave, on aura plus besoin d’Internet pour le reste de la presentation de toute facon..”

Office 2007 puts up some nice features, both graphically and technology-wise, and is definitely more user-friendly. The search tool (once again, strangely similar to Spotlight on OS X) is an asset for the user. The event itself was well organised and I particularly enjoyed the white wine. Yash had a hit on the babes and the sushis while Noush was busy working on the booze! ;p. On the whole, Microsoft still suxx but Vista and Office 07 are good attempts at providing an easy and pleasant computing experience on the x86 platform.

View David Pogue’s comparison of Vista v\s OS X.

Post Mortem of BlackGoldParty

So there we were, back at La Citadelle for the Black Gold Party. It promised to be the ‘greatest dance party ever organised in Mu’ but in the end, was merely to launch the new Guiness to the local beer-drinkers community. Beer is a very important actor in a young male’s life and a new beer in the harem is always worth a try ;p The first sip was the last for each one of us: the local Guiness tastes like shit! But we had fun nonetheless, we never ask for much et nous nous suffisons a nous meme, so..

Guiness was given out for free .. But we comforted ourselves with our good old Phoenix, which we gladly paid for! Ahh, nothing worth a chilled phoenix after a tiring week. The atmosphere out there was crap, with no one dancing and even on the so-called dance-floor, everyone was staring at each other with stupid looks on their faces :S. So we left and nouss made sure to grab some free coke, as if to compensate for our trouble to climb up to Citadelle on foot.

Youvan, guided by two gifted wingmen, drove off to ‘Mari yen de la paix’, as rebaptised by Youvan’s Pom’s slip of the tongue :D. Pom Youvan followed some time later with ‘Mari reine de la peine’. ..quel blasphème! Holy crap, that night must’ve been the longest blatant streak of dialog kk ever spit out, but all so worth remembering. So up on the hill, we philosophated about the importance of the COD – Complément d’Objet Direct to the world. **Que serait ce monde sans le C.O.D!**  We shot a few snaps (the view was spectacular from up there), ate Lays and smoked some weed, which smelt & tasted closer to incense wood than any weed at all!

We later drove to Kitsch while singing Francoise Hardy in the car. Pom even gratified us with some Mike Brant! ;p Kitsch was dull and near empty but we had a wicked time out there, laughing our asses out at our own jokes. Nouss ordered a Black Tower from the bar and there she met this guy who (obviously) had something in mind! :p We were so thankful that nothing more happened (consult wikipedia for the Nouss-BlackTower effect).. To kill off the night, we drove to Bhai Gora for some hot dhall-puris & gros-pois (killer combo!!)at 4:00 am! I eventually ended up on my throne a few hours later to attend to some forced but customary duties.

**Update: Clips **

part1 – part 2 – part 3 – part 4 – part 5 – part 6

The Last Shot

Exams due in a month or so, we decided to have our last clubbing night yesterday. Started off with dinner at Shooters where we had our beloved Black Tower which Pom had brought along. I ordered a Tagliatele with Calamari and the whole thing came with a huge King Prawn on my pasta. Seems you have to crack the head with your teeth and suck in the juice, youvan argued. Since we were to reach G’bay afterwards and i wouldn’t have risked upsetting my stomach, so i left the King Prawn head for next time. (the tail part was succulent though :p)

   

We left PL and reached Banana half an hour later. Crossbreed was playing live and we were so full up that we could barely finish our beers. Quite a nice atmosphere at Banana, as always.. We popped in at Buddha some time later to have our ritual ’shaker’ (never knew it was made up of ‘rum new grove’ :S). Must’ve been hardcore stuff, it even made Pom sing David Charvet. lol… (je marchais dans le couloir,..). We returned to Zanzi where we had a B52, and Noush & I vowed it’d be our last shot till we’re done with exams :S

Customary of a good clubbin’ night, you just can’t leave G’bay without a sandwich. So, I popped in at Mr Burger’s stand for a hmmmm.. delicious sandwich Nice times..

Pi Day

 

There’re hell lotsa things you can learn from RSS Feeds. Like.., today, 14th of March, is Pi day!

Yups, the famous Pi constant, 3.142 or the popular 22/7 approximation. And to celebrate Pi, well, people throughout the globe eat pies! From the constant, we are given that Pi (3.1415926) is celebrated on March 14th at 1:59:26 pm. Pi has been known since antique times and the first 22/7 known approximation is believed to have been derived by Archimedes, though not invented by him, in the 3rd century. By the way, the 22/7 approximation, known as Yuelü, is an overestimate of Pi, as proved in 5th Cen. BC by Chinese mathematicians.

14th of March also happens to be Einstein’s birthday, the very fellow who discovered the E=mc2 thing ;p

So, happy Pi day to you all! I’ll call Noush, Youvan & Pom to see if we can celebrate Pi with cheese & wine

Nou pays, Nou fierté..

Mauritius has come a long way since its independence, from a brit-ruled colony to a modern republic. It is matter of pride of us all to acknowledge what we have a achieved so far in matter of economic prosperity, social welfare, political stability, etc… Today, 12th of March, we stand proud of our country, proud of what we are.

This is a tribute to the people, to the ones whose blood and sweat are imbued in the soil of this country. True as it is that we have achieved a lot, but true it remains that we have much ahead of us. Not of prosperity or  economic development, but of the core of our society. We become one, only when circumstances lead us to be so, but in our day-to-day life, we are selfish, sectarian and uncivil at times. I dream of a country with true intercultural and interreligious cohabitation. Not merely ‘tolerating’ others, but accepting, welcoming them, embracing them… May we thrive in our differences and emancipate ourselves from mental slavery

Nation-building is not something that can be cast upon ourselves, but is one which comes from within. Let’s start by accepting people for who they are and what they are worth, and not to which political views they subscribe or to which religion they adhere to..

Women’s Day

The Human Rights Society – HRS has organised it’s very first activity today, to mark the International Women’s Day. The constitution of our society has not been approved yet (encore et tjrs la bureaucracie a l’UoM) and that is sad. Am pretty satisfied that we, a bunch of few, managed to organise something nonetheless. We organised a poster-campaign to highlight the rights of women, along with playback of female singers. The university crowd & staff are not very much responsive to such activities and we did not expect it to be otherwise either, but it would be nice if people would realise how noble it is to fight for one’s basic rights. However, am glad that we made it.

A small word from me for the occasion. (link)

CopyLeft

About the respect of Copyright in Mu.

Who sets the standards for right and wrong? Who gets to decide what is collectively right or wrong? Who, but ourselves? But what if we were all wrong, or all wrong about being right? A whole mess isn’t it..

The copyright law was passed in mauritius in 1997 , under the Labour regime. Acclaimed by professionals in various fields, it came at a time where Mauritians where massively stepping into IT and digital media. The Act sets standards for Intellectual Property (IP) rights and severes againts breaches of same, counteracting piracy. Following this Act, illegal software were removed from all shelves,..but only for a while (this is Mauritius). Law enforcement began only a year or so following proclamation. But till now software piracy has survived and is still deeply anchored into our mode of living I would say.

Why is it so? What lies behind piracy and what feeds it? The number 1 culprit are undoubtedly the software prices. They are way beyond the reach of most of us. And it is true that even if we can afford it, we will not want to afford it. But beyond this price-factor argument is the access to contents, to information, access to knowledge.. Masses in India, China or developing countries widely use warez. When we see how far these countries have reached today, we can only acknowledge the democratisation of access to knowledge. Access to knowledge brings along prosperity, social comfort and most positive things we can think of. I am not implying that piracy is the only way to knowledge, but it sure is an easy and cheap way. Do we override the need to learn by ethics? Extremely debatable issue indeed..

Now hold on, am not saying this is right! It’s surely not, but it may, under cirmcumstances, have been necessary. The way it is right now for us Mauritians to have access to knowledge if we are to survive in a global environment.

So, how do we do that? By stealing other people’s IP rights and violating copyright laws? I do not think it is right. But maybe we could argue that, in some way, somehow, it is necessary. The whole issue is extremely debatable, I know. And i stand on the line. But my point is that, without warranting the use or propagation of warez, it could be considered ‘okay’ to make use of same for personal and educational use only, in our case. We are not in the U.S where buying an OS corresponds to buying a fine chocolate at Rs 200. Why is software piracy so low in the U.S (compared to developing countries)? Simply because they do not need to use illegal software since they can easily afford originals. Would we expect a young mauritian graduate earning say Rs 10K to spent half his salary on a software, just to know how it looks like?

Again, I do not warrant nor encourage software piracy. But i firmly believe in knowledge accessible to all.

Maybe it would be nice if OS vendors would release a free trial version as is the case for many application software.
So that people who want to have a feel of a particular OS can do so legally.