Opinion Uncensored

"The Other Side" is the new section of my blog dedicated to looking at various news from a new angle. These would include technical, political all kinds of news. All of these are based on deductions and information sources used will be mentioned in the article. The first article in the series is an OTHER SIDE view of Amazon outage on its flagship cloud computing offering.  Here is a news clipping about the success and importance of Amazon' s cloud services division. "Although the company ( Amazon)  has not revealed the revenue breakup from its cloud services division  Amazon Web Services  ( AWS ) in its annual report, UBS analysts estimate a figure of $500 million in 2010, and predicted to rise to $750 million in 2011 and a massive $2.5 billion in 2014. This is not far from Citigroup ’s 2010 prediction of $650 million from AWS. AWS comprises Amazon’s 12 cloud computing offerings like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform, Simple Storage Service (S3) offering and ...

This week I got an email saying Flock will be killed ( jargon - support discontinued) on 26 April 2011. Contents of the mail were as follows - . Flock Official End of Support Notice Support for Flock browsers will be discontinued as of April 26th, 2011. We would like to thank our loyal users around the world for their support, and we encourage the Flock community to migrate in the coming weeks to one of the recommended web browsers listed below. Our Recommendations Since no further security updates will be provided to keep you safe on the web, we encourage all Flock users to upgrade to either  Chrome  or  Firefox . Both are based on the same reliable technologies as Flock, and both are being actively maintained and improved. Also, each of these browsers has a broad selection of add-ons and extensions to customize and extend their capabilities. For more information (including notes on how to migrate to other browsers), please see our  FAQ . Thanks, The Flock Team On hearing about the ...

Hello All, I am writing this post for all my friends and relatives who want to or plan to come to Singapore for vacation :) Main reason for writing this is that most of the things I tell them are same and I felt it will be a good idea to compile it all here. I will keep updating the post from time to time .  So this post would be kind of FAQ ;) Q1. What there for shopping ? A1. Electronics, clothes, chocolates, perfumes, jewelery ....thats it . Rest everything is cheaper in India :) Also do remember to get the 7% GST refund on any of the above items you buy here. You can get it on airport. Just take care of all the receipts and rest of the process is very easy. Q2. How many days are enough for Singapore ? A2. This one is little tricky. It depends on your interests and budget. Usually 4 days is the descent time period for SG . Q3. How is the climate here ? A3.  Hot and Humid. Do not carry any full sleeves. Carry lot of Sunscreen . Do carry 1 jacket as sometime AC in public buses and ha...

A few minutes back Facebook suffered a not so frequent outage across Singapore . (We are trying to find out status in other geographies) . This is the second such outage in recent months. [caption id="attachment_380" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Facebook Crash Screen @ www.varunmittal.info"] [/caption] Is it something related to their open sourcing their server architecture and designs ? Has someday used those designs to attack Facebook.  Or is there some query being fired like in Google case which affects only some accounts ? Another possibility is that it is a   routine maintenance since it is 6:22 AM in USA now on a Monday morning .  Comparatively lesser number of people are online at such a time. What are the true reasons of this shutdown are currently unknown and we are waiting for official explanations. Account temporarily unavailable Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved sh...

Is Hootsuite the new kid on block in the arena of social gaming... Do we finally have a challenger to Zynga ... Are companies getting insecure about facebook continuing to let them make money and not eat their lunch .. Read the email quoted below to find answers or pointers to answers of these questions !!! Link to private beta -  http://hootsuite.com/happy-owls " Board , Investors and Friends , Things have been going really well at HootSuite for the last while, but after watching the massive growth of Zynga and the likes, I've been thinking a lot about if we are in the right business? Building on top of third party platforms can be challenging, and the team and I want a change. I know that this will come as a surprise, but as of today we're pivoting business models with the launch of Happy Owls (screenshot and link to private beta below). This game is really addictive and I think we stand a great shot of making an even bigger splash in a really fun market. As always...

Last week I noticed this revolutionary MP3  player for all HTML5 browsers. This was one thing I always missed in my chrome browser and chromium OS . I already had my office suite in browser , now one more step to move rest of the OS to browser. Though this player is bit rusty right now, but it still a nice start. Click here to access this media player -  http://antimatter15.github.com/player/player.html [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="529" caption="MP3 Player in Browser"] [/caption] Limitations - 1) Can't play any MP3 player with better frame rate than 128kbps 2) Only MP3 files , no way to delete particular song from play list 3) List of features, I would love to have but a good start I must say Reference : http://antimatter15.com/wp/

All these months we have been hearing about the Khap Panchayats issuing the orders and authorising killings against couples indulging in marriages in same Gotra .  This has lead to several honour killings all around and in the National capital territory.  They have mixed up science and their prejudices and so continue to stay in the hangover. What are khap panchayats? These are community groups — usually comprising elderly men from the Jat community — that set the rules in an area comprising one or more villages. Transgressors’ penalty can be serious. What do they want? An amendment to the Hindu Marriage Act , 1955, to ban marriages within the same gotra (sub-caste) including mother’s gotra and within the same village. Local customs dictate that a boy and a girl belonging to the same gotra are brother and sister. How old is this institution? The exact origins of khap panchayats are lost in the mists of time but popular belief dates this social structure back to 600 AD. Scientific ...