This article on Slashdot has confirmed my views on what sort of company Microsoft is. Seems that Steve Ballmer simply won't dismiss the idea of suing "GNU/Linux for infringement of several trivial but fundamental patents that Microsoft holds", which by the way, includes a patent for the double click!

Apart from the fact that United States patent system is worthless at best, this development also shows how low Microsoft is willing to go just to gain an advantage over the free software movement. They know they can't beat us, they're just trying diversionary tactics; a typical business response.

The comments on /. are rather interesting: Assuming they even begin to sue "GNU/Linux", where do they begin? Linus Torvalds? Richard Stallman? Or the guy who works for IBM but submitted a critical patch to the kernel yesterday? Given the amount of money the company has, I won't be surprised if they go after each and every one of them. Kind of like what the RIAA is doing against the "file-sharers".

Somewhere on the Internet: "Microsoft gives you Windows, Linux gives you the whole house!"

-1 to M$. Again.

Prof. Rajat Moona had visited our college today to give a talk on Smart cards and how the IIT-K team had managed to bring in a standard for transport applications. Yes, India now officially has a standard for issuing smart card based driving licenses in all states!

The standard is named SCOSTA, or Smart Card OS for Transport Applications. The job of the IIT-K team was, among others, to define this standard and provide a reference implementation. SCOSTA is based on the the ISO 7816-x series of standards, but improves upon many of its drawbacks and ambiguities.

Some of the challenges that SCOSTA faced were very similar to those that any Government project in India does: corruption and fierce competition. In addition to dealing with corrupt officials, the SCOSTA committee also had to face the various smart card vendors and their business motives that tried to influence the standard. Technically, they also had to keep in mind the limitations of the processing power: only a mere 32kB of ROM and an 8Bit processor. Quite a different ball game when compared to the regular programming that we do on today's PC: virtually unlimited memory on 64Bit processors! It's amazing how they've managed to build an entire OS on a credit-card sized card!

It was a truly eye-opening experience. It seems that the NIC was responsible for this initiative and was the driving force behind the committee. I also learnt that Transport (and therefore issual of driving licenses) is, contrary to popular belief, under the Union Government. The state government only performs the task on behalf of the Central Government, and the police only challan offenders on behalf of the Judiciary!

He also gave us an insight into the future of smart cards. VISA has already started issuing contact-less smart card with biometric identification built in. One just has to hold the card with his right thumb, and a switch is activated which scans the fingerprint, and on successful validation, generates a one-time use number (which would be a hash of a combination of the current time, account number, etc) on a plasma display on the card itself!

Our institute has planned to issue "smart" identity card to us students after that encouraging talk. Let's see how far that goes!

I somehow happened to visit my own website in Internet Explorer for the first time (I think it was from one of the PC’s in the labs of our college) and was shocked to see how it looked! All my pages were XHTML1.1 validated, but the site looked nothing short of atrocious on IE.

The png images were not transparent, and not a single padding CSS rule was obeyed. I thought I must do something about this, and hence blocked all IE users from visiting the website at all! This was inspired by Christian Weiske, his site does the same too. Just 4 lines of PHP, and I was done.

I do hope that this makes a difference, I would be very happy even if just one person decides to switch to a better browser because they couldn’t view mine or Christian’s site!