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> It turns on ClearType. Globally. It can't be turned off (well, without a lot of work.)

Not that you're missing much with IE7, but have you tried unchecking Tools > Options > Advanced > Multimedia > Always use ClearType for HTML and restarting IE?

> ClearType anti-aliases fonts.

Also, I don't think ClearType applies anti-aliasing across the board -- in fact cleartype text has more jaggies than standard font-smoothed text produced using Windows' old method -- here's an example.

AFAIK ClearType tunes the letter forms in multiple ways (including using subtly different shaping rules -- this works especially well if the font has been designed with ClearType in mind, e.g., Consolas and Candara). This makes screen text at 11-18px (the vast majority of UI text) much easier to read.

If you have a LCD monitor you might want to set Windows to globally enable ClearType and try the Windows ClearType tuner powertoy -- well-tuned Cleartype fonts really do look a lot better with it on for *most* people.

Since you make it sound as if India is communications nirvana, I'll introduce a few elements of reality into the picture...

I spent a small amount of time in the US, and surprisingly the tarrif structure and the talk time etc., plans available in India are far better than in the US ... in case of cellular connections countries like India are way ahead of the US/Europe, and very soon 3G deployment will be mainstream

You know, you really shouldn't lump Europe with the US in terms of mobile penetration. According to some very rudimentary looking-up, India's looking at 30% penetration by 2009 (ref), whereas Europe is going to have near-100% penetration by 2007 (ref). Also, the US even with it's "dismal" record in mobiles has a penetration rate of 70% estimated for 2006 (ref).

On top of this you have other indicators, like the percentage of subscribers actually using GPRS (leave 3G aside for the moment because its uptake hasn't been huge anywhere), which is embarassingly low in India -- which is why Airtel has a Rs99/'unlimited' use GPRS plan: they're pretty much begging the market to use the service. This is analogous to their free MMS plan in non-Delhi/Bombay markets for a long time: they pretty much had to give it away because no one wanted to send MMSes at Rs 5 a pop.

Finally, most markets tend to reward staying consumers rather than random prepaid customers who use a cellphone for a few days. I'd say if you were living in the US for a longer time you'd have been pleasantly surprised with some of the offers available, including free night+weekend minutes, and free long-distance to selected numbers.

In broadband access developed nations have lot of lead over developing ones, maybe because to have good connectivity you require undersea cables as most of the servers are in west

While India definitely needs more fiber, it doesn't use what's available well -- I wrote this in 2002 and obviously things have improved since then (cf Anil Ambani's new FALCON cable) but the lighted capacity ratios haven't(check out how much of FALCON is unlighted). The net result-- even now, 256kbps seems to be the median connect speed for residential DSL in India, when even stodgy old UK gives away 2Mbps connections practically for free, and 16/24Mbps services are becoming common. I know telcos keep a certain level of unlighted capability but given India's population and demand, the sheer amount of unlighted fiber is wasteful IMHO.

Also, millions of people in India who've ditched their government-supplied copper-line phones for GSM/CDMA/WLL phones from private companies. This bites broadband growth in the back, because these technologies have a low data trasmission limit, which is shared by all subscribers in a given area.

Realistically, if you want good residential broadband you need decent copper wiring (a concept which MTNL's/BSNL's illiterate field staff don't understand -- which is why most of India's copperline phones cannot carry 8Mbps traffic even though theoretically they could do even more) or decent Ethernet/OFC wiring (and no one's done fiber-to-the-home in India just yet). And technologies like community wifi (and Wimax) are ill-suited to India's dense urban jungles.

> Umm... what about Dashboard widgets in Mac OS X tiger? They also are built out of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Pfft. I was using widgets built out of SVG, HTML and CSS (SVG Clock Example) on my desktop to track email and server logs in _1998_ (Active Desktop shipped with Windows 98 and NT4's shell update).

Desktop Widgets are useful, but they're only going to _really_ catch on when multimonitor setups become common.

I agree with you completely.

However, I did see one paper on this which was submitted to the IETF ASRG which was pretty neat on relatively new methodologies to eliminate spam.

You can find it here - Eliminating Spam: Protocol and Infrastructure Changes
.

On a related note, here's an interesting proposal written by cygnusx which I believe has been/will be submitted to the IETF.

For some odd reason, my name features there too :-)

They have done their groundwork beautifully well. They have been laying fiber optic all over the country, for quite a while, and have enormous clout. As an example, where other providers have so far been unsuccessful in getting govt. clearance for certain services in India, it looks like Reliance will not be having that problem.

Reliance is using existing technology customised for India, at the Indian Inst. of Technology Madras. Details here.

You have NO idea the way the demand for bandwidth for both voice and data is growing in India. Want figures? Find them here.

Do you know the proposed cost of deployment of RIL's telecom plan? You pay Rs.3000 initially ($60) and Rs.600 monthly ($12) you get the instrument and the service, but will have to service for a period of 3 years, as part of the Rs.600 will go towards your instrument. Just look at their pricing schemes.

In fact, pricing is one of the reasons why Reliance will succeed. Reason? They chose NOT to use GSM as the initial cost is high, but wanted to help atleast the middle class.

If you still are not convinced, goto Chaoszone, run by cygnusx. He has been keeping track of this for a long time, and has very interesting links on the current scenario and WHY this WILL work.

You are forgetting one very basic point. Yes, India has poverty to handle, but you do not solve it by denying all other technology, atleast that's what your attitude sounds like. There is a significant chunk of the middle class for whom the rates that reliance offers is EASILY affordable, and that comes to a significant portion of the population of a billion.

Read this interview with Mukesh Ambani. Forget quality, they'll see gold through quantity. And that is exactly what Reliance is banking on.

And as a geek, I sure as hell hope they do, am looking forward to getting one of their J2ME enabled thingys ;-)

> You're American right ...?
No :-)

Seriously, is upliftment a real word? I always thought it to be one of those pseudo-words that were popular in some parts of the world -- if you look closely at the Google results, you'll find quite a number of the 33k results to be from pages written by Asians/Africans. I wouldn't be surprised if upliftment was popular in `local' english (for some values of local) but it's hardly a standard word. On the other hand, the OED has over the past few years been very inclusive in its approach to including words from across the globe (jihad from arabic(?), thali from hindi, and so on) so who knows, somebody could have included upliftment as well.

Encarta can't locate ``upliftment'' (though I know it's hardly the final answer); but then neither does the online cambridge dictionary or dict.org or dictionary.com (which searches through quite a few dictionaries). My old dogeared copy of Oxford Concise also doesn't have the word.

I don't have a subscription to the OED Online, so I can't go to the ultimate authority :-), but please, if you can give me a citation, I'd be very glad (contact info here).

This'll never work with the "techie" crowd because they remember letters/numbers much better than they remember pictures. (ever wondered how unix fans can remember all of tar's options? :-)) On the other hand, for people who "think graphically" (designers, artists, etc), this may help. But I wouldn't bet on it, passwords are too deeply entrenched in our lives already -- ATM PINs, Phonebanking PINs, the whole nine yards.

And yes, I too don't see how this is different from Passface's Realuser, which uses faces in lieu of passphrases. I've tried Realuser, and I found it was far more difficult to remember their faces than it was to remember my passwords. And I could choose only 5 faces -- not too good, it's too easy for over-the-shoulder attacks, and it's a pain to change "faces" like I change passwords. I imagine a face-changing session would go this way: "Let's see, I chose a caucasian male last time, this time, I'll pick an asian female...". Uh huh, too much work.

Google News is now highlighting the Google's own "act of censorship". Funny, that.