Not many people that spend their day in front of their computer screens playing Halo or other MMORPGs are aware that Bill Gates was responsible for writing probably the first ever color graphics game for the IBM PC!
I remember playing this game in 1990 and spending a couple hours on it. Click on the Wikipedia link above for more information about the game. Trivial by today’s standards, Donkey was a really fun game at the time. Not to mention the wow factor of using an expensive PC to play games …

NOTE TO SELF:
Always check the expiry date of milk before buying it.
So, yesterday I bought a gallon of yummy strawberry milk only to take a sip full of some solid particles in it. Upon looking at the cap, it turned out that the milk had officially gone unfit to drink 5 days ago!
I don’t blame Harris Teeter though. This was just a sign that I need to switch to a brand that people actually buy before it starts rotting in the store fridge.

I have been talking about the idea of using an in-built GPS system in cars to track them for a long time. Turns out that is indeed going to become a reality with the Government announcing grants to develop such systems.
Their main premise is that such a deployment would allow them to setup a mechanism of “value pricing” for cars using public infrastructure like bridges etc. I am not sure if that’s the only true use of such a promising technology. As usual, privacy advocates are going to be up …

I installed Google Local for Mobiles on my Sony Ericsson S710a a couple days ago. The best part about this service is that it is a 100kb Java program that actually installs in your cellphone. This means that you don’t need to use the browser or type in any obscure URLs when you need to find the nearest Indian restaurant!
It is noteworthy that this service is completely free of cost, unlike the $4 a month that Mapquest charges for a similar service. You can also look at satellite pictures of …

Lawyers love patents. Engineers crave patents. Businessmen have mixed feelings. Visionaries hate them.
Patents are an amazing concept. They give a new meaning to ideas and their conceptualization and ownership. I think the American intellectual property preservation/regulatory system is the mainstay of its hitherto tremendous technological lead, as well as the entrepreneurial spirit at the academic as well as corporate level.
Software patents have always been the cause of huge debates. Almost no academic personality likes them. Open source developers disdain them wholeheartedly, citing innovation stagnation as a reason to not enforce …