Category Archives: www

Top 10 downloads of the decade

CNET is featuring a list of the top 10 downloads of the decade since they opened for downloads in 1996. ICQ and Winamp at #1and 2 are no surprise, but Acrobat Reader at a “lowly” #10 is (atleast to me). I guess everyone doesn’t use PDFs (really?!!).

Firefox’s popularity is evident from the fact that it is at #4 already, less than two years after it’s debut. Two old favourites, Winzip and Real Player are at numbers 5 and 9, either side of 3 relatively new entrants. iTunes is up at no. 6 and the latest “hot app”, Skype, is at 8. Sandwiched between them is Ad-aware, which is a sad refelction of what the windows world is like.

The biggest surprise, of course, is the old Napster which finds itself at no. 3. Remember this is a software which hasn’t had a single copy downloaded for years. P2P at it’s earliest best. No wonder they decided to go after it and shut it down – it was that popular.

Google Will Eat Itself

Their “mission statement” (?):

“We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on our website GWEI.org. With this money we automatically buy Google shares via our Swiss e-banking account. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself – but in the end we will own it!”

If this doesn’t make you curious, what will. Read on!

Technology that works

Everyone’s always highlighting things that don’t work here in India, so I thought for a change let’s talk about something that does, and quite well at that.

Train enquiry allows you to track movement of trains in “real time”. Well, it’s not exactly up-to-the-minute information on the trains but it does give you the (exact) time of departure and the (expected) time of arrival at all major stations along the route of a(ny) train that is currently running. The information is updated every 30-60 mins, so you can get a fair idea of the current position of the train. And it’s pretty accurate too – I can vouch for that!

I’m not sure if too many people know about this but it’s pretty cool to see Indian Railways provide this information online. If they can put this information on a map and have data for multiple trains, I know atleast one person who might drop in to their site just to watch all those trains go by… he he. We seem to have this idea of our railways being stuck in the 19th century, despite all the changes they’ve made recently like the online reservation system (which has been a huge hit). But let’s give some credit where it’s due.

So check the site next time before you leave your house to pickup someone from the station – it might save you the trouble of waiting a couple of hours at the station.