Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

LONDON: “Blog”, “netiquette”, “cookie” and “wiki” have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published recently. Topping the list of words most likely to make web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard” was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system. “Blogosphere” , the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; “blog” itself was third; “netiquette”, or Internet etiquette, came fourth and “blook”, a book based on a blog, was fifth. “Cookie” , a file sent to a user’s computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while “wiki” , a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth. The other two words in the top ten are "Vlog" and " social networking ." British pollsters YouGov questioned 2,091 adults earlier this month for the poll commissioned by the Lulu Blooker Prize, a literary award for books, which released the results in a statement. Earlie

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc.'s widely anticipated music- and video-playing iPhone will allow subscribers to wirelessly stream material from Google Inc.'s popular video-sharing site YouTube, Apple said on Wednesday. YouTube, which has developed a huge audience on desktop computers but is not widely used on cell phones, has begun encoding its videos in a new format to improve quality and save battery life when viewed over wireless devices. The iPhone will be the first mobile device to use the new format, Apple said. More than 10,000 videos will be available on the iPhone when it hits stores on June 29, with more material added each week, it said. AT&T Inc. has an exclusive deal to sell iPhones with its wireless subscriptions. While the phone will not support AT&T's highest-speed cellular data links, Apple said YouTube would work well on the phone's short-range Wi-Fi network connection. Prior to the development of the new mobile format, Verizon Wireless, a ve

The ‘dark' version of Google, aptly termed ‘Blackle,' is making waves in the Net. Darker does not have any disturbing moral connotations here. In fact it is quite ‘lighter' in terms of the monthly power bill. Blackle is the same as Google except that the background is totally black and the text is in light grey ( www.blackle.com ). It was set up by Heap Media, an Australian firm, after environmentalists proved that black screens consumed only 59 watts of power while white screens consumed about 79 watts. You can save lots of power by using black background. Heap Media founder Tony Heap said that Blackle would not solve the world's energy problem but was a small effort in that direction. The response to Blackle has been so great that the site even crashed several times. But Google said it has no plans to have a black background.

Microsoft has agreed to make changes to its Windows Vista operating system in response to a complaint by Google that a feature of Vista is anticompetitive, lawyers involved in the case said on Tuesday. The settlement, reached in recent days by state prosecutors, the Justice Department and Microsoft, averted the prospect of litigation over a complaint by Google that Vista had been designed to frustrate computer users who want to use software other than Microsoft's to search through files on their hard drives. Google had made its complaint confidentially as part of the consent decree proceedings set up to monitor Microsoft for any anticompetitive conduct after it settled a landmark antitrust lawsuit five years ago that had been brought by the states and the Clinton administration. The US government and the states were planning to file a joint status report by midnight on Tuesday in the consent decree proceedings that outlined the changes Microsoft would be making to Vista. St

Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams is all set to return home on June 21 after a record-breaking 194-day space odyssey by a woman with the mission managers giving the green signal. Sunita and six other astronauts, who came on June 10 to fetch her bid farewell to her replacement Clayton Anderson and two Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station (ISS) before the hatches between their spaceship and the station closed at 6.51 pm on Monday (4.21 am IST on Tuesday). "I'm sad to say goodbye, but that means progress is being made and it's time for the International Space Station to grow a little more," Williams told ground control before the astronauts floated into space shuttle Atlantis that would take them home. Undocking at 10.42 am (8.12 pm IST) on Tuesday, Atlantis is scheduled to touchdown at Kennedy Space Centre, Florida at 1.54 pm (11.24 pm IST) on Thursday, US space agency Nasa said. Sunita had set off from here on December 9 on spa

Aishwarya Bachchan talks about life after marriage for the first time You took a major decision in your life some time back. Now tell us about your life, post-marriage. Yes, I took a very important step in life and I’m very, very glad about it. I feel blessed, I think it’s wonderful to be married to your best friend. There is immense love and respect. I have the most wonderful father-in-law and mother-in-law, who treat me like their daughter. And what kind of a husband is Abhishek? Arre, if I start on that, we’ll have to get onto an autobiography.... In short, I’m in a happy place. Now will you be doing more films with Abhishek? It’s a good thing if we get to work together. Time is precious and we actors always have hectic schedules. Abhishek and I have done many films together in the past and he has been a wonderful co-star. As a colleague , it was always fun to work with him. It will be great to work with my husband as we will get to spend more time with each other. There were many c

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Oscar-winning actress Julia Roberts gave birth on Monday to a baby boy, her third child with husband Danny Moder, People magazine reported on its Web site. Roberts and Moder, who are also parents of two-year-old twins, welcomed Henry Daniel Moder at a Los Angeles hospital, her spokeswoman told People. Julia Roberts, 39, who won an Academy Award for playing the title role in the 2000 film "Erin Brockovich," married Moder, a 38-year-old cameraman, in 2002 at her ranch in New Mexico. Julia Roberts gave birth to twins Phinnaeus and Hazel in November of 2004.