Windows Vista: hardwarerequirements

 I recently started building my (first) computer - so far got ATX case, PSU, 400 GB Hard disk (PATA, dont ask me why not SATA), speakers. I know the heart is missing - CPU, mother board and memory. I am planning to buy decent mother board with 2 display support so that I don't need to buy video card. 

With recent announcements from both AMD and Intel, I thought of giving a closer look at where the technology is heading. 


If you look at Microsoft Vista minimum requirements, they tried to give an impression that most of the systems bought today (or in the last year) will be fine - at least for Vista capable, if not for Vista premium. But, I think one way of looking at those numbers is to look for what Microsoft announced for Windows xp. Here are they: from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/sp2/sysreqs.mspx
 

• 233 megahertz (MHz) processor
  
• 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM
  
• 1.8 GB of available hard disk space during installation
  

And every one knows how windows systems perform with at least 10 times faster CPU, 10 times memory and 10 times hard disk.

So, when Microsoft says you need 1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM and 40 GB hard disk, go figure...I bet any thing less than dual-core at 2GHz, 1.5GB RAM will be asking for trouble.
I am yet to see any comments from beta testers about the specs...I bet they may not be running 'real world applications' all the time.

Do not call for cell phones

Call 1.888.382.1222 to register your cell phone. From next month, tele marketers CAN call your cell number for marketing. So, do this before it's too late !

Stretch pants

Jay Leno type joke ....
As you all know, congress is deliberating 'obesity tax' on junk food. You know what else should be taxed ? Dockers with invisible waist band ! Before that, there is atleast one intensive to stay fit - save money on new clothes. With that taken away ......

Oracle Interview Questions And Answers

Oracle Interview Questions And Answers

Incredible Machine -

Incredible Machine

Get the most of T-mobile conditional forwarding

Like many people, I ran into the problem of running out of my 500 anytime minutes on T-Mobile family plan that I am on. Very few people know that each and every T-mobile plan (even a 20$ plan for 60 minutes) comes with atleast 500 'conditional' forwarding minutes. What this means is you can forward calls to another phone (landline/cellphone) and these minutes comes under this 500 forward pool , and not from your main pool (500/600/700 or whatever 'anytime' minutes you have).
Here 'conditional' important, as opposed to 'unconditional'. Each phone has different settings, but mine (the great :-) Audiovox SMT 5600 windows mobile) has four options under Call forwarding.

Unconditional --> Don't chose this one. Except this one, you can choose any of the following
No Reply -> For this option, My phone lets me decide after how many seconds the call will be forwarded.
Unavailable ->
Busy ->

You may see that by default, there is a number already set (Usually it is T-mobile voicemail number). Just edit to the phone you want to forward it to and change it back when you are done.
Effectively you have 500 additional minutes, as most of the time you are either in the office or have another phone available.

Eclipse can make ur code to use Generics!!!

Not a big deal, but incase you dont know : One can use Eclipse to automatically convert your code to use Generics, Simply right click in Editor -> Refactor -> infer Generics...

Some tips on Maven

If you want to skip tests while running any goal:

mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true install

Christmas lighting video ---This one is great!

The Wizards of Winter - Google Video