SQLAuthority News – Rambling of Author and Technology Musing – Bing, Google, Windows 7, Books, Blogs, Twitter and Life

I have been planning to write a general post on the latest technology for a long time but SQL keeps me so busy that I hardly get time. I know being busy is no excuse as everybody is busy with something. A manager is equally busy managing people as much as a peon busy doing errands. Now, coming back to my topic, I have lots of news to share with you all.

Anyway, number one news is that Bing has been finally released a couple of days back. I am very much excited as something is finally challenging Google – The Search Engine King. Google has been my preferred search engine for many years and my home page too. However, I am quite impressed with Bing which has a clearer and more organized interface. The navigation on the left side does make sense. My opinion is that there is no other option for Google but to improve to retain its popularity. In the search engine race Google has always been a clear winner for many years now, and people have always appreciated its simplicity and most importantly, its accurate results. But now, for the very first time I think Bing is going to challenge Google on two fronts – accuracy of search and simplicity of interface. Only time will decide who will rule, but I would like to give Bing a fair chance to improve itself.

Another major improvement I have done is that I have finally upgraded 3 of my 4 computers to Windows 7. I have never hated Vista for its shortcomings. I have seen people and media pointing negative things about it. In fact I think it has now become a trend to just bad mouth Vista. I thoroughly believe that Vista was a significant improvement over XP. There was a time when XP was everywhere and every software was designed in keeping with its compatibility with it. Then, Vista emerged in the market. XP required less hardware while Vista necessitated upgradation of hardware of most of the computer systems. This was not appreciated by many users as they had to spend money on hardware apart from spending on Vista. Additionally, it took a good amount of time for companies to come out with drivers of Vista. Today, Win 7 is out and getting loudly applauded by the same people who criticized it. Win 7 is definitely better and I love it! It has everything what Vista had and even more. If people hated Vista for some of its drawbacks, in that case Win 7 will not disappoint them and it will exceed their expectations with its additional features. Slowly and steadily, Win 7 is coming out as a winner. It took sometime for Vista to get accepted, which was entirely hardware companies fault as they did not release its driver. But today almost all the companies have Vista compatible drivers which work fine with Win 7, thereby making Win 7 more acceptable.

There is one more reason why Win 7 has become my favorite OS. My wife – Nupur Dave has an old laptop, which is single core (when we purchased it there was no concept of double core) and had XP so far. Since the past one month, my wife kept on complaining that her laptop takes forever to start. As her laptop is 6 years old with 1.6 GHz, Single Core and 1 GB RAM, we decided to purchase a new one. However, I decided to give it a shot and see if I can install Win 7 on this old machine. To my surprise, it took only 25 mins to install the whole operating system and it works better than XP. Now this is something really good about it and it saved my bucks!

What else is keeping me busy? There are so many things to say. I am reading a plethora of books and blogs. I have a collection of over 500 books in my home library and have almost the same number of feeds in my RSS reader. I recently finished a book Pro T-SQL 2008 Programmer’s Guide. It is written by one of the most popular book authors Michael Coles. You can read his interview here. His interview was taken by a dear friend of mine who is a .NET expert Vijaya Kadiyala. He is not only writing about .NET but also writing on SQL. Besides, whenever I have free time I try to solve T-SQL Challenges written by my fellow MVP Jacob Sebastian.

Well, my friend Abhishek Kant suggested me to start using twitter but not to forget my blog. Every time I spend too much time on twitter, I remember his saying: Hats Off! Thanks Abhishek for giving me these golden words. I will keep on blogging.

Thanks John-Wu Zioa for sending this cartoon. I’m flattered!

Now you know what I think of the latest technologies and what I have been doing. I will appreciate your comments for the same and please feel free to share your experience here.

Reference : Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)