Akshay Jain

OK, so finally after a lot of drama, chaos and all kinds of shady tactics, the results are out and the Congress led UPA government has finally won the NO-Confidence motion. This means that the current government will continue for atleast some time. Not only just winning by establishing their majority over the Lok Sabha they managed to pass the threshold mark of 272 which signifies that they are truly in majority even if we take the abstentions into account.

What this means for Indian economic growth?

• The government will be able to take independent policy decisions which they were unable to take till now due to the Leftist support (or rather the lack of it).
• More economic reforms are expected in Banking, Insurance and Investment sectors which the Left parties were opposing.
• This paves the way for the Nuclear Deal with the United States without any more expected hurdles. Although, I am not personally confident about the deal but in my opinion this is better than what we could have got in any case.
• Boost for the Stock Market:The investor sentiment had touched new lows with continuing inflation, instability in the government and global economic slow-down led by the sub-prime crisis.

I am quite sure that this would surely reflect in the Investor sentiment in tomorrow’s Stock Trading.

Overall, I welcome the winning of this confidence motion by Dr. Manmohan Singh Government.

Recently, the much awaited versions of two of the greatest browsers ever made were released. Opera 9.5 with its brand new theme and a much faster browsing experience and Firefox 3.0 which is claimed to be the fastest browser on the planet.

I personally use both the browsers because they both have their pros and cons. Opera for me is basically a “one package” for all things. It has a inbuilt E-mail client, IRC software, RSS reader, Torrent Client, Notes manager and some widgets (which I am not particularly fond of).

Firefox on the other hand comes with a great and enthusiastic team of developers and coders who are constantly developing new extensions/addons to this great browser. They make like easier for a webmaster and for many other people.

So, I decided to do a little test to compare the RAM usage of both as my computer is not really overflowing with RAM and the single difference between my computer running and crawling is of RAM. I have many applications open simultaneously and therefore would want some browser which takes the minimum amount of RAM.

For doing some kind of benchmarking, I restarted both the browsers so that the memory consumed in the previous sessions does not affect the results. After the restart, I opened five very popular websites on both these browsers. Here is an image showing those websites:

Now, the second job is to see the task manager to get to know which browser is using the lesser amount of RAM. Here is a screenshot for that:

I can clearly see that firefox is taking far lesser amount of RAM right now and therefore, Firefox clearly wins in this comparison. But I would like to point to my fellow readers that Opera has got loads of other functions that might be consuming more memory. (The EMAIL client, IRC, RSS reader, Notes etc). Therefore, considering the fact that any average email client will also use some sort of memory overhead, I would prefer Opera because everything fits so neatly into its interface.

Anyways, the decision is purely yours. If you do not use those other functions then I would suggest using Firefox, but if you are using those other functions by additional applications then I think Opera wins hands down.

I use Gtalk and I simply love it because of its simplicity. There is a very clean interface without any disturbing elements. The windows open fast and overall its a pleasant experience to use Gtalk.

Now, the feature that I miss the most in Gtalk is that of being invisible to your friends as you can do in Yahoo/MSN easily. But Gtalk simply does not have this feature of being “idle”.

There is a nice little trick to bypass this restriction in Gtalk. A nice and handy program which completely fits into Gtalk interface and is completely invisible. The name is GAlwaysIdle

This can be used to change your status message as you want.

There is one more trick to achieve the almost same effect but that is not from the desktop application of Gtalk. It is by using the Google Gadget‘

Enjoy!