Sure it will cost $505.99.
No, why it only costs $200 in US.
Sure if you are willing to steal it!

My brown Indian bros.. here is how it works -

You walk in the funky looking iStore, pick the cool looking iPhone (8GB) after talking to the people dressed in blue iT-shirts (the geniuses as they like to call themselves, so much for being modest) at an ultra cheap price of $199.00 + $15 (7.5% taxes).

The iGenius now asks you to activate the phone with a 2 year contract, they have these orange iT-shirt dudes (don’t know what they are called) to stop you from taking the phone outside the store without activating.  You activate it at $35 and pay the first month due of $69.99/month + some million type of taxes = $81.99.  Your total so far = $330.99

aha .. freedom - or so you think.

Now either you keep paying $69.99 per month or since you are buying the phone for someone in India you decide to deactivate your contract by paying $175.  Your total my friend comes out to be = $505.99 + unlocking the phone.

Cost of owning an iPhone from US (@$1 = Rs.43) = Rs. 21,757.57  + unlocking + no-warranties + customs chori + read the confidentiality agreement that At&t makes you sign, I am sure there is something illegal about unlocking the phone.

Cost of owning an iPhone from India = Rs. 31,000 + mental peace for me

Google launched ‘Chrome’ - the google browser - and like everything else that is Google, I had to test drive the shinny new chrome the very first day it was available.

First impressions :

Its fast, its clean - its everybit Google!

Neat Features :

• No wastage of expensive browser space with a bar on top
• Tabs are just clean and works like magic (unlike IE7).
• Dragging a tab outside opens a new window
• Each tab is a process in itself so you can kill something that hangs up without affecting other tabs (i.e. if you can figure out the bad one from the list of chrome.exe)

Things that I didn’t like so much :
• Bookmarks disappear when you open a website on a tab, to access them you have to open a new tab (an extra click)
• No adons
• CPU usage (see below)
• Different processes for each tab is a neat feature, but no id for the right tab to kill, its all “chrome.exe”.

So the big question is - DO I SWITCH FROM FIREFOX or OPERA or FLOCK or MAXTHON, or SAFARI, or even IE7?

Firefox had issues with memory usage, so lets compare that. I ran Chrome, Firefox and IE7 with 4 active websites and an empty tab - here is what we see

While the memory usage isn’t bad, its not too good either. Alarming thing is the CPU usage. I don’t know if I would sacrifice 50% of my cpu usage towards a better browsing experience - when Firefox isn’t really doing a bad job at that and besides I will miss stumbling.

Surely Chrome is my default browser at the moment, lets see how long it retains the position.

(Composing emails was never so much fun).

Download the alpha from http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Sent from my iPhone.

Posted by email from (pre)posterous

The objective us to keep the cows from drowning using a little, red raft when they take their leaps of death.

The game has a certain level of predictability and there is a definite pattern in the jump sequences when there are more than one cows jumping across the river. It’s just that the raft, which can be moved using a finger markedly lags behind the finger movement resulting in the poor cows’ untimely demise.

A fun game nonetheless — if you’re not easily annoyed by the constant mooing :). Here’s a screenshot of my highest score so far.

Sent from my iPhone.

Posted by email from (pre)posterous

This post is to check if Posterous really delivers what it promises. :)

A random pic from my photo album is uploaded for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!!

Sent from my iPhone.

Update: It works like a charm :)…the mobile blogger inside of me is very, very delighted

Posted by email from (pre)posterous

Considering that not everyone like me deposited this check in their savings account - what do the average consumer buy?  Shoes -  “made in China”, Electronics - “made in China”, toys - “made in China” ….. Another stimulus package - for CHINA.

This stimulus package is like giving 5 dollars to a homeless, you feed him for a day and not enable him to feed himself for lifetime.

CREATE  MORE  JOBS DUMBOS!!

It took me a while to find this. Hope it doesn’t take you long :)

I queried What is Objective-C and found that it inspired Sleep (Simple Language for Environment Extension Purposes) among other things.

I like the way the data is presented. Although it might be misinterpreted as illustrated in the screen shot below. Take it with a grain of salt, y’all!

In a separate blog post, I came across the transcript of the (mis-matched) dialog that took place after Gates’ testimony between him and Dana Rohrabacher, a California congressman who likes to think that global warming was caused by “dinosaur flatulence”.

Rohrabacher: If we bring in more people from the outside, realizing that we’re bringing the most talented people from other countries, will it not hurt those countries? And will it also not depress the wages in our own country that people like yourself would have to pay your employees in order to get quality people or in order to train people within our own society?

Gates: No, no. These top people are going to be hired. It’s just a question of what country they do their work in.

Rohrabacher: I’m really not talking about top people here. You know … there’s a lot of other people in society rather than just the top people. It’s the B and C students that fight for our country and kept it free so that people like yourself would have the opportunity that you’ve had. Those people, whether or not they get displaced by the top people from another country is not our goal. Our goal isn’t to replace the job of the B students with A students from India, because those B students deserve to have good jobs and high-paying jobs.

Gates: That’s right, and what I’ve said here is that when we bring in these world-class engineers, we create jobs around them. … The B and C students are the ones who get those jobs around these top engineers. And if these top engineers are forced to work, say, in India, we will hire the B and C students from India to work around them.

Rohrabacher: But according to BusinessWeek, almost 150,000 computer programmers have lost their job in this country since the year 2000. Now, my reading of all of this is that there are plenty of people out there to hire but people want to have the top quality people from India and China and elsewhere, and they’re willing to have these 150,000 American computer programmers just go unemployed.

Gates: Actually, BusinessWeek doesn’t do surveys. I think you’re referring to a quote in BusinessWeek from an Urban Institute study …

Rohrabacher: That’s what I said, according to BusinessWeek, yeah.

Gates: It’s not according to BusinessWeek. There was a study that a group at Urban Institute did that was deeply flawed in terms of how it defined what an engineer is. When we say that these jobs are going begging, we’re in business every day. We’re not kidding about it. These jobs are going begging, and the result is that in a competitive economy …

Rohrabacher: You’d have to raise wages.

Gates: No, wages are — 

Rohrabacher: If a job’s going begging, you raise wages, now in a — 

Gates: No, it’s not an issue of raising wages. These jobs are very, very, very high-paying jobs. And we are hiring as many of these people as we can.

Rohrabacher: Well, let me give you one example — 

Thankfully, nobody had to endure Rohrabacher’s example because at that point, committee chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tennessee) announced that Rohrabacher’s time was up.