20. Drinks and carries Mineral Water and always speaks of Health. (proving to be very health conscious).

19. Sprays DEO such so that he doesn’t need to take bath.

18. Sneezes and says ‘Excuse me’.

17. Says “Hey” instead of “Hi”.
Says “Yogurt” instead of “Curds”.
Says “Cab” instead of “Taxi”.
Says “Candy” instead of “Chocolate”.
Says “Cookie” instead of “Biscuit”.
Says “Free Way” instead of “Highway”.
Says “Got To Go” instead of “Have To Go”.
Says “Oh” instead of “Zero”, (for 704, says Seven Oh Four Instead of Seven Zero Four)

16. Doesn’t forget to crib about air pollution. Keeps cribbing every time he steps out.

15. Says all the distances in Miles (Not in KiloMeters), and counts in Millions.(Not in Lakhs)

14. Tries to figure all the prices in Dollars as far as possible (but deep down the heart multiplies by 43 times).

13. Tries to see the % of fat on the cover of a milk pocket.

12. When need to say Z (zed), never says Z (Zed), repeats “Zee” several times, if the other person unable to get, then says X, Y, Zee (but never says Zed).

11. Writes date as MM/DD/YYYY & on watching traditional DD/MM/YYYY, says “Oh! British Style!!!!”

10. Makes fun of Indian Standard Time and Indian Road Conditions.

9. Even after 2 months, complaints about “Jet Lag”.

8. Avoids eating more chili (hot) stuff.

7. Tries to drink “Diet Coke”, instead of Normal Coke.

6. Tries to complain about any thing in India as if he is experiencing it for the first time.

5. Pronounces “schedule” as “skejule”, and “module” as “Mojule”.

4. Looks suspiciously towards Hotel/Dhaba food.

3. From the luggage bag, does not remove the stickers of Airways by which he traveled back to India, even after 4 months of arrival.

2. Takes the cabin luggage bag to short visits in India, tries to roll the bag on Indian Roads.

And The Ultimate One:-
1. Tries to begin conversation with “In US ….” or “When I was in US…”

The issue relates to the intra-circle M&A norms issued by government on April 22, 2008, which prohibits intra-circle mergers for a period of three years. This restriction read with the 10% cap on cross-holding means that circles in which either Spice or Idea were already holding licenses cannot merge with or add additional spectrum till July 2011.

Idea already operates services in nine circles and intends to launch service in Mumbai and Bihar soon. The company has paid for and received licences in nine circles, two of which overlap with Spice’s existing operations in Karnataka and Punjab.

Telecom M&A guidelines prevent mergers for a three-year period in these two circles which exposes Idea to the non-refundable licence fee that it has recently paid for the two circles amounting to Rs 358 crore.

Similarly, Spice had paid Rs 484 crore to obtain UASL in four new service areas, AP, Delhi, Haryana and Maharashtra (see chart). However, Idea already operates services and has spectrum in these circles. By virtue of same M&A norms, spectrum from Spice’s new licences cannot be combined for a three-year period with Idea’s existing circles.

The option of holding these as independent entities will also face potential DoT (department of telecom) scrutiny due to the 10% crossholding limitation under UASL. In the meantime, the licensed entities are faced with obligations of rollout.

With an enterprise value of Rs 6,800 crore, the exposure due to this circle overlap of Rs 842.75 crore. Under UASL, Spice and Idea will need to approach DoT for seeking transfer of licenses at which time the issue of overlap licenses and M&A norms will have to be resolved.

A source close to the merger talks told ToI, “the issue will be resolved over the next few days. We have already written to DoT to merge these operations”. However, he was unsure whether Idea is bearing the cost of Spices licenses or not.

The two potential options for the merged entity include surrendering the licenses but this may not help since the entry fee is non-refundable. The other would be to sell these six licenses. However, the sale will have to be to a new entity since none of the existing operators, under the same M&A norms, can merge licenses or spectrum from these six circles.

The only saving grace pertains to the fact that spectrum has not been allocated yet in any of these six circles to either of the two companies.

Source:  Times of India

IE8, the follow-on to 2006’s IE7, was released in Beta 1 nearly three months ago. Since then, Microsoft has not specified a target for a second preview, although it has regularly posted progress notes and other information about the new browser on a company blog.

MacKechnie also told Web designers and site operators to start adding a compatibility tag to their site’s HTML code or those sites may not display properly when viewed in the new browser.

IE8, Microsoft said in early March, will default to a standards-compliant rendering of Web content — an approach that had been pushed by site developers — rather than a mode that stresses compatibility with IE7.

The new tag, which can be applied on a per-page basis or sitewide, instructs IE8 to display the content as would IE7.

“Browsing with this default setting [in IE8] may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended,” MacKechnie said. “This creates a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8.”

The first beta of IE8 is not exactly in widespread use. According to the latest data from Web metrics company Net Applications, IE8 Beta 1 accounted for just .02% of all browsers used last month. IE7, by comparison, held the top spot with a market share of 45.9%.

IE8 Beta 1, which runs in Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008, can be downloaded from Microsoft’s Web site.

The final version of the software will support any Web site, Yahoo said. It did not say when the final version of BrowserPlus will be available.

The most unique feature of the software, according to Yahoo, allows users to add new services without having to restart a browser or reload a page. “For users, this means no more interruptions or installers to run,” Yahoo said in a blog post. “We handle the complexity of software distribution and updates. For developers, it means you can check for and activate new services with a single function call (pending user approval, of course). BrowserPlus is dynamic, allowing us to implement the standards of tomorrow while enabling fun and playful Web applications along the way.”

Yahoo said all updates are signed and verified by Yahoo so users can trust that they’re are authentic. Updates are never applied without a user’s approval. BrowserPlus will never let sites access a user’s data or resources unless the user approves. If a security vulnerability is found in a service on the Web, Yahoo said it can quickly deactivate that service so it can’t be exploited.

As for performance, BrowserPlus runs separately from the browser so that Yahoo can minimize the performance impact and shut down the software when it is not needed. As a result, the software is unlikely to affect speed or stability of daily browsing, Yahoo said.

The new yahoo tool will compete with other recently unveiled offerings, including Microsoft’s Silverlight; Adobe’s Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR; and Mozilla’s Prism.

“The way you interact with the system will change dramatically,” the billionaire said at a conference in Canada, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph on Friday.

He said that computer users of the future will control their machines by voice and pen as well as touch.

Users of Windows 7 will issue commands by touching the screen rather than by the traditional keyboard and mouse combination that has dominated since the 1970s.

Windows 7 is due to be released in 2010 and is Microsoft’s attempt to catch up with Apple, whose touch screen iPhone has proved popular.

Touch screens are appearing on a host of other devices, including sat-navs, mobile phones and remote controls. A touch screen BlackBerry is expected shortly.

Vodafone made revenues of £35.5bn, up 4.2 per cent, and adjusting operating profit of £10.1bn in the year ended 31 March 2008. Earnings per share were up 11 per cent to 12.5p.

Sarin will be replaced by his deputy Vittorio Colao. The handover will take place after the mobile firm’s Annual General Meeting 29 July 2008.

The company now has 260m mobile customers, up 26 per cent, including 44m in India - Vodafone completed the acquisition of Essar in May 2007.

Sarin has been at the helm of Vodafone since July 2003 when he replaced Chris Gent, and his departure is a surprise; although in 2006 four major Vodafone shareholders opposed his re-election as CEO Sarin survived the hostile meeting and stayed on. He has overseen the expansion of Vodafone into India, Turkey and Eastern Europe.

Vodafone chairman Sir John Bond said Sarin had led the company with distinction, developed a new strategy and successfully expanded its business in emerging markets.

An Indian man is facing five years in jail for making an “offensive” comment after Google handed his personal data to local police. Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid, a 22 year-old IT consultant, was arrested after posting derogatory comments on Google’s Orkut social networking site. Vaid was posting in a forum called ‘I hate Soniya Gandhi’ and was identified after the police asked Google to hand over his email address.

Vaid was arrested after a police raid on his house on Friday and has been charged with breaking section 292 of the Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act. If found guilty he faces a possible five years in prison as well as a fine. The case highlights a curious facet of Indian law. The creator of the forum cannot be punished, since an individual’s dislike is covered under personal freedom of choice. However, the information Vaid posted is classed as “vulgar”, thus the arrest.

Vaid’s arrest also highlights Google’s increasingly tarnished reputation, despite its unofficial motto of ‘Do no evil’. The motto gained the company much kudos in the IT industry but, after Google’s activities in China, many are now questioning its stance on human rights.

So if you publish any content (including posts, scraps etc) on any website and you are in India, then it would be in your best interest to  go though a copy of  Indian Information Technology Act.

The probe began when a Pune Congress activist saw the message and notified the authorities, who in turn asked Google to provide them with the IP address of the person who posted the message. On receiving this information from Google the police found the ‘perpetrator’ -  22-year-old Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid.

Vaid worked for PC Solutions, an IT company in Gurgaon and was arrested from his home. He has been charged under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act 2000 and remanded to custody till the 21st of May.

Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.

Yahoo is partnering with the leading social networks so its users can take advantage of the freeing of user data, and it will also be crafting its own social network and APIs as part of its forthcoming Yahoo Open Strategy.

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington reasons:

The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).

With 70 million users, more than 20,000 Facebook applications, and about 350,000 developers, Facebook has a major scale advantage over Google’s Orkut. MySpace has the advantage of an even larger user base, but lags Facebook on the developer and application fronts.

However, Google has been taking a more open and distributed approach with its OpenSocial API, which allows compliant applications to work across any social network. By extension, Friend Connect would provide glue to allow any site to add a social dimension and build connections to other social networks.

I spoke with David Glazer, Google director of engineering, in March about injecting the social graph and data portability into the core fabric of the Web. He said the big challenge isn’t the technology but applying existing and emerging standards, such as OATH (secure API authentication), OpenID (identity management) and OpenSocial APIs (application integration).

The key for all the data portability efforts (check out the DataPortability Project) is that users have granular controls to manage their data and to maintain privacy and security. Facebook and MySpace have not fully disclosed how their privacy controls will work yet. Stay tuned for more details on Google’s Friend Connect and the next chapter of “The Making of the Social Web.”