Google + V/S Facebook

I got a joining request from my friend to the New Sensation these days, Google+. Being a little tech geek, I joined it instantly and started reviewing the features and other things available on G+. Obviously, I used this Pic for the post because everyone knows who's the big competitor for Google!

When Facebook introduced FBMail, GMail was scared, but now when G+ is going to be launched and started its trial, Facebook is already shook up!! So, thought to write some of the reviews of G+ and what if we compare it from Facebook.

Google +

Well, Everyone needs a change. People were sick of using Yahoo Mail, rediff, hotmail, etc, So they switched on to GMail, sick of Orkut or MySpace, they switched to Facebook. Now, comes the turn of Facebook! If you are now bored of facebook! Enough virtual poking friends, reading their feeds... Then welcome to Google +!

What's New?

Hang Out!

Mmm.... Well, they have added a cool feature of video conferencing with your friends named as "Hang out". Click on it and you will be streamed to all your friends. Contact all your friends by webcam at a single time. 

This feature of G+ made Facebook to collaborate with Skype! Funny market isn't it? hehe!

Spark

Synonym of news feeds related to your interest! To be very frank, I didn't found any SPARK like thing in that. Much boring part and I bet, it will prove a useless part of G+

Circles

Remembered Orkut introduced making groups and posting to limited people? Well, this is same here. You have to make groups of your friends and can have different status and other updates with different circles.

Anything special?

Well.. Nothing except Hang Out Feature...

G+ V/S Facebook:

Although Google team has worked hard on making the interface of G+ much much good and light version. But still, you can feel not so easy here. Frankly speaking: Google+ is Just Orkut V2. And eveyone knows, Facebook had already ruined Orkut! So, Should FB people be scared of Google+? No! I don't think so!

Pro's of Google+:

• No Application or game requests! Yes! Google+ means Just Social Networking. (Atleast they don't have it right now!) I am fed up by the application requests from various games and other apps on Facebook! You won't find any such thing here.
• Hang Out! I would love to use this feature with my friends and want to know about it more. But, right now, I don't have many such friends here. I am excited to use this feature!
• Circle wise update stream: You can check the update feeds from different circles individually. That's a nice feature. You can filter your update feeds by your circle.
• Best for frequent Google users: If you use Google as your search engine or you have a Gmail account, then it's the best thing. You can get all your G+ updates and notifiers almost everywhere on Google.

Well, till now I have found only this much good things. I will update the post regularly as soon as I find some more good features.

Con's of Google+

• Orkut V2: As I told earlier, it is the new version of Orkut! nothing else! So, kind of boring too.
• No groups or community type functionality: We are now addicted to Pages and groups of Facebook and even community of Orkut! Google+ has nothing like that. You can't always have fun by just reading other's status updates and chatting.
• No Friends Requests!: In G+, you just find you relevant person and add him/her to your circle. Google+ will just notify the other person that you have added him/her to the circle. You cannot delete yourself from anyone else' circle. What about privacy then? Google+ will just say you that the person who has added you has shared something with you, Wanna see them or not? And What about your updates? Only those updates will be shown to that person whom you have marked as PUBLIC.
• No Private Message: Google+ does not has the functionality of sending a PM to anyone. That was the most annoying thing for me! Also, feature like Write to Wall of Facebook is also not available. So you can't contact any one person individually! However, they have made a function to share the post with just one person. May be you can contact the person by this way. However, it would be just shown like normal posts in the feed. If we send a PM, it looks like an important thing or a Priority thing! Who cares so much for the post?

The Conclusion:

Both the Google people and Facebook people should understand one thing that Facebook can never beat Google's Email and Google can never beat Facebook's social network.

Google+ looks like soon a failure thing just like Facebook-mail.

Both the companies are good in their own market and should concentrate on that only! Otherwise, both will fail...

Well. these were my observations for Google+ and Facebook! If am wrong anywhere, Please let me know. And also, Don't forget to give your suggestions for the post.

Akshit (Kinchit in legal terms... LOL ;) )

Disable Pen Drives in your System

Today I got major problem at my workplace. The main server got badly affected by virus that no one is able to work on it. When the HO people came to know about it, they just gave ultimatum to strictly stop use of pen drives.

But, how to monitor 40 systems kept on 4 storey building that no one is using pen drives on client machines?

If I disable the USB drives from “Device Manager”, it will also disable my other USB peripherals like keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner etc…

Anyways, like always… “Google Jindabaad!! (Long Live Google)” I found a very nice but a risky way of disabling Pen Drives in the systems.

Nice, because it disabled only pen drives not my keyboard mouse etc.

Risky, because it was done by playing through registry entries.

Go to Registry Editor:

Start àRun à Type “regedit”. Don’t forget to remove quotes.

Then, go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEàSYSTEMàCurrentControlSetàservicesàUSBSTOR

Then, from the right window, go to “Start”, double click on it and change the value from “3” to “4”.

Click OK. Close registry editor.

That’s it guys!!! No more pen drives will be entertained by your system.

To make it work back, repeat the same process, change the value from “4” to “3” again.

Please note (for newbies): Playing with registry entries can be a dangerous thing for your OS. So, do it carefully and at your own risk… All the best!

Akshit

Notepad2 V/S Notepad++

While learning J2EE using Tomcat, My instructor told me to practice ONLY on notepad to improve my programming skills. But I found typing code in notepad a mess. No tab indentation, Tag closing, etc. The biggest mistakes i used to do are like forgetting closing tags in"web.xml" file... hehehe...

Obviously it's hard for a .Net programmer who is using Visual Studio from last 3 years to switch back to notepad and type the code. We get almost double work.

So, I searched upon the internet to find a better tool for that. I found various softwares that can replace existing notepad. But only two of them drawn my attention.

1. Notepad++:

Link: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

No doubt, the software is good, providing many functions which may help the code writing an easy task. It is almost same like working on a normal IDE for programming. It also provided me to get rid of monotonous white background of notepad and black fonts. Yes, it has many pre-installed themes for us. N you can even customize it according to your choice.

But this was not what I was looking for. The software was obviously a heavy one. N too many functions and features sometime make me feel irritated. I wanted something simple, small, yet powerful...

So I went to Second Option:

2. Notepad2

Link:http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

This replacement of notepad is again free and opensource. (Well... I don't know whether Notepad++ is open source).

It is a small one. With though not much functionalities like that in Notepad2, But still, I liked the portability of the software. You don't always need an installer to use this. You can put the Notepad2 file in your USB Drive and can use it on any system without hassle of installing it. If you want to install it, it will replace your Default notepad application to Notepad2.

So, if you are finding something power-packed notepad replacement, Go for Notepad++.

Or if you are like me (irritating for big apps...), want just a coding and a tab indentation, tag closing. nothing else, opt for Notepad2.