GMail, Google’s email appli­ca­tion, is a beta product. This means that it is in a testing phase and not stable enough for produc­tion. GMail, however, is quite robust, and works as well as any other email service provider. Besides, it’s been quite sometime since its release. So why is it still a beta?

If you look further, you’ll realize that GMail is not Google’s only beta appli­ca­tion. Google News, Google Groups, Google Scholar, Google Book Search — the list goes on.

So why so many betas? Maybe the answer lies in the fact that attaching a beta tag to an appli­ca­tion is like attaching a standard disclaimer. If it doesn’t work, the company can easily be forgiven. After all, the product is a beta — what right do you have to expect any better?

However — given that Google has a history of intro­ducing novel, minimal, efficient and highly compete­tive products that turn out to be immediate hits — perhaps the real question is: is Google insecure about its own products? Or is it something else?

Every­time there’s a terrorist attack somewhere in the country, security is “beefed up” at all poten­tial targets. Recently, there was a shoot-out at IISc, Banga­lore, in which a professor was killed and a few others injured. Immedi­ately after the incident, security was increased at the IITs, IIMs and other educa­tional institutions.

However, if you visit any of these “secured” places, you’ll realize that the concept of security is super­fi­cial. Bags are checked because they have to be; often, the security personnel will check a part of it and let it go. Baggage passing through the X-ray scanner is lazily monitored. The metal detector during an entry — if it works — is gener­ally disre­garded no matter how desper­ately it beeps.

As long as there are such lapses — chinks in the armor — terror-targets will remain vulnerable.

Many people make “New Year resolutions” — a whole bunch of things they will or will not do once the new year begins. For some, this is a fine arrange­ment. I’m not one of them.

The main problem with such resolu­tions is that if it is a partic­u­larly tough one to imple­ment, a single lapse will lead to dejec­tion and despair. For instance, a regular smoker who decides to quit smoking as a “New Year resolu­tion”, if persuaded to smoke even once after­ward, will revert to his old habits. The fact that smoking is addic­tive has nothing much to do with it. The general plaint goes thus — 

“I wanted to quit, but I had a weak moment — how does it hurt if I do it twice instead of once? In any case, the deed is done and I have failed…”

The best part is that despair and dejec­tion are used as a cloak to justify the act.

It would probably be far better to have resolu­tions on a day-to-day basis; at least we could start afresh any time we wanted. In some cases, a gradual phasing out is likely to be more effective.

If you’re a regular visitor of a site like Slashdot, or any other high-traffic news site that offers users a chance to publish comments, you’ll notice that the first comment is invari­ably something like, “Ha! I’m the first one to comment.”

(Inter­est­ingly, the fact that the same site is being accessed by hundreds of users simul­ta­ne­ously means that somebody’s “First!” comment may be the third or fourth to be regis­tered, making the claim seem rather silly.)

Enough of that! I’d like to say a few words about what this site is all about. Like Seinfeld — the show about “nothing” — this blog is a record of events, ideas and thoughts about anything and every­thing that seems inter­esting enough to be published. I hope you’ll enjoy the time you spend here; please do leave comments, sugges­tions and opinions.

Signing off,
Ramnath R Iyer