Have you got “Bangalored” today?
(Via Nilesh’s Weblog)
Region encoding printer cartridges
Taking a cue from the practice of region encoding of DVDs, hardware manufacturers in US have started making their products only usable in the country of their production.
H-P has quietly begun implementing “region coding” for its highly lucrative print cartridges for some of its newest printers sold in Europe. Try putting a printer cartridge bought in the U.S. into a new H-P printer configured to use cartridges purchased in Europe and it won’t work. Software in the printer determines the origin of the ink cartridge and whether it will accept it.
Height of Dumbness in Airport Security
Airport security in France, on supposedly a routine drill, put a bag of explosives in an unknown passenger’s bag and … misplaced the bag. Somewhere in the world, there’s a navy blue suitcase with a small pack of explosives tucked in its side pocket.
As Schneier writes in his latest newsletter:
It’s perfectly reasonable to plant an explosive-filled suitcase in an airport in order to test security. It is not okay to plant it in someone’s bag without his knowledge and permission. (The explosive residue could remain on the suitcase long after the test, and might be picked up by one of those trace mass spectrometers that detects the chemical residue associated with bombs.) But if you are going to plant plastic explosives in the suitcase of some innocent passenger, shouldn’t you at least write down which suitcase it was?
The Town by the Sea
“Amitav Ghosh, renowned novelist, accompanies the Director on a search through the island of Car Nicobar towards the seafront where the town of Malacca once stood. Discovering in stages how little he had understood the power of the tsunami, the writer finds himself completely unprepared for the experience. This is the concluding part of a special three-article series for The Hindu.”
http://www.hindu.com/2005/01/13/stories/2005011309081100.htm
I turned to follow him and we were heading back towards the blazing palms, when he stopped to point to a yellow paint box, peeping out of the rubble. “That belonged to Vineeta, my daughter,” he said, and the flatness of his voice was harder to listen to than an outburst would have been. “She loved to paint; she was very good at it. She was even given a prize, from Hyderabad.”
Brazil to break drug patents
This had to happen one day. After AIDS infections in the country has reached alarming levels, Brazil health organizations have found the monopolistic pricing of Multinational drug companies, impossible to sustain. Therefore the country has taken the position that they have to break patents to lift the country out of misery.
India has recently introduced product patents which is going into effect from Jan 1 2005. The immediate repurcussion of this is going to felt in a few months (till existing stocks are cleared) as medicine costs countrywide are going to zoom up. According to this article:
Interesting items on sale
Bananaguard : Our unique, patented device allows for the safe transport and storage of individual bananas letting you enjoy perfect bananas anytime, anywhere.
A travellers USB disk shaped as a mince pie.
Ramayana comics on the web
People of my generation would remember comics in our chidhood days which were mostly Amar Chitra Katha, Tintin and Asterix.
Well, it seems that the Ramayana comics (known by the term “graphic novels” these days) from the Amar Chitra Katha series is available as an exhibition on this site.
Good for me. Flipping through the pages refreshed my memory a lot, apart from spreading over a wave of nostalgia. (By the way, why does it seem that the king Dasharatha was a bit of a tender nature? - poor guy keeps fainting or dizzy time and again till his death!)
Video Conferencing On Linux
I have normally had a bad experience with multimedia related software till today. An expensive IBM PC camera has not been working for quite a while, so I had banished it to my family’s Windows XP machine. But I needed one to play with for my own FC3 linux box.
My hardware dealer at first insisted that I try out a damn cheap Chinese cam costing Rs. 950. The package was as cheap as it could be made, but the demo that he showed me was impressive. So I took it home, and guess what it still didnt work, coz’ there were no drivers.
Nice 404 error message :)
Try accessing http://smtp.linux-sxs.org/404 (wayback machine link)
America heading towards an economic armageddon
… so says Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, according to this article. The statistics are staggering:
To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day.
That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world’s net savings. Sustainable? Hardly.
Meanwhile, he notes that household debt is at record levels. Twenty years ago the total debt of U.S. households was equal to half the size of the economy. Today the figure is 85 percent.