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.
In the US of A, public asks for permission from corporates
It is interesting to see how the lives of people in USA are increasingly being taken over by corporates.
Here is how Verizon forces/lobbies/oils the Pennsylvania Senate into passing a bill which makes it unlawful for municipalities or any government institutions to offer telecommunications services which competes against them. Quoting from the article:
The Pennsylvania Senate passed House Bill 30 which prohibits municipalities from delivering telecommunications services for compensation if it competes with private enterprise.
…
It’s not that I think munis should be offering these types of services, rather I believe they should have the option of doing so, especially where there is a duopoly (one cable and one DSL operator).
A record company with a difference
A record company which takes its fingers out of some of the jars, and offers its albums under a Creative Commons licence!
Positron! Records also has a kickass official statement on this matter, saying:
Positron! Records is pleased to announce that our artists now have the option of releasing their works under Creative Commons licenses.
Unlike those who suffer from what we like to call “major label retardation,” we here at Positron! have never believed it was bad thing for our supporters to share our music with their friends. The Creative Commons licenses we use legally allow you to share songs from these records on peer-to-peer networks. In addition, you can sample portions of these songs for use in your own compositions, whether they are mash-ups for your friends, or a commercial release. The only caveat is that the resulting work must be released under the same license. It is our way of both thumbing our nose at the ridiculous state of copyright law in this country, and letting you, our customer and supporter, know that you are not a criminal, but a trusted ally in the war against corporate stupidity.
Patents - the new tradeable goods in town
Great! Here is a company whose reason for existence is to trade in patents. They don’t implement any of it, they just keep filing or buying ’em and selling ’em. They say that the firm was founded to invest in innovation and invention.
Lessig also writes:
In 1991, according to The Patent Wars by Fred Warshofsky, Bill Gates said this about software patents:
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. The solution . . . is patent exchanges . . . and patenting as much as we can. . . . A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.
IT vs other engineering fields
Cringely puts it well in this article:
IT used to do this, decades ago, but no more. Today, IT is based mostly on selling general ideas. The requirements gathering process is superficial. The project proposal is mostly a “shell of an idea.” IT projects have lots of meetings, lots of issues to be resolved, lots of management to coordinate things. The workers rarely spend more than 35 percent of their time actually accomplishing something FOR the project. In an engineering project the workers are generally over 80 percent productive.
I am getting married
I am getting married to Dipika!