This breed needs more fertilizers and pesticides, the article says it. That's the problem. Fertilizers are like drugs for the soil. Once, the soil starts using the fertilizers, it needs more and more of it every harvest. The soil turns really solid like rock. It needs far more water to grow, and heavy machinery to till it. Essentially, you are replacing the all natural process with an all clinical process. The argument is similar to saying, why don't we all check into hospitals? We will all stay healthier there. The pesticides can't stay away from the rice. It climbs into the stem and into the rice grain.
Now, about the real water consumed : The fertilizers consume a huge amount of water to produce. So do the pesticides. So, if you added the 'hidden water' consumed in production of fertilizers, you will realize that you have just used up water at a different place, that's all.
My BITX has been in open source for more than ten years now. (www.phonestack.com/farhan/bitx.html). It has an active community that mods it, a large number of websites dedicated to it as well. It goes exactly in the opposite direction from the proposed radio. It uses very generic electronic components, it can be put together for less than 10 dollars without requiring anything beyond a soldering iron. Open source hardware cannot mean hard to get chips, multi-layer boards and computer/phone that costs a few hundred dollars. And even after all that, the performance of this proposed rig is questionable. It has almost no strength on the front-end, the transmission is without the mandatory filters needed for the -50dbc limit on spurious emissions as per the FCC norms. The chips are not available on ebay.
Marketing is not the same thing as sales. Marketing creates the context for sale to happen. You are, probably, already late for any marketing consultation, as marketing begins with 'what can we sell?' and you already have a product. Which means, that you have already thought of who the customers are, what they want, how the product will be distributed. Inherent in those decisions are also things like what the user will perceive the product as, how a usage of the product will spread the buzz to other users, etc. So, if you think hard about it, it is impossible that you didn't have a plan for marketing the product. You need to sit down with someone and just talk about the product until you can verbalize the plan that is already in your head. For that, I would suggest asking your brightest friend to give you an hour over coffee (avoid beer) and then repeat this with two other friends. At the end of the exercise, write down all that you jotted on a piece of paper. Use a whiteboard while talking. Think in terms of users, costs, revenues and margins. At the end of the day, the product must financially survive.
'most people are idiots', 'we have to protect the innocent even if it means taking away their freedom', 'it is for your own good', 'let us decide what's good for you', blah blah blah. can i, as a citizen of the free world, have the choice to decide what is good for me and what is not? if i can vote, i guess i am sensible enough to choose an utrusted app or decline it. how can you force me to use a phone that i own in the ways that YOU want me to? this is wrong a some many levels! Next, you will ban muslims from using it i guess?
Take a deep breath and now.. exhale and think about it. is it really impossible? 1. display: what kind of display? I would say use the TV. cost of display : zilch. 2. cpu? how about the atmel arm processor that comes with 128kb ram for $3. 3. keyboard? hmmm.. a membrane keyboard is little more than a single side etched pcb with rubber pads over it. 4. box? i can get an abs plastic of the size of sinclair computer for about 30 cents.
it is not entirely impossible guys. just tough to act.
'temperature' denotes how agitated the molecules are in the matter. the hotter they get the more they knock around with each other. this in turn leads to them dislodging electrons from each other and these electrons float around until they find a slot (of another atom that had an electron knocked off) and fall back into the atom. hence, these floating electrons setup random electric currents.
any electric conductor that is not at absolute zero will introduce these random variations in a flowing signal. this is simply what we call as noise. hence, the higher the temperature, the noisier it gets inside an electronic component.
if you have a very weak signal (like a distant star's light), having a sensor operating at a low tempurature can mean the difference between seeing it and not seeing it at all.
remember, the noise will go down proportionate to the absolute tempurature. so moving from my city (hyderabad, 40 centigrade in the shade today) to stockholm will not make much of a difference. but moving down to single digit kelvin will be a huge force multiplier.
As someone who designs phones (softphones) for a living, I find iPhone to be a product that is more about the state of technology and general direction of user interfaces rather than anything innovative on apple's part.
If you look back at iPod too, the opportunity came for Apple in the form of three things:
A very low power, small sized hard disk of 4GB
The rise of MP3 as the open Internet standard for almost CD quality audio.
PortalPlayer's and other manufacturer's dedicated MP3 chipsets
Apple slickly packaged it. They are very good at doing that. But the point to remember is that they didn't (in spite of their claims) invent either the personal digital players(remember Rio), nor MP3 (actually napster did that) nor did they write the MP3 codec. More than anything else, they invented the jogwheel. Full marks for that.
Take a look at the main features of the iPhone now:
Soft-touch screen. Having a full soft screen is nothing new. My P800(from Sony Ericsson) had it a four years ago. In fact, you could detach the plastic keyboard overlay and turn it into a full screen phone. I guess the earlier models of Palm's phones were the same too. The point about Blackberry was that it gave people a full qwerty keyboard because users wanted it.
OS X. OS X has two components: A Unix-ish kernel and a Windowing GUI that uses WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer). The kernel is not a bad choice. But the GUI that includes menubars, dockbars, overlapping windows, are a bad idea. Handheld applications are 'bursty' (you flip it on, take a few seconds doing something and flip it back). Desktop applications, on the other hand, are 'sessions based' (You spend can 15 minutes browsing a site).
Closed Phone. Haha!! what kind of a smartphone is it that doesn't even allow me to write a 'Hello World'? Mach kernel you said??
All in all, an important milestone in phone's User Interface evolution, all along the expected lines (like the 'pinch' gesture that we saw in Jakob Neilson's video made for Sun Microsystems). But nothing that broke new technology grounds (not even a 3G phone!).
Skype needs revenues to get anywhere. Those revenues will primarily come from either SkypeOut or SkypeIn. Unlike the virally and self-spreading nature of a the original Skype (which is a pure IP play), these services require charging, billing and customer support. certainly not something that can be done by clever marketing and adding a codec to kazaa. they will need to re-orient themselves to be customer responsive, regulation compliant, service oriented business. which is going to be difficult for zenstorm to pull off.
if i really need a cheap internet calling card (essentially what skypeout is), i will hunt around for the best deal, keeping my skype id aside, there is no stickiness in calling phone numbers from a particular VoIP provider. Subscribers will switch to the best deal of the day. Skype will not be able to milk this unless they are the cheapest in the market. For that, they already have the volumes to negotiate. Their problem is a lack of customer relationship management. I seriously doubt thier ability to scale in that sense. Think India and Phillipines and process outsourcing.
Probably, they can charge the telcos that send their traffic to skype users. this is called the inter-connect fee. However, given the low reliability of skype and it's reliance on unsuspecting computers being turned into unwilling proxies, they call completion rates are going to be abysmal. as a result, the telcos might not agree to the standard inter-connect fees at all.
Earlier acquisitions like ICQ and Hotmail were relevant to microsoft and aol because they needed the userids. At the moment, there are far far many more MSN and AOL instant messenger ids than skype. (quick: how many contacts do you have on your AOL/MSN vs Skyp contacts? i have 200 on my msn and 5 on my skype).
Skype will need to become a regular telco to go anywhere. They will need to hire people and build a great world class customer support and e-commerce experience. I would suggest they hire Jakob Neilson and Patricia Seybold and get working instead of looking for a kerb side deal with the shady murdochs.
It is time you all woke up to and figured out that USA is as bad as any other country.
We may have more illiterates than any other country in the world, but you forget that India also has the largest number of engineers. More Indians can speak English than there are people in the entire USA. Think about that.
We are not poor due to our stupidity. We are poor by design. Just a 100 years ago, we were the richest nation on earth. Then we were split up into two countries and made to go at each other's throat. The Indo-Pak cold war has cost us an entire civilization.
Our political system is bankrupt. Most politicians are plain goons. But we also have the vision to elect a woman to rule us. Every second President of India is from the minorities. How many black presidents, how many women presidents has USA had? How about a Jew for the Prez?
I find it very surprising that most of the posts talk about Indian Poverty. It certainly points to the assumption that money according to American values is what defines a person. That is simply not a simple truth for many places in the world.
now, lets hear what they have been talking about
on
Businesses Discover Skype
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· Score: 3, Interesting
skype uses a cheap trick of routing calls between users through other user's computers (turning them into supernodes). a number of people, I included have experienced hearing others speak through my computer. This is inspite of skype's claim to the contrary. check this out http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/voip/voip- blog/skype-security.asp. A casual search on the net will reveal a lot more.
The problem is not something that can be fixed with a simple patch. there will be more problems in the future too.
The primary problem with using skype for business and carrier grade work is that it's protocol is not public. we don't know how it works, we don't have any assurance that we are not being heard by skype guys as we talk.
The article mentions a company called Portal Player. This is 'headquartered' in the USA, but it is in effect run from India. They run out of a couple of bunglows down my road and employ a few hundred people. It is now called PINEXE. They supply design and supply chips for MP3 players. It is as silly to give entire credit to Apple for iPoD design, if the reproduction is good, it is not due to any new compression algorithm invented by Steve Jobs. Slashdotters know better.
The report that a US amateur was on the island is completely incorrect.
The DXpedition was under the Aegis of National Institute of Amateur Radio (India) and it was lead by Ms. Bharati (VU2RBI), an Indian.
I know this, because I saw them off to Nicobar islands a few weeks ago and I have been monitoring their traffic over the last week. They are due back on the mainland today sometime.
Read the list of the the operators and the ARRL's version
Note: We are talking about UNIX the operating system kernel. The question is not about the applications that run on UNIX.
My wish list:
1. Event handling: UNIX has a silly signal() as the only signal handling mechanism. I know, I know there are 'extensions' all around, but we are talking about UNIX per se. select() is a kludge. Try handling 10,000 slow TCP/IP streams (think Instant Messaging) on an 'extension free' UNIX to see what I mean.
2. Lower level file handling: If only could I handle a file with it's inode! Dont' think this is arcane. There are a lot of useful things that could be done if this were possible (and cut down the time File system takes to parse a path name).
3. Instant volume mounting: The only good thing about Windows is that I can quickly plug in a removable media copy something and yank it off. None of the silly mount/umounts. I know, it 'can be done' with some intelligence at the app level. I am talking about the kernel you silly!
4. Quicker booting: I wish the system took less than 10 seconds to come up. at least on the CLI. But this is a personal wish.
5. ioctl() madness. do away with the 'there-is-ioctl-for-the-rest' mentality. C'mon guys, it is a kludgy way to pass data around through the kernel.
back in the 80s, all Intel Handbooks filled most of their pages with an arcane uP called the iAPX-432, calling it a mainframe. http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocom puting/intel/iapx432/ anybody in here remembers this?
Sending data over power cables is the first thing that strikes us when we think of broad-band. As someone involved with broad-band initiatives in india, as a veteran slashdotter and as an ex-ham, i think this needs a few pieces of missing information.
Why power lines? because they are there. More importantly, because you cannot touch any other copper lines (like ma'bell) nor lay them afresh without being billg hisself. now guess who demands this money? the very FCC!
It is often a cheaper and a simpler solution to just run a shielded cable. In India, where such zoning and municipal laws are lax, I have a 100 mbps ethernet drop into my home office. The electic poles are tapped for feeding the hubs on the way as well as providing the physical support for the cable high above the reach of straying cows, buffalos, kids on bikes and cable thieves.
The cable operators pay the electricity folks a fixed low per-pole charge. In the case of BPL, i think it is more of FCC trying to save the phone companies than creating a new last mile solution. Why can't we lay more cable in anycase? it is a cheaper option.
The point often missed about HF is that like ozone layer, it really affects the entire world. I have a 5 watt transceiver that regularly goes around the world (www.phonestack.com/farhan) using just a 10 meter stretch of wire for an antenna. the noise that BPL will generate can easily disrupt global HF communications that form the backbone for many countries even today. Imagine the interference BPL would create by contributing megawatts of power radiating over millions of miles of wires all over the country.
blaming amateurs is really a shame. especially at slashdot. from the early open source tcp/ip (the KA9Q) to Alan cox. Amateurs have frontlined development of Internet. the very idea of personal science (as something that individuals pursue for pure satisfaction) that propels towards free and open softwares finds its foundations in amateur radio.
Amateur radio is really the only open source communication technology. Everywhere else, you still pay per use. It is also the classic peer to peer technology, it requires no 'service providers' at all just you and a couple of transistors connected to a clothline. The entire communication stack (read morse code decoder) is in your head. how's that for a setup?
I would add to this that, whenever you create a technology, remember that it can be used on you.
Now, if you were to look at who created and used the nukes, agent orange, etc. you will realise, that in this game, you really can't sue the other side for intellectual property rights over weapons of mass destruction.
once you have created a weapon, it is for everybody to use. whether you like it or not.
you are grossly mistakened. don't think that india and indians are pushovers. the top five IT companies of india are all CMM-5 certified. their software quality is far better or equal to that of any usa company. so, stop being sarcastic about the 'indian quality'. If these companies listed on the NASDAQ, they would be in the top five.
as for the indian life style, you have NO idea of the comforts avaiable here. the cell phones cost less than a cent per minute. a pepsi bottle (yes, the very same) sells here for 10 cents. a train ticket covering 600 miles costs less than 10 dollars. getting root canal costs about $100.
as for the women (someone mentioned the quality of dates), we have won more beauty pagenents in the last five years than any other country.
indians are surely not jeffersons, probably they opted out. but nevertheless, they have less crime, more money to spare (yes, true), and far fewer debts to pay.
well, the logic of all this runs on simple but deeper thread: 1) usa consumes materials from all over the world, and does pay back fully. hence, there is a trade deficit. 2) to overcome this, usa has to sell it products and services (read microsoft, pepsi, mc donalds and michael jackson) to the world. note that:the usa is unable to sell anything like oil, steel or power. it can only sell things produced intellectually because usa has killed it materially productive industries. 3) when usa asks countries like india to open up its markets to usa products, it cannot refuse to open up usa markets to its programmers (india has a huge supply of people, more english speakers in india than rest of the world put together). 4) the indian economy is a low cost economy. it has something to do with the culture. most of the indians owe no debts (majority have no credit cards either), infact, almost all have small savings. as a result, living is cheap. and salaries are lower.
now rather than blaming the indians and callling them names (about being hopeless programmers), it might do americans well to blame those who have made it an expensive country to live in.
i can vouch that a programmer in india (even at $5 an hour) will earn Rs.40,000. That will allow him to have a five star date every weekend, maintain a decent car and live in a decent neighbourhood.
now if $5 goes such a long way in india, you should really be thinking of what went wrong with the usa economy. it is time for serious contemplation.
I live in India, and for a change I can say that it gets easier here with the text books.
BPB reprints several publishers from the USA for software books. Prentice Hall (India) publishes quite a few classics like the K and R.
Someone wrote that the K and R is available for $2. Not true. It is available for $5. But there are still cheaper ways to get books. India has a flourishing market of second hand books. these are hand-me-downs. A book typically listed for Rs.200 can be had for Rs. 50 in the seconds market (Rs.50 is approximately about a dollar).
If you still want it to be cheaper, you can even hire a book for the semester at 10% of the listed price. You have to return the book in reasonable condition though.
Finally, most of the schools (including the one I went to) have a tradition of the seniors passing on their text-books to their juniors. It is not with regret that I noted that my cousin (who is now in the same school) is using the same copy of Kimberley that i studied.
u would pay rs.4 million for that sort of a thing. that is about $80,000 per year. plus the cost of modems and leased line installation. the whole would come to about $100,000. Now, for real comparision, my drive is paid $60 per month. and a rail ticket from one end of india to another (1000 miles) costs $10. get the picture?
i have followed simputer for a while and some of the people working on simputer are well known to me. i live in india and i am familiar with the terrain they are trying to cover.
1. simputer at $216 is a very simplistic estimate (it it is not the list price). the $216 is the sum of prices of its parts if bought in bulk. it does not include the cost of assembling, testing, packing, CEO's lifestyle, rent of the office space, etc. By the time you add it all up and pay the taxes, the price could well touch $500. i bet a dollar it wont cost less $400.
2. simputer is a hardware platform that is not very different from ipaq. it uses arm processor, it has all the standard hardware features of a pocket pc. in that case, wouldnt it make sense to port simputer's software to existing hardware platforms that can leverage the economies of their existing scale of production?
3. dont be fooled into thinking that simputer is an open design. to use it, you have to pay them. check their fine print. their software is free, but their hardware design is not. which may explain why they didnt port it to existing pda platforms. 4. there is nothing especially about the simputer hardware than cannot be achieved, lets say, using the $150 handspring pda. then why pay more?
Slashdot Mirror
This breed needs more fertilizers and pesticides, the article says it.
That's the problem.
Fertilizers are like drugs for the soil. Once, the soil starts using the fertilizers, it needs more and more of it every harvest. The soil turns really solid like rock. It needs far more water to grow, and heavy machinery to till it. Essentially, you are replacing the all natural process with an all clinical process. The argument is similar to saying, why don't we all check into hospitals? We will all stay healthier there.
The pesticides can't stay away from the rice. It climbs into the stem and into the rice grain.
Now, about the real water consumed : The fertilizers consume a huge amount of water to produce. So do the pesticides. So, if you added the 'hidden water' consumed in production of fertilizers, you will realize that you have just used up water at a different place, that's all.
My BITX has been in open source for more than ten years now. (www.phonestack.com/farhan/bitx.html). It has an active community that mods it, a large number of websites dedicated to it as well. It goes exactly in the opposite direction from the proposed radio. It uses very generic electronic components, it can be put together for less than 10 dollars without requiring anything beyond a soldering iron.
Open source hardware cannot mean hard to get chips, multi-layer boards and computer/phone that costs a few hundred dollars. And even after all that, the performance of this proposed rig is questionable. It has almost no strength on the front-end, the transmission is without the mandatory filters needed for the -50dbc limit on spurious emissions as per the FCC norms. The chips are not available on ebay.
The scientists involved in the launch are praying to many gods to make the launch a success. Why am I feeling assured about the success now? http://www.financialexpress.com/news/indias-mars-mission-the-countdown-begins-for-isros-voyage-to-the-red-planet/1178892
Can't the slashdot editors be more active with their copy? Nothing goes faster than light. period.
Marketing is not the same thing as sales. Marketing creates the context for sale to happen. You are, probably, already late for any marketing consultation, as marketing begins with 'what can we sell?' and you already have a product. Which means, that you have already thought of who the customers are, what they want, how the product will be distributed. Inherent in those decisions are also things like what the user will perceive the product as, how a usage of the product will spread the buzz to other users, etc.
So, if you think hard about it, it is impossible that you didn't have a plan for marketing the product. You need to sit down with someone and just talk about the product until you can verbalize the plan that is already in your head. For that, I would suggest asking your brightest friend to give you an hour over coffee (avoid beer) and then repeat this with two other friends. At the end of the exercise, write down all that you jotted on a piece of paper. Use a whiteboard while talking. Think in terms of users, costs, revenues and margins. At the end of the day, the product must financially survive.
'most people are idiots', 'we have to protect the innocent even if it means taking away their freedom', 'it is for your own good', 'let us decide what's good for you', blah blah blah.
can i, as a citizen of the free world, have the choice to decide what is good for me and what is not? if i can vote, i guess i am sensible enough to choose an utrusted app or decline it. how can you force me to use a phone that i own in the ways that YOU want me to?
this is wrong a some many levels! Next, you will ban muslims from using it i guess?
Take a deep breath and now .. exhale and think about it. is it really impossible? .. a membrane keyboard is little more than a single side etched pcb with rubber pads over it.
1. display: what kind of display? I would say use the TV. cost of display : zilch.
2. cpu? how about the atmel arm processor that comes with 128kb ram for $3.
3. keyboard? hmmm
4. box? i can get an abs plastic of the size of sinclair computer for about 30 cents.
it is not entirely impossible guys. just tough to act.
- farhan
'temperature' denotes how agitated the molecules are in the matter. the hotter they get the more they knock around with each other. this in turn leads to them dislodging electrons from each other and these electrons float around until they find a slot (of another atom that had an electron knocked off) and fall back into the atom. hence, these floating electrons setup random electric currents.
any electric conductor that is not at absolute zero will introduce these random variations in a flowing signal. this is simply what we call as noise. hence, the higher the temperature, the noisier it gets inside an electronic component.
if you have a very weak signal (like a distant star's light), having a sensor operating at a low tempurature can mean the difference between seeing it and not seeing it at all.
remember, the noise will go down proportionate to the absolute tempurature. so moving from my city (hyderabad, 40 centigrade in the shade today) to stockholm will not make much of a difference. but moving down to single digit kelvin will be a huge force multiplier.
As someone who designs phones (softphones) for a living, I find iPhone to be a product that is more about the state of technology and general direction of user interfaces rather than anything innovative on apple's part.
If you look back at iPod too, the opportunity came for Apple in the form of three things:
Apple slickly packaged it. They are very good at doing that. But the point to remember is that they didn't (in spite of their claims) invent either the personal digital players(remember Rio), nor MP3 (actually napster did that) nor did they write the MP3 codec. More than anything else, they invented the jogwheel. Full marks for that.
Take a look at the main features of the iPhone now:
Soft-touch screen. Having a full soft screen is nothing new. My P800(from Sony Ericsson) had it a four years ago. In fact, you could detach the plastic keyboard overlay and turn it into a full screen phone. I guess the earlier models of Palm's phones were the same too. The point about Blackberry was that it gave people a full qwerty keyboard because users wanted it.
OS X. OS X has two components: A Unix-ish kernel and a Windowing GUI that uses WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer). The kernel is not a bad choice. But the GUI that includes menubars, dockbars, overlapping windows, are a bad idea. Handheld applications are 'bursty' (you flip it on, take a few seconds doing something and flip it back). Desktop applications, on the other hand, are 'sessions based' (You spend can 15 minutes browsing a site).
Closed Phone. Haha!! what kind of a smartphone is it that doesn't even allow me to write a 'Hello World'? Mach kernel you said??
All in all, an important milestone in phone's User Interface evolution, all along the expected lines (like the 'pinch' gesture that we saw in Jakob Neilson's video made for Sun Microsystems). But nothing that broke new technology grounds (not even a 3G phone!).I tried the google base. i tried creating a new content-type called 'Presence' it crashes with the message '-5.5'. the site is unstable as of now.
if i really need a cheap internet calling card (essentially what skypeout is), i will hunt around for the best deal, keeping my skype id aside, there is no stickiness in calling phone numbers from a particular VoIP provider. Subscribers will switch to the best deal of the day. Skype will not be able to milk this unless they are the cheapest in the market. For that, they already have the volumes to negotiate. Their problem is a lack of customer relationship management. I seriously doubt thier ability to scale in that sense. Think India and Phillipines and process outsourcing.
Probably, they can charge the telcos that send their traffic to skype users. this is called the inter-connect fee. However, given the low reliability of skype and it's reliance on unsuspecting computers being turned into unwilling proxies, they call completion rates are going to be abysmal. as a result, the telcos might not agree to the standard inter-connect fees at all.
Earlier acquisitions like ICQ and Hotmail were relevant to microsoft and aol because they needed the userids. At the moment, there are far far many more MSN and AOL instant messenger ids than skype. (quick: how many contacts do you have on your AOL/MSN vs Skyp contacts? i have 200 on my msn and 5 on my skype).
Skype will need to become a regular telco to go anywhere. They will need to hire people and build a great world class customer support and e-commerce experience. I would suggest they hire Jakob Neilson and Patricia Seybold and get working instead of looking for a kerb side deal with the shady murdochs.
I have had enough of crap about India.
It is time you all woke up to and figured out that USA is as bad as any other country.
We may have more illiterates than any other country in the world, but you forget that India also has the largest number of engineers. More Indians can speak English than there are people in the entire USA. Think about that.
We are not poor due to our stupidity. We are poor by design. Just a 100 years ago, we were the richest nation on earth. Then we were split up into two countries and made to go at each other's throat. The Indo-Pak cold war has cost us an entire civilization.
Our political system is bankrupt. Most politicians are plain goons. But we also have the vision to elect a woman to rule us. Every second President of India is from the minorities. How many black presidents, how many women presidents has USA had? How about a Jew for the Prez?
I find it very surprising that most of the posts talk about Indian Poverty. It certainly points to the assumption that money according to American values is what defines a person. That is simply not a simple truth for many places in the world.
skype uses a cheap trick of routing calls between users through other user's computers (turning them into supernodes). a number of people, I included have experienced hearing others speak through my computer. This is inspite of skype's claim to the contrary.- blog/skype-security.asp.
check this out http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/voip/voip
A casual search on the net will reveal a lot more.
The problem is not something that can be fixed with a simple patch. there will be more problems in the future too.
The primary problem with using skype for business and carrier grade work is that it's protocol is not public. we don't know how it works, we don't have any assurance that we are not being heard by skype guys as we talk.
Check www.hotfoon.com/node.html. They have been commercializing this for over four years now.
The article mentions a company called Portal Player. This is 'headquartered' in the USA, but it is in effect run from India. They run out of a couple of bunglows down my road and employ a few hundred people. It is now called PINEXE.
They supply design and supply chips for MP3 players. It is as silly to give entire credit to Apple for iPoD design, if the reproduction is good, it is not due to any new compression algorithm invented by Steve Jobs. Slashdotters know better.
The DXpedition was under the Aegis of National Institute of Amateur Radio (India) and it was lead by Ms. Bharati (VU2RBI), an Indian. I know this, because I saw them off to Nicobar islands a few weeks ago and I have been monitoring their traffic over the last week. They are due back on the mainland today sometime. Read the list of the the operators and the ARRL's version
Note: We are talking about UNIX the operating system kernel. The question is not about the applications that run on UNIX.
My wish list:
1. Event handling: UNIX has a silly signal() as the only signal handling mechanism. I know, I know there are 'extensions' all around, but we are talking about UNIX per se. select() is a kludge. Try handling 10,000 slow TCP/IP streams (think Instant Messaging) on an 'extension free' UNIX to see what I mean.
2. Lower level file handling: If only could I handle a file with it's inode! Dont' think this is arcane. There are a lot of useful things that could be done if this were possible (and cut down the time File system takes to parse a path name).
3. Instant volume mounting: The only good thing about Windows is that I can quickly plug in a removable media copy something and yank it off. None of the silly mount/umounts. I know, it 'can be done' with some intelligence at the app level. I am talking about the kernel you silly!
4. Quicker booting: I wish the system took less than 10 seconds to come up. at least on the CLI. But this is a personal wish.
5. ioctl() madness. do away with the 'there-is-ioctl-for-the-rest' mentality. C'mon guys, it is a kludgy way to pass data around through the kernel.
back in the 80s, all Intel Handbooks filled most of their pages with an arcane uP called the iAPX-432, calling it a mainframe.m puting/intel /iapx432/
http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retroco
anybody in here remembers this?
Sending data over power cables is the first thing that strikes us when we think of broad-band. As someone involved with broad-band initiatives in india, as a veteran slashdotter and as an ex-ham, i think this needs a few pieces of missing information.
Why power lines? because they are there. More importantly, because you cannot touch any other copper lines (like ma'bell) nor lay them afresh without being billg hisself. now guess who demands this money? the very FCC!
It is often a cheaper and a simpler solution to just run a shielded cable. In India, where such zoning and municipal laws are lax, I have a 100 mbps ethernet drop into my home office. The electic poles are tapped for feeding the hubs on the way as well as providing the physical support for the cable high above the reach of straying cows, buffalos, kids on bikes and cable thieves.
The cable operators pay the electricity folks a fixed low per-pole charge. In the case of BPL, i think it is more of FCC trying to save the phone companies than creating a new last mile solution.
Why can't we lay more cable in anycase? it is a cheaper option.
The point often missed about HF is that like ozone layer, it really affects the entire world. I have a 5 watt transceiver that regularly goes around the world (www.phonestack.com/farhan) using just a 10 meter stretch of wire for an antenna. the noise that BPL will generate can easily disrupt global HF communications that form the backbone for many countries even today. Imagine the interference BPL would create by contributing megawatts of power radiating over millions of miles of wires all over the country.
blaming amateurs is really a shame. especially at slashdot. from the early open source tcp/ip (the KA9Q) to Alan cox. Amateurs have frontlined development of Internet. the very idea of personal science (as something that individuals pursue for pure satisfaction) that propels towards free and open softwares finds its foundations in amateur radio.
Amateur radio is really the only open source communication technology. Everywhere else, you still pay per use. It is also the classic peer to peer technology, it requires no 'service providers' at all just you and a couple of transistors connected to a clothline. The entire communication stack (read morse code decoder) is in your head. how's that for a setup?
I would add to this that, whenever you create a technology, remember that it can be used on you.
Now, if you were to look at who created and used the nukes, agent orange, etc. you will realise, that in this game, you really can't sue the other side for intellectual property rights over weapons of mass destruction.
once you have created a weapon, it is for everybody to use. whether you like it or not.
you are grossly mistakened. don't think that india and indians are pushovers. the top five IT companies of india are all CMM-5 certified. their software quality is far better or equal to that of any usa company. so, stop being sarcastic about the 'indian quality'. If these companies listed on the NASDAQ, they would be in the top five.
as for the indian life style, you have NO idea of the comforts avaiable here. the cell phones cost less than a cent per minute. a pepsi bottle (yes, the very same) sells here for 10 cents. a train ticket covering 600 miles costs less than 10 dollars. getting root canal costs about $100.
as for the women (someone mentioned the quality of dates), we have won more beauty pagenents in the last five years than any other country.
indians are surely not jeffersons, probably they opted out. but nevertheless, they have less crime, more money to spare (yes, true), and far fewer debts to pay.
well, the logic of all this runs on simple but deeper thread:
1) usa consumes materials from all over the world, and does pay back fully. hence, there is a trade deficit.
2) to overcome this, usa has to sell it products and services (read microsoft, pepsi, mc donalds and michael jackson) to the world. note that:the usa is unable to sell anything like oil, steel or power. it can only sell things produced intellectually because usa has killed it materially productive industries.
3) when usa asks countries like india to open up its markets to usa products, it cannot refuse to open up usa markets to its programmers (india has a huge supply of people, more english speakers in india than rest of the world put together).
4) the indian economy is a low cost economy. it has something to do with the culture. most of the indians owe no debts (majority have no credit cards either), infact, almost all have small savings. as a result, living is cheap. and salaries are lower.
now rather than blaming the indians and callling them names (about being hopeless programmers), it might do americans well to blame those who have made it an expensive country to live in.
i can vouch that a programmer in india (even at $5 an hour) will earn Rs.40,000. That will allow him to have a five star date every weekend, maintain a decent car and live in a decent neighbourhood.
now if $5 goes such a long way in india, you should really be thinking of what went wrong with the usa economy. it is time for serious contemplation.
BPB reprints several publishers from the USA for software books. Prentice Hall (India) publishes quite a few classics like the K and R.
Someone wrote that the K and R is available for $2. Not true. It is available for $5. But there are still cheaper ways to get books. India has a flourishing market of second hand books. these are hand-me-downs. A book typically listed for Rs.200 can be had for Rs. 50 in the seconds market (Rs.50 is approximately about a dollar).
If you still want it to be cheaper, you can even hire a book for the semester at 10% of the listed price. You have to return the book in reasonable condition though. Finally, most of the schools (including the one I went to) have a tradition of the seniors passing on their text-books to their juniors. It is not with regret that I noted that my cousin (who is now in the same school) is using the same copy of Kimberley that i studied.
u would pay rs.4 million for that sort of a thing. that is about $80,000 per year. plus the cost of modems and leased line installation. the whole would come to about $100,000. Now, for real comparision, my drive is paid $60 per month. and a rail ticket from one end of india to another (1000 miles) costs $10. get the picture?
1. simputer at $216 is a very simplistic estimate (it it is not the list price). the $216 is the sum of prices of its parts if bought in bulk. it does not include the cost of assembling, testing, packing, CEO's lifestyle, rent of the office space, etc. By the time you add it all up and pay the taxes, the price could well touch $500. i bet a dollar it wont cost less $400.
2. simputer is a hardware platform that is not very different from ipaq. it uses arm processor, it has all the standard hardware features of a pocket pc. in that case, wouldnt it make sense to port simputer's software to existing hardware platforms that can leverage the economies of their existing scale of production?
3. dont be fooled into thinking that simputer is an open design. to use it, you have to pay them. check their fine print. their software is free, but their hardware design is not. which may explain why they didnt port it to existing pda platforms.
4. there is nothing especially about the simputer hardware than cannot be achieved, lets say, using the $150 handspring pda. then why pay more?