Fuji films still manufactures instant films. I live in India, and over here instant films are still quite popular for id card photographs, etc. Check out www.bhphotovideo.com to find Fuji films which would be compatible with polaroid cameras..
"The Hindu" is a respectable newspaper. It is one of the larger english dailies in India, published from quite a few cities.
The monkeymen story was actually quite a big news item for almost a week here in Delhi. It was all over the news and if you go thru the archives of any major indian newspaper, you will find a refference to the mysterious monkey man. Basically it was a thief/murderer who dressed up as a monkey!
From my understanding, India is a country of Very rich and Very poor. The middle class, if you would, is a newer concept (thanks to the tech boom).
There has been a big middle class in India. It is not like in the US, but still quite big. In a country of 1 billion+ residents, even if 10% form the middle class that is around 100 million people. And in India there are a lot more than 100 million in the middle class
So, if these villages lean to the poor side (assuming if you had $ you would live in a city) would you even have a computer? If not, what good is broadband?
While the average villager in India is poor. There are parts of the country where villagers do make good money. Farming is a profitable business in India for the landowners.
Re:Indian law specifically protects PlayFair
on
Update on Playfair
·
· Score: 1
The real beauty of Indian Law is that you can get a stay order against anything. Indian courts take years to resolve any case and typically the situation is like this:
- Person X does something wrong. - There is a case registered against X. - X obtains a stay order or figures our some legal means to delay court dates. Typically a case would drag on for quite some time. In a high profile case like this, the courts might be less willing to accomodate X's request. - After the lawyers have made their money, some result comes out (It really doesn't matter much if the result comes out after 5-10 years)
In India, just like in the US it is the lawyers who end up making most ammounts of money. But unlike in the US, there is no concept of mega compensations in civil cases. Mostly the law is very clear and the fines are ridiculously low.
In this case there is a clear law, and the defendants just need to get some good lawyer to fight their case to win. But it is not about winning/loosing the case that is the issue. It is the time taken for the case to be resolved that is going to matter most.
Apple could also use the standard delaying tactics along with a stay order against sarovar.org and it's ISP. So in effect what would happen is that Apple would obtain a restriction and then pay their lawyers to delay the case for 4-5 years. By which time there would hardly be any intrest left in this case!
With the influx of cash and availability of higher incomes (according to local standards), how'd Indian real estate market doing? What does it cost to rent a two-bedroom for the family? To buy a house?
Real estate is already quite expensive over here, especially in Delhi & Bombay. Buying a house is real expensive, given what an average person earns. Most Indians living in the big cities don't own the house they live in.
Do you think that Indian IT boom will repeat Californian and Eastern European patterns, where availability of US dollars drove the living costs through the roof, thus making developers not a whole lot cheaper than hiring local American engineers?
Do you see the costs rising in Indian real estate market? What would be the monthly salary, according to your estimate, to have a comfortable living in India in 2004, and let's say, 2009?
Prices are already too high in India. In fact with increased real estate development and lowering of intrest rates for housing loans, cost of buying a new house has actually gone down. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a real estate boom in India. Now things have stabilized and over the last few years prices have started to come down.
Buying a 2-3 bedroom appartment costs at least Rs 1 - 1.5 million (approx US $20-30,000) in Delhi. In locations, the cost of a 3 or 4 bedroom house can be quite a bit more than Rs 10 million (around $200,000).
The situation with rented accomodation is quite different. Because of some old rental laws, people who have been living in the same rented house for a long time are paying real low rents. Even if you take a house on rent now, the costs are quite low. A house that would sell for say Rs. 6,000,000 (around $120,000) would be available for rent at Rs. 20,000 per month, or even less.
As an example, let's take, for example a certain Desktop publishing layout software from a company in Denver Colorado. This company's product has had a virtual monopoly in DTP for more than 13 years. About three or four years ago, IIRC, that company (use your brains as to who that is) outsourced the entire software development to India. About six months to a year later, Indian developers from this company started popping up in developer mailing lists asking really basic C/C++ questions and acting very arrogant when they didn't get immediate answers. Aparently those Indian developers were so bad (relatively speaking, probably more a management problem) that it took them almost three years to port that DTP programme to Mac OSX, where it finally turned up a few months ago.
It is intresting that you bring up the issue of Quark (the company from Denver!!). They are known as a bad company even by Indian IT standards. Most of the problems that Quark face is mainly because of 2 factors. They have real bad HR policies and they are located in a city (Chandigarh) which has very few IT companies. Together this makes for a combination that makes it nearly impossible for them to hire and then retain good quality talent. It is no surprise that they got coders who don't even know basic C/C++!
I have had a few friends work at Quark, and all of them left the company within one year. Most of them didn't know about the really bad HR practices that Quark had followed before they joined.
Quark is right now known as a company where you go if you are out of a job and need to get a big company's name in the resume. Getting into quark india is a joke. If you really wan't to work for a DTP company, then come to India and work for Quark.
Quark is probably the worst example of what can happen if you outsource to India. I am sure that if they followed similar practices in the US, they would be with no developers right now.
A typical Indian developer working at one of the bigger outsourcing firms would definitely be better than one working at Quark! It is surprising how one bad american company can give such a bad impression of Indian developers. I have worked with developers from around the world, and have met all types of them. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys. If you pay peanuts and try to save big time by hiring cheap indian programmers you only get stupid code monkeys.
Slavery is illegal in India. And although there are cases of slavery being brought out, it is clearly on it's way out.
It is not something that has been eradicated fully even from the US. You have high tech slaves in the form of H1B workers who are kept at a low wage and made to work long hours because of the pecularities of the H1B visa. And then there are frequent reports of sweat shops operating in the US with what is in effect slave labour.
You don't need to bash India as a country that promotes slavery. Even the US does the same thing. In fact in the US the government even helps slavery with the H1B program, while in India there is no such equavalent that is abused in this manner! What makes the US so different from India in this regard? Is it that most of the people who are slave labours in the US are illegal immigrants, while in India they are locals?
Now if Bram would just get busy and figure out how to swarm a multimedia feed, we could solve the bandwidth problem for that.
Radio on the net, video on the net...the problem is the multiplying lag factor. You need to organize the swarm into tiers, by lag. Tough but doable. Add support for IP broadcast, where available...
For most streaming services like net radio and net video, it is not lag that really matters, but being able to keep a constant data rate. I won't really mind if a radio or tv station was 5-10 secs behind time. This already happens to a certain extent with satellites and TV. Sometimes when the same live sports program is comming on 2 channels, you can switch between them and see that one is ahead of the other.
There is an existing solution for this problem. It is called IP multicasting. Windows media server supports this too. I don't know exactly why, but IP multicasting doesn't on the internet. Also with streaming, you will end up with clients uploading more than they are downloading, as you can't use swarming techniques. So I doubt if streaming media will get any help from BitTorrent like technology.
In fact in India SCO has been promoting Linux a bit too hard. Some of their representatives started spamming Delhi LUG's mailing list with offer to participate in a paid for Linux symposium sponsored by sco. And this was as a reply to any mail sent to the mailing list.
If you are stuck with IE on windows, then check out the combination of Crazy Browser and Proxomitron. Crazy Browser provides a tabbed interface using the IE engine and while it has a built in popup blocker, popups just open on another tab, so you don't have much problem ignoring them. Proxomitron is proxy with ad busting and other features.
Moreover, the consistant argument CEOs and top officers make for their huge salaries and generous bonuses (in spite of drops in profits) is that they posess talents that are in short supply (leadership, strategic thinking, etc), and that the short supply demands large wages.
If that's the case, why isn't Americas marketing and executive class full of H1-Bs? If India is competant at generating engineers then I'm sure they're highly skilled at generating MBAs and marketing people, too.
There are 2 problems with importing MBAs and marketing people from India. The first problem is that marketing is a very localized activity, and what works in India is typically not what works in most countries. Second is that in India there is a huge market for marketing and MBA people.
But after all this, you still find a lot of Indians in a lot of American and Europian FMCG companies, although mostly outside Europe or US. Current President & CFO of Pepsi is an MBA from India. I suppose that if the US had an H1B program for MBAs, then there would have surely been more of them in the US.
if they make some sort of interface between e-books and text-to-speech. Instant 'sound-book' *smiles*. No longer do the visualy impared have to wait for someone to make the soundbook for them, no longer do I need to actually read the long, booring documents people send me at work./i
You should check out the Digital Talking Book specs. It is an open format and there are readers available which allows text to speech and other effects. Most of the readers have been designed with visually impaired target audience.
Even here in New Delhi, India we have a similar situation. In congested areas you leave your car keys with the parking lot attendents and then they move around the cars to take up all the space inside the lots. Of course there are parts of Old Delhi where people just park their cars at a parking lot and then take a cycle rikshaw to their destinations (which are max 3-4 kms from the nearest parking lots).
Especially when you consider that an Indian born male (to my knowledge) has never been in space.
Rakesh Sharma went to space abroad a Russian craft in 1984. He was the first Indian in space. His Soyuz re-entry capsule is still on display in a planetarium in Delhi.
This thought occurred to me last night while doing some kazaa downloading. Maybe a better P2p capture system would involve each client downloading 1 frame per movie, and sharing that with the world. The clients could assemble the movie from a distributed network, much like a frame server does in premiere.
eDonkey does something similar for the files that it downloads. It divides the file into 9mb chunks and when you have one complete chunk, that part is shared on the network. It works really nicely for large files like movies and ISOs. eDonkey also has this neat feature of having urls that stores the file's hash value. So if you share a file, and wan't people to download that particullar file, you just publish the url on a web page. There are whole sites devoted to edonkey links. ShareReactor and FileNexus are the two most common such sites. Check them out and see the power of this system! The eDonkey network is based on servers and anyone can set up one. The maker of eDonkey has now come up with a serverless P2P system called OverNet that is based on the same edonkey protocols for file transfers and link sharing
If you wan't to use edonkey, then get the open source eMule client. It is an edonkey clone with better features and it is open source. It has a lot of mods for various types of addon features. I personally use the eMule Plus MOD. It even has a web server that you can use to control the client remotely!
The CDMA WiLL technology that is being deployed is a cellular phone system. The only thing is that handoffs are disabled in the system to make it comply with the regulations about WiLL. It is not very different from most CDMA cellular networks out there using similar technology. I am sure that even the handsets are same or with small firmware changes.
In India to get a cellular telephony operator's license, the operator has to use the GSM system and pay higher license fees than for land line phones. The government allowed the use of any kind of WiLL technology by land line operators to speed up the rollout of new telephone servies. But there is a small legal loophole that is being exploited by all the basic telephony operators to provide limited mobility using CDMA technology. The main problem with the CDMA WiLL technology is that the call won't follow you across cells when you are moving around or allow for roaming, otherwise it behaves like your regular cellular phone network. The issue is not about tech
Also the government run telco,MTNL, has been offering similar services in Delhi and Mumbai for more than 2 years now and with similar price structure. The MTNL scheme didn't pick up because of the limited number of connections that they gave out (around 20,000 in delhi) and the poor quality of their network. MTNL also runs a GSM cellphone service and that too has not really picked up because of the network quality in the initial stages. The technology is not new. What is new is the promoter behind this and some additional services. There are other private companies giving similar services for the same price!
What are the cable deals like for Slashdot readers outside of the US?
I live in New Delhi, India. Here I pay INR 250 per month (Approx USD 5.2) and I get everything that is available to cable subscribers in India. I get around 65 channels. The cable operators over here just give you a mix of channels. And there are no blocked channels. Here the cable operators typically underreport their subscriber base and pay the channel operators for only a small fraction of the actual subscribers. Cable TV industry is still quite small in india, and in most parts of delhi there are 2 operators or more. Most of the operators are quire small. Limited to only a small part of the city.
I don't know why television software companies can't sell me a copy of my favourite show after it is aired. I have to download using p2p sw and see the latest episodes of some of my favourite shows because in my area they are not just aired. I live in India, and I am sure that by downloading the latest episode of Friends or Fraiser, I am not denying any of the networks revenue when I download these episodes. All that I ask for is a the ability to download these shows from a good, reliable server and I will pay for the service. Is this that hard to deliver?
Now I can get similar service from p2p networks like edonkey right now. Sites like www.sharereactor.com and www.filenexus.com provide for links to these latest episodes very soon after they are aired. If we can get this kinda service legally, I am very sure many people won't be visiting these sites to get their share of the latest episodes.
EXACTLY. I had the same experience trying to locate 3 episodes of last season's Buffy that I missed. It was a PITA to find a server, download the episodes in 10 meg pieces (with several retries), and assemble and convert them into something vlc could handle.
Have you tried out edonkey (www.edonkey2000.com) and sites like sharereactor.com, filenexus.com, etc. Edonkey makes p2p such a nice thing when you pair it with these sites.
This story is very very shady. Note that there isn't a paper called Hindustani (note the i) Times. There's Hindustan Times and it's online version has no mention of this at all.
Hindustan Times is one of the larger newspapers in india. It is the largest selling newspaper in the capital city of Delhi. I get this paper, and this news was the main headline on the front page of the newspaper a few days back.
The online versions of most of the Indian newspapers don't carry all the news items.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuji films still manufactures instant films. I live in India, and over here instant films are still quite popular for id card photographs, etc. Check out www.bhphotovideo.com to find Fuji films which would be compatible with polaroid cameras..
"The Hindu" is a respectable newspaper. It is one of the larger english dailies in India, published from quite a few cities.
The monkeymen story was actually quite a big news item for almost a week here in Delhi. It was all over the news and if you go thru the archives of any major indian newspaper, you will find a refference to the mysterious monkey man. Basically it was a thief/murderer who dressed up as a monkey!
From my understanding, India is a country of Very rich and Very poor. The middle class, if you would, is a newer concept (thanks to the tech boom).
There has been a big middle class in India. It is not like in the US, but still quite big. In a country of 1 billion+ residents, even if 10% form the middle class that is around 100 million people. And in India there are a lot more than 100 million in the middle class
So, if these villages lean to the poor side (assuming if you had $ you would live in a city) would you even have a computer? If not, what good is broadband?
While the average villager in India is poor. There are parts of the country where villagers do make good money. Farming is a profitable business in India for the landowners.
The real beauty of Indian Law is that you can get a stay order against anything. Indian courts take years to resolve any case and typically the situation is like this:
- Person X does something wrong.
- There is a case registered against X.
- X obtains a stay order or figures our some legal means to delay court dates. Typically a case would drag on for quite some time. In a high profile case like this, the courts might be less willing to accomodate X's request.
- After the lawyers have made their money, some result comes out (It really doesn't matter much if the result comes out after 5-10 years)
In India, just like in the US it is the lawyers who end up making most ammounts of money. But unlike in the US, there is no concept of mega compensations in civil cases. Mostly the law is very clear and the fines are ridiculously low.
In this case there is a clear law, and the defendants just need to get some good lawyer to fight their case to win. But it is not about winning/loosing the case that is the issue. It is the time taken for the case to be resolved that is going to matter most.
Apple could also use the standard delaying tactics along with a stay order against sarovar.org and it's ISP. So in effect what would happen is that Apple would obtain a restriction and then pay their lawyers to delay the case for 4-5 years. By which time there would hardly be any intrest left in this case!
BTW.. I am from India.
Because you can then bill for the time it would take to re-write the code that you re-used ;-)
/. while you get paid for it too!
And you can then end up reading
With the influx of cash and availability of higher incomes (according to local standards), how'd Indian real estate market doing? What does it cost to rent a two-bedroom for the family? To buy a house?
Real estate is already quite expensive over here, especially in Delhi & Bombay. Buying a house is real expensive, given what an average person earns. Most Indians living in the big cities don't own the house they live in.
Do you think that Indian IT boom will repeat Californian and Eastern European patterns, where availability of US dollars drove the living costs through the roof, thus making developers not a whole lot cheaper than hiring local American engineers?
Do you see the costs rising in Indian real estate market? What would be the monthly salary, according to your estimate, to have a comfortable living in India in 2004, and let's say, 2009?
Prices are already too high in India. In fact with increased real estate development and lowering of intrest rates for housing loans, cost of buying a new house has actually gone down. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a real estate boom in India. Now things have stabilized and over the last few years prices have started to come down.
Buying a 2-3 bedroom appartment costs at least Rs 1 - 1.5 million (approx US $20-30,000) in Delhi. In locations, the cost of a 3 or 4 bedroom house can be quite a bit more than Rs 10 million (around $200,000).
The situation with rented accomodation is quite different. Because of some old rental laws, people who have been living in the same rented house for a long time are paying real low rents. Even if you take a house on rent now, the costs are quite low. A house that would sell for say Rs. 6,000,000 (around $120,000) would be available for rent at Rs. 20,000 per month, or even less.
BTW... I am from New Delhi.
Well..
/. at 2:30am from New Delhi!
/. target audience!
Reading
It is quite popular nowadays. Esp among the usual
www.anandtech.com. Select "Print this article" and you will have the article in a single page.
Well here is an actual comment from a friend of mine who used to be an employee of Quark india (the company in denver!!)
man Quark is left with assholes, and they need more assholes.. if u r good there is no space for u
As an example, let's take, for example a certain Desktop publishing layout software from a company in Denver Colorado. This company's product has had a virtual monopoly in DTP for more than 13 years. About three or four years ago, IIRC, that company (use your brains as to who that is) outsourced the entire software development to India. About six months to a year later, Indian developers from this company started popping up in developer mailing lists asking really basic C/C++ questions and acting very arrogant when they didn't get immediate answers. Aparently those Indian developers were so bad (relatively speaking, probably more a management problem) that it took them almost three years to port that DTP programme to Mac OSX, where it finally turned up a few months ago.
It is intresting that you bring up the issue of Quark (the company from Denver!!). They are known as a bad company even by Indian IT standards. Most of the problems that Quark face is mainly because of 2 factors. They have real bad HR policies and they are located in a city (Chandigarh) which has very few IT companies. Together this makes for a combination that makes it nearly impossible for them to hire and then retain good quality talent. It is no surprise that they got coders who don't even know basic C/C++!
I have had a few friends work at Quark, and all of them left the company within one year. Most of them didn't know about the really bad HR practices that Quark had followed before they joined.
Quark is right now known as a company where you go if you are out of a job and need to get a big company's name in the resume. Getting into quark india is a joke. If you really wan't to work for a DTP company, then come to India and work for Quark.
Quark is probably the worst example of what can happen if you outsource to India. I am sure that if they followed similar practices in the US, they would be with no developers right now.
A typical Indian developer working at one of the bigger outsourcing firms would definitely be better than one working at Quark! It is surprising how one bad american company can give such a bad impression of Indian developers. I have worked with developers from around the world, and have met all types of them. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys. If you pay peanuts and try to save big time by hiring cheap indian programmers you only get stupid code monkeys.
Slavery is illegal in India. And although there are cases of slavery being brought out, it is clearly on it's way out.
It is not something that has been eradicated fully even from the US. You have high tech slaves in the form of H1B workers who are kept at a low wage and made to work long hours because of the pecularities of the H1B visa. And then there are frequent reports of sweat shops operating in the US with what is in effect slave labour.
You don't need to bash India as a country that promotes slavery. Even the US does the same thing. In fact in the US the government even helps slavery with the H1B program, while in India there is no such equavalent that is abused in this manner! What makes the US so different from India in this regard? Is it that most of the people who are slave labours in the US are illegal immigrants, while in India they are locals?
Now if Bram would just get busy and figure out how to swarm a multimedia feed, we could solve the bandwidth problem for that.
Radio on the net, video on the net...the problem is the multiplying lag factor. You need to organize the swarm into tiers, by lag. Tough but doable. Add support for IP broadcast, where available...
For most streaming services like net radio and net video, it is not lag that really matters, but being able to keep a constant data rate. I won't really mind if a radio or tv station was 5-10 secs behind time. This already happens to a certain extent with satellites and TV. Sometimes when the same live sports program is comming on 2 channels, you can switch between them and see that one is ahead of the other.
There is an existing solution for this problem. It is called IP multicasting. Windows media server supports this too. I don't know exactly why, but IP multicasting doesn't on the internet. Also with streaming, you will end up with clients uploading more than they are downloading, as you can't use swarming techniques. So I doubt if streaming media will get any help from BitTorrent like technology.
In fact in India SCO has been promoting Linux a bit too hard. Some of their representatives started spamming Delhi LUG's mailing list with offer to participate in a paid for Linux symposium sponsored by sco. And this was as a reply to any mail sent to the mailing list.
If you are stuck with IE on windows, then check out the combination of Crazy Browser and Proxomitron. Crazy Browser provides a tabbed interface using the IE engine and while it has a built in popup blocker, popups just open on another tab, so you don't have much problem ignoring them. Proxomitron is proxy with ad busting and other features.
Moreover, the consistant argument CEOs and top officers make for their huge salaries and generous bonuses (in spite of drops in profits) is that they posess talents that are in short supply (leadership, strategic thinking, etc), and that the short supply demands large wages.
If that's the case, why isn't Americas marketing and executive class full of H1-Bs? If India is competant at generating engineers then I'm sure they're highly skilled at generating MBAs and marketing people, too.
There are 2 problems with importing MBAs and marketing people from India. The first problem is that marketing is a very localized activity, and what works in India is typically not what works in most countries. Second is that in India there is a huge market for marketing and MBA people.
But after all this, you still find a lot of Indians in a lot of American and Europian FMCG companies, although mostly outside Europe or US. Current President & CFO of Pepsi is an MBA from India. I suppose that if the US had an H1B program for MBAs, then there would have surely been more of them in the US.
yora
if they make some sort of interface between e-books and text-to-speech. Instant 'sound-book' *smiles*. No longer do the visualy impared have to wait for someone to make the soundbook for them, no longer do I need to actually read the long, booring documents people send me at work./i
You should check out the Digital Talking Book specs. It is an open format and there are readers available which allows text to speech and other effects. Most of the readers have been designed with visually impaired target audience.
yora
Even here in New Delhi, India we have a similar situation. In congested areas you leave your car keys with the parking lot attendents and then they move around the cars to take up all the space inside the lots. Of course there are parts of Old Delhi where people just park their cars at a parking lot and then take a cycle rikshaw to their destinations (which are max 3-4 kms from the nearest parking lots).
Ambar
Especially when you consider that an Indian born male (to my knowledge) has never been in space.
Rakesh Sharma went to space abroad a Russian craft in 1984. He was the first Indian in space. His Soyuz re-entry capsule is still on display in a planetarium in Delhi.
This thought occurred to me last night while doing some kazaa downloading. Maybe a better P2p capture system would involve each client downloading 1 frame per movie, and sharing that with the world. The clients could assemble the movie from a distributed network, much like a frame server does in premiere.
eDonkey does something similar for the files that it downloads. It divides the file into 9mb chunks and when you have one complete chunk, that part is shared on the network. It works really nicely for large files like movies and ISOs. eDonkey also has this neat feature of having urls that stores the file's hash value. So if you share a file, and wan't people to download that particullar file, you just publish the url on a web page. There are whole sites devoted to edonkey links. ShareReactor and FileNexus are the two most common such sites. Check them out and see the power of this system! The eDonkey network is based on servers and anyone can set up one. The maker of eDonkey has now come up with a serverless P2P system called OverNet that is based on the same edonkey protocols for file transfers and link sharing
If you wan't to use edonkey, then get the open source eMule client. It is an edonkey clone with better features and it is open source. It has a lot of mods for various types of addon features. I personally use the eMule Plus MOD. It even has a web server that you can use to control the client remotely!
This system is WiLL which means no handoffs.
The CDMA WiLL technology that is being deployed is a cellular phone system. The only thing is that handoffs are disabled in the system to make it comply with the regulations about WiLL. It is not very different from most CDMA cellular networks out there using similar technology. I am sure that even the handsets are same or with small firmware changes.
In India to get a cellular telephony operator's license, the operator has to use the GSM system and pay higher license fees than for land line phones. The government allowed the use of any kind of WiLL technology by land line operators to speed up the rollout of new telephone servies. But there is a small legal loophole that is being exploited by all the basic telephony operators to provide limited mobility using CDMA technology. The main problem with the CDMA WiLL technology is that the call won't follow you across cells when you are moving around or allow for roaming, otherwise it behaves like your regular cellular phone network. The issue is not about tech
Also the government run telco,MTNL, has been offering similar services in Delhi and Mumbai for more than 2 years now and with similar price structure. The MTNL scheme didn't pick up because of the limited number of connections that they gave out (around 20,000 in delhi) and the poor quality of their network. MTNL also runs a GSM cellphone service and that too has not really picked up because of the network quality in the initial stages. The technology is not new. What is new is the promoter behind this and some additional services. There are other private companies giving similar services for the same price!
What are the cable deals like for Slashdot readers outside of the US?
I live in New Delhi, India. Here I pay INR 250 per month (Approx USD 5.2) and I get everything that is available to cable subscribers in India. I get around 65 channels. The cable operators over here just give you a mix of channels. And there are no blocked channels. Here the cable operators typically underreport their subscriber base and pay the channel operators for only a small fraction of the actual subscribers. Cable TV industry is still quite small in india, and in most parts of delhi there are 2 operators or more. Most of the operators are quire small. Limited to only a small part of the city.I don't know why television software companies can't sell me a copy of my favourite show after it is aired. I have to download using p2p sw and see the latest episodes of some of my favourite shows because in my area they are not just aired. I live in India, and I am sure that by downloading the latest episode of Friends or Fraiser, I am not denying any of the networks revenue when I download these episodes. All that I ask for is a the ability to download these shows from a good, reliable server and I will pay for the service. Is this that hard to deliver?
Now I can get similar service from p2p networks like edonkey right now. Sites like www.sharereactor.com and www.filenexus.com provide for links to these latest episodes very soon after they are aired. If we can get this kinda service legally, I am very sure many people won't be visiting these sites to get their share of the latest episodes.
EXACTLY. I had the same experience trying to locate 3 episodes of last season's Buffy that I missed. It was a PITA to find a server, download the episodes in 10 meg pieces (with several retries), and assemble and convert them into something vlc could handle.
Have you tried out edonkey (www.edonkey2000.com) and sites like sharereactor.com, filenexus.com, etc. Edonkey makes p2p such a nice thing when you pair it with these sites.
This story is very very shady. Note that there isn't a paper called Hindustani (note the i) Times. There's Hindustan Times and it's online version has no mention of this at all.
Hindustan Times is one of the larger newspapers in india. It is the largest selling newspaper in the capital city of Delhi. I get this paper, and this news was the main headline on the front page of the newspaper a few days back.
The online versions of most of the Indian newspapers don't carry all the news items.
VMWare doesn't allow you to run VMWare inside a VMWare guest OS