It's quite a solid piece of hardware, and Symbian^3 isn't bad either. The first firmware update later this year promises to update the built in Qt runtime to 4.7, replace the existing dog of a S60 browser with a Qt based one, and other improvements.
And because of the way Symbian's been designed from the ground up to work with limited CPU cycles/memory, it runs exceedingly well with a 680 MHz ARM11 and a Broadcom GPU. Angry Birds has been ported to Symbian, Need for Speed Shift looks gorgeous, and HD videos play smoothly on the AMOLED display. Detractors crow over the gigahertz class CPUs on rival Android/iOS devices, but consider that Android practically REQUIRES that sort of CPU power for its eyecandy. A lower specced Android phone just doesn't cut it for speed. And while battery technology doesn't keep up with clock speed, GHz level CPUs are going to guzzle battery as well.
My phone lasts great for 2 days with wifi permanently on and push email running for GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo, with around 2-3 hours of calls a day and moderate web browsing and youtube. It has a power saving mode as well, that reduces display brightness and other settings in one go to consume less power.
For all the bullshit in this article, he never even talks about Nokia's Q3 financial performance. They've sold 26.5 million smartphones, with an operating profit of €529 million, and net sales of €10.3 billion.
Today in India, you can buy a Symbian based Nokia C5 for about INR 7000 unsubsidized (about $160). Just a couple of years ago that was unthinkable for a Symbian phone, they typically cost double or more. Nokia's pushing smartphones lower into the mass market with Symbian - they're able to standardize the hardware (600 MHz ARM CPUs as of now) and because of Symbian's scalability it can power these low end handsets.
Meego will wind up for the successors to the N900 and probably be a netbook/smartphone hybrid OS, with appropriately beefy hardware and targeted at the high end market.
And both Meego and Symbian will be bound by Qt for application development, so that there's no fragmentation going forward for developers. Qt is a proven toolkit, in use by Skype, Google Maps and VLC, and can be used to make desktop apps for Windows/Linux/Mac as well.
And naturally everything here is true honest open source, not locked down or restricted like the 2 competing phone OSes(Android the OS being restricted by its device manufacturers even if it itself is open source).
I see this as quite good - an incentive for developers to write apps that will reach the entire world, not just the US (there's 10 million downloads a day on Ovi Store as of now, it seems), while using standard development tools that can be used outside of mobile phones as well.
Mod parent up. As someone in another thread pointed out, the average voter doesn't really care about Nasa as it doesn't affect his/her life directly. If the Cold War lunar trips were boosted by competition from the Soviets, perhaps China being the new bugbear will really inspire the US to get NASA back on track.
point me at a company that hasn't released a product with an engineering flaw
Every company would have released a flawed product at some point or the other. But when you portray yourself as totally perfect, that those who don't use your products are losers (I'm a Mac/PC commercials) and claim to have super high standards of quality, expect to be held to them; expect to be excessively celebrated for your successes as well as excessively vilified for your faults.
For all their claims to design perfection - using the metal back cover as part of the antenna is an incredible degree of high school level physics class fail. And instead of owning up to the fault, Jobs says 'You're holding it wrong'. Because he knows that even if he slaps white paint on a smooth pebble and calls it an iStone, it'll be sold out before the day is done.
IBM offers an installable 'client for eBusiness' OS image based on RHEL for the last 3-4 years for employees. It comes with Lotus Notes, Sametime and whatever other IBM software is used internally, and is supported by the IT team as well.
Some people I know dual boot this along with XP on their company laptops.
They've been playing catch up to Android/iOS so far in the UI department, and Symbian^3 is an improvement, though not totally there (I bought an N8 a couple of days back).
They're promoting Qt as a development toolkit. Symbian^3 has support for Qt as well as the older S60 applications, while earlier Symbian devices need the Qt runtime installed for them.
Qt is also supported on the N900's Maemo, and will be a part of Meego as well. Qt is also a proven toolkit - it is used in well known products like VLC and Skype.
Symbian^3 is a stop gap until the Symbian^4/Meego devices start shipping next year, and developers can write apps that will work across all these OSes. I think Nokia should be able to pull this off. Let's look at the others-
1) Apple - One trick pony. Single OS, single device. This is good for them, but not everyone can afford an iPhone sans contract outside the US and it remains a premium product.
2) Google - Make the OS only, letting manufacturers dick around with Android and resulting in the fragmentation mentioned in the article.
3) Microsoft - Same as Google, they've been making WinMobile for close to a decade but it's not popular.
Only RIM and Nokia have one OS to rule their stable of devices. Symbian and Meego allow Nokia to churn out multiple models at different price points with varying features, but developers need not worry about the underlying hardware. If they need a specific capability like GPS or an accelerometer, the app won't install on a phone that doesn't have it.
I guess this will elicit yawns from US readers, but consider that the 5800 Xpressmusic (a Symbian^1 device) has sold over 10 million so far worldwide.
And why do you think IBM has a better incentive than Oracle?
Disclaimer: I work for IBM's Java Technology Center.
Because IBM also uses Java as the core component of all its software brands - Rational,Lotus,Websphere,Tivoli - all of them run on IBM's Java. Also IBM provides JDKs for its own platforms (AIX, z/OS and Linux on System p/z) to support the same brands.
Essentially,Java is crucial to allow modern enterprise applications to run on mainframes and legacy OSes like System p/z without having to code native applications for them, and which can benefit from the traditional stability and processing power of large mainframes.
Torrents still require hosts to share them and the entire internet infrastructure. Seeders also wax and wane over time- sure, popular movies/music will always be shared, but what about obscure stuff? How easy is it to say, find a torrent of some little known movie from the 70s? We still need a Library of Congress type offline archive for all these things.
Games are interactive, films and books are not. I'm not basing interactivity as a case against such games, but just consider this- Many kids don't really bother about the backstory of a game- they skip through the cutscenes and just get into the action.
So if a kid approaches this game the same way as CoD or any other multiplayer game, then isn't the purpose lost?
How many do you think would prefer to choose the role of the escapee rather than the guard?
Better would have been to create a stealth kind of game like the old Thief series, where you only act as an escapee and have to sneak past the guards.
Back when there was no internet, these same people shrugged and got on with their lives if they couldn't afford/didn't want to pay for the software/music/movie. Total revenue for software developer/studio = 0
Today they're getting copies for free, and the revenue is still zero.
They were never a market to begin with, so rather than focus on preventing them from getting to it, publishers (of software/music/movies/books etc) should focus on not pissing off their paying customers and driving them to piracy by DRM or other means.
Meego will take a while to catch on- if only because there's no devices running it as yet till next year (other than a couple of demos on netbooks).
I also have high hopes for Qt - it's a pedigreed GUI toolkit used by big name projects like VLC and Skype, and starting with the Nokia N8, will be shipped on all Symbian^3 devices. I'm sure there are plenty of Qt developers, who won't have to learn anything very different to build mobile apps; moreover they can easily adapt the same application for both desktop and mobile using Qt.
However, sometimes US trademark lawsuits cross the asinine into the surreal, like with the Sunrider controversy.
Summary - LucasArts created a Star Wars Expanded Universe character called Nomi Sunrider, who featured in a few comics and novels, and was to have appeared in the Knights of the Old Republic game. Jeep sued them for trademark infringement because they make a Sunrider range of soft top vehicles, and obviously their customers can't tell the difference between a fictional character and a vehicle.
Thanks to the lawsuit, LucasArts had to discontinue use of the character, and we got Bastila Shan in KOTOR instead.
So the Symbian UI is 'dated' and 'old'. Well, guess what,pick up a Palm PDA from 1995, any Symbian handset and the American darlings, iOS/Android - and look at the way the UI is presented.
What pray is so sexy or innovative about a gazillion icons presented in a scrolling view, as on the iPhone? Android does the same. So did Palm and so does Symbian/Nokia. Or is it the pretty transitions when you tilt the screen? Or the beveled edge buttons? GUIs have been about rows of icons to click on for ages. On a non touch mobile device, you use buttons to scroll/select while on a touchscreen you tap and slide your finger to scroll the display.
How many different ways is one to implement menus, checkboxes and radio buttons? Those are not going away any time soon. In 2006, Nokia introduced an optional new home screen that showed shortcuts to apps and alerts for new email/calendar appointments/nearby wifi networks. This is now far more customizable as in the upcoming Symbian^3, where you can have upto 3 homescreens with customizable widgets. Android also has something similar, but iOS as far as I've seen has no such native capability. That's not innovative?
Symbian has been designed from the ground up as an OS optimized for low CPU/memory usage, so it scales well from low to high end devices. It also has true preemptive multitasking since its 2002 debut- for example if there's too many apps open and there's an incoming call, the call takes priority over everything else and the OS will close a couple of background apps to free memory.
Compare that with the hottest new Samsung Galaxy S which sometimes fails at receiving a basic phone call.. You can't control when the phone syncs data, or using what type of connection- you need an APNDroid hack to stop it syncing permanently in the background!!
People rave about Snapdragon and gigahertz class CPUs for the newer Android devices, but the OS doesn't scale to lower specs at all. It practically requires a high powered CPU to power all that eyecandy.
Let's not even get started on the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco.
Symbian has matured over 8 years and got the basics right - power management, multitasking, making calls,managing data connections over GPRS/3G/wifi/Bluetooth etc. It has also supported themes since its inception -there's hundreds of custom themes with different icons and colors available since then on various sites, so it's not like you're stuck with the look and feel that it ships with out of the box either.
But well, superficial looks are all that matter in the end, apparently.
Or, welcome to India. The rich (not the publicly well known millionaires like the Ambanis or the Tatas) can fudge their accounts to avoid paying taxes.
The vast majority of the country is too poor to fall within the tax bracket.
Guess who ends up paying over 30% of their salary as taxes? The middle class, who don't have a choice anyway since tax is deducted at source by their employers.
I for one absolutely do not understand this attitude. It sounds like a 'hit and run' style of development. From experience, I've seen that it's hard to recollect why even I made a change barely a couple of weeks later - let alone understand changes by someone else long after they've moved on and are unavailable to help.
If you work at the same company for 2 years or more, chances are you'll wind up fixing a bug in a piece of code you originally wrote - and then this attitude will bite you in the ass.
Documentation doesn't have to be pages long, it can be an inline comment, or in your bug tracking/version control system along with the change. Even a simple 2 line description of what was changed for what purpose will save you and others tons of frustration later.
There's another way to look at documentation - if you've put in an easy to understand comment then you won't get a call suddenly from whoever's maintaining the code months after you've moved onto a different piece of work. A minor hassle that can save much pain later since you can royally proclaim "RTFM!"
I worked for a US based medical imaging software company - per HIPAA and other regulations, all changes had to be well documented. We were required to add javadoc comments for every new method introduced, or change to a method signature for easy readability in Eclipse, and no change would pass peer review if the accompanying explanation was unclear.
Perhaps there's an attitude of 'I'm doing it for free so don't complain if there's no documentation' with open source projects (at least the ones that aren't bankrolled by big companies that employ people to work on them)
Symbian bloated, based on what? It has evolved over 10 years scaling up from devices with very low processing power and memory to what's available today.
Android on the other hand doesn't scale backwards as much - it's one thing to crow about Snapdragon based CPUs until you realize that you need that kind of hardware to get a responsible UI on an Android. Take a look at this review of 2 low end phones - Symbian vs. Android. Android simply requires high spec'ed hardware to run. By contrast I've seen my nokia 6630 circa 2005 have the same decently fast UI and memory management as anything current.
I was pointing out that there's no connection between the Prussian military inspired school system and the caste system in India, where there wasn't any special training as such. Members of each caste passed on knowledge of their profession from father to son.
If anything, ancient India followed the Gurukul system, where students lived with their teachers away from family while they learned, and also performed daily chores for the teacher-a far cry from the military inspired setup of the Prussians that came about much later.
If so, then they learned it from the USA which learned it from Prussia which learned it from India's training for the underclasses of the Hindu caste system
Citation needed. I'm sick of people going on and on about the caste system without understanding anything about it. Castes initially began with the division of labor, broadly into the priests, warriors, artisans and untouchables. Within each category there are thousands of subcategories.
It is very important to note that no Hindu scripture endorses or enforces the concept, thus you can still call yourself a Hindu if you don't want to follow the system.
The trouble with caste started by people being locked into it by birth. The son of a blacksmith could not aspire to any other profession, for example. The untouchable castes were ostracized by the upper castes. There was no 'training' as such for anybody, and lower classes stayed illiterate.
If anything, the rote learning that is so common today in Indian education can be traced to Lord Macaulay, who famously dismissed all Indian/Arabic literature as not worth even a shelf in a Western library. (note 10)
He started the education system in India, which was aimed at producing clerks for the East India Company and later the British administration. These people would understand enough English to get work done but not form any kind of critical thinking that might lead to unrest and rebellion.
They used satellite phones, not cellphones. But yes, terrorism is cited as the main reason for SIM card registration. While registering you're required to show proof of identity- a passport/driving license and proof of residence.
Millions of people play MMOs without letting them take over their lives. If they can balance their time playing with other activities, what's this guy's problem?
How is NCSoft in any way liable for this guy wasting away his life on a game?
I'd say India's worse...even otherwise privacy is not considered important. This is a place where it's perfectly normal to start asking you personal questions within minutes of meeting for the first time.
Slashdot Mirror
And because of the way Symbian's been designed from the ground up to work with limited CPU cycles/memory, it runs exceedingly well with a 680 MHz ARM11 and a Broadcom GPU. Angry Birds has been ported to Symbian, Need for Speed Shift looks gorgeous, and HD videos play smoothly on the AMOLED display. Detractors crow over the gigahertz class CPUs on rival Android/iOS devices, but consider that Android practically REQUIRES that sort of CPU power for its eyecandy. A lower specced Android phone just doesn't cut it for speed. And while battery technology doesn't keep up with clock speed, GHz level CPUs are going to guzzle battery as well.
My phone lasts great for 2 days with wifi permanently on and push email running for GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo, with around 2-3 hours of calls a day and moderate web browsing and youtube. It has a power saving mode as well, that reduces display brightness and other settings in one go to consume less power.
For all the bullshit in this article, he never even talks about Nokia's Q3 financial performance. They've sold 26.5 million smartphones, with an operating profit of €529 million, and net sales of €10.3 billion. Today in India, you can buy a Symbian based Nokia C5 for about INR 7000 unsubsidized (about $160). Just a couple of years ago that was unthinkable for a Symbian phone, they typically cost double or more. Nokia's pushing smartphones lower into the mass market with Symbian - they're able to standardize the hardware (600 MHz ARM CPUs as of now) and because of Symbian's scalability it can power these low end handsets. Meego will wind up for the successors to the N900 and probably be a netbook/smartphone hybrid OS, with appropriately beefy hardware and targeted at the high end market. And both Meego and Symbian will be bound by Qt for application development, so that there's no fragmentation going forward for developers. Qt is a proven toolkit, in use by Skype, Google Maps and VLC, and can be used to make desktop apps for Windows/Linux/Mac as well. And naturally everything here is true honest open source, not locked down or restricted like the 2 competing phone OSes(Android the OS being restricted by its device manufacturers even if it itself is open source). I see this as quite good - an incentive for developers to write apps that will reach the entire world, not just the US (there's 10 million downloads a day on Ovi Store as of now, it seems), while using standard development tools that can be used outside of mobile phones as well.
Mod parent up. As someone in another thread pointed out, the average voter doesn't really care about Nasa as it doesn't affect his/her life directly. If the Cold War lunar trips were boosted by competition from the Soviets, perhaps China being the new bugbear will really inspire the US to get NASA back on track.
point me at a company that hasn't released a product with an engineering flaw
Every company would have released a flawed product at some point or the other. But when you portray yourself as totally perfect, that those who don't use your products are losers (I'm a Mac/PC commercials) and claim to have super high standards of quality, expect to be held to them; expect to be excessively celebrated for your successes as well as excessively vilified for your faults. For all their claims to design perfection - using the metal back cover as part of the antenna is an incredible degree of high school level physics class fail. And instead of owning up to the fault, Jobs says 'You're holding it wrong'. Because he knows that even if he slaps white paint on a smooth pebble and calls it an iStone, it'll be sold out before the day is done.
IBM offers an installable 'client for eBusiness' OS image based on RHEL for the last 3-4 years for employees. It comes with Lotus Notes, Sametime and whatever other IBM software is used internally, and is supported by the IT team as well. Some people I know dual boot this along with XP on their company laptops.
1) Apple - One trick pony. Single OS, single device. This is good for them, but not everyone can afford an iPhone sans contract outside the US and it remains a premium product.
2) Google - Make the OS only, letting manufacturers dick around with Android and resulting in the fragmentation mentioned in the article.
3) Microsoft - Same as Google, they've been making WinMobile for close to a decade but it's not popular.
Only RIM and Nokia have one OS to rule their stable of devices. Symbian and Meego allow Nokia to churn out multiple models at different price points with varying features, but developers need not worry about the underlying hardware. If they need a specific capability like GPS or an accelerometer, the app won't install on a phone that doesn't have it.
I guess this will elicit yawns from US readers, but consider that the 5800 Xpressmusic (a Symbian^1 device) has sold over 10 million so far worldwide.
And why do you think IBM has a better incentive than Oracle?
Disclaimer: I work for IBM's Java Technology Center.
Because IBM also uses Java as the core component of all its software brands - Rational,Lotus,Websphere,Tivoli - all of them run on IBM's Java. Also IBM provides JDKs for its own platforms (AIX, z/OS and Linux on System p/z) to support the same brands. Essentially,Java is crucial to allow modern enterprise applications to run on mainframes and legacy OSes like System p/z without having to code native applications for them, and which can benefit from the traditional stability and processing power of large mainframes.
Here's a Greasemonkey based permanent solution
Torrents still require hosts to share them and the entire internet infrastructure. Seeders also wax and wane over time- sure, popular movies/music will always be shared, but what about obscure stuff? How easy is it to say, find a torrent of some little known movie from the 70s? We still need a Library of Congress type offline archive for all these things.
Games are interactive, films and books are not. I'm not basing interactivity as a case against such games, but just consider this- Many kids don't really bother about the backstory of a game- they skip through the cutscenes and just get into the action.
So if a kid approaches this game the same way as CoD or any other multiplayer game, then isn't the purpose lost? How many do you think would prefer to choose the role of the escapee rather than the guard? Better would have been to create a stealth kind of game like the old Thief series, where you only act as an escapee and have to sneak past the guards.
Back when there was no internet, these same people shrugged and got on with their lives if they couldn't afford/didn't want to pay for the software/music/movie. Total revenue for software developer/studio = 0 Today they're getting copies for free, and the revenue is still zero. They were never a market to begin with, so rather than focus on preventing them from getting to it, publishers (of software/music/movies/books etc) should focus on not pissing off their paying customers and driving them to piracy by DRM or other means.
Meego will take a while to catch on- if only because there's no devices running it as yet till next year (other than a couple of demos on netbooks). I also have high hopes for Qt - it's a pedigreed GUI toolkit used by big name projects like VLC and Skype, and starting with the Nokia N8, will be shipped on all Symbian^3 devices. I'm sure there are plenty of Qt developers, who won't have to learn anything very different to build mobile apps; moreover they can easily adapt the same application for both desktop and mobile using Qt.
This is not really a surprise considering it is the only mainstream open platform not tied to any particular hardware.
You forgot Symbian..been around since 2002.
However, sometimes US trademark lawsuits cross the asinine into the surreal, like with the Sunrider controversy.
Summary - LucasArts created a Star Wars Expanded Universe character called Nomi Sunrider, who featured in a few comics and novels, and was to have appeared in the Knights of the Old Republic game. Jeep sued them for trademark infringement because they make a Sunrider range of soft top vehicles, and obviously their customers can't tell the difference between a fictional character and a vehicle. Thanks to the lawsuit, LucasArts had to discontinue use of the character, and we got Bastila Shan in KOTOR instead.
Cisco had the trademark on 'iPhone' long before the fruit(cake) phone launched, later the 2 companies came up with an agreement.
So the Symbian UI is 'dated' and 'old'. Well, guess what,pick up a Palm PDA from 1995, any Symbian handset and the American darlings, iOS/Android - and look at the way the UI is presented. What pray is so sexy or innovative about a gazillion icons presented in a scrolling view, as on the iPhone? Android does the same. So did Palm and so does Symbian/Nokia. Or is it the pretty transitions when you tilt the screen? Or the beveled edge buttons? GUIs have been about rows of icons to click on for ages. On a non touch mobile device, you use buttons to scroll/select while on a touchscreen you tap and slide your finger to scroll the display.
How many different ways is one to implement menus, checkboxes and radio buttons? Those are not going away any time soon. In 2006, Nokia introduced an optional new home screen that showed shortcuts to apps and alerts for new email/calendar appointments/nearby wifi networks. This is now far more customizable as in the upcoming Symbian^3, where you can have upto 3 homescreens with customizable widgets. Android also has something similar, but iOS as far as I've seen has no such native capability. That's not innovative?
Symbian has been designed from the ground up as an OS optimized for low CPU/memory usage, so it scales well from low to high end devices. It also has true preemptive multitasking since its 2002 debut- for example if there's too many apps open and there's an incoming call, the call takes priority over everything else and the OS will close a couple of background apps to free memory. Compare that with the hottest new Samsung Galaxy S which sometimes fails at receiving a basic phone call.. You can't control when the phone syncs data, or using what type of connection- you need an APNDroid hack to stop it syncing permanently in the background!! People rave about Snapdragon and gigahertz class CPUs for the newer Android devices, but the OS doesn't scale to lower specs at all. It practically requires a high powered CPU to power all that eyecandy.
Let's not even get started on the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco. Symbian has matured over 8 years and got the basics right - power management, multitasking, making calls,managing data connections over GPRS/3G/wifi/Bluetooth etc. It has also supported themes since its inception -there's hundreds of custom themes with different icons and colors available since then on various sites, so it's not like you're stuck with the look and feel that it ships with out of the box either. But well, superficial looks are all that matter in the end, apparently.
Or, welcome to India. The rich (not the publicly well known millionaires like the Ambanis or the Tatas) can fudge their accounts to avoid paying taxes. The vast majority of the country is too poor to fall within the tax bracket. Guess who ends up paying over 30% of their salary as taxes? The middle class, who don't have a choice anyway since tax is deducted at source by their employers.
Everybody hates documentation if you're a coder
I for one absolutely do not understand this attitude. It sounds like a 'hit and run' style of development. From experience, I've seen that it's hard to recollect why even I made a change barely a couple of weeks later - let alone understand changes by someone else long after they've moved on and are unavailable to help. If you work at the same company for 2 years or more, chances are you'll wind up fixing a bug in a piece of code you originally wrote - and then this attitude will bite you in the ass. Documentation doesn't have to be pages long, it can be an inline comment, or in your bug tracking/version control system along with the change. Even a simple 2 line description of what was changed for what purpose will save you and others tons of frustration later. There's another way to look at documentation - if you've put in an easy to understand comment then you won't get a call suddenly from whoever's maintaining the code months after you've moved onto a different piece of work. A minor hassle that can save much pain later since you can royally proclaim "RTFM!" I worked for a US based medical imaging software company - per HIPAA and other regulations, all changes had to be well documented. We were required to add javadoc comments for every new method introduced, or change to a method signature for easy readability in Eclipse, and no change would pass peer review if the accompanying explanation was unclear. Perhaps there's an attitude of 'I'm doing it for free so don't complain if there's no documentation' with open source projects (at least the ones that aren't bankrolled by big companies that employ people to work on them)
Sweden and Norway and the others follow Social democracy, not fullblown socialism.
Symbian bloated, based on what? It has evolved over 10 years scaling up from devices with very low processing power and memory to what's available today. Android on the other hand doesn't scale backwards as much - it's one thing to crow about Snapdragon based CPUs until you realize that you need that kind of hardware to get a responsible UI on an Android. Take a look at this review of 2 low end phones - Symbian vs. Android. Android simply requires high spec'ed hardware to run. By contrast I've seen my nokia 6630 circa 2005 have the same decently fast UI and memory management as anything current.
Somebuddy gonna get a Hurd real bad!
I was pointing out that there's no connection between the Prussian military inspired school system and the caste system in India, where there wasn't any special training as such. Members of each caste passed on knowledge of their profession from father to son. If anything, ancient India followed the Gurukul system, where students lived with their teachers away from family while they learned, and also performed daily chores for the teacher-a far cry from the military inspired setup of the Prussians that came about much later.
If so, then they learned it from the USA which learned it from Prussia which learned it from India's training for the underclasses of the Hindu caste system
Citation needed. I'm sick of people going on and on about the caste system without understanding anything about it. Castes initially began with the division of labor, broadly into the priests, warriors, artisans and untouchables. Within each category there are thousands of subcategories. It is very important to note that no Hindu scripture endorses or enforces the concept, thus you can still call yourself a Hindu if you don't want to follow the system. The trouble with caste started by people being locked into it by birth. The son of a blacksmith could not aspire to any other profession, for example. The untouchable castes were ostracized by the upper castes. There was no 'training' as such for anybody, and lower classes stayed illiterate. If anything, the rote learning that is so common today in Indian education can be traced to Lord Macaulay, who famously dismissed all Indian/Arabic literature as not worth even a shelf in a Western library. (note 10) He started the education system in India, which was aimed at producing clerks for the East India Company and later the British administration. These people would understand enough English to get work done but not form any kind of critical thinking that might lead to unrest and rebellion.
They used satellite phones, not cellphones. But yes, terrorism is cited as the main reason for SIM card registration. While registering you're required to show proof of identity- a passport/driving license and proof of residence.
Millions of people play MMOs without letting them take over their lives. If they can balance their time playing with other activities, what's this guy's problem? How is NCSoft in any way liable for this guy wasting away his life on a game?
I'd say India's worse...even otherwise privacy is not considered important. This is a place where it's perfectly normal to start asking you personal questions within minutes of meeting for the first time.