My company had released a Google Maps based GPLed software to track diseases. The software is free as in free beer and free speech.
You can check it out at -
Web Based Health Monitoring System.
The software allows hospitals and doctors to record cases as and when they are reported and then the system will collate the information and provide basic statistical analysis and geographical presentation on Google Maps. The source code is available on sourceforge and there is also a demo set up on the site.
That is a not-so-common way of looking at it. People look at NASA expenses and complain as if NASA takes
hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and launching the money into space
. The actual amount that is thrown out into the space would only be the cost of the materials. Money spent on the cost of labor remains on planet earth itself and can be accounted as R&D expenses.
I dont understand why it is a new idea - The whole internet is about information exchange - read "Communication". Of course people have been looking at means to improve the way in which we communicate and make it easier to communicate between different people from different regions of the earth and also to make it easer to communicate with larger number of people. People have been trying to do it from the point Internet was started.
It is pathetic the way companies are trying to solve this problem when you see that there is a simple solution using plain old classical economic theories. You pay for what you want and you pay only as much as the value you would get from the transaction and you get what you paid for. The solution is to move away from the much-hyped unlimited bandwidth plans to the the plain reality behind the unlimited bandwidth plans. There is no unlimited plan - you just pay for the bandwidth you use. ISPs should charge based on the bandwidth that is used by the consumer - the content provider as well as the content consumer. They should probably charge in slabs. Customers who want more bandwidth pays for the extra bandwidth. As far as the ISP is concerned the service the ISP is providing is the transportation of contents. The ISP should try to increase revenue by increasing traffic or increase QOS and charging higher for higher QOS. What they are currently trying to do is like UPS and Fedex opening each box they are shipping to see the content before fixing the rate for the tranfer. Pathetic... Indeed...
Recently there was this big debate on slashdot about google's purchase of doubleclick. Why would you care if your usage patterns are tracked by a company - without attaching it to your personal identity - and deliver targeted advertisements. There is no free lunch. You are paying for the free content by selling your usage patterns. They don't want to do it in any other way. You can leave it or take it. Perhaps at some point of time in the future there would be ad-free subscription based content. I doubt, though.
I run a company and I face the same problem - How to reach the set of people who are most likely to be my customers. The more successfully I can do that, the lower would be my marketing cost, and the cheaper would the product be in the long run. Ultimately if we have a system where each person sees only those ads that he needs to see we would have a highly efficient marketing system with the lowest marketing costs. A reasonably big percentage of the cost of most products you buy are marketing costs. So if you would like them to be cheaper - stop complaining and start selling your usage data.
There is only one issue here - privacy advocates have to ensure that there is no real breach of privacy in the process. If googlebot sees the mails i see there is no problem, but if googlebot reads my mail and checks against some preset filter and requests Mr X to take a look at my mail then it is a breach of privacy. As long as the identity is kept separate from the patterns there shouldnt be any problem
Linux has a reasonably big marketshare in the server market share [Netcraft Survey]. However it is still waiting for the day when it will be accepted in the Home PC market as a strong competitor for the Windows family of OSes. I am a strong fan of Linux and I have been trying to promote Linux in my market but people still refuse to accept it open heartedly. In spite of detailed explanations and demos people are hesitant. I even offer free linux installation assistance for people who already own computers. People still look at Linux with scepticism.
I think it would have been much better if more effort is put into making linux acceptable for a wider audience. Though I personally disagree I have to agree with what the market is saying - that Linux is still an operating system for the geeks.
I like what ubuntu is doing - ie making the whole Linux experience easier and better for a common man. In a country like India where I live we are talking about 800 million people whom we can identify with the common man. 2/3 of the world ie 4 billion could be classified with these. We need Linux to target this market. We need Linux to focus on making the Linux experience much more comfortable for these people. We need more effort to be put into creating Linux drivers for the hardware that are not yet Linux compatible. We need easier installations for a larger number of applications.
I am not too excited about the proposition other than as an useful feature for a small percentage of the whole world.
I remember hearing the CEO of Time Warner ask this question in regards to fios: What can't you do with 30 Mbps that you can do with 100 Mbps? He was stating that you can easily do VOD, Voice, and Data over 30 Mbps connections and there was no reason for more speed. Some time (a long time) back a soon-to-be-famous person said that 640KB is enough for a common household. Now I cant even fit a decent image in 640KB. So it is not really wise to say something like that as a certainty.
Wherever we have reached limits - we have broken them. Sooner or later humankind is going to figure out ways of using up 150MB. Only that companies should not just jump on the wagon and start laying fiber to the doorstep in one go. It will take time to increase the general capacity, create the demand and generate the revenues.
So the verdict is - Yes we will probably use all of it.
First it was dumb terminals and super-duper-server and then it was good pcs and now we are going back to super duper virtual machines and just dumb terminals
Multiple monitor display: Users can configure one virtual machine to span multiple monitors or multiple virtual machines to each display on separate monitors with this industry-first capability, enhancing desktop productivity. Only thing left is for it to support multiple keyboards and mice to take us back to that.
Just having a faster modem will not result in faster downloads. It is like fixing a huge 150" tap to a 1" pipe. Unless the internet backbone, the servers, the routers, switches, bridges increase their capacities we are not going to see an across the board increase in download and upload speeds. We might see some fast on demand IP based TV solution provided by the ISP and stuff like that. But slashdot.org is probably going to load at the same speed it is currently loading and your email attachments are going to take as much to upload as it is currently taking.
I dont know if that is overvalued. If youtube went for 1.65billion photobucket can go for 300 million. Companies are really paying for the users not just the application. Youtube and photobucket has comparable number of users. Even if you discount a big percentage of duplicate accounts there still should be enough to repay the 300million through ad-clicks or adviews. If I had the worlds best(est) application and 0 users nobody would pay me that kind of money.
I own a computer dealership in India and I have been pushing AMD Sempron processors for the PCs sold from my store. For the simple reason that AMD Sempron processor plus a decent motherboard goes at less than half the price of the corresponding low end processor P4 from the Intel family. The only difference I have seen is that Intel with its massive marketing campaigns have created in the minds of people a need to go for C2D or DC. I have had people coming to buy C2D pcs for internet browsing (yes, that is right - not even gaming). Other than high end applications and gaming - I think AMD should easily be able to focus on the developing world market and get a good market share provided they do the marketing correct.
If you have read the book - The World is Flat - then you wouldn't worry much about this issue. Chinese economy is growing so fast and the people are getting richer and richer each day that it is going to be very tough to impose restrictions on them. The greatest flattening force is capitalism and that is the way to bring democracy to countries. Empower people and let them eventually choose democracy. Rather than not buy Chinese products we just keep on buying the better product be it from China or India and let time prove this theory true.
Why should we complain about some company collecting our browsing information? Cant we think of it as - us selling our browsing information in return for free use of websites. Of course google will be making money out of it. But they have to - if they have to survive. Earning money is not evil. If that is the case we are all evil in one sense or another - we all earn our money.
Slashdot Mirror
My company had released a Google Maps based GPLed software to track diseases. The software is free as in free beer and free speech. You can check it out at - Web Based Health Monitoring System. The software allows hospitals and doctors to record cases as and when they are reported and then the system will collate the information and provide basic statistical analysis and geographical presentation on Google Maps. The source code is available on sourceforge and there is also a demo set up on the site.
I dont understand why it is a new idea - The whole internet is about information exchange - read "Communication". Of course people have been looking at means to improve the way in which we communicate and make it easier to communicate between different people from different regions of the earth and also to make it easer to communicate with larger number of people. People have been trying to do it from the point Internet was started.
It is pathetic the way companies are trying to solve this problem when you see that there is a simple solution using plain old classical economic theories. You pay for what you want and you pay only as much as the value you would get from the transaction and you get what you paid for. The solution is to move away from the much-hyped unlimited bandwidth plans to the the plain reality behind the unlimited bandwidth plans. There is no unlimited plan - you just pay for the bandwidth you use. ISPs should charge based on the bandwidth that is used by the consumer - the content provider as well as the content consumer. They should probably charge in slabs. Customers who want more bandwidth pays for the extra bandwidth. As far as the ISP is concerned the service the ISP is providing is the transportation of contents. The ISP should try to increase revenue by increasing traffic or increase QOS and charging higher for higher QOS. What they are currently trying to do is like UPS and Fedex opening each box they are shipping to see the content before fixing the rate for the tranfer. Pathetic... Indeed...
Recently there was this big debate on slashdot about google's purchase of doubleclick. Why would you care if your usage patterns are tracked by a company - without attaching it to your personal identity - and deliver targeted advertisements. There is no free lunch. You are paying for the free content by selling your usage patterns. They don't want to do it in any other way. You can leave it or take it. Perhaps at some point of time in the future there would be ad-free subscription based content. I doubt, though.
I run a company and I face the same problem - How to reach the set of people who are most likely to be my customers. The more successfully I can do that, the lower would be my marketing cost, and the cheaper would the product be in the long run. Ultimately if we have a system where each person sees only those ads that he needs to see we would have a highly efficient marketing system with the lowest marketing costs. A reasonably big percentage of the cost of most products you buy are marketing costs. So if you would like them to be cheaper - stop complaining and start selling your usage data.
There is only one issue here - privacy advocates have to ensure that there is no real breach of privacy in the process. If googlebot sees the mails i see there is no problem, but if googlebot reads my mail and checks against some preset filter and requests Mr X to take a look at my mail then it is a breach of privacy. As long as the identity is kept separate from the patterns there shouldnt be any problem
Linux has a reasonably big marketshare in the server market share [Netcraft Survey]. However it is still waiting for the day when it will be accepted in the Home PC market as a strong competitor for the Windows family of OSes. I am a strong fan of Linux and I have been trying to promote Linux in my market but people still refuse to accept it open heartedly. In spite of detailed explanations and demos people are hesitant. I even offer free linux installation assistance for people who already own computers. People still look at Linux with scepticism. I think it would have been much better if more effort is put into making linux acceptable for a wider audience. Though I personally disagree I have to agree with what the market is saying - that Linux is still an operating system for the geeks.
I like what ubuntu is doing - ie making the whole Linux experience easier and better for a common man. In a country like India where I live we are talking about 800 million people whom we can identify with the common man. 2/3 of the world ie 4 billion could be classified with these. We need Linux to target this market. We need Linux to focus on making the Linux experience much more comfortable for these people. We need more effort to be put into creating Linux drivers for the hardware that are not yet Linux compatible. We need easier installations for a larger number of applications.
I am not too excited about the proposition other than as an useful feature for a small percentage of the whole world.
Wherever we have reached limits - we have broken them. Sooner or later humankind is going to figure out ways of using up 150MB. Only that companies should not just jump on the wagon and start laying fiber to the doorstep in one go. It will take time to increase the general capacity, create the demand and generate the revenues.
So the verdict is - Yes we will probably use all of it.
Just having a faster modem will not result in faster downloads. It is like fixing a huge 150" tap to a 1" pipe. Unless the internet backbone, the servers, the routers, switches, bridges increase their capacities we are not going to see an across the board increase in download and upload speeds. We might see some fast on demand IP based TV solution provided by the ISP and stuff like that. But slashdot.org is probably going to load at the same speed it is currently loading and your email attachments are going to take as much to upload as it is currently taking.
I dont know if that is overvalued. If youtube went for 1.65billion photobucket can go for 300 million. Companies are really paying for the users not just the application. Youtube and photobucket has comparable number of users. Even if you discount a big percentage of duplicate accounts there still should be enough to repay the 300million through ad-clicks or adviews. If I had the worlds best(est) application and 0 users nobody would pay me that kind of money.
I own a computer dealership in India and I have been pushing AMD Sempron processors for the PCs sold from my store. For the simple reason that AMD Sempron processor plus a decent motherboard goes at less than half the price of the corresponding low end processor P4 from the Intel family. The only difference I have seen is that Intel with its massive marketing campaigns have created in the minds of people a need to go for C2D or DC. I have had people coming to buy C2D pcs for internet browsing (yes, that is right - not even gaming). Other than high end applications and gaming - I think AMD should easily be able to focus on the developing world market and get a good market share provided they do the marketing correct.
If you have read the book - The World is Flat - then you wouldn't worry much about this issue. Chinese economy is growing so fast and the people are getting richer and richer each day that it is going to be very tough to impose restrictions on them. The greatest flattening force is capitalism and that is the way to bring democracy to countries. Empower people and let them eventually choose democracy. Rather than not buy Chinese products we just keep on buying the better product be it from China or India and let time prove this theory true.
Why should we complain about some company collecting our browsing information? Cant we think of it as - us selling our browsing information in return for free use of websites. Of course google will be making money out of it. But they have to - if they have to survive. Earning money is not evil. If that is the case we are all evil in one sense or another - we all earn our money.