Video of the moon flyby by Chandrayaan - The Indian unmanned moon mission
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
The iPhone 3G is finally in India now. I received a SMS this morning from Vodafone. Prices are - hold your breath - a whopping 31K for 8GB and some 36K for the 16GB model.This is excluding any plans. You have to pay 10K to pre-book and register. Only people who had pre-registered are entitled to buy on the launch date - 21st August. So if you have the dough go and buy now.
I know a lot of people including me are paranoid about continuous monitoring leading to an invasion of privacy. London is an extreme version of this. But here is a city which is using technology in the right way to solve and prevent crime. A very forward looking and good experiment by the City of Newark and the Mayor Cory Booker who is leading from the front.
Apple India is running a promo in which it is offering a 12% discount to students from approved institutions. This is a great offer to grab as the prices are as low as they can get!
I’m holding out for the Macbook revision before I take the leap. Stuck to my Dell for now 
Today Microsoft launched a hosted Exchange solution to counter Google Apps. Is this a slow and steady response to the Google threat?
When the world’s biggest company launches a subscription based online/offline software of it’s core product you that Subscription based software and Software as a Service has arrived into the mainstream. Microsoft today launched a subscription based service of Microsoft Office Home and Student edition. It will be available starting Mid-July and is mainly targeted towards the lower end of the consumer spectrum. Clearly Microsoft still wants it’s enterprise customers locked into it’s desktop software. Understandably so, enterprise customers will be more apprehensive about sending their data into the ‘cloud’ without secure and reliable storage channels.
However with this new service Microsoft is clearly targeting the SOHO and casual users community which might be looking at Google Docs or Zoho type of services for their daily word processing and spreadsheet needs. It remains to be seen whether this experiment by Microsoft will succeed and if they will ultimately port the Professional edition also onto the SaaS platform.
27th June is Bill Gate’s last day at Microsoft. I think Microsoft is what it is today because of Bill Gate’s vision. He was a visionary and he knew right in the beginning that the PC industry is where growth lies. People blame him for copying other people’s ideas and crushing competitors. Although some of it might be true, ultimately innovation does not matter if it is not brought to the market quicker than others in a form that people can use it(Xerox are you listening?).
I remember the End of an Era Friends episode when Rachael is moving out of Monica’s apartment and it belatedly dawns upon Rachael that she will no longer be living with Monica and share the good times. It’s the same case with Microsoft. Only once Bill leaves will we see if there is any impact of him leaving and how the company is run by Steve’s without Bill’s advice and constant support. Technically Bill is still going to spend around 2 hours a week with the Search and Live teams, so he is still hanging around but it will never be the same again.
Today’s Mint has an article on the Indian Met department purchasing Doppler weather radars from a Chinese firm. Now these radars are basically and upgraded version of the NEXRAD system being used in the USA. One of the reasons this deal is being touted as a technologically advanced one for India is the fact that this system is being used in the US currently. Coincidentally there is an article on the Slashdot front page today proclaiming that the US is about to replace the very same NEXRAD technology because it is old and deeply flawed in the eyeys of the meteriologists in US.
This again put in the context of the following comment makes the new deal an act of dumping old technology in third world countries!
“While our technical evaluation company is certainly competent, I hope they have not compromised on quality for cost,” says an IMD scientist not connected with the technical evaluation and selection of firms to supply the radars and who didn’t want to be named.
If the scientists themselves don’t trust the technical evaluation with all their knowledge, what do we make out of this purchase?
Python commit video shown below:
code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.
Ever hear of a nuclear plant being shut down because of a software update? Well is happened. At first it looks like an update gone bad. Indeed it was a design which was flawed. A business system was used to connect to a control system which then went down because of the bad data. After reading the Slashdot article I realized the control system did the right thing by shutting down the nuclear plant in face of the bad data it received since that was the safest thing to do.
So in the end things did not turn out to be so bad after all because of the well designed control system.
