Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Of Bodyshops and Bestsellers

Published on October 15, 2011 in Book and Technology. 56 Comments

So here’s what happened. Narayana Murthy, the big chief at Infosys, complained that the standards of IIT students were going down and held coaching schools responsible. Nothing particularly earth-shaking about this pronouncement, in every generation, those that have grown old have complained “when we were your age, things were so much better.” Chetan Bhagat, thought-leader and best-selling author and an IIT alum himself, felt sufficiently piqued by this to retort that he who runs body-shopping company should not comment on the standards of others. Such a rap-battle, of course, generated a lot of heat and light in the popular media. Of course then Mr. Bhagat’s new book released to glowing reviews and insane sales and he kind of apologized for his previous statement and all was right with the world again.

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The Cult And the Man

Published on October 8, 2011 in Technology. 51 Comments

The way I see it, Steve Jobs will be remembered for having created the world’s biggest corporate cult, a cult so blinding in its hold that its devotees no longer cared if others were making more technologically advanced products at a lower price. As far as they were concerned, if it was not an Apple, it would never be perfect.

This is not to say that Apple devotees were mindless zombies. Okay maybe they are but you could not blame them, just like you could not blame a moth for flying into the flame. Jobs was that awesome.

Like those who claimed to speak to Gods, Jobs delivered Zennish koans and inspirational commandments . Like cult leaders, Jobs abhorred technological and organizational glasnost, used a fearsome legal team to pursue anyone who was perceived as a threat, even a nineteen year old blogger and was intolerant of criticism to the point of being petulant—he removed all books of John Wiley and Sons from Apple’s retail store because they had published a book about him that he did not approve of.

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The Grand Secret OS

Published on October 14, 2010 in Technology. 90 Comments

Given the history of technological white elephants that our research agencies have produced, reading about the DRDO’s proposal to create a “closed source operating system” just made me groan.

“We have to protect it (data),” Saraswat said, adding, “Only way to protect it is to have a home-grown system, the complete architecture…source code is with you and then nobody knows what’s that.”

Nobody knows what’s that. A perfect description of government research agencies.

This line does sound ominous, more so given the fact that it is precisely these “nobody knows whats going on” kind of systems that have historically shown to have the most security vulnerabilities which explains why “security through obscurity” (typically explained with respect to cryptography in computer security textbooks) is, in general, a deprecated principle. [Another thing which has gone out of fashion is closed-source, proprietary OSs but try telling these guys that]

Of course, the idea of a “Government of India”‘s very own operating system does sound amazing. Here are some specifications I think will be implemented (warning geeky stuff to follow).

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Lafda—Rise To Power

Published on September 13, 2009 in Technology. 34 Comments

Among my different bad habits has been added one more. That of playing Mobsters Vendetta on Facebook. During this time I have not only wondered how addictive this silly game is but also how inherently attractive the concept of a Role-Playing Game (RPG) (originally from Dungeons and Dragons) is in a social context. Not that people do not already know that well enough considering that Warcraft, which is what is known as a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), is a huge money-making franchise inspiring many other knock-offs including my favorite game of all time “Knights of the Old Republic” all set to become a MMORPG in its coming incarnation.

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Dus Ka Dum

Published on February 5, 2009 in Silly and Technology. 56 Comments

So what if the $10 laptop is worth $30? So what if it is actually $100 and the concerned Indian official did not read one “zero” as it was mistyped —after all what’s a few zeroes between friends, especially when the zero represents representatives of the Indian government. So what if the laptop is not a laptop at all but a hyped up storage device,a glorified pen drive? And finally so what that Ramar Pillai could not make gasoline from water?

Still hum hain be-misaal. Iske upar naheen bolne ka.

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