BBC –The Big Blunder Corporation

As usual I had been listening to BBC news on my radio, at 6:30 am (IST). You get it at the frequency of 596 KHz, in northern India, in other way it is on Short Wave (SW) 6.30 MHz

At around 6:45 am news about the present condition of finance in America was on air. Precisely it was about the conversion of a private bank to a nationalized one. I don’t remember what name was that of bank. It was surprising for us to hear that. At one side, in India, where we are going private leaving the national mark behind, America is doing the opposite. Well! This may be true due to the present economic condition.

For the detailed report a reporter was presented, and off course he was speaking in English. As usual, in the Hindi telecast of the BBC news they convert any foreign language to Hindi, whether it is English or any other language. Surprisingly, the voice of the reporter wasn’t dubbed and we continued to hear his thick American accented English. We thought that it might be a minor mistake. But all of a sudden I realized that the news program was continuing in English itself.

Really it was a blunder from BBC’s side. And it got better after the Hindi newsreader was kept back to air and he apologized for the technical error. I think this must be one of those blunders by BBC which occur once in a decade.

Bill Gates Predicts The Future; Or The Past

Bill Gates is often called stealer of ideas, and accused of indulging in less than ethical business practices. He’s also infamous for his sometimes awry predictions- “640 K ought to be enough for everybody,” which to be honest was probably wrongly attributed for him. It’s probably all that money he’s surrounded by that causes jealousy and need for such rumors.

However, the latest prediction, some say, suggests that he’s retired just in time… Addressing a gathering of 1600 researchers, developers and academics in Hong Kong, Bill Gates shared his ‘vision’ about the future of the computer use. This was a seminar marking the tenth anniversary of Microsoft, at their Asian research wing.

He looked far into the future and discussed the various transformations that he expects in technology. He noted how the increasing connectivity to the internet will allow for more development of server-based technology. “People often talk about this as the internet service revolution, which will eventually lead to machines that have lots of server capacity, lots of low cost computing, low-cost storage and that will let us write software in an even more ambitious way, eliminating the last constraints we have.” Reading between the lines, it means that in the future, Microsoft hopes to catch up with Google and offer services in lines of Google apps.

His other gem was about touch screen appliances being everywhere, “because they’re fairly developed in the labs, I can say that in 10 years (they) will be widespread.” Yes, he did say “In ten years, they will be fairly widespread,” in case you thought you read wrong. In another interview, for BBC, he said “I’ll be brave, in five years we’ll have many tens of million of people sitting browsing their photos, browsing their music, organizing their lives using this type of touch interface.”

Err… Mr. Gates, it’s called an iPhone or an iPod Touch, and millions are already using such devices.

Some other Gates gems include “I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.”

It’s sad really, because a lot of Linux fan boys and general Microsoft bashers now get to add more fuel to the already raging anti-Microsoft fire. On some forum a member seems to have the last laugh, “Hell, what do you expect from a person who never saw the end of the millennium coming.” This was in reference to the Y2K bug.

This article has been taken from Digit, September edition.

Com'mon! Let's Imagine! Contd.

Hey! Have you got any idea what I had been talking about yesterday? Okay! Just chill! Let me make you understand it completely.

Let us imagine a situation. I see a man robbing a girl. The robber has a pistol and she is taking the belongings of the girl. There is no one around. Just as in Hindi movies, I grab the robber’s neck from behind, stealthily. The robber leaves the girl and starts over me. In the meanwhile the girl flees and I remain there to fight him. He points his gun towards me and with a flash I grab his gun, still in his hands. We start struggling for the possession of gun and somehow bullet is triggered. With the Bang of bullet you reach to the scene and you see a gun in my hands and a man dying on ground. You call police and I am taken under arrest. I try to tell the policemen that I am innocent. But just like Hindi movies they tell me that I’ll have to present my part of story in the court.

At the court, in absence of enough proofs I am accused of killing a person and I am also charged for having illegal possession of a gun. I am sentenced for a life imprisonment. I don’t know where the girl has gone, whom I had saved from that robber. Well! That is not important now. The important thing is that how would I spend my 14 years in jail and that too for saving a helpless girl.

Another instance: You ask your girlfriend for a date. You plan to have lunch at a restaurant. You ask her to reach there by one in the noon. It is certainly going to be a romantic encounter. It was time and you got out of your flat for plan of the time. Just as you started your bike you see a car hit a child and run away. No one comes to the rescue of child and you run to pick up the child. You ask one of the pedestrians to help you take the child to hospital. You get late for your schedule. There at the restaurant you girlfriend is waiting. When you get too late she puts you a call and talks in a very angry language. You try to make her understand a lot but she is not ready to listen a single word.

Now, what do you feel with these two instances? If you would have been at the lead role, what would you wish to?

Let’s have a look at the first case. Generally a person would beg for the faith in his statement, in the court of law. The person would simply think ‘if you could see the matter as I had seen and felt’ or ‘if you had been there then you would understand and believe’. This can be simply done by video shooting of the event or with the other measures. But just imagine about a video playing in your mind, with all the emotions which a person has felt while he was seeing that with his/her eyes. Or take it the other way. I transfer the memories of that event from my mind to that of the Judge. How would that be?

Let’s take the same thing in the second case. You transfer the memories of the date day event to your girlfriend’s mind. Then how easy it would become for you to make her understand? It would be the same way you saw the accident, the way you felt at that time, and your girlfriend is getting all that the same way.

Here my point is, wouldn’t it be revolutionary to develop a technology which facilitates this? What do you say?

Come On! Let’s Dream!

Today technology has taken us that so far, which used to be the limits of old science fictions. Telecommunication was a thing of dreams. The Hindu mythologies added a lot to this feeling, where telepathic communication was depicted very commonly. Telecom is a thing of wonder for the older generation and a thing of exploitation for the present generation.
This article is going to put an idea which may be revolutionary or a dumb imagination.
Every one of us would have gone somewhere for sightseeing or leisure. Many of us must have done or faced something which haunts us. Somebody would have met a cine star etc. The point behind mentioning all these is we get experiences with every step of ours.
There are many ways for us to share our experiences. Today we do this by clicking photographs, shooting videos, describing vocally, writing etc. and showing or telling those to others. The best part is we ask the person to make an image of the description, which is off course his own and is in his/her mind. This makes every persons’ mental image of the description a unique one.
What if, you want a person to feel the way you felt, when a particular event occurred. What if, it becomes possible for us to record our experiences, not the way a camera or tape would do. I hope you understand; that would be completely different from the ways we have today.
I shall continue this topic tomorrow. Have your thought over this? I hope I am clear enough to have your response.

My Bike, The Worst Bike

Yester night my Dad returned at around 9 pm from his office. As usual the day was hectic and tiring, especially for my Dad. He told me that, to add some spice to the situation his bike gave up around 2 km away from home. He had to come home dragging it all the way.

That was the yester night part of the story. To have a good end for this annoying story, we started early morning.

At around 8 we made our first move. We suspected that the fuel flow was getting obstructed. For the diagnosis we tried opening the ‘T’. It is the switch which is connected to the fuel tank and controls its flow. After a lot of trails and contacting Uncle Google, we gave up and called up a mechanic. We simply asked him what to do next as we couldn’t take that bloody thing dragging all the way long. My Dad was on line and he was told what to do next.

I thought of trying something but we didn’t have appropriate tools. After all, my Dad decided to detach the fuel tank of the bike. Have you ever done that? It is like making your bike stark naked. A detached tank made it easy for us to try our hands on the poor ‘T’. We tried a lot but came up with almost nothing. Yeah! That’s another point that we didn’t have right tools. Then I started to my neighbors, one by one, asking if they have any of the compatible tools. My search didn’t go futile and one of our neighbors, being extremely kind gave me whatever he had. The thing was useful for us. After a good two hours of struggle we managed to open the ‘T’ and took out its dirty contents. It seemed as if every part ahs been smeared in a light red paint. I don’t know what was that, probably rust or some other metallic oxide.

Now comes the toughest part. After a lot of planning we decided to wash the tank with simple water. Also we couldn’t risk the tank, washing it with the same dirty petrol we had taken out from it. Well! We started after all. There comes the biggest problem. You know that it wouldn’t be nice for an engine to have even a single drop of water. After washing the tank we came to know that we are not able to get the remaining water out of it. They have such designs for a fuel tank that you can’t do anything with that directly, at least when you are at home.

Praying for the goodwill we kept on washing. Also we spent a got amount of our energy shaking the water out. When we couldn’t go any further, we transferred the rest of the work to our Most Mighty, the Sun.

The work is going on till now and I am praying for the good will of the bike. What do you say? Isn’t it the worst bike?

The work is in progress. Inconvenience is regretted.

कार्य प्रगति में है। असुविधा के लिए खेद है।

Microsoft Photosynth, Just Amazing!

Just imagine you go Paris on a tour. You have just your camera phone to hunt around clicking pictures. You don’t want to risk your memories to some bad quality video from a camera phone.

You return home and one of your friends asks you to show the pictures. He is impressed by the snaps and wishes if he/she could see that place in reality, if not at least a video of the place. Then you feel guilty about your decision to have only snaps.

Well! Those days are gone where you would have to face such a problem. Our old grandpa Microsoft has unveiled Photosynth. You might feel weird about the name but this is very interesting.

Microsoft’s livelabs has unveiled software named Photosynth. It pools together photos into synths that generates 3D panorama of the shot subject. On August 20 it was released to common public.

In simple words; it is a software which converts your two dimensional photographs in three dimensional objects. From the above mentioned situation, you can use this software to make your photographs in a 3D structure to let your friends feel the real thing. This software works by identifying common elements in a bunch of snaps, and creating a virtual 3D view of the subject, and placing the photos in the appropriate positions depending on the angle at which the subject was photographed. This means that more the number of photographs, the more clear and accurate would be the 3D representation.

In order to use this service it is necessary to download an installation file from the website (www.photosynth.com). The installation has two components, a browser for viewing synths and software for creating the synths.

This service is currently free and there is an upload limit of 20GB. Alas! This thing is still in its infancy and you would not get anything more than a very grainy 3D structure for your photographs. Well! This is a good thing to play around. So just ask your friend to take around a thousand snaps of yours, through different angles. And get ready to see a grainy yourself of you in a zoom able and movable 3D. Enjoy!

Hellooo! Don't get afraid! This Lungi clad person is none other than me. I was a bit thoughtful before posting this image. There was a single question in my mind,'what if my friends see this?' And now that fear has also gone. I have come on the path of Do or Die. Well! Today is a grate day. It is very pleasent today. No heat, no sweat and no hot blood. Afterall I am Happy today. Also it is not a guarantee for tomorrow. And that's all what is called Life! Have a good Day!