Roshin Roy

Isn’t it a lill over rated? for an Oscar i mean. But that makes me wonder about the rest of the movies that got nominated. The ‘east meets west’ factor play a major role here; much more than the movie by itself. Some say it digs into India’s gritty depths to show the world a ‘different face’ of India. oh yeah ? There are tonz of movies that digged deeper. Anyways, I m happy abt the 8 Oscars that we r bringing home. Rahman never need an Oscar to get noticed anyways. Rasool needed it and he got it. This could be just the beginning of his joy ride. Freida will be busy sorting out the mess that the fame brought with it, thankz to the media. Dev could come back later to know that ppl in bollywood dont even remember him anymore. But the kidz got some talent, hez getting formally trained in the art. Anil Kapoor will keep blabbing about the oscar for another few weeks before the media gets something better.
But what about Rubina and Azhar ? While they are basking their fame their poverty continues to be a glaring reality. The money Azhar earned could only fetch medical aid for his parents. Are they gonna get escorted from Chathrapathi Shivaji International Airport straight to the slums in Bandra, Mumbai?

The Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) have magnetic disks that spin at over 7000rpm while a read/write head hovers over them to do the job. Cons: moving parts, mechanical faults, lower speed, power consumption, heat and all that can bring the performance down and increase the carbon footprint ( these days anything can be measured by its impact on the environment ).
Enter Solid State Drives (SDDs) which do not have any moving parts and thus ‘eliminate spin-up time, and greatly reduce seek time, latency, and other delays inherent in electromechanical disks.’ -wikipedia.
I am sure these are going to find its place in enterprise servers, data centers and storage solutions before they get to desktops. But this technology is HOT and will remain so for some time.

The top tech concepts that will keep you busy this year could be -

• virtualization – over 50% of all the servers in the world are virtualized. This technology is going to step out of the datacenter and move on to SMBs and even your desktop. The idea is to squeeze the last ounce of computing power from your chips.
• information security – intrusion detection, access management, authentication technologies, security audits, firewalls, UTM boxes blah blah .. get yourself and your information lockedup in a ‘safe’ place .. if you can.
• the green move – I am facinated by this move and I’m quiet excited about working on this I should say. Its not just about being friends with nature but to get your costs down by being more efficient and productive. It will have a great effect on your energy costs and cooling expenses. If you think this is just for datacenteres, you should take a look at this – www.ncomputing.com . I am in love with it already.
• social networking software – orkut, linkedin, myspace, facebook and all that sprouts up on the web ( thanks to Web 2.0) is changing the way we interact with the society. Your enterpise could tap into the power of ‘humman connections’.
• enterprise mobility – I am ‘always awailable’ if you need me for work. Sad, but true thankz to realtime mobility. You cell phones with IMs VoIP softphones etc can work with WiFi hotspots at home, work, coffee shop, canteen etc to keep u hooked on to your work no matter where you go.
• web 2.0 – I wonder if you’d find conventional operating systems go thinner and thinner untill it becomes just a browser which supports web 2.0. Go Fig ..
• web – video collaboration – Polycom, Aethra, Sony which dominated the market finds competition from mlabs, webex and a plethora of opensource applications. MS finally became serious about that NetMeeting application after all these years. And then there are paltalk, skype, meBeam etc.
• software as a service – Well if you want to move your software expenses from CapEX to OppEX, then this is where you should go. But do you really want to move all your data out of your control to someone else who’d process it and get back to you? I suppose you would, cuzz they’d do a better job when it comes to security and uptime than you could.

The success of Debian GNU/Linux can be illustrated by the following numbers. “It is developed by over 1,000 volunteer developers, its software repositories contain more than 20,000 packages (compiled for 11 processor architectures), and it is responsible for inspiring over 120 Debian-based distributions and live CDs. These figures are unmatched by any other Linux-based operating system.”

Well its not just that. Debian stands out be a completely non commercial project developed by volunteers in their ‘spare’ time. In less than a decade, Debian GNU/Linux became the largest Linux distribution and possibly the largest collaborative software project ever created!