Tag Archives: Technology

The mobile computing revolution – choosing your next PC

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To figure out your needs, ask yourself these questions:

  • What is your budget? Are you willing to stretch it a bit if you get a significantly better device for a little more?
  • What are you planning to do with the device?
    • Make phone calls? – you will need a SIM card enabled device like a smartphone or tablet
    • Take photographs?
    • Check mail?
    • Send messages – SMS and\or an online messaging service?
    • Browse the internet? On the go, or at home?
    • Create documents? – smartphones and tablets are still quite limited in this area
    • Read documents and e-books? – a large screen with high resolution screen will help
    • Use maps and navigation capabilities? On the go? – GPS will be required
    • Watch movies?
    • Play games? Demanding ones or casual ones? – the hardware will have to be fairly powerful for a good experience
    • Edit images and videos? Casual or serious?
    • Make video calls? – a front facing camera will be required
    • Listen to music? At home or on the go? Radio or MP3?
    • Play CDs and DVDs?
  • How large a device are you willing to put up with? This will affect both usability and portability.
  • Do you need expandable storage?
  • How comfortable are you using an on screen keyboard?
  • Are you willing to spend time tinkering with the device to improve your experience?
  • Do you care if your device does not get the latest OS updates, but just serves your needs as it is?
  • Do you plan to install additional software on the device, purchasing them if necessary?
  • How important is battery life – are you willing to charge the device at least once a day?

Once you answer them, you will see that you can’t have it all. There will be trade-offs, and you will have to evaluate the areas where you are willing to compromise. Here are a few tips to help you decide:

  • If you don’t have a smartphone yet, get it – you’ll be able to do lots more with it as it’ll be with you all the time.
    • Android is the smartphone OS to go for if you are a big user of Google services like Gmail, Picasa, Maps etc. and also like to tinker with your devices.
    • Windows Phone provides a very good out of box experience with very little setup needed, and the phones are available at pretty attractive prices.
    • The iPhone is definitely nice to have, but the Android and Windows Phone alternatives are much better value propositions.
  • If you are serious about editing documents (Word\Excel\PowerPoint), you still require a laptop as the smartphones are too small for editing and the tablet software is not completely compatible with the document formats.
    • On a tight budget (below Rs 20,000) – AMD ones and not the Intel Atom ones.
    • For portability on a higher budget (above Rs 40,000), consider the Ultrabooks as they are significantly lighter than regular laptops but just as powerful.
  • Video and photo editing is possible on smartphones, tablets and laptops, but for heavy duty editing, you are better off with the laptop as these tasks require a good amount of computing horsepower.
  • Tablets are much better than laptops, netbooks and smartphones for watching movies, reading e-books and internet browsing.
    • Apple has a definitive edge due to its better app ecosystem, albeit at a single size – 10″. The iPad is priced quite reasonably in this area compared to its Android counterparts.
    • Smaller tablets are lighter and better than their larger cousins for reading while handheld.
    • If you are considering Android, then definitely look for the tablets with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) or higher as the user experience is much improved than the older versions.

Just to add to the fun, Windows 8 will bring with it a multitude of tablets and hybrid devices (laptop + tablet combo), and the next year should completely overhaul the laptop market. So, if you are looking for a laptop, wait a few months. And, in case you thought the iPad was a bit big for your tastes, but wanted an Apple device, there might even be a smaller iPad announced by the end of the year. Revolutionary enough?

Ra.One

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Managed to watch Ra.One this evening on the IMAX screen (the picture was quite grainy at times, so not sure if it was actually meant for IMAX), and it was definitely a unique experience for a Bollywood movie in terms of the special effects. There are plot holes aplenty in the movie, but if you go in without bias then it can be pretty entertaining (if you managed to sit through TMK, then this one’s a breeze). There are however quite a few other interesting things, including my customary tech observations about the movie:

  • This movie probably has the maximum density of Apple products, given the number of iMacs we are shown, along with the customary iPhone (3 GS though)
  • Which brings me to the second point that it is really peculiar that the game is being developed on iMacs…
  • which have not been using NVidia GPUs for some time now (NVidia is a pretty prominent partner for the movie)
  • The PS3 is probably the only product shown in the movie that uses an NVidia GPU, unless you consider the Alienware laptop & MacBook Pro used in the beginning of the movie for the demo.
  • On the topic of gaming consoles, Microsoft definitely missed out a golden opportunity to showcase Kinect’s motion sensing capabilities.
  • The comic book (Superman – he was a jumper initially), video game (Crysis for the suit design, and action games like Mortal Kombat, Tekken etc. for the general concept) and Hollywood (Terminator, Iron Man, Matrix) influences are very apparent.Crysis
  • Talking of video games, Bollywood is definitely getting more serious about them. Even the recent flop Toonpur Ka Super Hero had a climax involving video game concepts.
  • Coming to the non-technical aspects, the movie creators seem to have done quite a bit of Market Research to target the youth segment. The way they have researched action video games is pretty evident. The elite gadgets like the PSP & PS3 are also thrown in for good measure. Besides that, the impact of Japanese animes (just try switching to the Animax channel) is also pretty visible – the first action dream sequence for one. Even the soundtrack is not left alone.
  • The car number plates were pretty interesting, particularly for the VWs owned by SRK – they all had featured IO (Aiyo?) in them. Rajnikanth’s was of course SUPERSTAR.
  • UK seems to be getting back some of Bollywood love that it lost out to the US, with this movie (could have been due to budget constraints though) following in the footsteps of Mere Brother Ki Dulhan and Patiala House.
  • Armaan Verma reminded me a lot of Ritesh Deshmukh
  • SRK also seems to be pretty serious about song copyrights – this time it was “Stand By Me” (after “Pretty Woman” in Kal Ho Na Ho)
  • Last but not the least, Chammak Challo will never be the same once you realise that it is G.One dancing with Ra.One

2012: The right time for Windows 8 tablets

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Windows_8_Developer_Preview_Start_Screen

That is of course if the world doesn’t end. Jokes apart, the reason I think that the second half of 2012 is the right time for Windows 8 tablets is that it’ll guarantee the right mix of hardware will be available around that time. Quad core & higher ARM tablets would be the norm then with pretty powerful graphics (which would be a must if display resolutions hit the 2Kx1K levels with the iPad 3). Intel would also be closer to providing a compelling x86 based SoC in the tablet space. In fact, the tablet hardware is going to continue to scale up in leaps & bounds over the next 2-3 years before we reach a level of acceptable performance (just look at the roadmaps of the major SoC makers).

 

Apart from the hardware angle, the software landscape and usage model on tablets is also evolving. At the moment people are trying to mostly replicate the desktop or smartphone UI paradigms on the tablet. For Windows 8, it all boils down to how well Microsoft is able to adapt their MS Office UI to the tablet. Then again, we could also be looking at tablets being used as a laptop\desktop replacement when docked – Apple seems to be heading that way with their Thunderbolt display (MacBooks for now).

So, don’t fret over the timelines, and instead be excited over the emerging paradigms over the next couple of years.

P.S. Extremetech has a nice how-to for building your own Windows 8 tablet (you will need an existing Windows 7 tablet of course)

Nooks, books & helpdesks

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I was going through Engadget’s review of the nook and it reminded me of a youtube video I had seen a few years back titled “Medieval help desk”. With so many e-book readers on the market today like the Kindle, nook & Sony Reader, we’re definitely seeing a paradigm shift in the way most of us consume books. The whole user experience is transforming, and I’m quite sure that we could easily upgrade this video spoofing the introduction of books to the introduction of e-book readers. No matter what happens, enjoy the video :-)

Interning on FOSS 1: Open Source Development

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I’ve been interning at Sun Microsystems in Delhi from May 1st and during this period, I’ve had the opportunity to research a variety of open source applications. My initial project was to explore and research various open source applications suitable for use by students and compare them against each other and with the proprietary alternatives. There are indeed a bunch of alternatives available for the software we use during the course of our day to day work.

I managed to submit a paper on “Components of an Open Source Operating System for Sustainable ICT Education in Schools in Developing Countries” to the HICSS conference, and I’m starting off a multi part post with my learnings on open source software and development.

One of the interesting works that I read on open source development was Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and The Bazaar”. This is probably one of the definitive works on open source development, and a number of theories stem from it. In fact, quite a few papers that I referred to during the course of my research cited this work. He has postulated the following principles in the essay:

  1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
  2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
  3. Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.
  4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
  5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
  6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
  7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
  8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. (The full version of Linus’s law – Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow)
  9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
  10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
  11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
  12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
  13. Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
  14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
  15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
  16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
  17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
  18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
  19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Most of his principles are for software development in general, and so also apply to open source development. The key learnings form his essay are two-fold. First is that it is important to have a working prototype of the project before making it open source, or at least trying to find other developers who’d be interested in it. Second is that open source attracts a wide variety of talent that can be put to various uses, ranging from bug finding, to improvement suggestions to actual coding. Thus, it is essential to treat the participants in the right manner as everyone could make an important contribution.

One of the other observations to be made about open source development is the vital role that the internet has played in creating the synergy that exists between the developers, users and other contributors of any open source project. In fact, Eric Raymond has said as much in his essay:

… Another (in hindsight) was that the Internet wasn’t yet good enough.

Before cheap Internet, there were some geographically compact communities where the culture encouraged Weinberg’s “egoless” programming, and a developer could easily attract a lot of skilled kibitzers and co-developers. Bell Labs, the MIT AI and LCS labs, UC Berkeley—these became the home of innovations that are legendary and still potent.

Linux was the first project for which a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool was made. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993–1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet access made possible.

In essence, open source development has a lot of potential when used in the right manner. In fact, many companies use it quite strategically and couple them with interesting licenses (I’ll cover licenses in another part). There are also quite a few organizations championing free (as in freedom) software with the FSF (Free Software Foundation), headed by Richard Stallman being one of the pioneers. There is also a bit of controversy in the Free/Open Source world with some preferring the term free to open source. This has however not deterred organizations from leveraging open source development strategically. Open source development may not be practicable in every situation, particularly for routine software development in enterprises, but it definitely has its merits and I’ll be looking at other aspects of open source software in subsequent parts.

The Apple Story [contest version]

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Slideshare is having a contest that’s on upto 15th June. I entered a modified version of my Apple Story presentation into the contest. Do check it out and vote for it (you will need a slideshare account for that) if you like it. It is primarily a presentation on Apple over the years in the form of pictures with a few additional words thrown in over the original. Also embedding it here (you need to go to the site to vote though).

University 2.0 ideas

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In the last few weeks, I’ve come across quite a few presentations regarding University 2.0 (links: 1 2). They seek to make use of several Web 2.0 technologies, that have become popular in the last 2-3 years, for educational institutions. This idea seems quite interesting to me, especially because I was trying to get some of those technologies like wikis and blogs implemented for our b-school. I have another year and a half of my course remaining, and I hope to implement as many of them as I can with help of my classmates and others from the school.

So, here’s a a basic outline of the ideas:

LinkedIn profiles

LinkedIn has become a standard in professional social networks, and it is quite important for professionals to have an up to date LinkedIn profile. My idea is to get everyone to set up their profiles and put the links on our school student profile pages.

Student & Faculty introduction videos

This will make the profiles richer, and should definitely look better than having just static photographs. There are several online video sharing sites, and any of them could be used for this purpose. It could be done initially for the students who are part of different committees, and later expanded for the others depending on the response.

Social network groups

There are several social networks out there like orkut, facebook etc, and our school has a group on each of them. They need to be streamlined a bit and kept up to date. The links to the groups could also be placed on the official school site to gain better visibility.

Online magazine

We have a school magazine L!VE that is published both physically and electronically. However, the electronic version is in a pdf form with only a few of the articles being published in html form. My intention is to make use of  a blogging platform to publish our magazine online. This will not only increase the visibility of the magazine, but also facilitate interaction on the articles and get the content indexed on search engines. WordPress seems to be an ideal platform for this purpose, and there are quite a lot of magazine themes for this purpose.

School blog

Currently we do not have a blog for our school. However, we do make use of blogs during our annual b-school fest like we did for AVENUES 08 this time. The idea here is to make blogging a continuous phenomenon. This should again facilitate interaction, increase visibility, and keeps notifications up to date.

Wiki

I had already started a wiki some time back, and did manage to put up some content on it. Over time, it can become a very important knowledge repository with different kinds of information on our school.

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Once set up, these avenues should definitely help the school from different aspects. Moreover, most of these services can be setup or for free. There are of course several other services that can be used in addition to the ones mentioned here like photo sharing, social bookmarking etc. So, the main investment required will be time, which is quite an important commodity in management courses :-) .

However, there are several challenges and constraints to be overcome before these become a reality, the biggest of which is going to be getting participation and garnering critical mass from the various stakeholders so that this initiative can be sustained in the long run.

The real story behind the space pen

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The story of NASA spending millions of dollars to create a pen that worked in space for their astronauts, while the Russians just opted to use pencils, is often cited as a KISS example. However, it turns out that it’s just that – a story, and not the reality.

I first came across the actual story behind the space pen in the Geek Trivia article of TechRepublic. Apparently, both the Americans and Russians opted to use pencils initially, but turned out to have several problems due to the tips breaking off, and their flammable nature (in the high oxygen environment). NASA did opt to use mechanical pencils initially, but they were pretty expensive (almost $130).

In the end both parties started using the space pen developed by the Fisher Pen company which was a lot cheaper ($2.39 after a bulk discount). The research behind development of the pen did require around a million dollars, and patented in 1965. But, this was done by the pen company and not NASA. Also, if you are interested in buying one, it costs around $50.

There is also a detailed Scientific American article on the space pen which appeared last December.