Mouli's thoughts and musics over two decades
Remember a while back, MIT developed a $100 laptop. This was an experiment. It was decided that, if it could be done, it could be used to make computing available to the masses in developing countries. Well they did it. Looks like, there is now a Taiwanese company which wants to mass market this computer.
The coolest thing that I found in this was, the computer actually works using wind-up power ! Wow.
Read the $100 laptop page here.
Nope, that is not the local cyber police. This is a software that I just noticed on lifehacker, that is supposed to be an easy-to-use file recovery program. This is freeware. Lifehacker says it in a humorous way, and I have to reproduce it here 🙂
If you’ve accidentally erased a few important files that you would kill to have back, put down the gun and try out PC Inspector.
Go the PC Inspector page.
NY Times has an article about Ray Ozzie – the new CTO at Microsoft. The article talks about how Microsoft bought Groove Networks, the company that Ray Ozzie had founded, primarily to get Ozzie. Ray Ozzie has been enlisted primarily to get Microsoft to ‘rethink’ and ‘refocus’. Ozzie would be heading Microsoft towards the web services model . Though, they do not really admit it, this is to counter Google and several other small startups who are begenning to show up their web-services – which can potentially hit Microsoft where it hurts – revenue. Lets see what happens.
Read the full article here.
Be sure to peek into the leaked-out memo from Ozzie – a longish read, but a worthwhile glance. So the giant is indeed noticing what is going on.
A brilliant article in DesignNews, which I found through an ACM news letter on how the US is appearing to lose its technical edge. A very third party-ish neutral article, urging the people of the US to wake up. The article is laden with facts – some of them which surprised even me. I usually do not write about US-bashing, but this article is a genuine plea.
Some nuggets:
China is headed toward a million engineers a year …Â and India isn’t far behind
“Numbers aren’t everything,” adds Orsak of SMU. “But it’s a lot easier to find a diamond when you’re searching through ten times as much material.”
Some contend that China’s national will in this matter is similar to the one it applied to sports more than two decades ago. Back then, China’s desire for a powerhouse basketball program resulted in a “genetic conspiracy” that culminated in the birth of an 11-pound, 23-inch boy named Yao Ming, says a new book titled Operation Yao Ming. Yao, whose father was 6′-10″ and whose mother stood 6′-2″, was quickly funneled into the Communist sports machine. He grew to the extraordinary height of 7′-5″ and became a national icon.
Today, China is said to be applying a similar form of national will to engineering. And, as it did 20 years ago, its desire for success is trickling down from the top. Heads of state are applying their engineering knowledge to a desire for the country’s biggest companies to “get more than mere pennies on the dollar” for the products created there. By developing intellectual property, instead of merely specializing in knock-offs of existing designs, Chinese officials hope to grab a bigger share of every economic pie, much as Microsoft does in the U.S.
 Interest in engineering among American students is dwindling, particularly at the Ph.D. level, where 51 percent of the students are now foreign-born. Moreover, applications to U.S. engineering schools are down 60 percent from China and 40 percent from India during the last two years, suggesting that our foreign spigot may be running dry.
For many, the most frustrating part of the entire phenomenon is engineering’s lack of appeal among American-born students. A combination of factors—salaries and public image, as well as offshoring of jobs to Asia—has made engineering appear undesirable to high school kids who might otherwise choose it as a career path. Add to that the fact that it’s generally recognized as the toughest undergraduate curriculum in American education, and that many of its students increasingly see their college experience as an extraordinary grind, and the result is that worst of all cultural images: uncoolness.
Read the full article here
Gina Trapani, over at lifehacker, has an excellent piece on ‘how to optimize for slow internet connections’. She had been home for the holidays and had to post to lifehacker over a dial-up connection. She now details her experiences and how she overcame them in this post.
Check out the full article here.
Two excellent technology articles. Very good reads – all three of them.
Evan Williams of Blogger fame, has a neat set of 10 rules for web startups. He even has some GTD stuff going on. Check out rule #10:
#10: Be Balanced
What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amount of work. But it can’t be all the time. Nature requires balance for health—as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I’ve found than David Allen’s GTD process.
Read the full article here.
The Telegraph (news.telegraph.co.uk) has a great writeup on Jonathan Ive, the man behind the IPOD and the iMAC. The man is supposed to be a very shy, yet a very personable, charming, and gentle figure.
Ive’s reticence has added to the fascination about the man, particularly among the millions of Apple devotees.
The new iMAC has an entertainment center bundled with it. It has a remote with one large button which performs 14 functions (compared to the nearest competition which has 40 buttons). The remote even has a magnet in it, so that you can stick it to the side of the computer – so that it does not get lost.
Read the full article here.
Microsoft is a manufacturer of software, which even if made globally, is fairly easy to manage. The XBOX is a piece of hardware and it was a challenge for these guys. The Wall Street Journal has an article detailing how the global production is carried out for the XBOX 360.
Wow. Right out of a globalization text book. Read the full article here.
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