The fastest I have surfed is when I was alone on the campus (during a brief stay in summers) at Planet-I. It was a glorious 2mbps speed. And it rocked! All you want at a click of a button. Even when the campus was in full swing, with 300 odd participants surfing the internet, the net was still at a decent pace. This is India we are talking, where people still pay a big premium for connectivity.
Last week, one of my room-mate informs me that in UK, they are working on this new technology thats going to shoot the transfer rates beyond imagination. Just imagine, what would you do with transfer rates of 100mbps!! All data you want is completely accessible and available to you within seconds. An entire movie within seconds … infact, the individual user’s need for a personal storage drive just might go down. This combined with the fact that many websites are now showing a conceptual web-OS … like Desktop2 or Fanbox. Also, many SMEs are now opting for the Software As a Service (SaaS) model, where in the firm does not have to invest in the licensing cost of any software, but would rather pay a periodical amount for that service.
You could in fact, cut costs by having an hosted ERP, Google Docs, a web OS and dumb terminals hooked up to a hosted storage server all on the internet. Your capital expenditures go down, but the variable expenditures might go up. If the opportunity cost of your capex beats your opex, then you definitely have a winner here.
Think about an individual user, all media content available … on a pay per usage basis of course. For gamers, there is the WWW as your LAN … talk about one huge LAN party.
It does change your perspective on connectivity and storage doesn’t it?
Have any of you watched the movie Kya Kehna – its the one in which Preity Zinta gets pregnant while still being an undergraduate. The entire movie is one sob story followed by next, how the society shuns her, how her college shuns her, how Preity’s character simply buckles under all the pressure … well, I have to confess that I could not stand to watch the entire movie. I had to switch the channel, I do not like to watch people roll about in their self-pity.
That is precisely the reason why I loved Juno. The outline of the plot is the same … Juno, the main character of the movie, finds out that she is pregnant. The first 30 minutes go about in how the news has impacted her and all her friends … her parents, and their reaction about the news. The fresh perspective comes now … her parents accept it naturally and extend her the much needed support. Her friend also helps her out in her own inane way … by finding out a surrogate family to whom Juno can donate the child to. Juno meets the loving family, and decides that her baby would be safe with this family. The baby’s father is Juno’s good friend Bleeker (played by Michael Cera from Superbad) who is completely unaware and not there during the entire pregnancy. The movie has its fair share of twists and turns … where we are forced to think about relationships as the plot unfolds.
Juno is shown as the unpredictable, cool chick who is simply not ready for this, and yet she takes this on and goes through it … without victimizing herself. Without feeling sorry for herself at any moment. And thats why I loved it so much. Definitely a 8.2
Microsoft in an official release to the public has announced what features (read enhancements) they can expect from the much hyped Internet Explorer 8. This was at the MIX08 conference held at Las Vegas … you can read about the entire details here (beware, it is encoded with the usual marketing spin). Will list down some of the salient features here –
Activities – Users can add more extensions to their browser (the way Firefox does already). These activities would enable the users to do more, in short, Microsoft gets a whole new way to bundle their failed products with the new and improved browser
WebSlices – Users can subscribe to content from within a page. The moment the content is changed, the users will be notified in their Links Bar.
Automatic Crash Recovery – That’s reassuring!! This feature is being marketed actively instead of an implicit indication that it was always there. Anyways, how is this adding value over Firefox or Opera for that matter.
Safety Filter (thats Anti-Phishing) – This is to be improved and enhanced, which will block sites known to contain malicious scripts. No comments here. I am actually hoping that this works, people do not realize how important this feature is. And those who do, do not use IE :-)
Compliance – IE8 will now be more compliant to the CSS standards. Finally, some sense, these days too many sites are relying more and more on CSS instead of flash or complex javascripts for glitzing up their websites
AJAX Navigation – Hmmm … this is a nice touch I must say. In all the AJAX based portals, whenever we click the back button of the browser, the browser goes to the page which was last submitted completely and not the last AJAXed state. Having this might be a blessing for normal users, I know the techies had just learned to live without AJAX navigation
Integration – IE8 promises ready made integration with Facebook and eBay, et al. So, thats a plus for all facebook and eBay users … dunno how many of them will actually use it though.
All this and a lot more kids! These have been promised to the doe-eyed of Microsoft … you can almost see the bunch of users in the background using their respective other browsers waiting and watching to see what happens next. I am one of them.
As of now, if you do want to try out the beta, try the IE8 Readiness Toolkit and then proceed for the installation. One word. Apprehension.
But I came across this great site. Its iimjobs.com.
Its a portal for all job hunters or for those of us who want to know our market value, and feel good with that information. The site has a simple layout with all the recent job openings on top. Plus, if you are particular about one stream only, then you can browse through the job postings by specialty.
And the best part about the site is that you do not have to register to get to the content.
Kudos Tarun!!
Coming back to this post after a decade, and can say so much has changed about IIM Jobs. It has become one of our default sites to post jobs, and also refer to friends and family when they are hunting for opportunities.
Had gone to Mumbai over the weekend, my mother talked me into watching this movie on Saturday night. Since I did not have anything else to do except visit my ophthalmologist, I complied.
It has been over 4-5 years since I have watched a marathi movie in a theater. And I was pleasantly surprised with the new age of marathi movies coming. Valu in marathi means a bull which is unleashed in the wild, it is not to be tamed and not to be tampered with either.
So the movie starts off with a no-nonsense forest officer who is dispatched to capture a rogue wild bull who is disturbing the peaceful proceedings of some nondescript village. The forest officer is miffed at this prospect, that such an important person like him is now relegated to capturing wild bulls instead of leopards and their ilk. Nonetheless he goes there, along with him, comes his younger brother … and his video camera. The entire movie is about different perspectives from different villagers about one problem. A wild bull. If you do understand marathi, then definitely worth a watch.
What is more interesting, is how the movie was made. The producers of this movie are not your regular Sippy’s and Bokadia’s … they are not even millionaires, they are simple middle class people like you and me. The aam aadmi of Maharashtra. How did they come up with the moolah? Well, through their friends, relatives and friend of their friends.
