Prakash Advani's Blog

Before buying any USB device you can check if your device is supported on Linux. Found this site quite useful and information is nicely classified.

Striking the roots of Corruption is important.

- There is no Accountability. If a person’s car or a citizen gets hurt
because the road are not proper, no one is held responsible. If the
citizen walking on th road who is being affected or the car owner who
has paid road tax, can hold the agency responsible then someone is
accountable.

- Today a government job is considered to be very stable job. You often
hear that someone got suspended or transfered due to corruption. You
never hear someone lost his job. There is no fear about anything since
they know no one or nothing can take away the jobs.

- Most of the systems that still exists were designed by the British and
they continue to be so. The British were ruling India so they always
looked at Indian with suspicions. Government employees were paid
salaries based on how many mistakes/defaulters they found.

This attitude remains today, income tax officials look upon tax paying
citizen’s like all of them are evading taxes. They don’t look at the
people who don’t file returns at all. If their attitude towards tax
paying citizens is that they are contributing, which is helping the
country and paying their salaries too, then things will change.

- Reduce complexity. Like Dr. Nani Palkhiwala had said “We need a
Ministry of Simplicity” . Look at ways on how to simplify things rather
than complicate things.

An example: I was one caught by a Traffic Police for missing a signal. I
accepted my mistake but refused to bribe, and was willing to pay the
fine. He refused to take the fine, said I have to go 5 Kms away to the
Traffic Police booth and pay the fine. The fine couldn’t be paid the same
day too. It had to paid anytime after the next day and within 15 days.
It had to be paid between 12 Noon and 5 PM, which means I have take
leave from work or send someone to go and pay the fine.

It easy to pay the bribe and so difficult to pay the fine!

From DQ Channels India:

The experts in this domain suggest the best way to begin offering solutions on Linux is to take up edge-of-network projects. These include setting up mail, proxy or web server, putting up firewall and intrusion detection systems in place. “That’s how we started and today we have evolved to a stage wherein, we have our own solutions, which we productize and sell,” informs Prakash Advani, Senior VP, Netcore Solutions.

Wall Street Journal had an interesting article.

It says:

Excluding labor and shipping, and leaving out the costs of a monitor, keyboard or mouse, the typical desktop PC these days costs the Dells or the H-Ps of the world roughly $437 in parts.

The biggest portion of that — 30%, or $134 — goes to Intel for a Pentium processor. The disk drives, including whatever CD or DVD is installed, cost around $104; the RAM memory is $54; and the remaining hardware items — power supply, case, circuit boards — total $100.

The final 10%, or $45, goes to Microsoft for the Windows operating system.

From Computer Reseller News:

Prakash Advani, senior VP, Netcore Consulting, and Venkatesh Hariharan, both co-founders of Indlinux.Org, an Indian language GNU/Linux initiative, said, “This is an endorsement of the large market which exists for local language solutions. We believe major customer for this product will be those government and public sector units, which have bilingual computing as a policy and who are not aware of free software.”