Prakash Advani's Blog

Patents were designed to protect the innovator. But deals in the recent past prove otherwise. They are primarly used by the Big Boys to get money from the small guys or make them do things which actually prevents innovations.

Read this article to get an understanding.

This time, the lucky donor of cash for secrets is Brother, which will now be allowed to use Microsoft patents to make printers. As Microsoft doesn’t make printers–indeed, doesn’t even make printer drivers–it is an interesting exercise to try and guess what’s actually happened. It’s fruitless to ask either of the companies–and we did try. In cases like this, as in the best gangster movies, nobody ain’t sayin’ nothin’.

Thomas Edison’s teachers said he was “too stupid to learn anything.” He was fired from his first two jobs for being “non productive.” As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?”
Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

I have a nice feeling of gratitude towards Thomas Edison for inventing technology thats lighting up our homes everyday.

French fighter planes were unable to take off after military computers which were running Windows were infected by a computer virus.

France is a big user of Linux. The French police and the French Parliament is already using it, so now the military should also switch.

This is an interesting article comparing various features of Ubuntu with Vista and Windows 7.

It covers the following:

• How long does each operating system take to install?
• How much disk space was used in the standard install?
• How long does boot up and shutdown take?
• How long does it take to copy files from USB to HD, and from HD to HD?
• How fast can it execute the Richards benchmark?

Read the whole article.

Internet Explorer has been loosing market share to Firefox. This is now old news but we now have stats to prove.

Internet Explorer has lost more than 7% market share, it has gone from 74.80% to  67.55% market share. Note to Indian websites, can you now please make your web site work on Firefox? You are loosing the customers who don’t use Internet Explorer.

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Ext4 is here and it rocks! It a faster file system and expect it to show up in upcoming distros such as Ubuntu 9;04. Finally we have a file system that gives faster performance and is widely accepted. ReiserFS had good performance and I have used it in the past, but today is not been used widely. Ext4 should fill in the void pretty well.

Read this article for more details.

While we are still struggling with a few Kbps speeds, which we call Broadband in India. Korea is already rolling out 1Gbps broadband by investing US$24 Billion.

Most of the internet plans available in India, have a download limits of 1GB and speeds are 256/512Mbps.This defeats the whole purpose of having high speed internet when the moment you start using it, you end up paying for every MB of download.

Airtel which is offering the highest speeds for home use of 8Mbps, has  a cap of 4GB, which you can easily use up in about an hour! And BTW Airtel service is available in only select cities and locations, so you are out of luck.

What India needs:

• Active peering between ISPs, most local ISPs don’t connect to each other, so traffic has to go around the world to reach them.
• Fireup the unused fiber.  Only 3% of fiber optic cables are actually being used, the rest are sitting idle. Create a law to force people to put this to use within a time frame, else this fiber becomes public property.
• Currently its more expensive to host sites in India, than in the US, because of which most Indian companies have web sites situated in the US. First reduce the cost of hosting in India and second give tax incentive for businesses to host web sites in India.
• Also ISP shouldn’t charge for downloads, if the downloads are from an Indian server. This will encourage people to download from a local server.
• Setup  local mirrors of popular software such as Linux flavours.

LG has recently launched this mobile phone in India with a claimed battery life on 1 month (standby). I have been playing around with this phone and here is my take.

This is a basic phone with a street price of Rs. 4175/- (US$ 85 Approx)

Whats good about this phone:

• The battery went on for 3 days with moderate usage. I wasn’t able to to test the claim of standby time. MP3 playback drains battery.
• The phone includes FM Radio and MP3 function.
• Inbuilt speaker is quite loud but quality is average as compared to expensive phones.
• Good screen resolution, better than the basic phones from Nokia.
• USB cable included to sync address book with PC and can be used to charge the phone as well.
  Note: This is a proprietary cable, so you can’t use any standard USB cable, you have to use this one.
• You can record video, audio and record songs form FM Radio. I tested this and works well. You can also record your phone conversations .
• Can playback audio and video files using handsfree, bluetooth or through inbuilt speakers.
• Can play FM  Radio on the speaker (provided you have your handsfree cable connected which acts like an antenna)
• Supports stereo bluetooth headsets! When even the iPhone doesn’t
• No degradation of performance after loading 900 contacts + 1000 mp3 files.
• Inbuilt 60 MB memory which is free even after loading all the contacts.
• Expandable memory, so you can add MicroSD card. I tested this with Sandisk 4GB MicroSD and works well.
• Decent 100 pages manual.
• Mobile tracker included, so if your phone gets stolen, and someone changes the SIM, you can get an SMS alert of the new number on any 2 alternative numbers of your choice.
• Handy and light weight.
• You can exchange Business card from other users (including Nokia), the card is saved as vCard format (which is s a standard), you can also save any contact as vCard to the memory card.

Side note for Linux users (Tried this on Ubuntu 8.10): When you connect the phone with the USB cable, it gives you an option on the phone to select Mass storage, if you select mass storage, the phone will get auto mounted, then you can then drag and drop any files that you like for example you can copy mp3 files which can be played back on the phone.

When you plugin the USB cable, it also gives you an option to select COM port, if you select COM port,the phone gets detected as  /dev/ttyACM0 . To test you can type:

echo atdt111 > /dev/ttyACM0

and the phone will dial 111 Make sure you select a number that won’t call the police!

I was also able to use KMobileTools and access the phonebook but haven’t done extensive testing.

Limitations.

• Camera is of a low resolution, so if you are primary looking for camera function, this camera is not for you.
• The interface is not very intuitive, takes time getting used to.
• Cannot charge and use handsfree at the same time, as they use the same slot.
• No 3G, EDGE, GPS or Wifi, so if you are looking for using more of data functions, this one only has GPRS support.
• T9 dictionary is included but can’t be customised, no way to add your own words. No way to cycle through words.
• Handsfree quality is good for music but has a hissing sound when used for phone call.
• No standard headphones jack, so you can’t directly connect any other headphones (except bluetooth).
• No stop watch or timer included.

Final Thoughts: Excellent phone for its price, if you really need any of  the missing features, then you need to look for alternatives.

If your hard drive is seagate, then you may need to update the hardrive firmware.

A firmware issue has been identified that affects a small number of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive models which may result in data becoming inaccessible after a power-off/on operation. The affected products are Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22.

If your drive is one of the affected ones,  you can get the update firmware here.