Prakash Advani's Blog » General

MIT Genius Stuffs 100 Processors Into Single Chip

Prakash — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 02:30:30 +0000

Anand Agarwal directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s vaunted Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL. His company Tilera sells chips with 16, 32, and 64 cores, and it’s scheduled to ship a CPU with 100 cores.

It is green cause its power efficient. A 400-watt Tilera server provides as much processing power as eight x86 servers that draw 2,000 watts.

HTC Inspire 4G a good budget phone

Prakash — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:02:16 +0000

HTC Inspire is a good budget phone, however I don’t know when HTC will launch this in India. It’s currently available in US from AT&T.

Here is what is cool.

4G Capable HSPA+
Android 2.2 upgradable to 2.3
4.3″ Display
8 Megapixel Camera, 720p video recording.
Dolby Surround sound
Scratch proof, Gorilla Glass screen
4 GB Built in with expandable microSD memory card slot.
1 GHz processor

Whats the limitations

1 GHz processor sounds a little low as compared to the new generation dual and quad core phones. However for people just wanting to use the phone features this is enough unless you want to play games. By choosing a single core processor, HTC is able to keep the price affordable for this phone. Unlocked phones are available for around $300 on Amazon.

No Front facing camera, this in my opinion is a need for people wanting to do video calling over 3G or skype.

HTC incredible D provides an update to HTC Desire HD HTC has launched the HTC Incredible S, which is an...
Amazon Fires a price war, HTC flyer now $299 The Amazon Kindle Fire has started price war. Since its...
iPhone 4s, is it cool? Apple has released the iPhone 4S, here is whats cool....

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Cloud Demystified

Prakash — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 02:00:28 +0000

Cloud is the buzz of today and many people are getting very confused on what is the cloud. To put is in simple way, Cloud is any service delivered on the Internet. Cloud based hosted services have been around for 10 years however now people are calling it Cloud.

Lets take an example, if a university offers it courses only in the class room, and now wants to offer online classes, then it is the Cloud. Similarly if you are running a business and you want to start selling online then you are moving into the Cloud.

Once you have decided to move your business online, you can select some of the current Cloud technologies which will allow you to scale very well such that your website/webstore will be able to handle high traffic very well at the same time optimise your resources when the traffic is low. These are Cloud technologies or building blocks which is not be confused by Cloud services. You could still offer your services in the Cloud without using any Cloud Technology. However if you use Cloud Technologies you can scale well and optimise your resources well.

Enterprise and Private Cloud Solutions – Conversations in the Cloud Recently published postcast on Ubuntu Cloud. This was recorded at...
How Has Cloud Computing Changed Business? Mashable has a nice infographic on how Cloud Computing has...
10 cloud startups to watch in 2012 From Gigaom’s article: The past few years have been nothing...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Open Source solution to Microsoft Azure

Prakash — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:52:02 +0000

Build on VMWare CloudFoundry, IronFoundry offers .NET support in the Cloud. Cloud Foundry is VMWare’s PaaS solution which is open sourced. Tier 3 (the company behind IronFoundry) has take the code and added support for .NET. Related posts: 50 Open Source Applications for Sci-Tech Education This article has a nice list of 50 [...] Related posts:

50 Open Source Applications for Sci-Tech Education This article has a nice list of 50 open source...
HP should open source webOS Looks like HP is going to kill webOS. HP webOS...
Get an Open PC What is special about the Open-PC? Hardware and Software is...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Why OpenStack is important

Prakash — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 02:25:09 +0000

OpenStack is the future of Cloud computing. Founded by NASA and Rackspace it aims to provide a fully scalable open source cloud infrastructure. This can be deployed to build a public cloud or your own private cloud.

Here are the reasons why I believe OpenStack will be successful.

Its completely Open Source, hence it is continuing to develop at a rapid space. Being open in nature, the project will never die down.
It is designed to scale up very well.
Its highly flexible you have a choice of Hypervisers including ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, LXC, QEMU, UML, Xen, and XenServer.
Over 2000 Developers and 144 companies are behind OpenStack making it an Industry Standard.
This includes the who’s who of Cloud computing:

Cloud Vendors: Citrix, Cloud.com, Nebula
OEMS: Dell, HP, NEC
Chip makers: Intel and AMD, Broadcom
Storage: Netapp
OS Vendors: Canonical (Ubuntu), SUSE
Telco: NTT Docomo
Networking vendor: Cisco
Service Provider: L&T Infotech

Some website stats shared by OpenStack.

People in over 13,000 cities from over 200 countries visited OpenStack.org in 2011
Ttotal of 750k+ visits from 430k+ unique visitors.
The most popular city was Beijing, followed by Seoul, London, and Bangalore
China was #2 after the U.S. as a source of visitors to openstack.org

How Has Cloud Computing Changed Business? Mashable has a nice infographic on how Cloud Computing has...
10 cloud startups to watch in 2012 From Gigaom’s article: The past few years have been nothing...
Why HTML 5 is the most important standard Since the time the HTML standard was created, people have...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

After free online courseware now MIT is offering free online leaning

Prakash — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 03:05:09 +0000

After the success of Open Courseware, MIT is planning to launch free online learning courses. MIT Open Courseware is now 10 years old, wow! The online course will be called MITx. It will not earn you an MIT degree however it will still give you a certificate of completion. The course will be free, the certificate will attract a small fee which is yet to be determined.

It will be built on Open Source and the technology developed for this will also be Open Source.

Time to learn something new ?

Get an Open PC What is special about the Open-PC? Hardware and Software is...
LibreOffice coming to Android, iOS and to the Web At the LibreOffice Conference, they announced that they will be...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

10 cloud startups to watch in 2012

Prakash — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 04:51:26 +0000

From Gigaom’s article:

The past few years have been nothing if not a boon for entrepreneurs looking to cash in on venture capitalists’ lust for all things cloud. All the activity has been great, and we’ve seen some exciting new companies emerge and prosper — companies such as Heroku, RightScale and New Relic — but it also means there’s precious little room on the playing field for newcomers. Startups that want to get noticed, get funded, and ultimately have a winning exit must either find their own unique niche or stake out ground on a different field altogether.

Here are 10 cloud computing startups that launched in 2011 and that have a chance to make it big in 2012.

Read the rest of the article.

Expect these companies to receive enormous amount of funding way past their realistic value.

Enterprise and Private Cloud Solutions – Conversations in the Cloud Recently published postcast on Ubuntu Cloud. This was recorded at...
How Has Cloud Computing Changed Business? Mashable has a nice infographic on how Cloud Computing has...
Test drive your own private cloud If you want to test drive your own private cloud,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

How Has Cloud Computing Changed Business?

Prakash — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 06:28:22 +0000

Mashable has a nice infographic on how Cloud Computing has changed businesses.

Enterprise and Private Cloud Solutions – Conversations in the Cloud Recently published postcast on Ubuntu Cloud. This was recorded at...
Test drive your own private cloud If you want to test drive your own private cloud,...
Short video about the Ubuntu Cloud Here is a short video about Canonical’s cloud offering. This...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The Negative Effects of Technology

Prakash — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:17:33 +0000

The age of technology has ushered in countless conveniences that have shaped our lives in more ways than we can probably even imagine. The late, great Steve Jobs likened technology to a bicycle, in that it helps us get to where we want to go more efficiently. If you want to know how very much technology adds to your quality of life, then try just for a moment to imagine your life without it. Difficult, isn’t it? But just like everything, the benefits of technology come with some costs. Consider these negative effects of technology:

Changes in business. As technology has ushered in all of this convenience, it has also made it unnecessary for people to perform certain menial tasks that computers are now able to accomplish in a fraction of the time. This can be a good thing, unless you’re one of the thousands of people whose job has been replaced by a computer. Moreover, print sources like newspaper and publishers, as well as media retailers like music and video rental stores, are shutting down in large scale because their goods are no longer needed now that people can easily access information and media online.

Intimacy. Technology allows people to communicate with others on a mass scale, and from one corner of the globe to the other. While this may be good in some ways, it also serves to alienate us from true, intimate connections. We have less face-to-face conversations with people in favor of texting via our mobile devices, and we make “friends” with people we’ve never met before, sometimes communicating with them online more than we even spend time with our families.

Laziness and instant gratification. When things come too easy to us – when we no longer have to pay our dues to get a return – we become lazy and complacent. One day, it’s a thrill just to be able to access boundless information on the Internet, and the next day we’re complaining that our pages aren’t loading fast enough. Where does it end?

Technology has made it possible for us to do things we never before could’ve imagined, and it seems we’re only just beginning to understand this fascinating frontier. However, has the advent of the age of technology taken us further away from ourselves? Are we forgetting what’s really important? It seems that today’s culture is, more and more, becoming more about the machine and less about the man. It’s time we take a good, hard look at what we are making of all this technology, before it makes something of us that we no longer recognize.

About the Author: Odette Maupredi is a communications specialist with an avid interest in technology. While she enjoys using email fax services and online sites to better run her business, she is consciously aware of how changing technology is making it more difficult for people to communicate face-to-face.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Harness the power of compounding

Prakash — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 03:31:52 +0000

In the book, Once Upon a Wall Street, Peter Lynch, one of the most successful mutual fund managers that Wall Street has ever seen, narrates a story.

“Consider the Indians of Manhattan, who in 1625 sold all their real estate to a group of immigrants for $24 in trinkets and beads. For 362 years the Indians have been the subjects of cruel jokes because of it – but it turns out that they may have made a better deal than the buyers who got the island. At 8% interest on $24(note: let’s suspend our disbelief and assume they converted the trinkets to cash) compounded over all those years, the Indians would have built up a net worth just short $30 trillion, while the latest tax records from the Borough of Manhattan show the real estate to be worth only $28.1 billion.

That’s 1000 times more! the power of compounding. Found this article interesting.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.