Prakash Advani's Blog

General Electric says it knows more about big manufacturing gear and data than any cloud provider ever will. Critics say it can’t keep up with the cloud giants of the world.

Read More: http://fortune.com/2015/08/06/ge-is-building-its-own-cloud-outsiders-wonder-why/

Transportation is one of the world’s largest industries. The five largest automotive companies in the world generate more than 750 billion euro in annual revenue. The names in the industry are global brands – BMW, Ford, Daimler. Yet despite its size and stature, it’s also an industry in the midst of transformation. Today, new transportation vendors like Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, and Grabtaxi are changing our relationship with cars.

Read More: https://hbr.org/2015/07/what-the-auto-industry-can-learn-from-cloud-computing

When a subordinate of President Kalam at DRDO couldn’t take his children to an exhibition due to work pressure, Kalam surprised his subordinate and took the children instead!

During a significant project of the DRDO, the work pressure was high. A scientist approached his boss – Dr. Kalam – and asked to leave early that day considering he had promised his children to take them to an exhibition. Kalam generously granted the permission, and the scientist got back to work. When he did, he lost the track of time and forgot to leave early. He reached home, feeling guilty, and looked for his kids, but could only find his wife. He asked for the kids, and to his surprise she told him: “your manager was here around 5:15 and he took the kids for the exhibition!”

Apparently, Dr. Kalam had been observing the scientist and noticed that he might never realise he had to go home. Feeling for the kids, he decided to take the kids instead. If that’s not sweet, what is?

Read More: http://www.youthconnect.in/2014/11/13/12-rare-stories-about-dr-apj-abdul-kalam-will-make-your-day-today/

India was the sole emerging market bright-spot in IBM’s second-quarter earnings, as the other BRIC countries weighed down the technology giant’s results.

Read more at: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/48170664.cms

GOOGLE HAS BECOME the biggest name yet to back the open source cloud system OpenStack. Specifically, Google will help integrate its own open source container management software Kubernetes.

This may seem like in-the-enterprise-weeds news, but it represents another significant step as Google tries to make up ground against Amazon’s wildly popular AWS suite of cloud products.

Read More: http://www.wired.com/2015/07/google-backs-open-source-system-cloud-battle-amazon/

Unfortunately, there are plenty of factors impeding this data-rich future. The problems range from the 400-plus competing IoT standards to lack of global Internet connectivity, and more.

Vendors largely control the 400-plus competing standards, but the battle for developer hearts won’t be won by a corporate logo-laden home page. Open source, however, could help, allowing developers to focus on interoperable code, rather than interoperable vendors.

Read More: http://readwrite.com/2015/06/29/internet-of-things-11-trillion-obstacles-open-source

OPEN SOURCE is key for humanity to preserve its history in the digital age, Vatican Library CIO Luciano Ammenti has argued.

“The Vatican Library is a conservation library. We try to preserve our history. We tried to expand the number of reading rooms available for people that want to use our library,” he said.

“But we realised that reading rooms will never be enough. We have 82,000 manuscripts in total, and at any one time only 20 percent of them can be read in the library.

Read More: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2407221/open-source-is-only-reliable-way-to-preserve-human-history-argues-vatican

One of the drives to Cloud is that it is suppose to be green, but is Amazon Web Services green itself ?

Amazon Web Services has been under fire in recent weeks from a group of activist customers who are calling for the company to be more transparent in its usage of renewable energy.

In response, rather than divulge additional details about the source of power for its massive cloud infrastructure, the company has argued that using the cloud is much more energy efficient than customers powering their own data center operations.

But the whole discussion has raised the question: How green is the cloud?

Lets find out: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2936654/iaas/how-green-is-amazon-s-cloud.html

The latest Kilo release of the OpenStack software, made available Thursday, sports new identity (ID) federation capability that, in theory, will let a customer in California use her local OpenStack cloud for everyday work, but if the load spikes, allocate jobs to other OpenStack clouds either locally or far, far away.

“With Kilo, for the first time, you can log in on one dashboard and deploy across multiple clouds from many vendors worldwide,” Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, said in an interview.

Read More: http://fortune.com/2015/04/30/openstack-federation-cloud/

Dell commissioned Greyhound Research to understand PC usage in India.

The ‘The PC Users Trends of Emerging India’ survey polled 6000 citizens from 40 cities from Tier 1 to Tier 4, across five user groups broadly defined by age and sociological factors like life aspirations and purchasing capacity.

According to a recent study by MAIT and KPMG, India’s PC penetration is estimated to be just 9 percent, lower than neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka, which stands at 12 percent, while China has 50 percent. The traditional desktop PC market is expected to grow at 2 percent, while the market for notebooks is expected to grow at 9 percent, according a Gartner report published in April.

Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/06/12/what-indian-pc-users-want_n_7551024.html

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is upping its investment in cloud computing in the United States, making it more of a competitor to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft than ever before.
Alibaba’s cloud division, Aliyun, has signed a series of new partnerships with the likes of Intel and data center company Equinix to localize its cloud offerings without having to build its own new data centers, CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal reports.

The slew of partnerships, which Alibaba is calling its Marketplace Alliance Program, focuses on expanding its cloud services globally, not just the US. Besides Equinix and Intel, it also signed a deal with Singtel in Singapore.

Read More: http://www.businessinsider.in/Alibaba-boosts-its-investment-in-the-cloud-wars-against-Amazon-Google-and-Microsoft/articleshow/47590813.cms

For the first time Amazon has revealed its numbers for AWS.

In its latest financial earnings report, Amazon said AWS grew 49 percent in 2014, pulling in $4.6 billion in revenue. After reaching $1.57 billion in the first quarter of this year, AWS is on track for $6.23 billion in sales by year’s end, the company said. Though its cloud business still accounted for only 7 percent of the company’s overall quarterly revenue of $22.72 billion, AWS is growing at a much faster rate than the rest of Amazon (AWS grew 49 percent, while the company’s core North American business grew 22 percent). And contrary to what the company has indicated in the past, its margins are significantly higher with AWS.

Read More: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/amazons-cloud-is-the-best-part-of-its-business-aws/

Code Name: MT8173

Features: 

• Quad Core
• 4K Video Support
• 64 Bit
• Support for upto 20 Megapixel cameras

Read More: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2890656/mediatek-claims-new-64bit-chip-will-power-the-fastest-android-tablets-on-the-market.html

Indian food, with its hodgepodge of ingredients and intoxicating aromas, is coveted around the world. The labor-intensive cuisine and its mix of spices is more often than not a revelation for those who sit down to eat it for the first time. Heavy doses of cardamom, cayenne, tamarind and other flavors can overwhelm an unfamiliar palate. Together, they help form the pillars of what tastes so good to so many people.

Read More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/03/a-scientific-explanation-of-what-makes-indian-food-so-delicious/

Facebook said today that it’s giving away a tool it built to spot errors in Android application code.

Facebook has gradually improved its main app for Android, as well as other apps for the mobile operating system, including Messenger, Facebook Groups, Facebook Pages Manager, and most recently Facebook at Work.

Read More: http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/18/facebook-unleashes-stetho-its-android-debugging-tool-under-open-source-license

In 2015, many Linux and open-source vets still distrust Microsoft’s conversion to open-source. In 2006, no one believed that when Sam Ramji, who oversaw BEA Systems move to open-source software, became Director of Platform Technology Strategy for Microsoft’s Open Source Software Labs, that Microsoft was doing more than paying lip-service to open source. They were wrong. Now, years after leaving Microsoft, Ramji is returning to play a major open-source leadership role as the new CEO for the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

Read More: http://www.zdnet.com/article/sam-ramiji-takes-lead-at-the-open-source-cloud-foundry-foundation/

Who says you can’t have fast, good and cheap? The Document Foundation’s latest release of the most popular open-source office suite, LibreOffice 4.4 is quite fast on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows; it works well on all three desktop operating systems, and it won’t cost you a penny.

Read More: http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-best-open-source-office-suite-libreoffice-4-4-gets-new-release/

Download Here: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/?version=4.4.0

Amazon EC2 was the most reliable compute and Google Cloud Storage was the most reliable storage.

The Laguna Beach, California company tracks status of more than 30 clouds from AWS to Zettagrid:

Read More: https://gigaom.com/2015/01/07/amazon-web-services-tops-list-of-most-reliable-public-clouds/

With other languages such as Java and Python getting large user base, this is a good move to gain some users.

Microsoft is open sourcing .NET, this should reduce the compatibility challenges with cross-platform applications developed using Microsoft Tools.

http://news.microsoft.com/2014/11/12/microsoft-takes-net-open-source-and-cross-platform-adds-new-development-capabilities-with-visual-studio-2015-net-2015-and-visual-studio-online/

The main thing the Tox team is trying to do, besides provide encryption, is create a tool that requires no central servers whatsoever—not even ones that you would host yourself. It relies on the same technology that BitTorrent uses to provide direct connections between users, so there’s no central hub to snoop on or take down.

There are other developers trying to build a secure, peer-to-peer messaging systems, including Briar and Invisible.im, a project co-created by HD Moore, the creator of the popular security testing framework Metasploit. And there are other secure-centric voice calling apps, including those from Whisper Systems and Silent Circle, which encrypt calls made through the traditional telco infrastructure. But Tox is trying to roll both peer-to-peer and voice calling into one.

Actually, it’s going a bit further than that. Tox is actually just a protocol for encrypted peer-to-peer data transmission. “Tox is just a tunnel to another node that’s encrypted and secure,” says David Lohle, a spokesperson for the project. “What you want to send over that pipe is up to your imagination.” For example, one developer is building an e-mail replacement with the protocol, and Lohle says someone else is building an open source alternative to BitTorrent Sync.

Read More: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/tox/