Prakash Advani's Blog

MIT Media labs is working on a Sixth Sense technology, amazing stuff.

Check out this video.

Whenever you avail of any service which sends you an SMS alert,  be aware, there is nothing which prevents the service provide from using your number to spam you.

They keep spamming you with all their new offerings even if you haven’t asked for it. This in in spite of subscribing for DND services.

I have thought of a way around this.

• Go to the service provider’s web site and find their toll free number. If its not listed on the site, just google for it:)
• Call them on their toll free number so you don’t pay for the call.
• Explain to them, taking as much time as you need that you don’t want to receive their SMSes.

Now if they understand simple economics, they will stop the SMSes. If they don’t understand, they will anyways be out of business.Here is how:

Its very cheap for them to send a million SMS but it will be very expensive for them if only 1 percent of these start calling them.

1 Million SMS costs less than Rs 100,000 (at Rs. 0.10 per SMS for bulk SMSes)

10,000 people calling cost Rs. 1,000,000 (even if you take Rs. 100 per call)

The service provide would soon realise that more customers are calling them to complain, the service provider is paying for the call and the service provider’s agents are busy attending to them rather than attending to customers wanting to buy their product and services. They would also lose business as potential customers wouldn’t be able to get through and would be on long holds.

You can’t imagine the effect of team work. If all of us do this, we can bring the biggest spammer to listen to us.

Have started a India Anti Spam Action Group on Facebook, please join if you are interested.

Simple business model:

• Make your product/technology popular.
• Let people start using and depending on it.
• Now extract money by suing them.
• Profit!

This is exactly what is happening with Patents, its becoming a way to extract money.

And Microsoft is using it to fight Linux.

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’.

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.

Read More

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.

The iPhone Dev Team has successfully booted Linux on the iPhone. Its still very rudimentary, no fancy apps or touch yet.. but this is just the beginning.

The Dev Team is hoping to run Google’s equally Linux-based but more complete Android mobile operating system on the iPhone and is searching for programmers to help with the project.

Check it out.

As the global economy is slowing down, companies are now looking at Open Source more seriously. With IT budgets experiencing a significant cut, open source is the best way to save cost.

So the bad economy is actually working out good for open source. It also breaks the company out of the vendor locking where they are forced to upgrade by proprietary software vendors.

Business week has a nice article:

Cost-Conscious Companies Turn to Open-Source Software

My friend Leslie took me to this wonderful restaurant and I really enjoyed the food and the concept.

Located in Salt Lake City  and called One World Everybody Eats. The restaurant has no price, no menu, eat as much as you like and pay what ever you like.

They serve only organic food and their mission is to eradicate hunger.

The best part is, they are making reasonable profit.

If you happen to be in Salt Lake City (SLC), please do visit. Here is where you will find them:

One World Everybody Eats
41 South 300 East
Salt Lake City, UT  84111

Ubuntu 8.10 just got released and here is a summary of What’s new:

• Guest Session: If your friend comes over and wants to use your laptop, you can give guest access which is completely locked down so the guest user can’t see or touch your data.
• Support for 3G data card. This becomes easy with the new Network Manager 0.7. It also makes it easy to configure Broadband connections that rely on PPPoE.
• Encrypted Private Directory. You can create an Encrypted folder and store all your confidential data there. If you ever lost your laptop, then this will ensure that someone else can’t access your data.
• BBC Content: Totem now has a plugin for BBC content which makes it easy to find and stream BBC content.
• Automated Printer Driver install. If you have a new printer, Ubuntu will find the driver automatically and install it for you.
• VM Cloning for testing. You can convert your current Ubuntu image to a VM to do any upgrades/testing. This way all your testing can happen in a VM before actually deploying.
• Kubuntu Users would find that the new release is now using KDE4.

Go here to download the ISOs or better still download the torrent: ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso.

All the Ubuntu torrents.

If you are already running a previous version of Ubuntu, you can upgrade:

Press Alt+F2, and type

update-manager -d

Now click on the Update button.

The Valley of Butterflies is situated at Rhodes Island in Greece. A popular tourist attraction, which was once full of butterflies. Now its hard to find any butterflies there. And it not just global warming, its also because of increase in number of people visiting the place.

I managed to spot one butterfly and a nice Lilly too.

OpenOffice.org released OpenOffice 3.0 which reported 3 Million downloads in the first week itself! Way to go OO!

What’s interesting is, 80 percent of the downloads were on Windows and price being the major driver since OpenOffice is both Free and free. Free as in Open Source and free as in free of cost too.

In today’s economy, I am sure cost would be a major factor which will work in favour of Open Source alternatives.

The 451 Group has released a survey which says that Open Source is not a business model.

As per the survey most of the companies doing open source have a hint of proprietary software.

This is done to create a reason for customer to pay. Why would a customer pay if he/she is getting everything for free?

If you know if any pure open source companies, do write in.

Interesting quote:

“You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can’t write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.”

— Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD)

God bless the Windows sysadmins 🙂

Still running Firefox 2? Or worse still running IE? Time to check out the latest browser Firefox 3.

Download here.

Read more about the new features.

Still not sure ? See the download stats updated in realtime! Its a new world record of 8 million downloads within the first 24 hours!

As per various articles, cancer can not only cured but prevented by consuming Vitamin B17. Cancer is caused due to the deficiency of Vitamin B17.

Test done on cancer patients has proven this. Also cultures such as the Navajo Indians, the Hunzakuts the Abkhazians have never had a reported case of cancer! And their diet is rich in Apricot Seeds.

Apricot Seeds have a little nut inside, which is the richest source of Vitamin B17. Eating 5 of these everyday can prevent cancer.

Read this article for better understanding.

And see this video for more detailed knowledge.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, came across this information and found it very interesting and hence I am sharing this in the hope, it can help other people. I haven’t tested this and don’t know anyone who has either.

After announcing the number of billionaires from India.

Forbes recently did a vote count and found that 53 percent believe that India will have most billionaires by 2017 than any other country.

Over 13,000 people voted and more people are voting.

Go ahead and cast your vote or see the list. I just did mine 🙂

I recently upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1. Looking at the features, I was really tempted to upgrade to 2.5 but decided to wait until the .1 release. 2.5.1 fixes a lot of the bugs which were reported.

The upgrade was very smooth, and retained all my widgets, ads, layouts (which was something that used to get messed up earlier).

The new user interface is very sleek, easy to use and had a lot more features.

A noticeable new feature is the Gallery, yes it has an inbuilt photo gallery which is simple and easy to manage. I have yet to try this feature.

See the complete list of new features.

What happens when a relatively small company launches a low cost notebook? A device that doesn’t do everything but does all the basic computing: email,browsing and wordprocessing and is available at half the cost!

From this article:
Sony: “If (the Eee PC from) Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble.”

You better be 🙂 . Its high time customers stop paying a thousand dollars for typing emails, which be done as well on a $100 PC running Linux.

Eeepc Website