Prakash Advani's Blog

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/

Last month, LinuxGizmos.com and the Linux Foundation’s Linux.com community website sponsored a 10-day SurveyMonkey survey that asked readers of both sites to choose their favorite three Linux- or Android-based open-spec single-board computers. This year, 1,721 respondents — more than twice the number from the 2014 survey — selected their favorites from a list of 53 SBCs, compared to last year’s 32.

Read More: http://linuxgizmos.com/raspberry-pi-stays-sky-high-in-2015-hacker-sbc-survey/

Since the onslaught of mobile phone with cameras, camera sales have been on the decline. The point-and-shoot camera are getting quickly replaced with mobile phones with decent camera functions. The other high-end are the DSLRs. If you need something more than a point-and-shoot but don’t like the big and bulky DSLRs, keep reading.

These high-end pocket cameras have a lot of technology borrowed from the DSLRs but are in a compact body, primarily large sensor (good pictures) and full manual controls. They are not exactly pocket friendly in price but most of them would fit in your pocket. They also support RAW format which is nice to have. Some of them are almost the price of an DSLR though, or even higher! Except for interchangeable lens, they have everything that you would want from a DSLR. If you still wasn’t interchangeable lens but smaller size, look for a mirrorless, but they are not as tiny as most of these.

Notes:

• The Canon G1XII is the heaviest and also the only one with 1.5″ Sensor
• Except for Canon G6 the rest of them have 1″/1.5″ Sensor
• The Canon G16 has an optical view finder, while Sony RX100’s have electronic view finder built-in
•  The Canon G16 and the Sony RX100’s have slow motion video, but they are missing touch screen
• The RX100 IV is the only one with 4K video

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

I had been thinking of my Touch Table project for a long time. My research on existing solutions was a bit disappointing: mostly insanely expensive, large, or platform locked, they did not fit my vision of a [Android or Linux-powered] ‘desktop’ that would allow me to fit it into my existing workflow, rather than hope that applications would support it (like the Microsoft Surface).

Read more at http://www.ikeahackers.net/2015/06/hemnes-multitouch-table.html

 

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

E-commerce was supposed to simplify things, but in reality it is getting more complicated.

While purchasing online is getting easy, however making payments is painful.

First these sites give you a dozen option to make payments, for example they will say if you pay using a third-party wallet you would get 2% off, but if you use another wallet you would get 5% off and a third wallet will give you 7%!!

Now you have to first go and register in these wallets, if the wallet was popular, why would they offer discounts? They are offering the discounts to capture customers, hence you have to register with them first. With leading banks such as ICICI and HDFC jumping onto the wallet business, I think this will get more complicated.

You end up spending time registering with different wallets. After registering, they will still ask you for your credit card credentials.

In case you are already registered, they ask for you for login password at-least.

If that’s not enough, the credit card company will again ask for you a password to compete the transaction!

I am tired now of e-commerce, so I just choose cash on delivery 🙂 but that’s not available every-time.

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/

The best phone money can buy, one plus one is now available without an invitation.

If you are in the market for a new phone, here is your chance.

Here are three invites for One Plus One – India edition.

Grab them before they last 🙂

Click on the link below.

Use any of these 3 4 invite codes:

INFN-X2IG-EPM5-ZGRT

INBM-589Q-DPIM-WQYQ

INBV-E96S-OZS0-SMWH

INL1-ZVCC-ZAXY-NIXS

 

Benchmarks show Linux beats OSX on a MacMini:

All of the benchmarks under both OS X and Linux were facilitated using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. All of the hardware was the same throughout testing: the reported differences on the automated table above just come down to differences in what the OS reports, such as the difference between the CPU base frequency and turbo frequency, etc. On the following pages are the initial results with more interesting data points to come shortly.

Read More: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=osx-fedora21-vivid&num=1

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/