Call easy!

It is not more than an year ago that I was new in Europe and had just relocated. My Employer was kind enough to grant the first 20 days of accommodation for free and I was taken to a guest house - which was well furnished and maintained too. It had a WLAN, parking garage, furished kitchen, free laundry service etc. not to forget the Television - a replica of CP/M professional system released at the beginning of the 80's, powered by an Intel 8085 processor, 80x24 text resolution on a 12" built-in green phosphor monitor. Nevertheless, it had a brand new rocket age remote control - which was more colorful than then TV itself! I bet, the landlord would have paid more for the remote than the value of the TV then:-) It was torturous to look at it for the first 30 secs after switchin it On when the fluorescent green display turned into multicolor display:-

The landlord also gracefully pulled a contract the moment I stepped into the house and had it signed by me. It had all the restrictions under the Sun:
1. No watching TV b/w 2200 - 0800 hrs
2. No smokin
3. No littering
4. Wipin the shower glass after every shower (there was a free demo too
5. Being ultra careful with the keys - losing which invited a fine
6..
7..

And so there was a small note saying "the telephone would be charged on usage basis and the guest is required to clear the dues on the day of vacating the house"

As I had arrived on sunday and the city was literally dead (Europeans go in for Nirvana on sundays), I grabbed the telephone to catch up with my buddies back home. Somehow, my risk appetite stopped me from talkin for long and I guess I was on the phone for about 70 mins. So, days and weeks passed and I couldn't get the mobile phone as my Passport was submitted to the registration office for visa stamping - - not surprisingly, I used the Home phone a few more times but now, not more than 5 min in total.

And finally the day came or rather the landlord came to me with the bill which had a whooping 408 Euros! Which is good enough to:
1. buy swimming passes in an indoor pool for 4 continuous years
2. fly from Berlin to Zurich and return - 4 times - in Lufthansa (all inclusive and miles too, this data is as on today from Lufthansa website)
3. pay your electricity bills in Europe for a lil more than an year (If you're single, you would have to pay about 30+ Euros/month)
4. and yes, speak to say US for 45000 mins (24/7 - for a month) to any landphone/handphone over internet!! (This rate is from Europe to US at the rate of 1 cent/min - which is prevailing at this time)

One of the above or a 70 min telephone call - - unfortunately, I had to choose the latter ('coz, I like small numbers you know)

This runs down as the the most stupid thing I have done in my life till date. On the other side, its really amazing to look at the way technology is changing and affecting our lives pretty much personally and directly.

Days are not far when these calls would just become free to and from all over the world (of course we have this already if 2 people wishing to talk are on the same domain, Gtalk and Skype are good examples).
Days are not far when the conventional telephone companies just run out of business if they don't change
Days are not far when there's seamless connectivity between people - world will not only be flat but nearer too

On the other hand, its vulnerable too - atleast as of now, there are still ways to hack into your conversation, so, if your wife's a computer savvy, make sure to speak to your girlfriend over physical phones


Gulmohar.

Cloud computing - where is technology headed to?

Something cloudy? Not exactly.
I heard this new buzzword at my workplace some months back and its interesting to know how and where the technology is headed to.

Cloud computing is the highest degree of encapsulation to the user wherein she/he cannot see anything running behind his desktop as such. Rather on the other side, the users need not worry about the underlying infrastructure/applications enabling them to place a purchase order for his employer. But the question is - do these really work?! There are already instances of such realization. The best examples are Google/Yahoo/Amazon. We are in the verge of following the footsteps of outsourcing fever that started a few years ago. The mantra of outsourcing was "give away and earn more" and the same seems to be slowly applying to clouds as well

Some food for thought:

Pros:
1.
Effective usage of computing power - the greatest advantage is that we will be able to do efficient and effective computing with this model. We are definitely far below the ideal threshold usage of computing power with our pervasive and disparate computing capacities

2.
Easy regulatory compliance as the only record needed in most of the cases would be a SAS70 report. So, the company saves effort and some smart bucks too!

3.
Reduced IT budget. With the prices being attractive and on-demand, this appears to be the way to go! So, it could be time to fire some IT employees:-

The other side of the coin:

1.
Is the same level of security ensured as one would have on-premise? Ofcourse contractually the vendors are bound to maintain confidentiality. But have we reached an ideal world already?

2.
This will also open up a new world with a chain of vendors, say vendor X offering an application which in turn is hosted by the infrastructure provided by vendor Y. Who would be liable in case the customer loses his data integrity? Will this be just another law suite as many others that go on for years?

3.
Are the exit options safe? How can I make sure, there's no image left on the cloud after I discontinue to use the service?


Nevertheless, for me, it appears we are not there yet. Of course, not a bad start at all. I would use on-premise for my core business and any day use clouds for non-core businesses (anyways, does it matter?


Gulmohar.

Smokin kills?

Does it matter?! Well, that's what even I think when I have that burning tobacco between my fingers. But soon after am done with blowin them into flames, I think it does worse than killing..

A cigarette in my hand,
I feel like a Man, the flames moving up in the air,
listening to "waiting for the Sun" - Jim Morrison in the band
quitters are not winners, to think like this is just not fair:-(


Gulmohar.

First law of Thermodynamics

In my Engineering days, I religiously studied (and probably forgot to understand:-) the first law of Thermodynamics - "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, the sum total of the energy in an isolated system remains constant". What a memory! Call it the power of mug-up

Then it was not too much in the past, that I started wondering if the law would be true, how the hell can we produce enormous amount of nuclear energy with so little input power? Is this an issue of a lot of benefit with negligible cost? My deeper sence of consciousness yelled at me to figue out how this works. A bit of scratching my head resulted in the below:

All bogs down to the law of gravity. The law of gravitation is that every body attracts another in a manner directly proportional to their mass and inversly proportional to the square of the distance between them. Naturaly, the gravitational force between the consitutents of an atom is enormously large because of the distance between them is infinitely small. So in case, the Nucleus is split (which is in fact the case in nuclear power generation), the amount if energy that has to get released has to be obviously huge:-

And the 2nd point is that the first law of Thermodynamic also takes into consideration of the system attributes - - It says that the energy is constant in an isolated system. And our case has 2 independent isolated systems - so problem solved!

By the way, when I think about the law of gravitation, it was only after a couple of years of my school days that I got to realise the exact law. Until then I was wondering that if I were to stand at one of the Poles of our planet and drop a ball, the ball would be gone for ever in space (because, its opposite to what I do when I am away from the poles - to throw a ball upwards and it comes down) and it was hard for me to believe and to imagine too -
But then I came to know that the force acts towards the center of the Earth and in fact even in Poles, I can only throw it upwards:-!


Gulmohar.

Word of the day - - - KATTE

Literal translation of word "Katte" (Pronounced as "Cut"+"Tey") into English is "Bench". This english word is well known and used pervasively among the software engineers in India. Whenever people have not been staffed on any projects, it is to say that they are on Bench:-)

Now, Katte on its constructive sense is to use it to:
1. catch up with your comrades on an evening
2. have discussions that does and doesn't matter
3. have some tobacco butted
4. and kill time:-

What can a Katte be:
1. any meeting point (Treffpunkt for our Deutsche pals)
2. any smokin corner
3. any literal bench in a parkland

So, thats about it. Each one of you shall have some kind of a Katte - - think about it and post it. It shall be interesting to spread the variants and versatility of Katte


Gulmohar.

Saaz....the musical journey

It's movie and music time:-


People who have the minutest of interest in classical music will just rock on the songs in this movie. Watch it online for a price or grab yourself a DVD. The movie is directed by Padma Bhushan awardee Sai Pranjape - who is also the director of - "Chashme Baddoor" - must watch for Katte (Refer to my blog http://go-for-a-kill.blogspot.com/2008/07/word-of-day-katte.html) and all Bachelors) - a straight simple comedy movie starring none other than Farroq Shaik and Deepthi Naval.

Now, back to Saaz, the music is directed by Pt. Zakir Hussain, Bupen Hazarika and Rajkamal. Pt. Zakir Hussain has acted too.. The movie is a smooth storyline based on music and strong emotions. Listen to the classic on Youtube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FS39rjdSF2c - - Kavita Krishnamurthy
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vji36gxM9-g&feature=related - Suresh wadekar


Gulmohar.

What is goin for a kill?!

Hey Guest! Welcome to the "Does it matter" blogs!
Do soak up and just kill time - afterall, you wouldn't be doing this if were not to kill time:-)
Rest assured, you'll constructively kill time in here!!

More to come
Gulmohar.