June 2010 Archives

If your work requires you to work on computers (or Laptops) most parts of your day.. then this post might make sense to you.. (Otherwise just ignore this.. its for stupid geeks who expect their computers to understand them... like me)

Computers have improved our lifestyle.. our communication skills.. haven't they ?

There was a time you just went to the railway station to get rail tickets.. and now you go online... whether you get tickets or not these days depends on the internet bandwidth (humidity of the air if it is wi-max), and sometimes even depends on whether you paid your electricity bill.

There was a time you called up your friends and had a get-to-gether at the coffee-shop .. end of the street under the street lights.. now you have facebook.. its even more easier.. all friends sit at different locations (mostly different places on earth).. whether your friend got married or has kids or joined a new course in a college all depends on whether he / she has updated the status, pictures, facebook wall etc., on time. sometimes we also do this thing "subscribe for updates".. so its kind of officially like subscribing for a newspaper.

We are all so dependent on computers and all related hard and soft wares.. the related technologies.. the viruses or anti-viruses.. that we pray (though not literally) that our computers should always work and our internet connections should always exist.

The power goes off.. the internet is busy.. we are almost in an island of No-Data.

And haven't sometimes thought.. your computer is tuned to your way of using it... that it understands you.. like we say about bikes and cars..

Will it understand you? If it hasn't already you think.
Won't it just work when you want it to. Well we will all keep praying more and more... and keep saying those things without an itch of sceptism .. "computers have changed our lifestyle for good", "computers and technology space have advanced so much", "its a small world", .. and all that.

And now lets see what people have guessed for the future:

There is this futuristic view that computer will be the size of mobile phones, You place it on the table and switch it on, it will project a screen in the front, and a keyboard and touch pad on the desk.. and you will work on it.

More advanced machines.. and You will talk to them instead of typing and moving the mouse cursor.. say something like "google for taxis near adyar chennai" or "show route from adyar signal to race course road"

They call the technology voice recognition.. the interesting part is, people are unable to just make computers understand voices.. not to the quality to commercially make systems which will bought by a lot of people with different voices, accents and fluencies.

In 2004, Mike Bliss composed a poem about voice recognition. He then read it to voice recognition software on his computer, and rewrote it as recognized.

a poem by Mike Bliss-----------------------------------------------a poem by like myth

like a baby, it listens------------------------------------------------like a baby, it nuisance
it can't discriminate-------------------------------------------------it can't discriminate
it tries to understand-----------------------------------------------it tries to oven
it reflects what it thinks you say----------------------------------it reflects lot it things you say
it gets it wrong... sometimes--------------------------------------it gets it run sometimes
sometimes it gets it right.------------------------------------------sometimes it gets it right
One day it will grow up,--------------------------------------------won't day it will grow bop
like a baby, it has potential---------------------------------------Ninth a baby, it has provincial
will it go to work?---------------------------------------------------will it both to look?
will it turn to crime?------------------------------------------------will it the two crime?
you look at it indulgently.-----------------------------------------you move at it inevitably
you can't help loving it, can you?-------------------------------you can't help loving it, cannot you?

Africa is having a bash hosting FIFA 2010 world cup football, from SouthAfrica.

Usually any celebration in SouthAfrica doesn't look like it is an African event because of the mix of people in SouthAfrica.. especially the white population being more or equal to the black population there. This time, hosting FIFA, the event feels more connected to Africa.

The main stadium looks like a giant African calabash pot, with capacity to host more than 75,000 people.. and is called 'The Soccer City Stadium' at Johannesburg. You should try relate the size of the stadium to the size of people in the image.

The opening ceremony had the ingredients of an African celebration.. on June 11th 2010.

Also representing the number 11 where many other items:
JABULANI, meaning "to celebrate" is the 11th adidas World Cup ball featuring 11 different colors.
A football game has 11 players on each side.
There are 11 official languages spoken in South Africa, and,
there are a major 11 South African communities.

True to football's spirit of being a short game (90 minutes per game), The official opening ceremony was planned for only 40 minutes.

The Jabulani: That is the name given to the matchball designed by adidas.. has had very controversial reviews like earlier FIFA matchballs. It is often claimed that matchball's are designed to favor a team which is told about the details of its ergonomics so they can have an advantage.

The matchball for every FIFA is different and a new design based on new technologies and understandings of physics behind a ball's movement, the swing it can generate in flight etc., Every team gets a lot of matchball's almost 4-6 months ahead so they can train on them.

The purpose of having new matchball's is (1) to have a huge branding sponsor and a lot of money through that, and (2) to have a new change in the games because the same kind of balls and world quality players make every team just the same.

The world cup song:
"saminamina hey hey ", "waka waka hey hey"... I don't know whether it is African or spanglish.. but the match song for FIFA 2010 is done by the hip-moves-expert Shakira.

I think I just remember that Ricky Martin did the first FIFA world cup song.. 'Cup of Life'.. again a Spanglish singer.

The idea of having different matchball's for every FIFA world cup, was started since the 2002 FIFA world cup if I am right (and that time it was Nike who made the first ball if I am right again).. this is one of the firsts in world cups in any event. Similar is having a different world cup song for every FIFA world cup. FIFA happens once in 4 years.. just like Olympics and is hosted very much a big event like the Olympics.

There is talk that the next FIFA world cup could be hosted by some state in the United States... and that Brad Pitt and many celebrities are already part of the campaign for that.

In India, which is more populated than many bigger countries, it is usual practice to dump trash / daily garbage over the compound wall of your house (if it is a vacant plot of land on that side).

Some people who live at important / economically more costly areas of the city, will have regular garbage pickup, and a street corner garbage bin. Usually people litter more around the garbage bin, than into it. Even if people put it in the bin, the trash usually ends up being outside the bins... thanks to garbage pickers, street dogs, cows (which are freely allowed on roads in residential areas) which depend on leftovers in the bins.

While we all Indians thought and usually crib that our trash is so unorganized when compared to the so-called developed countries which are cleaner, it seems like the developed countries have developed ways keep clean by spoiling the entire planet rather than spoiling themselves.

Recently, I read that in-between America and Japan, in the vast waters and depths of the pacific ocean, there is a new island formed, where people haven't yet inhabited.. which is called by names like 'Plastic island', 'gyre', 'floating island of trash' etc.,

Chris Parry with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco said the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, has been growing a brisk rate since the 1950s, The San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday.

The trash stew is 80 percent plastic and weighs more than 3.5 million tons.

"At this point, cleaning it up isn't an option," Parry said. "It's just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues."

This is how this island was formed:
From trash thrown over by countries into the oceans, without place for it in their developed geography.

What you see in the picture by arrows are ocean water currents, which push or pull the floating objects.

Seen an Animated view of the above at GreenPeace website here.
Wikipedia details here on more such islands in formation in oceans all around us by different countries.

Well, I don't mean by all this that India dumps its garbage better.. but I guess as humans we have developed so badly forgotten our planet so far, that we are way out of returning or working around to become eco-friendly and reverse all effects of such trash islands, air pollution, etc.,

We are leaving behind a lot of *shit* for the future generation to clean up to even survive on earth.

I was terribly disturbed at knowing the marketing strategy behind the "Cannot Play Discs" problem I get on most DVDs on my DVD player.

It seems since many years back, the CD/DVD industry (and so follows the current blu-ray and HD-dvd industry too) practially decided and divided the world into money zones as depicted in the picture below.. and all DVD players sold in a particular zone were to have a setting 'NOT to play discs sold in another zone'.

The idea behind was to be able to sell the discs at different costs in different markets for especially movie and music discs. So, you cannot buy 100 english movie DVDs in china for a bummer and expect to play it on your DVD in your home in San Francisco.. because then that kills the DVD market of San Francisco it seems.

ok. The hard point is, they make the DVD player itself disabled partially.. to implement the strategy.

Even if justified that it is to survive all markets in a balanced way, they should have done the disabling thing in the CD/DVD technology, rather than the player itself which is purchased at a much costlier price that an average DVD by the consumer.

When we buy branded DVD players we all end up paying for a partially disabled player... because all companies that make branded DVD players have an agreement on implementing the region codes on the players.

The Tip: If you can find, by some means, a way to reset your player's region code to ZERO (usually done through some combination keys on the remote for the player), then you have enabled your DVD player to all the world's discs.