My Journey

I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest -(Napoleon)

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

France eats the 'Apple'


After Adam and Eve, it is the turn of French government to eat the forbidden fruit, and that too a huge bite. In the series of never ending controversial news emanating from France, this time it is French government versus the online music sellers. The lower house of French legislature Assemblé National has passed a bill requiring sellers of digital music players and online music to become interoperable. This simply means music brought from any store can be played in any digital music player, bypassing the whole concept of DRM (digital rights management). At present the music brought from stores of Apple, Microsoft, Sony etc can be played only in their own digital players. This move will hurt all the players in the industry but Apple being leader of the pack is miffed most. It has sold 1 billion propreitary itune music from its online store and 42 million ipods, which is considered the next best thing after bread and butter to happen in the music industry.

According to the bill, it is wrong, for example, the music bought from itunes store to play only in the ipod. Apple has denounced the move calling it as ‘state sponsored piracy’ and vibes from US governments seems to be supporting Apple. The fact is, after burning the music bought from itunes, it can be changed in any format and also ipod does not play only the music from itunes store. So what was the need for this bill ? France says it wants to stop monopoly in online music industry.

Customers at first might, find it a welcome move but it is not. The music industry is still nascent and trying to stabilise after years of piracy, illegal download and sharing. A mature music market will always be in favour of customers which could be wiped out due to this bill. It has been time and again proved that compeition in free market is the only thing which favours customers. The threat is not only from France but from other countries replicating the French move. Already in Denmark the government is petitioned by local music sellers to introduce a similar bill.

It is yet to see how Apple reacts if the bill is passed by French senate and made a law. It might take off its itune store from France. It does not make as much money from itune music as from ipod so this should be a worthy decision to operate in France under the new law. The other reason for making this move could be the fact that if in some way the music of itune is made interoperable in France this could be done in any other country. No one can stop a software to run in other places on internet. Shutting the shop in one country makes sense than losing the whole business.

Is this latest move of French government confusing? To some it might seem so. On the one hand it is trying to create an open competition in the music industry and on the other hand it is blocking Italian company to buy the French energy firm or Netherlands based Mittal steel company to buy Arcelor. What it is for? Protectionism or free market? On a little deeper analysis the picture is crystal clear. Anything is okay for France as long as it is in its favour. The only thing which works in France is nationalism.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Time has changed






First 'sunrise' of the official summer time.

(0707 Hrs)

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Crash




I saw this movie couple of weeks ago, only after it got the three Oscars, including that for best picture. The movie, based on the central theme of ‘Racism’, has a slightly complex storyline with impressive cast.

The movie tries to answer several questions and I must say it is highly successful in it. After the Oscar award for this 2004 movie, any sort of appreciation will sound cliché, so I will save on it. I watched this movie twice, back to back, and allowed myself sufficient time to grasp it. Racism is such a sensitive and hot issue that most of time we form a pre-opinion before dealing with anything related with racism.

This movie has several characters and their daily lives are entwined. All of them meet each another in one or other circumstances, each incident has something that stands out and answers one of the questions. Racism is nothing but abject manifestation of discrimination and not restricted to typical black white portrayal. It amplifies this by showing 36 hours of life of a white DA and her wife. An African American detective and her Latino partner. A Persian man mistaken for an Arab. A Mexican locksmith. A Korean couple. A black television director and her wife. In the whole duration of movie all of their lives gets interlocked with each other and explains their actions.

The idea is to show how everyone is a human and gets carried by their own prejudices. These prejudices take the shape of racism. Personal interest and petty gains can make one turn blind eye to racism or engineer pseudo tolerance. A racist person can turn into a victim and sometime a mistake from a tolerant person can take racist color. Circumstances can make a racist person do compassionate act and might turn a victim to trust the victimizer. Racism is fundamentally due to human nature of getting carried away due to anger, bad experiences and complex prejudices. But, inside us, all have the same heart. This movie says this all without adopting a didactic tone rather with seamless integration of incidents in lives of different individuals.

I am sure anyone who watches this movie will go for introspection.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Laptop !


My laptop is back with me via the safe hands of UPS. I couldn't wait to take it out of the box and I am mighty pleased with the work of IBM. The laptop was delayed by a day and the reason given by IBM was that they detected last minute problem with the touchpad. I could not make head or tails of it when those Scotland based executives mentioned. But now I know what was it? Actually I had made one hairline crack on one corner of my laptop few months ago but didn't mention it to them. They saw it replaced the whole part including the touch pad. I had asked them to check the CD-RW cause some cds won't play and they replaced the whole CD-RW. They said the warranty covered it. The motherboard is new and there is not a speck of dust in the grooves. Feels like a new laptop. I think I should also have mentioned them to me that letter N has been erased so that they could put a new N or may be have replaced the whole keypad. May be next time. Anyway for the time being I am happy(the cynic in me put the word "for the time being", after all it is a computer)

I was using different computers all these days but never felt comfortable with them. I would just do the necessary stuff and nothing more. A sense of unease prevailed like I was living in someone else's home. Past few days made me realise that laptop has become a part of my life and also that I can live without it.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Old Times


It was like old times. I came to office in the morning and opened my mails – personal and official. There were many mails to read and reply. Nothing unusual about it, much less to something to blog. Wait, there is a reason. This has happened to me after 2 years. Yeah, for the last 12 hours I had no computer access. Only few days back, I was so smug about my laptop and I thought IBM laptops (now Lenovo) are the best ones around. But yesterday morning the inevitable happened.

The screen flickered and computer hanged. Mouse pointer won’t shift and keys won’t work. I thought rebooting will make it fine and so I booted it. It started working, I was happy but it was shortlived. After something like 10 minutes back to square one. I knew the worse has happened. Why did I have to be happy over my laptop? May be my thought process is jinxed. I connected to IBM site and the site offered to identify my computer. In few seconds the details were infront of me. The serial number, type number, domestic warranty, International warranty and support center in Finland. Atleast things were moving. I called the support center and they opened a ticket and gave me some esoteric number. After one hour someone from UK called me and spurted out like a taped message. In short it was that they suspect some problem with the display adapters and so mother board has to be changed. Mother board? How come? I mean what else is there in a computer other than mother board and processor. There is a reason to call it a ‘mother’ board and my laptop is not even 2 years old. The guy did what they do best. “Sir, I am just a technical support executive, our engineers would be better able to tell you why it happened”, this was his reply.

They want my laptop to be shipped to their support center in Helsinki and it will be returned to me after 7 days! I am not sure, but I think it takes less than 7 hours to assemble a laptop. The executive offered me a workaround i.e. to use an external monitor. This is how I am using my laptop while writing this blog. I borrowed one external monitor in office and it is working fine. But at home I have no external monitor so no computer and no internet. Sigh. I am not going to ship my laptop for 7 days until I get a replacement laptop. Let’s see what happens.

But I still love my laptop and my next laptop will again be IBM. After all it is Hollerith’s company. Won’t someone like to buy a bulb directly from the company of Edison (GE) Computers are known to be unreliable and I will request Oxford dictionary to include it as an adjective. For example - he/she is so computer (unreliable)

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Nobel Museum





This weekend I was in Stockholm (again). I have been to Stockholm in all the seasons and almost seen whole of it. But this trip stands apart for one reason; this time I spent considerable time in the Nobel Museum. I wished to see it in my last visit but since that day was 10th December - the day of Nobel Prize, I wasn’t sure if the museum would be open for general public. Camera is not allowed inside the museum so all I have is outside view.



The museum is situated close to the Royal Palace in old town Gamla stan. It is housed in the famous Swedish Academy (one which awards the prize). I watched the change of guard ceremony at royal palace then opened my map to locate Nobel museum and realized that I was standing 5 feet from it. I was overwhelmed. The last time I felt this was when I saw the leaning tower of Pisa just infront of me.



The Nobel museum was opened in 2001 to commemorate the centennial Nobel Prize occasion. You can imagine the importance of education in Sweden by the fact that Swedish Academy is situated steps away from Royal Palace.



The museum is about 700 sq meters and can’t be considered a big one. It houses the detail of 758 prize winners till date. There is one room dedicated to Alfred Nobel and to me it was like sanctum sanctorum of the museum. It has details from Alfred Nobel’s life, his traveling kit, the dynamite and detonator. Incidentally the laboratory where Nobel tested dynamite resulting in huge explosion which tore down the building and killed his brother was steps away from this place. There are details of the business empire of Nobel which at one time extended to 90 countries. The museum is currently having exhibition about the life of Albert Einstein. It is there I learnt that committee was not comfortable in awarding the Nobel Prize to him. When it was finally awarded, much to Einstein’s amusement (he had in advance pledged the award money to his divorced wife) it was not for Theory of Relativity but for his experiments on 'Light'.

The most impressive thing in this room is the will of Alfred which is the reason why we have the Nobel Prize. It is hand written in Swedish with ink pen. The heading is “Testament” and I must say that Nobel had a good handwriting. He signed the will in 1895 and later died in 1897 at the age of 63. He remained unmarried. The will does not mention about prize in economics which is not actually a Nobel prize but ‘The Bank of Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’ first awarded in 1969.

There are two rooms which keep showing 3 minutes movie of each Nobel Prize winner, one of the rooms are specifically for individual prize winners. When I entered the room the movie about Indian Literary prize winner Rabindranath Tagore was on. Sadly I could not see it as the guided tour started that very moment. There is also a cableway in the roof of the museum through which details of each winner comes one by one but not in any particular order. It will take 5 hours 20 minutes for all the winners to be shown.

The museum has several other things to see, such as medals, the transcript of award to Schrödinger and utensils from the legendary Nobel banquet held each year after the award ceremony. There is one café inside the museum which is called as Kafé Satir. The peculiar thing about this café is that all the chairs of the café are personally signed on the underside by the winners. I flipped few chairs and saw the famous signatures. It has also a shop to buy souvenirs. To remember this visit I bought one Nobel museum wallpaper and one miniature gyroscope symbolic of Einstein’s experiment in submarines.

Interestingly I didn’t find few answers even in the Nobel Museum. It is a known fact that Nobel started the peace prize may be due to his guilt of creating huge amount of wealth from wars which used his invention of ammunition. But there was no answer as to why he asked a Norwegian committee to decide upon the peace prize. Norway that time was under the Swedish empire. One of the controversial questions about not awarding Nobel peace prize to Father of non-violence, our Mahatma Gandhi was indeed mentioned there.

I am not a museum person but I can rank this visit as the best out of all my other museum tours.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

The Giant Returns



Spread over 22 states of US it had a complete monopoly till 1984. Then a Federal judge split the giant in 7 smaller parts. Yeah, it was then ‘Ma Bell’ now known as AT&T. Twenty two years later the split is getting reversed. Already four of the seven babies have joined and now there is a new development. AT&T is set to acquire ‘BellSouth’ for a sum of 67bn US dollars. If this merger gets the go ahead from the regulators then AT&T will again become largest telecom company in US, pushing Verizon to second place.

In recent years no other industry has seen so much of change across the world than telecom. Technological innovations, convergence of services and new ways of communication have made telecom one of the most profitable sectors. When Ma Bell was split in 1984 it was to allow competition to flourish in public interest and today when Ma Bell is reversing the split it is again the competition. One of the collateral benefit of this merger will be coming of Cingular – the mobile phone company, into the folds of AT&T. Till now AT&T and BellSouth has joint holding of Cingular. The ultimate entity will be sort of one stop for services like local, long distance and mobile calls. AT&T has many other benefits to accrue if this merger goes through.

I guess regulators will be taking a hard look at all the facts. Many consumer groups have already gone on record with their opposition to the deal. They believe, if allowed, AT&T will become what it was before 1984 and prices of all the services will increase.

The question is will the regulator think alike? Will they be of view that competition will be eliminated with this deal? The answer for them might be in the technological change that has happened in telecommunication industry in the past few years. The biggest change is that now voice transfer does not depend on telecom companies. Many internet companies like Vonage, Skype and TimeWarner are providing voice services at far cheaper price. At present biggest competition in telecom sector is from these companies which will be very much there even after buyout of BellSouth. But this is not totally in black and white, there are several grey areas. For start, most people have access to broadband internet through the network of the telecom companies which includes AT&T. So will it lead to unfair trade advantage? Difficult to say so but I am sure we will have pretty interesting developments in coming weeks.

Monday, March 06, 2006

Newspaper's online edition - how to make it better?


One never knows when something which we take for granted can so easily disappear from your life. Few years ago, I had the luxury of holding a newspaper in my hand every morning and poring over it. Now I don’t. Sometimes I hold the newspaper in my office but only can see the pictures and relate to the news. The only time I get a newspaper in a language which I can read is when I go out of country. The online editions of newspapers have become my lifeline so it is only proper to devote one of my posts to online newspapers.

Almost all print newspaper/magazine have their internet version as well. They seem to have very happily integrated both the online as well as print edition in their business model. But sometimes I feel that there is lot more to be desired from those wonderful print newspapers in their online avatar. So, what is the difference between an online version and print version for those newspaper companies? What should be their USP for online version?

If we look at customers then they are not always mutually exclusive. There are people like me who read only the online version and people like my father who would never check the online version and there are people who do check both the online and print version. For a country like India, I think people who read print version would be far more than those who read online version.

From the business point of view advertisements appearing in print edition would have far more reach and hence more valuable. But online version doesn’t lag far behind this. It is only the online version which gives the leverage of targeted customer. For example, when I open the website of any Indian newspaper the advertisement are of money remittance facility, air fare deals, calling card or hotel reservations. The same space would be used for different advertisements like government advertisements, etc for a reader in India. So though the reach is less, I am pretty sure the advertisements are more effective in online version.

By above, we can say that a newspaper company can't afford the online version to play a second fiddle. I think there are many ways to make the online edition more effective.

For start the online version should contain all the news items, analysis, reviews, op-ed pages in full. It may not be possible to keep everything in the main page but neat, easy and clear links could be given for those pages. Most of the newspapers don’t put the local news in online version which is found in print edition. This is wrong. I would very much like to know what is happening in my home town everyday, irrespective of whether I am visiting that place or not.

Secondly for the newspapers to attract those who read their print edition to read online edition as well, updating the site with latest news would work wonders. The news in print edition can be updated only once per day, but no such limit exists with website. I have found many newspapers severely lacking in this aspect.

Thirdly an online version gives easy method of searching for some particular news and also the archives. This greatest advantage of internet adds more value to online edition and also enticing for readers.

Fourthly, the online versions give the unique advantage of putting comments for each and every article and thus lead to a healthy debate. This could also become one of the star attractions of online edition. Most of the present online edition fare very badly on this count.


There can be many other ways to make the online edition more attractive but then this post has already become long.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Autumn & Winter

A picture is worth thousand words...



















Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Blogger blocked in Pakistan


I was surprised when I got to know from Koi this morning that she was not able to access blogger in Pakistan. It was working fine in India and Finland. Two mails later, and it was proved that ISPs in Pakistan have blocked blogger. I guess this is the first time this has happened in Pakistan. Blogger has been blocked permanently in China and though Google acceding to Chinese restrictions they are not bringing blogger in China.

What could be the reasons for Pakistan blocking blogger? Well, no one doubts that reach and spread of information through blogs has reached phenomenal level. Hence blogs have started to bear brunt of repressive governments. I think visit of George Bush, President of United States may be one of the reasons for blocking blogger there. He is on five days visit to India and Pakistan. I don’t know how much controversial his visit to Pakistan is, apart from the usual controversy, which regularly brews in Pakistan over its support to United States. This makes the sudden blockage all the more confusing.

There has been no word in any of main stream media of Pakistan about this blockage. It remains to be seen whether this is a temporary step or blogger is going to be banished from Pakistan forever. Till then, there isn’t much one can do except to use some proxy servers.