Category Archives: Science and Technology

Stuck with the 50cc Bajaj

Posted on by

Microsoft is offering a lower-priced version of Windows in Hindi to discourage piracy. But Microsoft has artificially hamstrung Windows XP Starter Edition in some funny ways:

… display resolution is capped at a maximum of 800 by 600 pixels… users can run only three programs or have three windows opened at once, a limitation that research company Gartner believes could frustrate users and drive them to buy bootleg copies of Windows XP instead.
Muslims are demanding four simultaneous windows, while Hindus are happy with just one. Tamils are protesting Hindi hegemony, and the BJP is angry over Windows-with-a-tiny-dikki and is pushing for a nuclear-powered version.

In all seriousness, differential pricing is as big an issue in software as it is with drug reimportation. Customers hate it, yet countries with lower average incomes can’t afford first-world prices. And high-value products that are easy to pirate are especially trapped in dilemma. To their advantage, software companies can create market-specific versions in ways that pharma companies morally cannot.

We’re all Dravidians ;-)

Posted on by

GNXP isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (the material there attracts controversy like flies to cow theetum) but Razib’s got some interesting material on the mtDNA of Desi’s – Gene Expression –

There is a important new paper (you can view the full PDF if you follow the link) out that surveys the genetics of South Asians viewed from the angle of mtDNA, that is, the direct female lineage. If you follow this stuff, you won’t be surprised to find out that the authors conclude that

Continue reading →

Maybe a single tea is long enough to know

Posted on by

You’re on the phone with your grandmother, and she wants to know when you’re going to produce grandchildren for her and how on earth you can be “dating” the same person for 2 years without any marriage plans. You tell her that these things take time, that people are complicated, and it’s hard to know where this is going. You feel morally superior as she clucks disapprovingly. You think, I’m a modern person, and I have science on my side.

Or do you? Well, today the BBC reports that:

People decide what kind of relationship they want within minutes of meeting, a study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships said. “It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. We make a prediction about what kind of relationship we could have with a person and that helps determine how much effort we are willing to put into developing a relationship.” The results were the same for people who talked for three, six or ten minutes. Prof Ramirez said: “That tells you things are happening very quickly. People are making snap judgements about what kind of relationship they want with the person they just met.”

Continue reading →

Cry me a river – “Mr. Hotmail”, no more

Posted on by

It’s tough to pity the guy – CNN.com – ‘Mr Hotmail’ seeks new challenges – Aug 26, 2004.

(CNN) — As the inventor of Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia is the pin-up of India’s IT revolution; the boy from Bangalore who went to Silicon Valley and made his fortune. Bhatia was in his mid-20s when he developed the idea of web-based email accounts in 1995, raising $300,000 in investment to launch the revolutionary service the following year. Within 12 months Hotmail had 10 million users and Bhatia had sold his creation to Microsoft for $400 million.
Launching his new company in 1999, a one click e-commerce venture called Arzoo.com, Bhatia claimed it had the potential to be twice as big as Hotmail. By mid-2001 the dotcom bubble had burst and Arzoo had folded.
“The last couple of years I was quite depressed because I didn’t have an idea or a vision or a goal that would be world-beating like Hotmail. I often wondered if that would be the only success that I would have at the end of my life.
“I would rather not be known as Mr Hotmail anymore,” he says. “What is in the past is over. Now I’m looking for the next big thing.”

Don’t get me wrong, I have respect for Hotmail and Mr. Bhatia BUT, can’t he and his fawning masses attribute just a tad of his fortune to Timing and Luck? Hotmail was one of the keystone companies of the bubble – no revenue but lots of eyeballs. In any other world, it wouldn’t have been a name-making $400M venture….. There’s a helluva lot of Attribution Error goin’ on…

Maybe I’m just jealous. 😉

Infosys CEO is an ex-socialist

Posted on by

N.R. Narayana Murthy, billionaire CEO of Infosys, an Indian outsourcing giant, used to be a socialist until an encounter with a Frenchwoman on a train didn’t turn out quite like Before Sunrise:

Back in the early 1970s, while traveling through Europe by train, Murthy was seized by police in a town near the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. He had been chatting up a fellow passenger in French, and he believes that her boyfriend complained to a cop. Murthy was kept in a room in the train station for 72 hours and shipped out on a freight car. “There was no going back to communism after that,” he says.

Ah, nothing like the smell of a burned convert in the morning…

Continue reading →

The ugly Microsoftian

Posted on by

<

p dir=”ltr”>There was a brouhaha over Kashmir in Windows 95:

When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India. Microsoft was left to recall all 200,000 copies of the offending Windows 95 operating system software to try and heal the diplomatic wounds. “It cost millions… Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world…”

Continue reading →

India backs off of Moon ambitions

Posted on by

Warning: Given my non-blogging job, the following posting is bias. I don’t care!

The Tallahassee Democrat reports:

India is rethinking its plan to send a man to the moon by 2015, as the mission would cost a lot of money and yield very little in return, the national space agency said Thursday.

Okay, I have no problem with that. India has so many other concerns that space travel should not be even a top 100 priority. What I have a problem with is that they can’t be honest about that fact and instead have to cover their retreat by saying the following:

“Whatever a man can do in space, it can be done with instrumentation, also,” said G. Madhavan Nair, head of the Indian Space Research Organization.

False! Not true. This is the same myth perpetuated by the anti-space lobby in our country as well. Here is a good explanation of why robots cannot and should not compete with humans.

Also, keep in mind that the real motivation behind the Indian space program announcing a Moon mission in the first place, was probably the same motivation behind our own program in the 50s and 60s. A nuclear arms race. Whose rocket is bigger, India’s or Pakistan’s?

Why Anna is Sexy (well, one of the reasons ;-)

Posted on by

Marginal Revolution reports on fascinating research on what makes some people sexier than others – their names –

New research has revealed that the vowel sounds in your name could influence how others judge the attractiveness of your face.
Women with round-sounding names such as Laura tended to score higher than those with smaller vowel sounds. “Unfortunately for me, Amy is one of the bad names,” Perfors laments.

So “Ah-Na” is good while the classic Mallu-aunty name “Ai-lee-ahm-ma” is bad (although to be honest, this often isn’t just because of her name) And for the boys –

For boys, a good name will contain vowel sounds made at the front of the mouth, such as ‘e’ or ‘i’ sounds; names with fuller, rounder vowel sounds such as ‘u’ tend to score lower. So pat yourself on the back if you’re called Ben… but if your name is Paul, you might have to work work harder to snare a date.

“V-ih-nohd” is Good. “Ah-bee” – you’re screwed. 😉

Banarasi saris, now ribbed for her pleasure

Posted on by

In yet another instance of Indian ingenuity, the new generation of sari weavers in Benares are using condoms to help them produce more saris, faster:

The weaver rubs the condom on the loom’s shuttle, which is softened by the lubricant thus making the process of weaving faster. The lubricant does not leave any stain on the silk thread which might soil the valuable saris. There are around 150,000 to 200,000 hand and power looms in Varanasi alone and almost all are using the technique. And every loom has a daily consumption of three or four condoms.

(analysis follows, below the fold) Continue reading →

Om Malik outs a tech startup

Posted on by

Veteran journalist Om Malik of Not Really Indian outed a tech startup on his blog, to great effect:

Kathy Rittweger, CEO of Blinkx, was on what she thought was just a normal trip to the offices of Business 2.0 magazine to show the editor her new search software. Om Malik, one of the journalists in the meeting, was so impressed that he immediately wrote about it on his blog. “He called me to say he’d done a ‘blog’ on us, and I have to confess I was disappointed as it didn’t sound as good as an article,” Rittweger reflects. “Within a couple of hours we were being mentioned on thousands of sites and I had venture capitalists calling me left, right and centre. The blog made us so popular that we had to bring forward our launch from autumn to June.

Nice job, Om. (Btw, I’m writing about a guy writing about himself writing about a startup. Death by echo!)