Create commons books at Connexions, with an excellent one of music theory; I was impressed as the book started not with the expected (this is a musical stave, with the notes) but with what a standing wave was, and worked from there.
Balaji’s article is one of the better bits of analysis on the Indian economy I’ve read recently. note: with my financial background hat on!
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iPhone… wow!
I quickly discounted the new Apple iPhone launched this week as the latest fad; clearly I was wrong. After seeing Mr. Showman’s keynote there is little doubt that iPhone’s technological innovation, product innovation and business model innovation has great potential. However there are few not-so-impressive things: slow web traffic, limited choice of service providers, no third party apps and $499 price tag. (Btw, AAPL stock is all-time high at $94.62 today, up from $86.37 before the keynote!). iPhone – it’s everything 🙂
How to write a cool CS conference paper…in 5 secs? Use an automatic paper generator. Thanks to folks at MIT for highlighting the sadly low standards of some of the conferences these days. Via Grady Booch’s blog.
A business & strategy viewpoint by world famous “thinker” C.K. Prahalad that I’ve just started reading is quite insightful. Having the advantage of being in 2007, five years since it was originally published in 2002, gives an opportunity to evaluate its vision and thus also to extrapolate what is about to happen. Via Sramana Mitra’s blog.
A summary of interesting collection of thoughts by two authors who co-relate economics with general things in life. “He determined that in spite of the cottage industry of parenting and the millions of how-to books on the subject sold every year, who you are matters much more than what you do.” – Hmm, not sure if I fully buy that! Thanks to Gaurav for the recommendation.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Summary
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The Urban Vehicle Grid
I came across some exciting research work that the UCLA CS team are doing around “the urban vehicle grid”, a vehicle-to-vehicle system (much like a peer-to-peer network), whereby vehicles may participate in opportunistic “Ad-Hoc” wireless networks and may produce data about its environment (pavement condition, weather data, physiological condition of passengers); act as an information gateway for such content; and collaborate with other vehicles (forward collision warning, intersection collision warning, ice on bridge…). Pretty cool.
Communication and Content sharing in the Urban Vehicle Grid (very detailed info)
Most respected non-government India-based companies in my personal opinion are:
Others alphabetically: Aditya Birla Group, Apollo Hospitals, Bharti, ICICI Bank, Jet Airways, Mindtree Consulting, NDTV, Oberoi and Taj Hotels, Ranbaxy, Rediff and Tally Solutions.
HD DVD and Blu-ray format war for next-gen high definition content just doesn’t excite me at all. I don’t see a great need to choose between the two mediocre and confusing things; and the DRM obsession beyond reason in both is simply too much to accept. Add the price/performance factor, and you’ll quickly realise it’s simply a dumb idea to invest in these technologies. On the other hand, IPTV (and generally, convergence to IP) is amazingly cool and I’m really really looking forward to it in next 2 years or so.
10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed
A lot of controversy surrounds Swami Ramdev, but there is no doubt that he has re-invented Yoga and Pranayam by bringing it to masses – no less than several million people! Personally, I fully concur with his critical views on soft drinks, in particular ones that contain aspartame, which can lead to several fatal diseases.