SPAM!!! Not really, but still

I logged into my Gmail account for the first time about 4+ years ago. Truth be said, I’m a satisfied customer. After a busy week I opened my mailbox. I was in fact waiting for some important mails. Not to my surprise I found 200+ mails in my Spam box. After 4+ years the number of mails from those ‘kind people’ who wanted to make me rich quickly was only about 200+. It is respectable number because I have registered in so many forums and other website (I know that Google won’t say that because it eats up lot of their resources). And the best part, 98% (rough figureJ) goes to spam box. I looked at my inbox there was about 300+ unread messages. Trust me; I’m not a person who receives hundreds of email a day. I remember the last time I opened my mailbox the number of unread messages were around 275. Those 275 are among those which I will never read and they are not sent by any ‘get rich quickly’ spammers. They are in fact send by my friends. Most of them forwarded messages. Their intensions are good, they want to share some ‘fun stuffs’ they got. And honestly, at times (read it as very rarely), I enjoy reading them. The rest stays as unread messages. Once in a while I made time to delete all those then I came up with an idea. I made all the Fwd: mails to skip the inbox by creating a label. It worked to an extend and that’s why those number is only 300. But then there was another problem. I missed some of the very important Fwd: mails. So even though I made it skip the inbox I still end up checking the forwarded messages.

Why don’t these service providers can come up with a method of setting a priority to the mails like in the installed mail clients? So that all these funny forwarded messages can be set a lower priority and I can have a cleaner inbox and never need to search for a mail from my girl friend (well when I have one ;))

Can India produce billion-dollar innovations?

Some days ago Vipin Sir (A faculty in Amrita) gave me an article written by Arindam Banerji. This post is comments to his article. I didnt find any copyrights in the article so I will upload that pdf somewhere soon.

This is what I think about his comments:

I think most of the things he mentioned in the book is correct except that I think he is a little too impatient to see India at the top. He has mentioned the problems and the solution for this cause. But I think he has failed to see the reason for that. What I feel is India today is very different from India 10 years ago. From page 12 he has mentioned some innovations from India. They may not be earth changing but still they are Innovations. All the innovations cannot be earth changing. The fact remains that you cannot simply invent a idea and keep quite. If telephone was invented now can you imgine connecting two places using expensive copper wire to communicate? If I need to communicate with a person in US I would need millions of kilometers of copper wire just to talk to that person. But grahambell knew that it had a future and started a company and invested money in it. The fact remains that now the whole world is connected. It didnt turn out to be that expensive. My point is that you or someone else need to work futher on your innovation to make it successfull and make 'the world know about it'. Most of these 'small innovations' are not properly implemented and hence the world dosent know about it. So what we want is investment. These days, I believe that Industry is the best source of investment. And unfortunately Indian industry is still in adolecent stage and they cannot probably 'risk' on such innovations. Lets wait until these companies are ready or until that time when those 'Global' companies are ready to invest and dosent want to take credit outside of India. To strengthen my point I will show you some instance. Binary numbers were not popular until it was started using in computers. Transistors were again made popular my computers. Leave all that when did the dhabba wallas became that popular?? After some companies started implementing this idea. So lets wait until someone is ready to buy out idea (probably an Indian company otherwise the patent might go to US ;) )

Earth changing Innovations:
The main complaint made by the author was that there was no earth changing innovations. Innovations can be of two kinds one for which there is a need currently and the other may be used in the future. For the earth changing innovations that are in need for the present time needs a global prespective. People ,at times should feel the need, for innovation. And the indians until recently didnt have a global prespective. Very few people had the exposure to global technologies.

Another issue that I find is that the lack of contributions from the Schools and university. Ideas should come from the universities. This is one of the very few place where ppl really 'thinks'. Sadly even now they are just a knowledge production centre. There are lots of colleges and schools everywhere but most of them lacks funds. Sadly it the number of schools and colleges are a trade of between quality and quantity. And a good number of them are only intrested in the 'business' side of it. Why should they worry about research. Do you know that an engg college in palakkad runs in an auditorium? The only real colleges in India I believe are IITs ans NIT's. Apart from some IIT's no one has lead by an example. This is where I think most of the work should be done for some earth changing innovations.

An intresting story found in the internet:

"At the Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted that
Microsoft 'will do
some
buying of companies that are built around open-source
products,'
suggesting that to avoid open-source companies would
'take us out of the
acquisition market quite dramatically.' Ballmer has
apparently come a long way since
dubbing Linux a 'cancer.' The real question, however, is which
open-source
companies make sense within the Microsoft product
portfolio, both
from a technology and philosophy perspective.
Novell? 37Signals? Jive? SugarCRM?
And, equally importantly, which companies
could look their communities in the
eye after selling to Microsoft?"

Its not hard for a $250bn company to buy a $2bn redhat or anyother small free
softwares. But will that make any difference?? I mean they already are under
some licensing scheme (like gpl). And according to it they have to keep the
source open whether it is microsoft or any other company. So the only thing
they can do is maybe they can prevent such comapnies from contributing to
free software. Ridiculous. Correct me if my observation is wrong.

Eight and counting

My new HP laptop is giving me a real head ache with the recovery disk creation. I have used 8 different media (including Rs25 worth sony dvd). It requires 2 dvds. But until now I have just managed to create only 1 dvd. This damn dvd writer cannot write on all the disk. This is 'BURNING' a hole in my pocket and not dvd's.

Huntred need some work

Huntred is now almost 6 years old. Its been almost 4 years after it was moved to download.com. Until now I havent worked seriously on the profile page. I need to create some good text. Can anyone help me?? currently the link is music.download.com/huntred . If someone can plz send me an email.

Btw I'm planning to upload a couple of songs in the album. One of them will be uploaded this week itself. The work is almost completed and its ready to go.

Great Indian victory

Yet another win in T-20 for india. It seems india is really enjoying t20. This should be a really good news for BCCI and zee india. Indian premier league and zee's league should see success. These victories should pull more crowds to the stadium and television. Any way I'm enjoying the game. I can see the result in 3 hrs. And this is the only game format in which india is winning ;) (just joking - no one can beat india in test matches :) ).

BTW the absence of the oldies, i feel, is certainly helping india ;) . And I dont see a place for them in the t20 in the near future.

Funny 'sun'ny interview

Few days ago one of our faculty announced that sun microsystems need a campus academy partner to promote their products. Sun afterall is known for its brilliant efforts to promote opensource software (or may be its because of the finiancial crisis that has been haunting them for about 5 yrs that made them the opensource side). Anyway my love for 'open' forced me to attend it. I got through the first phase now there are only 5 ppl. Ok, the day came I was very prepared I learned a lot of things about sun, I already knew a lot about opensource or rather free software. I can make a long speech about LINUX. what more they want?? I was very confident. The interview started everything was going fine but one question really surprised me 'HOW DO YOU CONVINCE A LINUX USER TO USE SOLARIS?'. I never knew that sun's love for opensource ended with solaris. okies so linux and solaris dosent go together ;)