Tech Visions - 2

Almost forgot that I own a blog!!! Heard about the gun shooting in Dawson college last month? Killed 1 and injured many others. Well, there have been so many posts over this topic anyway, people have written so much.... especially after it all happened, people came up to say, "You maniac, go shoot yourself and don't kill innocent people" and stuff..... man, whats the use commenting on it after everything is over Prolly people think by criticizing it they may prevent such incidents to happen again. But, do you really think it works??? I think on the contrary. But well, who cares.

One of the most amazing theories which came up was the guy couldn't fit in the society because of the Quebec culture and attitude of people here towards non-Quebec people, ie, rest of the 50% population of Montreal. Well, I kinda disagree to this one too.... how about the shooting in Concordia few years back, or the our favorite Columbine shooting??? Well, may be lets not discuss it here anymore, you never know who is reading it and who gets offended and then who tracks it down, and then they deport me to back to my homeland :( Anyway this was not supposed to what I am discussing here, I was supposed to write about those dreams I had where I had these visions about the technology ;)

Before I start, I would like to know, why is it that writing a blog in a "blog window" feels so cool and writing it in doc file and doing copy paste feels so stupid??? (does it? or is it just me?) Given that the 'save', 'spell check' and many other options are much easier to use in MS word. But I guess, blogging is supposed to be a "cool" thing. You just do it as a time-pass, its not very "serious" thing. Ohk, back to technology (geeeeeeek). I just realized that I already mentioned about the MP3 players. So lets start with something different. Business cards! or to be precise business e-cards. You receive that 2 line email with an attachment which is nothing but senders e-card, which could have been written in plane text..... NO.... we need colors!!! Well, how long do you think people are going to use the paper business cards? How about this small pager looking like e-card gadget, which can store just your business cards?

Ohk, here is goes. So MS corp comes up with new gadget, which looks like a pager, but thinner, comes in white or black, has screen as big as your business card and 4 navigation keys and 1 on/off button obviously, with a bluetooth connectivity (infra red is old fashioned...c'mmon). Now, your MS office comes with another utility to make e-cards, with a million basic templates and of course if you are not yet satisfied you can make your own! Prolly import a pdf or jpg and convert it into a e-card, lets call it the '.ecd' file. So the device, name it 'ECD 2000', can store one of your own business card and may be a zillion cards from other people (don't need more that a Gb I guess to do that, iPods got 60Gb these days, c'mmon). Ya, so what you do is, connect your ECD 2000 to your comp and transfer your own e-card to it and you are good to go! Now assuming that every 'rich' guy has got one of these ECD thingie, only thing you have to do is place 2 ECD's in front of each other and push 'Send' on one and 'Receive' on the other, and your e-card is transferred!! Cool? But obviously it has some limitations, like browsing through the cards etc. So 1 month later Sony comes up with a model of its own, 'Sony Eio', comes in silver, thinner than ECD 2000, metal finish, feather touch buttons (like the one on your microwave oven). Eio lets you browse through the cards alphabetically, so if you are looking for Mr. Xin Yan Zou (that is a REAL name), you don't have to start from A, B, C.....X. So life is peacefull, although you pay almost twice for the Eio compared to ECD 2000. But.... but, after 2 months Samsung comes up with 'SGX-A210' which has the capability to store upto 3 business e-cards of your own!!! Now that's COOL!! So you can make different type of e-cards and chose which one to give to whom! Later on with further improvements, you have ECD's which can not only transfer your own e-card but can send any other card from your database, given that the .ecd file is not 'locked' or 'protected', in which case only the owner can transfer it!

Well, not very exciting, but just wanted to get it off my head.... man can't sleep (well that has a different reason though). At 5 in the morning, writhing this dumb blog, only thing I wish is that somebody makes a gadget which could finish your thesis :((

tech visions

"Technology, as i see it.... " can you believe it I used such a line for a SoP when I was applying for a scholarship...ofcourse I din't get it. Remebering my GRE analytical/essay writing score, 3.5/6, lowest in the university, I can bet you can't have worse writing skills than mine...seriously. People who have been correcting my SoP's and CV's...they have so much patience.

Well let's talk about something else; the technology, which is helping to make our life easy...or may be more complicated. I still remeber those college days, when we had access to unix systems, no GUI. There were only 2-3 windows systems, for 97 students in the batch, that too we couldn't open any site with a "mail" in it(rediffmail, mail.yahoo.com etc). On unix system you can read the incoming mails from yahoo, rediff etc, but cant send mails using these accounts. The CS studs tried changing the properties and do lot of patching work to send mails from unix or windows account. I could never do that or even remember everytime if somebody would have told me how to. So I started receiving mails on my regular yahoo/rediff account, check it on unix systems and used the yahoo greetings to send mails using the windows systems rather than emails! kind of innovative huh! Dont kow if sounds good to you or not, but my girlfriend surely liked it then!!! Getting a regular mail with a picture of roses...everyday...what more a girl can ask for ;). I have always believed in innovations, rather than improvements. just come up with something totally new! I hate to work on increasing the efficiency of a system by 0.127%, or improving the control algo for a smoother curve, rather I would spend my life designing a new system, which uses totally different phenomenon. I dont know if I would be able to do that sometime or not, but i really appreciate the people who do. Amar Bose (the Bose speaker and music system guy u know, phd from MIT), designed new amplifiers, came up with bose speakers...nothing can beat it. Now he designed car suspensions, after 24 years of hard work...using electromagnetic coils and motors! I have seen people, famous people, working on car suspensions for their whole life, trying to improve the handling/comfort/ride quality by 1-2 or max 3% in 5 years. Because all they can think of is a spring-damper system. Prolly they will replace the fluid, use different solenoids..whatever...but doesnt help. Bose gave a new life to suspensions...no spring no damper...its awesome!and thats the future!

I have such visions many times....ya i sound funny. well not abt the suspension..but similar things sometimes. I thought of the MP3 player long back when the disc-man was hot stuff in the market..and few years later..boom its there! Sometimes really funny, when I was 13yrs old or something, I thought of generating electricity from train wheels...obviously I dint know abt the energy conservation principle! well, came out that its actually used in india!

the way the technolgy is improving these days, I am not sure if it is making our life simpler or complicated. Because people are not working on actually improving the technology or coming up with new ones, they just want to give you more options, more colors, which actually confuses you. I opened my first ever email account in year 2000. Since then I have opened atleast a dozen(literally) more, and forgot most of them. All of them serve the basic need, but we need more space....not exactly, but new colors. Then again this chat and blog thing....IRC, ICQ, yahoo, msn, rediffbol, gtalk and a million more i dont know about. then u got atleast 7 different messengers which are compatible with atleast 4 of these services. I myself have used eassymessenger, yahoo, trillian, gaim, msn, windows messenger, eassymessenger.net, meebo.com and what not..i dont know why. then these groups and blogs and societies...."join classmate.com!", rediff connextion, yahoo 360, live journal, orkut, hi5 and ofcourse the blogspot! Sometimes when i think about all this, i know i have wasted so much time on these sheer nonsense things....although i wouldn't have utilized my time in a more constructive way anyway.

So basically I feel that, all these improvements are not helping but more bugging and annoying. But somehow I have this inclination towards google. They kinda do new stuff....google desktop search...saved my life! All these hardware companies, making faster processors, better motherboard and higher GPU's for gaming ....laptops with 4Gb RAM for personal use..and not for NASA research (i remember my 1st comp with 1.1Gb HDD)...all they are trying to do is improve the technology...making things compact, light weight, more powerful, higher capacity...and all this. But is it actually required? well, u still have to purchase/pirate the software, look for updates, u need internet for sure...need anti-virus...and millions of other tasks you need to do to keep your system up-to-date....more complications with improving techinology! So what do we need then? A change..... change in the way we look at PC's. I dont know if it is already in the market..something like this..but m sure that it must be in google's or somebd's agenda.

Imagine a PC...or let me call it a GC, google computer, which has minimal hardware, like a keyboard and mouse ofcourse, a screen..well, small amout of HDD, or prolly RAM/ROM coz thats gonna be faster than mechanical HDD, low level processor, and other very basic requirements with a high end ethernet/wireless card to connect to internet(which would be ultra ultra high speed). The GC comes pre-installed with the Google OS, GOS, which has nothing but a web browser. It doesnt take 8 min to boot and load all the 219 programs like windows...or linux...whatever. It just connects you to the internet...or rather your personalized google space, Gspace. Now, here is the fun part, you got a HDD quota on google server, which you can increase/decrease whenever you want, by paying extra money. You dont have to buy a new faster HDD, from 5400rpm to 7200rpm (and now 10000rpm) and throw your old one, or keep those 300Gb external HDD's to store movies and songs. Well, you will not be storing any movies or songs on your Gspace anyway, because everything is available on google video/audio/media center. Just pay for it monthly, or per movie and watch it whenever you want! It will have all the movies and songs in many languages! Now what do u do for work??? Well, google has license to all the softwares, including the tech ones, Adams, Catia, Spy, Matlab and others like word, Nero, Acrobat, photoshop, Maya....u just name it! most of them are free, others you pay monthly or as per usage...hourly or the amount of processing you need. now you dont have to worry about updates, you always work on latest version, that way all this compatibility issue is solved [u cant open a CD in nero5, which is burned in nero6 or RoxieCD, same with Matlab :(], because, at a time, every1 is using the same version....so u got same version on every GC, wherever you go! No worries about virus and ads. no system crash problems, ur data is safe with google servers...u know how it works right....No hacking problem and all, hopefully google will have the highest security level. so All the softwares can be run in the web browser itself, afterall its the data transfer, so google takes input data from your keyboard, does the processing at its end, gives you back the results. Now imagine the processing power!!! If 100 people have GC'c and paying for the softwares and the processing and whatever, google will obviously have enough processing powerfor the worst case scenario, ie, even if all 100 people are using the processor, it should be faster than the PC's. But obviously again with time zones and everything, only 20% of the total users would be processing at a time..so u got like 5times advantage in processing most the time!!!!

Thats what some japanese companies are doing, utilizing the resources to max. they ask u to hook up ur system to net, and let them use it for processing when you are not using it, mainly for research work. Well, the funda of param 2000, indian super computer; again a new thought which changed the way people looked at super computers; dont use a ultra fast and ultra costly processor which is difficult to manufacture, but use many slow processors in parallel, tough part is to design the algorithm to distribute the job(thats what I have heard..not sure..google for it and lemme know :p). Hard work but worth it! So why not to use all possible processing power available in PC's, hook them up together when people are not using it! or even better, get all the processing power centralized, Gserver, and let everybd use it thru net. Well, it would be cost effective too. Just look at it. Since google is getting GC's manufactured by 1 particular company, in bulk, its gonna be cheap. Also, the hardware is minimal...kinda an intel celeron or smthing :p. that would be like 1/10th of the price of a PC i guess. Then you dont have to worry about norton 2005 and 2006 every year. You dont waste your money on new versions! and you have access to every damn software...if you wanna try a software, you dont have to purchase the whole damn thing and realise its not useful for you!

Use your GC as a VoIP phone to call(with video) any other GC in the world for free, using Gtalk ;). Finally when everybd has a GC, u get a Gaccount, which basically is ur gmail account type, u chat with it, u use G-services with it, u email/blog/call/shop/get salary/file taxes/pay bills ....whatever with it. The Gaccount will eventually give you a GIN, Google Insurance Number, which will replace your SIN/SSN/PIN. Now everybody in world is on the same ground, globalization has completed, no boundaries between the countries. Information is travelling at the speed of light. Welcome to the G-world, experience the G-fied life!

blah blah blog

ok, so 4.30am on a saturday morning, and I am finally planning to blog something..well I always hated this whole blog thing, but may be I can use it in my own way. I have no clue what these blogs are for and I am just too lazy to google for it and "learn" about blogging. Well, I have never been a good learner ....except from my own experiences..which unfortunately have not been really good :p

so I have been thinking about all this blog thing, have been reading people's blogs sometimes (you know when you get that forwarded link in that high school or university alumni yahoo group...) But i guess my way of looking at it is totally different...well may be not the best way..but whatever.

so i think this blog thing can be used to just blabber out, whatever i keep thinking about, all sleepless nights, and may be one day i can collect all this and write autobiography :p ....well most of the people want to write a book...i want to write autobiography...perhaps it won't be the "best seller" .....for a long time, but still, by the time i write a book i hope to have earned enough money to afford the losses!

so all this blog is going to be about ME!!! I know nobody is going to visit my blogs[u just proved me wrong ;)]. So let me start with this whole blog funda itself. Well I hate it because I hate the "wired"(not weird) life most of the "geeks" living these days. you know, real life and real fun is when u actually meet "real" people and not when talk/blog with some "gr8nbed_143". At this point lemme clarify something, which I should have prolly mentioned in the beginning of this blog, all the names used in my blogs are totally fictitious and resemblance to any "real" "screen-names" is totally co-incidental. ya so i was talking about the blogs! people say its kinda global dating thing and its the best way you can find "perfect" friends because the number of people you can "meet" through wire is atleast 7million times more than people you can actually interact in real life. well, very true. but still, you know it doesn't give me that feel :p

people are losing the presentation skills, social life and so many other qualities because of the increased wired communication. here is the preference order of social interaction of many people these day: personal meet-talk on phone-chat-email-mighty blog! [i just lost 500 words i typed...cant do it again :(( ]. ok, so people's preferences..that's what i was talking about. so people say, this preference order is convinient given the cicumstances, the time zone differences, long distance, gloabalization and many other factors; true again. but i got another thoery working behind it. well everybody is not a good faker on the face...i mean everybody can not lie in front of other person without showing the face expressions. so meeting people and talking to them, tough task dude. you need to look presentable(doesnt mean you need to be arjun rampal or something), good colloquial skills, fast thinker and blah blah. so not a good idea basically when there are easier ways available. talking on phone- well u dont show how are you feeling, but still you have to make it sound correct and still gotta think fast. like i talk to my parents with a smoke in hand [plz dont tell my parents if you happen to know them]. so you can lie if you are little bit confident about ur skills! but still why not to just chat, where you can use :( or :) irrespective of what you are actually feeling.. i mean there is no way the other person will know your feelings. and you can take some time to think..."the connection is bad", "i just went to get some coffee". and then comes email, where you have plenty of time to think/consult/search, oxford online dictionary and finally come up with the best excuse you could have. And above all is this blog....and thats because...well as i said i dont know much about blogging so i wont discuss that :D. (well I prefer emails myself, u know the spell checks and all that..really helps :)). so finally this is the only way i/others can express mine/their opinions to millions of people..thanks to the free web spaces, search engines like google and the high speed unlimited DSL!

well talking about google..i would like to write a whole blog on it! may be just after this one tonight! so i guess thats about the introduction...not mine but introduction to blogging...which i will keep doing now....kinda getting hang of it :p