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Yet Another Self-Important Blog.
Rohit Singh
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[Mon, 15 Sep 2003]
IITs've Arrived ;-)
Who cares about 60 Minutes' coverage of IITs! This is what really matters!!
Pick the lesser evil
Denver Post [via Slashdot]
says
why RIAA is getting it all wrong while MPAA has been getting it right.
They say MPAA has handled the internet thing in a strategically better way
than RIAA. In particular, they talk about how movies are cheap and DVDs
are a better standard (??) and how DVDs work everywhere (unlike poisoned CDs).
Some good points here, but the writer ignored a very basic observation. If
I need to pay $20 for an album's CD and I really only care about 3 songs
in that album, it amounts to about 20MB worth of song downloads. A movie
has to be gotten in its entirety- thats a 200MB download (for a bad divx)
for something worth $20. Clearly, there's much more value-for-money
in "sharing" music than in "sharing" movies.
Sun's Scott McNealy Talks about Why Sun Won't Die Soon
It seems like such a long time ago when I did my summer internship at Sun's
Colorado office. They were the only people who have ever given me a
dual-monitor setup. Have always lusted after one since then. And their
walls were painted in really cheerful pastel colors- I think they still
are.
Sun's Scott McNealy talks [via Slashdot] about Sun- in particular, he defends the claim that Sun isn't going to die or be eaten (stock price went from $62 to $3+change, in 3 years). Actually, he sounds rather defensive about the whole thing. Quite understandable. I really hope Sun doesn't go away. They have done some really cool stuff- things that have inspired so many other ideas. Sun's list of contribution includes, IIRC: NFS, RPC, Java. And Sun is a small company, compared to IBM or AT&T or Microsoft.
Heh!
Damned if we claim POK
and
damned if we don't!
Sharing the Love
Watching the WTO negotiations has become so much more fun recently. As the
poorer nations have realized that they too have some power on the
negotiating table (if they can unite) and the richer ones have realized
that there's some giving involved in any give-and-take, the
negotiations-that-lead-nowhere are getting more fun because of the acute
embarrassment they are causing to everybody involved. Americans and EU
want open 3rd world markets ("3rd world"!!) but those open 3rd world
markets have figured that there are quite a few things *they* can sell
(food, clothes, services) to the Americans, EU, and Japan. The problem, of course, is that
everbody wants to sell to others but nobody really wants to buy from
others. Leads to nice
fireworks. Here's a bunch of links:
Cancun might fail,
Coffee, Mayans, and Import Duties,
Legalese about Prejudge-and-Prejudice etc.