ThePanda

Man celebrates 100 yrs of powered flight today, though the celebrations were unfortunately delayed due to rain (God doesn’t like man flying or something). While this is in important event, it aint as important as 108 yrs of movies, celebrated on the 28th of December, 2003. I shall be celebrating both birthdays in a slightly deferred manner, celebrating flight on the 25th and movies on the 31st. In keeping in line with my deferment @ Columbia, this looks like the appropriate thing 2 do.

Today seems to have been a nice day for public prosecutors Europe, with the Ian Huntley Case coming to a successful finish with his conviction, and most of the November the 17th being herded off to prison. Fortunately none of these guys were awarded the Death Penalty (ZE PANDA DOES NOT SUPPORT THE DEATH PENALTY).....

Wired 11.12 has a little piece on Burlington, Vermont’s effort to build a community owned Advanced Fiber Network, and the implication of such a community based product in a capitalist economy, where communication networx r supposed to be provided by private enterprises and argues abt how AFN’s are natural monopolies like energy distros. Well livin’ in a country which up until a decade back leaned towards socialism, and has of late shifted over to capitalism; and still lacks ne concrete form of social security or of enforcing fair practices in commerce, there r some pts in the article with which I agree and some with which I disagree. Let’s take my neighborhood for instance…. I live in a relatively small colony in Delhi (700 or so houses) and well we r served by two phone companies, one cable operator and one broadband access provider. Unfortunately the broadband access provider and the cable operator are one in the same person. One of the phone companies is privately owned while the other has a majority Government stake, and the Government’s (the citizens’) company also has the first mover’s advantage having successfully monopolized Delhi’s telephone networx for well over 25 years.

Now this heady mix of private and public enterprise gives u a taste of problems with both. The public phone company can afford to provide dirt cheap connections and transmission rates, however this often comes at a gr8r price. If u have a problem with ur phone conextion u either have contacts inside the exchange (me get some courtesy the fact that both my parents hold MDs and work in one of India’s largest public hospitals) or u pretty much sit and wait for eternity. Now this leads to an Orwellian situation with some pigs being more equal than others, and ppl depending on who they r, & (often) on how connected or rich they r, getting better faster services than others. The private phone company by comparison is forced to keep prices down, to have even a moderately even playing field and is forced to sell its services on the basis of services provided. Interestingly major service requests take almost as long to be processed by the private company as the public company, becoz the private company laid most of its cable thru areas where the public one already had cables and needs permission everytime it wants to check or change cables.

The cable op/broadband provider leads an even more interesting life. Cable much like power and AFN is a natural monopoly since it doesn’t make sense to have multiple cables and signal amplifiers serving each home (DTH is unfortunately as of now unavailable as is HDTV), specially in this small a colony. However as a monopolistic player my cable provider serves ugly service, often removing channels at whim, and usually the signal we receive at my place (6 or so blocks away from the point of origin) is weak and sadly distorted. However complaining to this guy has no effect on him becoz u have to use his services, or use no services at all (which in essence means that if he says my set top box arrives after a week, and costs more than it shud, then it just does, no questions asked). He also charges 2 to 3 times more than cable ops in any other area of Delhi, becoz economic forces at work there allow a far gr8r (n>=2) no. of cable ops to exist and hence they regulate each others prices and service. Now broadband in my colony is a farce since these guys offer 64 KBPS peak speeds at abt 100 times the cost of a regular dial-up conexion. Since the 64 kbps network backbone doesn’t have enuf avlbl bandwidth, u usually get something close to 32 kbps. The only thing which makes such a connexion worth having is the fact that its always on (no dialup time) & u rnt charged by the hr. However the prohibitive pricing puts it out of reach for most ppl (read me), since someone like me who surfs close to 3 hrs every night, and often comes online during the day, runs up a phone bill of Rs. 3000 (~$60) which is all I really pay since the ISP itself charges no money from 8 Pm to 8 Am, while the cable op would charge me a flat fee of Rs 10,000 (~$200) per month, making no economic sense for a shift to broadband.

Now at the end of all of these the NATURAL MONOPOLY thigee makes no sense to me becoz as a consumer I am under-represented (ZE PANDA DEMANDS OVER REPRESENTATION, THE SILLY OLD CONSUMER PROTECTION GROUPS HARDLY EVER RAISE MY OBJECTIONS, AND I HAVE NEVER SEEN A SINGLE MEMBER FROM NE OF THESE GROUPS WHICH ARE SUPPOSED TO BE PROTECTING MY INTERESTS…... ME INTERESTS IMPORTANT….FOR ME THEY OUTWEIGH EVERYONE ELSES INTERESTS) in both the public enterprises and the private enterprise, since shifting nething isn’t much of an option. While the Cable op shud be affected by the abysmally low no. of broadband conns, he more than makes up for it on his cable services, and in the 3 yrs that he’s been offering broadband services I haven’t seen the slightest dip in his prices, despite the fact that he has managed to penetrate less than 10% of homes in my colony. Now this guy is amazingly powerful, he gets ppl to sign on an agreement for set top boxes, where point 1 says that he is not a monopoly and he didn’t force us to buy this particular brand of set top box…. Oh right as if we have a choice in the matter, since he wudnt give us decryption codes for ne damn Set Top Box. Besides Delhi is suffering from a huge scarcity of said boxes….... NO MONOPOLY BOOOHOOOO, the GUYS PRACTICALLY RIPPING US OFF BECOZ OF HIS MONOPOLY STATUS AND EVERYONE REFUSES TO SEE THIS SIMPLE FACT…..

Neways on another note the same issue of Wired also mentions a bit on LinEx a localized Linux distro targeting users in the Extremadura region of Spain. The distro itself has been sponsored by the local government, mostly to bridge the digital divide in this region. The govt provides free computers, OSs and high speed net conns to enable ppl to communicate. Zis is very good becoz over the past 4 or so yrs I have come to realize that Open src projects, aint as simple to build as putting an idea on a site and putting a little bit of code and expecting others to contribute. Infact more than 60% of all open src projects started in any month are likely to not reach code maturity, never come out of alpha stages and have no more than 3 contributors. The open src community has had its successes, and I am an ardent supporter of all things open (including the open text book project, currently gestating in some far off corner of the world; arXiv, the open physics, math & comp community; the MIT Open CourseWare Project; etc), but while Open things if successful lead to robust, highly useful and customizable products; Peer Review for All is a dream which will probably never be accomplished becoz most developers are lucky to get ppl to download working binaries, let alone getting ppl to contribute code (of course there r developers like me who produce enormous amts of Vapourware, and never release 99% of the few working thing that we produce since these r never good enuf for us). Unless we have a larger portion of the population moving towards open src products, something not currently achievable since most open src products are not mature enuf for common ppl (no one, not even Linus Torvalds, uses OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, OK maybe Richard Stallman and a few other diehard fanatics do but they r the exception rather than the norm). Now moves like the one Apple made while releasing the Darwin core to open source, Netscape made while making the Mozilla project and the Extremadura region is doing by supplying an open src product to the masses; are ultimately going to bring abt a gr8r acceptance for the Open Src dev methodology (long used in scientific workplaces, where Peer review and collaborations have existed long b4 GNU & the FSF), and lead to acceptance of Open Src products in a mature user oriented market place. A friend of mine has been asking me to suggest a good Linux distro 4 him so that he can install it dual boot on his laptop, and well while I suggested Fedora I still have my reservations on suggesting ne of the 25 or so distros avlbl, becoz while installations have become easier since my old Slackware days, they rnt still simple enuf to be handled by ne and all users, since there is no way to non destructively install linux unless u choose the Custom install option on most installers, and most users hate choosing custom installs. Besides choosing partitions and mnt points on an install which names hard disks differently (/dev/hda1 instead of C) from what most users know, is well unintuitive and hard. While I’d use Linux on an Intel or Compliant system without a second thought, recommending a distro to someone who hasn’t installed or used linux b4 (even if he’s a pro at working on other OSs) gives me the jitters. Unless someone, somewhere, makes this easier for ppl, Linux wud remain one of the defining characteristics of Nerds & Geeks, not an OS for everyday use. Now Darwin is a great Kernel, and if someone manages to implement most of it on the IA32 architecture (fancy name for the architecture used by all Intel chips post the 386 and almost all AMD chips post something) I am sure Apple cud make a pretty penny selling Mac OS X to current windows users. My dad for one wud shift, since he still uses an old Apple IISe running Mac OS 7 for some of his work, and well he really loved that machine. Unfortunately Apple never really produced a machine cheap enuf so that he cud justify its purchase for his lab, and while he has 2 G4 towers in his lab, those exist becoz two of his machines require macs to run and these G4 towers still run Mac OS 9 becoz the company which manufactured the equipment they run never ported over its legacy software to OSX, and u cant run this software on Classic. So in short a whole lot of Open Src projects show a lot of promise and hope, but unless we manage to convince the non-Geeky world, the world of non-programmers, non-hackers, the world dominated by 35-60 yr olds but which has a helluva lot of 5-35 yr olds too, that shifting to Open Src software makes economic sense, that these software r easy enuf, that u dont need to go for classes or get a consultant to install them on ur systems, that u can go online or walk into a shop and pick up a piece of software without much thought, get back to ur computer and install this, without fearing for ur comps safety, we rnt gonna get newhere with r revolution…......

Its official I am judging Programming (both Jr & Sr most probably) and Software Display prelims at DPSVK... They got pizzas for us judges, while the poor participants get to eat food from their hostel… ALL PIGS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ARE DEFINITELY MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS…. YAHOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Oh and me had a run in with the guy who collects money for my cable operator, and we had him return part of the Cable money, and we told him to hurry up and bring us the damn Set Top Box as fast as possible. The damn guy talks 2 sweetly and my dad doesn’t like fighting with him much, I am sure he’ll resend the money sometime soon, always happens, BOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO….......

Ze Panda,
apologizing for 2 much ideological, political, computer-oriented, nonsensical and non-humorous content on this particular post, but at the same time reminding ppl that this was supposed to be at least a semi serious blog.
Ze Panda’s also wondering y wud he want to buy sensational Sachin VCDs/DVDs, hmm y oh y, wat do u have me down as Hotmail?????????????????

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2003 at 1:31 pm and is filed under article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.