Tuesday, May 23, 2006

apologize or else

Apparently, Madonna's latest gig had her on a cross - apparently
this is offensive to chrstians. They seem to have missed her previous shows
and perhaps failed to spot the clue in her chosen stage name -they
are all meant to be fairly annoying to people who have no clue, no sense of humour
and probably are a bit wobbly in their faith.


Or perhaps the people compllaining have shares in her company, and are just boosting her publicity
(which of late was flagging a bit)


Perhaps Madonna could do a Da Vinci tour? Perhaps the people who spend so much time complaining about
troivia like movies and music could get a life and look at things that people of allegedly christian beliefs
are meant to like aid in darfour, or peace in the middle east or something that actually MATTERS for a change.


Jesus, these guys are hipocrites.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

A True History of the Internet - Virtualising Handsets and cars

Xen is quite useful in providing
ways to dice and slice a server (farm) at different granularity from
processor, core, or thread, and for its isolation, migration, and
multi-OS support. To date, its targetted at Intel and the desk/server side.


What we desperately need is to virtualise handsets and also processors in cars.
Right now, the tussle between the various service providers to create walled gardens has led to a disaster which is that there are now far more OSs (and even just incompatible variants of OSs) in the handset/pda world than any other computign world - linux, symbianos, windows mobile smart phones, nokia, ericsoon and samsung ownbrand OS and re-badged symbian and java and other OS - despite ample resources (CPU and memory in a typical 2006 phone is more than an internet host or router of 1990), these folks produce bluetooth and wifi and camera APis that are stunted, they don't ship location services, or p2p/manet tools, and basically have NO clue- in the interest of short term profit, they misunderstand that the LONG term profit will be bigger if the service*network is bigger (see Metcalf's law, or dave reeds version of it) - killer apps wont "appear" for 3G or wifi enabled phones unless the community can program them. Frankly, its an embarassement.


Don' even get me started on in-car devices... ... ...


So if we para-virtualized them, we'd take these problems away -= application writers could write to a single platform, instead of 11, and know that that platform would work on the VM on any phone - since many phones use either ARM or (a few) xscale, the processor is pretty friendly, so the lower level of a "xen-like" system, would be not too bad - the page sharing stuff in Xen 3.0 would allow a lot of efficiecies too so the memory footprint of running n variants of Symbian OS and Linux and windows smart phone OSs, would not be n-times - it would be a fraction more...


show me the money:)

apologize or else

Da Vinci, Da Vinci, we all fall down



protests from religious fundamentalists about the da vinci code movie and book, only made worse by the movie hype, are yet another symbol of the corruption of thought in reglious groups. A well trained jesuit would never misunderstand the difference between fictional entertainment, and blasphemy. Frankly, the christians are very very lucky that the dominant religion in the west is not (say) orthodox judaism where the portrayal of humans (since they are in the image of god) is forbidden.


More importantly, where to they get off objecting to a speculative, amusing, and quite well made movie (but terribly written book)? Look at the bible - its full of inaccuracies - for example, the commandment translated by Christians as "Thou shalt not kill" is an incorrect rendering of the Aramaic which meant "Thou shalt not murder" - I will defend my right to the death to _talk_ gibberesh, and christians have by the own rules, given up that right, so they can go away and sulk in the corner and turn the other bloody (==by my lady) cheek.


Gosh, they never complained about Dogma (very amusing film with Alanis morisette as god), or Time Bandits (very very amusing film with Ralph Richardson as God). What is wrong with a religion that has a terminal sense-of-humour failure? Read the Name of the Rose and weep:)