The return of Sony Ericsson?
Posted by Srinath
For quite a long time, Sony Ericsson has daunted the mobile giants Nokia, Samsung, et all, yet somehow always falling at the last hurdle. It was a story of the underdog putting up a brave fight, but always failing to upset the champion. Faced with rapidly falling sales, and a lineup that didn't offer anything different or exciting, SE had to comeup with something radical to stay afloat. Their recent refresh in Q4 2009 offers something for everyone, with a variety of devices aimed at different segments and price points. But will it be enough to save the company and turn it around? This article tries to explore.
Info on Cricinfo
Posted by Sandeep
I don’t know how many of you out there are avid cricket fans and follow the progress of your favorite team ball-by-ball no matter how much pressure your delivery manager imposes on you or even during the toughest times of your work. Yes! Cricket fans like me by now would have guessed what I am talking all about. Cricinfo.com, one of the biggest sports websites in the world, logs in almost 10 million unique visitors on a monthly basis.
It all started when Simon King, an English graduate working at an American University was fed up with not knowing how his team was doing. What began as a network of fans over Chat instantaneously grew about to become the world’s largest cricket website.
PHP bashing has to end!
Posted by Srinath
Of late, I've been noticing a lot of PHP bashing around the web. Most of it is related to one major issue: Security. Granted, PHP's security implementation isn't the best out there, and it is a widely discussed topic. But more often than not, the security loopholes are due to bad/inconsistent programming principles, rather than a core PHP issue.
Also, PHP's lack of support for threaded programming is another major let down. While this is a genuine issue, rewriting the entire PHP core and the parser to support threads is not worth the effort. But I genuinely haven't felt the need for multi-threading in PHP till date. While threading is a must for system programming, the need for it in a web environment is not entirely clear. Also, the major strength of PHP - its simplicity will be compromised if threading is to be introduced.
Another genuine concern is the confusion caused by settings such as "register_globals" , "magic_quotes", "safe_mode" . These three variables have had a major impact on the deployment of PHP scripts. Web hosts allow ways to tweak these settings, but for the layman who just wants to get a blog up and running, its a bit of a hassle. Also its an issue that needs to be addressed by web developers who want maximum compatibility for their applications. The next major release PHP 6.0 aims to completely do away with this settings for good, and that will indeed clear up a lot of mess.
Most of these issues boil down to one thing - the lack of a an official formal specification. Although the PHP Group oversees the continued development, it is still a community effort, and as such requires stringent software engineering and management. Since the original PHP parser was completely rewritten for version 3 and above, there have only been attempts to patch up vulnerabilities, and add new features like Object Oriented Programming, namespace support among others. PHP 6 is touted to be THE release, which will address most of the major concerns.
For all its shortcomings, its still THE easiest server side scripting language to work with. The C/C++ syntax, seamless integration with MYSQL, support by almost all web hosting providers still make it THE web language IMHO. The LAMP stack is undoubtedly the king of the web, and will continue to be so, owing to the simplicity and widespread community support offered by all its components. And not to forget, its completely free.
So long Geocities
Posted by Srinath
For those who were fortunate enough to have Internet access in the 90's here is saddening news indeed - one of the earliest social networking site, geocities has finally shutdown. Yahoo has pulled the plug on the legendary site which allowed users to connect with others with the same taste on various topics, and create their own pages. It was the earliest free host if you will.
Yahoo bought the company near the peak of the dotcom bubble for more than $3 billion, which, along with the rise of alternative services, quickly spelled the end of GeoCities’ prominence. Today, it appears that the end of GeoCities is being made official, as Yahoo has closed the service to new accounts and posted an FAQ with some details as to how the shutdown will go.
Wikipedia page here
Adios.
$10 laptop from India – a sci-fi story?
Posted by Srinath
You've read it everywhere, in everyplace. Supposedly sporting 2gb of ram, and is wi-fi enabled. That's pretty much all the information that is being given out right now. Touted as India's response to the OLPC plan, it being developed by the Human Resource Ministry, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and Indian Institute of Science. It is meant strictly for students, and will be distributed directly by the government through schools, and colleges.
The question is - how true is the cost projection? I'm a big fan of such initiatives, but common sense prevails and its pretty damn clear that this is unrealistic. MIT's OLPC was projected at about $100, but finally ended up being priced upto $190. In short, I believe the Indian government is trying to pull off another cheap publicity stunt. Unless the exchange rate of the US Dollar goes upto Rs.1ooo, I don't see this happening.
But then again, the initiative will be heavily subsidised by the government to make it as cheap as possible. But will they take upto 90% of the price remains to be seen. I'm sure in the current financial position, they simply cannot and will not do so.
Until further details - this simply isn't going to happen.
UPDATE: Yea, its a total flop show. The device is actually some sort of external storage, not a laptop. More here