This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

P.S:

With Tata Nano, and Telnic both going live today, it looks like small is beautiful, small car, small domain.

I would not put it as an obscure topic outright, as it concerns almost everybody who uses Internet & Technology, with what we are going to discuss further, people who have high moral values, will feel cheated, those who understand will get relieved, and those who want to argue are most welcome, I can take you to the culprits right away .
The scope of our discussion is the word unlimited, when (all the moralists, this goes for you) ever you hear the word unlimited, what does it make u feel?
Happy? Content? Value for Money? Precisely, most people attach the word unlimited with a happy sequence, never ending happiness. So what happens when the same people who say unlimited, actually mean, limited to a point?
Lets take an example, we goto Rajdhani Thali Restaurant (this is for example purpose only, caution, please do not enact the following sequence) and we start eating an unlimited Thali, for which we are ready to pay a decent amount of money, but, as soon as you eat 30 chapatis the manager says, your unlimited account is over. How would that feel? Specially if you have the capacity to eat 60 chapati’s?
Well, my first instance with unlimited fiasco came when I was a student in Bangalore, a well known telephone company promised unlimited sms’s for a particular sim card plan, well, we were in college, we were jobless, and we decided to see how much does actually unlimited meant.
At a point, we crossed 5000 SMS’s from a particular cell phone in a month, and then! Lo! we were charged 50 Ps. per sms, what is the point?
Nothing is unlimited, other than stealing neta’s pocket holes. In fact, the telephone company had the gall to tell us that we came in high user group. We!, jobless, engineering students, who wanted to expose the companies dirty policies, were penalized. LOL!
I would not blame them.
So, what is happening in India now, that, I had to recall this incident?
February 2009, saw the advent of a new policy by the ISP’s, Internet Service Providers. I will now outline the policy in points below, as each company has its own policy and implementation rules. As usual, there is no standard formula.
Also, the system which they are trying to ape from the west is apparently badly aped, and we don’t even match the aping standards.

1. Under the guise of Broadband Fair Usage, our ISP’s will now restrict all the unlimited accounts at a certain point. This will be known as the Fair Usage Policy (FUP)

2. The various ways in which companies will restrict their accounts are to be read in the fine print under the Unlimited word, which will be followed by FUP.

3. Through its FUP, Airtel, for instance, has “defined fair usage levels for unlimited data transfer plans” and “on reaching the fair usage level, the plan speed would be rationalized by up to 50% for the rest of the monthly billing cycle”. I will come back to this point again, as I have more to speak on this.

4. For Tata, after the billing cycle is over, it informs subscribers that the predefined limit has been hit and they must move to a higher plan or the service would be terminated.

5. BSNL, the government owned ISP has not declared any FUP as yet, but it does not have a high speed unlimited as yet which is affordable to the common man, so we shall not be discussing that.

6. They want to restrict all the Bit Torrent traffic, which can be detrimental to Linux users, as they cant download the distro’s.

This policy is coming into effect slowly but steadily by almost all the ISP’s so either we accept it or demand the reason.

Now, I will proceed to give the arguments given by the companies who want to implement the detrimental FUP.
Most of the companies, have the same parrot like arguments which are unimaginative and profiteering in nature, I find a grain of truth in all of them, but I am opposed to certain practices which might be followed if we are not alert.
Consider this to be my two bits for Jaago Grahak Andolan.
The best and the most hard hitting argument which an ISP can give is uneven distribution of bandwidth. There are people and there are people, the companies say, under the FUP, they want to protect the decent guys from the b/w hoggers. As 99% of people who use Internet, dont misuse it to an extent wherein the company has to take an action.
Lets take another e.g., you know a certain guy in the building who has 2 good robust PC’s at home, and knows enough Technology, by which he uses the same account to download movies, porn, music day and night, there by hogging all the b/w, thus your connection is perpetually slow and you hate your ISP. Now when the FUP is implemented, and the guys wings are cut, you will be the happiest guy, as you have a decent connection now.
The second reason might make the likes of Shah Rukh Khan Happy with a capital H, as, the ISP’s proclaim that by FUP, they will be able to control the piracy makers, as they are the basic source of trouble, first use too much b/w and then cut back on sales of original DVD’s for music/movies etc. KUDOS for this thought!
Atleast, there are some ways by which the companies think of giving good service, third and the most widely used argument by the ISP’s is that they are just aping the west as usual, saying its an international trend, but I know of at least 1 company in UK which does NOT implement FUP.
They throw around heavyweight names like AT&T, Verizon, BT, Vodafone, Orange, but one thing which I would like to remind our desi ISP’s is that these guys give amazing speeds. Which you guys can not match up in the next 5 years, apart from Reliance, who is coming up with some very decent speeds, and neither did these guys actually read the fine print for FUP, which, in some countries and by some companies, the limit for download is as high as 50GB, not 5 or 10, we are talking of good 50GB high speed Internet, which I think would satisfy any decent user (we are trying to stop the indecent ones only remember??).
Now, the issues I feel would be raised by any level headed guy towards these companies,
1. Would you like to be held on ransom by some XYZ company and be forced to move to a higher cost plan?
2. Does everybody know, that the government subscribed broadband connection is only called broadband if and only if the connection speed is 256 Kbps? So now the point no. 3 which i mentioned earlier comes into picture, if you are in a basic 256 Kbps unlimited plan and you cross the FUP, and your ISP decides to halve your speed, would you technically still be a Broadband user? although you are still paying for a Broadband connection?

I agree the cap is a good idea, but it should be implemented intelligently, and not in a regressive way, because, I too want the value for MY money, and I don’t like Forced Usage Policy!

Also, if you are not selling unlimited, then why boast about it?? Implement the Australian Policy, I think even those villagers have more sense of fairness, we pray our Internet does not go our politics way.

Apparently I don’t have the gall to actually call him a wood cutter in terms of technique, as he has been textbook perfect as long as we have seen him, what I am talking about here is about the brute strength used to clear the ropes earlier, and the sheer nimble effortless perfectly timed sixes, which he hit in yesterdays game. His instincts might have been dulled, but they are still better than most of the young guys, and what age has taken from him in terms of response time, it has given it back in terms of experience.
What better than twenty years of backbreaking international experience to keep the kiwi attack flabbergasted? You cannot take away anything from this man.
His talent spotting radar is a well known phenomenon, he is known to have supported MSD’s nomination, so we know that he is humble along with being great, as he knows his limitations. He knows each and every correct button of Indian Cricket and wants to use it for the best of Indian Cricket.
What more do you ask of this man?
We want a world cup. Not for us, but for him, as we have long known that he considers his career a failure unless he helps India procure a World Cup for India, our prayers are with him, aren’t they?
Sachin Tendulkar is a statesman, cricket in India is known by him.

doom.tel for Yellow pages?

Last Saturday a group of long lost friends decided to meet up, after a long hookah session in Mocha, somebody got the bright idea of going for a movie, and the ordeal which we went through after that decision can be read further..
We went inside the plush PVR and waited, and right from the first scene we knew that this was a hare brained movie, only fit for kids.
What is with Ash and Pink Panther? First movie she was in a flick and miss role, in this movie though she has a good part, she behaved the way a new comer would. None of us saw the self confident actress you see her as in Hindi cinema, instead, it reminded me the way she worked in Jeans, too conscious of her looks, and till the last minute desperately trying to remain on the screen.
Ash and Andy Garcia made the movie bearable, if it was for Steve Martin antics, I would have walked out right after the blooper of the first scene. His accent was atrocious at the best, and the take on Pope was simply not funny.
The movie was complete cliche including Ash wearing a Pink dress in the final sequence..
All and all, nothing to spend money on.

Click here to look at the image. zoom in and see, you can identify each face and the expressions on it. If you are unable to open in your browser, then COPY the below given link and PASTE into your browser address bar.

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?auth=033ef14483ee899496648c2b4b06233c

This post is specifically for all the photo buff’s, world over President Obama’s swearing ceremony was noted, but rarely somebody has put in such a staggering effort.

Alas I could not download and paste the photo, but I hope the link will suffice the most hardcore photo buff.

I would suggest that a total aspect of emotions should be kept aside in the discussion, as it brings in a completely new dimension to the whole topic. I would like to agree and mention early on that man is a slave to emotions.

    I agree that it has barely been a little more than a month to my own marriage and in this time span I saw three of my friends getting married and a couple of more planning their marriages; these thoughts are not about being happy in marriage or otherwise, they are simply focused on the sole driving force of economy called marriage.

    People ask me how does it feel to get married? One honest thing that I feel is getting married is expensive, so what is common is all the marriages? "Expenses", however simple a marriage or however grand, its not only the process of getting married which is expensive; its the expenses before marriage as well as after marriage and the relative juggernaut which brings an avalanche effect.

    I always wondered, did God himself think about the expenses before creating the world? Before I raise any flames, the expenses occurred on God’s behalf is considered in terms of Energy he expends to create it.Did He think how much energy would he need to maintain it? or did he think about the energy spent in being sad about the state of the earth now?

    So, taking things at a fundamental perspective we can generalize a statement that your basic driving force of economy is the physical attraction between a man and a woman or a man and a man or a woman and woman.

    Another question which nags me again and again is whether love or sex is the driving force, but I don’t have that stout a heart as to enter such a debate which might earn me the wrath of my wife.

    Its just that the same things get repeated a generation later. Same expenses, same events. So tell me what is the driving force of the economy?

This post was previously published on http://nyjoshi.googlepages.com

This made me realize that I wanted to stay updated as usual, which led me to download IE 8 ( that merits a complete new post for it ). Once I installed IE 8 I came across a nagging problem, which now seems like a boon.

The nagging problem was of managing add-on’s, which kept on telling me that I was not using the correct add-on, I triple checked the existing add-on list which gave no indication that anything was amiss and took me to a MSDN IE page, and bang, I come across a link which tells me that my Live in Assistant was outdated and when I got there, I was told to download an application which completely updated the Windows Live list.

Windows Live Writer was a part of it, it also included the updated version of Windows Mail, which is shipped with Vista. ( Outlook Express is a legacy product of Windows Mail now Windows Live Mail).

The best part of Live Writer is that it is not restricted to Windows Live Spaces account. It allows you to configure everything, as it should be on the Internet. It allowed me to get connected to my word press account, once I enabled the RPC option. The layout is simple yet powerful.

With Windows Live Mail, it automatically imported all my existing accounts from Windows Mail as well as let me add other Windows Live Accounts, which when used from hotmail give you advertisements.

The sleek new MSN messenger was a bonus.

Of course, now my IE8 gives no more error’s!!