pome article freespeech novel

Hey guys this is a poem i am entering in the bcl poetry cantest. The inspiration as u might guess came from my most abused childhood toy GI Joe. so here it is titled - GI JO , a 1X4 Conversation . anyone know french for conversation, parlez vouz ?? . 1000 bucks prize. investment 10 bucks. So much wisdom can be gleaned from old monk eh. When musing on life , back in sunny bhutan this oct, it struck me that , percentage of old monks around : percentage of rum drinkers around. Take bhutan for example. pel ke old monks dikhte hain and full rum ki sale hoti hai. or nepal . Maybe thats why the daaru company chose the name old monk. Ahem ,, sorry got carried away. waise ek baat to hai mujhe to lagta hai ki yeh jo WTO aur level playing field waali debate hai , to b*** m aaj tak to maine dhandhe ke negotiations mein nahi dekhi, yeh cheeze keval khel ke ground par hi ab rah gayi hai, kahi nahi milti level playing field , saala, as maddu says , sub maya hai. Bloody , even the ground at lords slopes from one end to the other, bah, and they talk of level playing fields. where was I, yes haan poem padho. its the season to be jolly, i'm getting fat. set in a rum place...

here goes GI JO a 1X4 Conversation (or running nepal flag song )

jo:- oye ,

what to do.?

is this normal

am i just like you

gi:- hey

do i know you

you're not normal

and i'm not like you

jo:- oy

li'l eyes blue

don't act so formal

cause it doesnt suit you

gi:- hi

so its you

you're abnormal

i've known guys like you

jo:- Yo

I know who

woh fox n jackal

why they're not with you

gi:- Aww

wish i knew

Not in touch at all

And how's the girl named sue

jo:- oye

can i call u

coz i gottagomakeacall

and maybe we'll chapo a movie or two

gi: yes

I'm busy too

I don't mind at all

The card has my email, URL, mobile and fax too.

( they both say see you later and meet a year later in the same place and have the same conversation,,,,,,,)

The following is a draft of the article written for CHIP india , as part of my work as editorial contributor. This appeared in Chip Special- Basics of Computing as the concluding piece. ---------

What will the PC be like in the year 2001? Or, for that matter, 12 months from now? Smaller, faster, smarter, and if you believe the software ads, friendlier. But will the PC be more reliable and customizable? Or will it continue to aggravate us with maintenance hassles, compatibility glitches, and an ever-spiraling rate of guaranteed obsolescence? The technology turns over so quickly that it's tough to keep up.

Though it looks like we're about to shift into warp speed. With the 500 MHz offering from Intel already in commercial use, the 1 GHz mark should soon be scaled. What lies ahead are even more pronounced advances in processors, storage, displays, and all the supporting technologies needed to make the PC more personal still. At the heart of it all, of course, is an insatiable appetite for ever more processing power. It's just more proof that Moore's Law is holding strong. (Back in 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicted that processing power would double every 24 months.)

GartnerGroup's "10 Technologies Business Executives Should Be Watching in 1999 and Beyond" shines the spotlight on digital subscriber line (DSL), natural language retrieval, and corporate extranets. Gartner also cites four other technology trends as "coming on strong in the next two to five years" including speech recognition, IP telephony, Internet chat, and biometrics. Gartner says these four technologies will influence areas such as the virtual corporation, online shopping, banking, and government-related industries. Other technologies that the marketing research firm finds to be gaining in importance include wearable computers, avatars , and electronic books. Described as an intranet that may be accessed by trusted external parties such as customers, extranets will be adopted by banking, technology, consumer packaged goods and telecommunications companies in the next two years.GartnerGroup says that the rollout of these technologies will be slower than customers like, but xDSL technology and cable modems will be key to expanding the "all forms of remote business communication from telecommuting to consumer use of the Web."

These are communications methods that alleviate Internet access bottlenecks, "promising speeds of up to 200 times today's conventional data communications methods." Influence will be felt in the next two to five years.Connectivity shall be taken care of by optical fibre technology mainly. FireWire will rise to 1 gigabyte per second by the end of the decade. USB already connects low-bandwidth devices such as mice and scanners to new PCs. FireWire can be used to link to external DVD and CD-ROM players, digital video and still cameras, and hard drives. Rewritable DVD-ROM drives could well knock off rewritable CDs as the portable medium of choice. But DVD-ROM is also facing its share of compatibility snafus. And it will be competing with higher-capacity versions of removable hard drives like the Iomega , all faster, cheaper, and more portable than DVD. Wouldn’t we all rather look at our data through a crisp, colorful, slim 20-inch LCD rather than a bulky 17-inch cathode ray tube? That big tube is gradually being replaced with a flat panel that hangs on the wall or one that uses a small fraction of your desk area. The trend should continue and grow stronger as volumes cause further reductions in cost, bringing down costs by half and then they shall begin to get really competitive. Apples Studio Display is 15.1 inch TFT with max res. 1024.768 pixels but it costs nearly a lakh rupees.

In the not-too-distant future, we'll all talk to our computers--just like Dave in the classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It remains to be seen whether they will listen any better than the murderous HAL 9000. Speech Recognition will gain in use and performance. This recognizes a user's speech and translates it into commands or text. Healthcare, telecommunications, and financial services companies will be integrating speech recognition in the next two years. Bill Gates, CEO Microsoft, while elaborating about the Digital Nervous System, points out that the cost of computing has dropped by a factor of a million in the last twenty years, and will so likewise in the next twenty years. He also says that 90 percent of the code of the operating system of the future will relate to speaking, listening, recognizing handwriting and understanding linguistics. So though your hard disk may be a million times bigger, the bad news is so will Windows. IP telephony describes the use of the Internet to place phone calls. It saves money but voice quality is still a problem. "Higher education, technology, and telecommunications will adopt IP telephony in the next two years for calls where quality is not critical, particularly facsimile. “ says Gartner.

Internet Chat: though popular on online services will grow rapidly as, "bundling into major groupware (such as Lotus Notes) during the next two years will drive corporations to adopt Internet chat more quickly." Advanced, high-security identification techniques by reading fingerprints or the eye's iris or by voice identification. Government agencies and financial services firms will be the leading adopters of biometrics in the next two years. Electronic Books: Gartner describes it as a computer device roughly the size of a paperback book that can be used to download and read novels, textbooks, and other publications off the Internet or a CD-ROM. "Businesses should be prepared for the chance that consumer demand will move away from PC-based delivery and onto devices like E-books. Investors might also come to expect stock quotes and order confirmations from mass access devices like wireless PDAs (personal digital assistants), or conventional newspapers may be replaced by Web-based versions accessible via PDA or other devices."

In line with this is Sun Microsystem’s new software that enables mobile workers to reproduce their office desktop on any other computer while they are traveling, using an Internet browser. The software, called i-Planet, creates a virtual workspace by enabling access to a mobile worker's applications, calendars, files, and email on their office desktop, from any Internet browser using Sun's Java programming language. Wearable Computer can be a belt computer with a wrist-based keyboard or a microphone to input commands, with a head-mounted display. "Wearable computers will be monitored closely by the manufacturing industry in the next two years." Say Gartner.

Compaq in its latest effort to provide mobile computing power launched its ultra-portable. It is one-inch-thick,3 pounds, about 11-by-9 inches. 11.3-inch TFT display capable of 800 x 600 resolution 333-MHz Pentium II processor, 64 MB expandable to 128 MB of memory and a 4GB or 6.4GB hard drive. Customers will also be able to choose either a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive and optional high-capacity LS-120 drive.

From Xybernaut Corporation , a pioneer in wearable computers, and the same company that has recently introduced a head-mounted display, and a body-mounted mobile computer, comes a body mounted flat-panel 6.5-inch display. The screen is designed to be worn on the forearm or on a belt, the company said. The company is hoping to capitalize on the exploding mobile computing market, which includes products based on Microsoft's Windows CE operating system and the PalmPilot from 3Com . To date, none of these products have yet been introduced in a body-hugging model. "The wearable computer is hot now because it offers the ultimate in portablity," said a company spokesman in a statement. "The wearable computer will be used by sales engineers and repair persons in the telecommunications, office equipment, and manufacturing sectors." Orang-Otang Computers has designed an arm-mounted PDA (personal digital assistant) case which allows hands-free PalmPiloting, the company announced.

Avatars: Avatars are popular today in 3-D chat rooms where participants can select a persona to represent them as they walk the room and interact with other avatars. "Commercial development appears to be years away, but vendors are currently developing applications for avatars for online sales and customer service.". Popular game and multimedia development applications have become increasingly refined. An example is DreamWeaver which allows for the creation of 3D environments peopled with increasingly lifelike ‘actors’. AGP will just take over," says Jon Peddie, founder of The Peddie Report in Tiburon, California. "We're predicting that by the year 2000, all PC graphics will be in 3D.. Hands down, Internet gaming is the brightest, most obvious star in the future of gaming Traffic on the Internet doubles in four months. That’s more than 700% growth.

According to Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1989 invented the World Wide Web, the first phase of the Web is human communication through shared knowledge. The second side of the web, yet to emerge, is that of machine-understandable information. As this happens, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade and bureaucracy will be handled by agents, leaving humans to provide the inspiration and intuition. The Web we see as a glorified television channel today is just one part of the plan. PC software companies are working on ‘quick boot’ operating systems that will enable a PC to be started up almost as fast as a television. on seamlessly on the web.

The net is huge and getting bigger. A survey to check the various search engines found that combined, the 11 search engines found only 335 million pages, or 42 percent, of the total Web. This means that users of metasearch engines, such as MetaCrawler and Ask Jeeves, have a substantially better chance of finding results on a specific topic compared to those who use a single search engine, according to the researchers. These are the first really widely accepted agents.

Paul Liao, Panasonic's chief technology officer and president of Panasonic Technology, says that ultimately, the market for PCs and TV-centric entertainment devices like set-top converters or game consoles will not converge or impinge much on each other, even though both are increasingly intertwined through common technology such as hard disk drives and Internet connections. "I don't think you're seeing a convergence of the markets. The market represented by the family room is not merging with the market of the office and home office. Nobody really wants to run an Excel spreadsheet on their TV," Liao said. Likewise, nobody talks about watching a PC, he said. In the face of PC popularity, Net devices increasingly may have to become home servers, he predicted, a device that can also provide Internet connections to other appliances or link up various machines.

The increasing returns dynamic of the Internet suggests that leading players will see more consolidation in 1999 and beyond as traditional companies in the media, telecommunications, and retail sectors look to buy and/or partner their way online and as current Internet players attempt to create critical mass. Traditional companies are beginning to feel the pain of the Web's rising popularity, as increasing numbers of consumers shift increasing amounts of their time and buying power to the Internet. Traditional companies will accept the fact that they need a serious Web strategy in order to be relevant in the future. At the same time, current online participants are focusing more on acquiring loyal users or customers as quickly as possible.

The turn of the millenium shall be a time of reflection as well as a dream of what the future holds. When we look back at this century, especially its latter half, it shall also be with a sense of wonder. How did we manage all the unsorted information, the uncertain software and the cranky hardware? How did we make the transition to this age of ubiquitous technology? When we look forward it will be with the hope that technology will mature so that we can depend on it to make our lives easier.The evolution of the internet has been likened to the evolution of the human brain. The eventual picture sees us all as units, or ‘cells’ spread all over the globe, constituting one organism.

But these questions may be moot, Ray Kurzweil, an AI pioneer who has started several successful companies based on AI technology, notes. "By the year 2040, in accordance with Moore’s law, your state-of-the-art personal computer will be able to simulate a society of 10,000 human brains, each of which would be operating at a speed 10,000 times faster than a human brain. Or, alternatively, it could implement a single mind with 10,000 times the memory capacity of the human brain and 100 million times the speed. What will be the implications of this development?". The ubiquitous chip might well turn to be the invention to end all inventions.

The following is a lament of a hardcore rock fan , who found himself in the position of having only gazal mp3's in his comp for a month.

well i've finally done it yup, i did the unthinkable. Bahut fight ki, tried to resist as long as i could, but finally i too gave in. Man i sold out, but i couldn't help it. The unforgiven, u bet ur ass , its worse than that and i feel miserable but it had to done. Life must start anew each day mustn't it. To leave behind the past , one has to make these decisions, but as i said before, i know this will help me get on with life and leave behind emotional baggage by the wayside,as all well-meaning friends would no doubt advise, and will enable me to get on with the business of earning lotsa money and look forward to microwave powered brighter tomorrow, but initially its a bit tough. Well , shampoo did it a couple of years ago and pandey followed suit and then everyone , till i think only dingchak and adhiman are holding out. But i gave in and bought my first ghazal cd as part of the whole bloody process of starting afresh. Its ok, and cheap at 150 for a bucketful of mp3s. But as i said , tis a bit odd at first. sample this below, my father raves about this guy, ghulam ali and this is supposed to be one of his finest- humko kiske - - sher - dil ki choton ne kabhi chain se rahne na diya jab chali sard hawa , maine tujhe yaad kiya iska rona nahi kyo kiya tumne dil barbaad iska gam hai ki bahut der main barbaad kiya -first - humko kiske gam ne maara (2) ye kahani phir sahi X2 kisne toda dil hamaara (2) yeh kahani phir sahi X2 -second- dil ke lutne ka sabab poochho na sabke saamne (2 ) naam aayega tumhara yeh kahani phir sahi - humko kiske ---- phir sahi - -third - nafraton ke teer khakar dosto ke shahar mein humne kis kis ko pukara yeh kahani ohir sahi -humko ---- phir sahi - -4th- kya bataye (n) pyar ki bazi wafa ki rah mein (2) kaun jeeta kaun haara yeh kahani phir sahi - humko kiske -------- phir sahi -