Do Indian Film Studios Know About Piracy Through Bittorent ??

I have always wondered how MPAA, RIAA and other foreign film industry watchdogs have tried to curb piracy. They haven't succeeded in the battle against piracy, but atleast they have tried to scare people. If not scare atleast they have sent some letters to the Bittorrent/P2P that have all the copyrighted movies/audios free for the entire world. The latest on the hit-list of the watchdogs is Demonoid.com, which is a popular Bittorrent tracker. Today, the hosting servers of Demonoid were taken down and a warning displayed to the users...

That made me ask the question, what is the Indian Film Industry doing to stop online piracy?? Haven't heard anyone talk about online piracy... May be some producers or actors have asked people not watch pirated movies or download stuff off the internet, but no legal action has been taken against these online piracy communities. There are many "desi" community sites that offer torrents and trackers for Bittorrent downloads and I don't think anyone from the Indian film industry even knows about it... I wonder if they've even heard of Bittorrent??

With so many movies being made, may be piracy helps some movies get an audience. But it doesn't help them make any money. I think some big studios that use modern technologies know about it, but I guess they are scared to send the legal notice to their audiences. After all, they'll get a bad name if they do it, right?? May be the studios feel that it's a publicity thing, which can be recovered from the high ticket prices at multiplexes these days...

Whatever it may be, I think piracy is a crime and some noise from the studios will help reduce piracy. Atleast, the weak hearted will get scared. As for the real pirates, they'll always find the "patli galli"...

Supercomputer On A Graphics Card (1 TFlops)

Not so long ago, who would have thought that a desktop computer would be able to process "trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFlops or TFlops). Most people not up-to-date with technology would say its impossible for a normal desktop computer to do it, but it isn't anymore!! Really..and I'm not marketing for any company...

Today AMD announced the FireStream 9170, a General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) running at 775Mhz and performs 497 GFlops. That's about 0.5 TFlops!! The FireStream is based on the RV670 chip and has 320 double-precision floating-point (FP) units. The RV670 will also be available in desktop variants for gamers and will be known as the HD 3850 and 3870 as mentioned by me here.

But it is still just 0.5TFlops... right?? Yes, but in about a few months time, AMD (actually ATI) will be releasing R680 which will have 2 of these chips working together. Add a few more clocks to the chip and we'll have a chip that can perform 1TFlops!! Aint that great??

Consider this: The world's fastest supercomputer i.e. IBM's BluGene/L scores 280.6 TFlops and costs a few billion dollars to build whereas one GPGPU will cost some thousand dollars. Do the math and you'll know its some million times cheaper with the GPGPU!! But the entire comparison I did is comparing apple to oranges. And the reason is because BlueGene/L uses general purpose CPUs which are easily programmed, whereas GPUs require special programming. I don't say that programming GPU is tough, it's just that we are habituated to program CPUs and hence we currently don't have the same type of tools that are used to program CPUs. But as the tools come up and mature GPGPUs are going to be the next milestone in supercomputing.

Intel also about a year back showed a 80 core processor do some networking to process as much as 1.81TFlops at 5.7Ghz... But its still got a lot more tweaking to do and the yield I think won't be very good at the moment!!

All of this means that in the very near future, by the use of GPGPUs, each one of us may be having a supercomputer built into our computers. But where is the work that these fast mean machines would be doing??

NetBeans 6.0 Begins RC1

The netBeans 6.0 IDE which is under heavy development begins RC1 (Release Candidate). The nightly builds can be downloaded from here. This means that it is very close to release. I had previously covered the features from netBeans 6.0 and much of it has remained same through the development phase.

netBeans 6.0 added a lot of new features and when you add a lot of features, it generally means you have lot more bugs. Infact, netBeans has added so many features, that I dont think any other IDE could have dared to add these many changes in one version. netBeans 6.0 also has its share of bugs and we at the netcat team had some discussions on how many bugs were acceptable. From the netBeans 6.0 Quality Criteria:

Code Freeze (Entry) - FCS QC
All P1 bugs must be fixed (not waived)
All P2 bugs must be fixed or waived
All P2 bugs reported after cutoff date must be evaluated for showstopper status
All bugs must be evaluated before submitting for waive request

Based on the quality requirements, the netBeans 6.0 developers have already had a delay of 2 weeks during the beta 1 release. A lot of people who haven't had their favorite bug fixed want the date of release to be extended, but I think the netBeans developers have set a more realistic goal and I'm confident the final product released wont have any of the show-stoppers!!

Just a look at the Bugs Dashboard for people wanting to look at the different bugs:

The final version for netBeans 6.0 is supposed to be released on 3rd Dec, 2007 and if everything goes like planned then I'm all excited for this one.

Why Did RedHat Choose OpenJDK ?

RedHat just got itself into the openJDK community and this is apparently big news. Even Jonathan Schwartz, thinks its a momentum for Java!! I'm sure most of you remember the open letters that were written to Sun to make Java open source... OpenJDK was Sun's response to those letters. But all this is history... RedHat's promise has just taken its first step to contribute openly to Java...

But just integrating openJDK with its distribution is not going to help Java... not that Linux never had JRE (Java Runtime Environment). Every DVD distribution with had non-OSS software included jre or anyone could download it from Sun's website.

So what's RedHat going to do with an openJDK?? Firstly, it will be able to test compatibility with Sun's JDK 6 and make sure Java remains "Write Once Run Anywhere"... Only time will tell if it remains this way with the other JDKs

Secondly openJDK does not have classes that are Sun proprietary. RedHat will contribute open-source variants of these classes... I'm wondering how much time will it take to reinvent the wheel ;-)

Thirdly, it had to do it since it was one of those that pressurized Sun to open source Java. I'm wondering why it took RedHat so much time to join the openJDK community if it had it in mind since long!!

All those explanations do not make much sense to me... Sun was already doing very good with all the work in keeping Java version-compatible and language changes didn't have steep learning curves. Any answers from you guys why RedHat's joined openJDK??

Gamers should be less selfish: Buy the 3xxx series

DirectX 10 Cards That Will Be Cooler

Finally I think we will have DirectX 10 cards worth your money... DirectX 10 is widely publicized to be the best thing that happened to gaming since "PacMan". I really don't see many games on the shelf that use only Dx10. Nor did we want the cards!! Yet it's been months that ATI & Nvidia have been selling Dx10 cards with the 2xxx series and 8xxx series respectively.

Coming on 14th Nov (Apparently Children's Day in India), we have the next-gen Dx10 cards launched by ATI also known as the 3xxx series (RV670). The first cards will be called the 3850 & 3870. These cards aren't apparently any faster compared to previous Dx10 cards. But what's special about these cards is that it'll be cooler and taking less power compared to both the 8800 and the 2900.

When the 8800 and the 2900 were released, I didn't buy them because of the high power required by these cards. Even when not under heavy usage these cards easily suck in close to 200W power and close to 300W on load. That much power requirement is just plain insane and should have been banned by government agencies considering the Global Warming Issue..

The 3xxx series doesn't make the power requirement lower by much, but it still promises atleast 50W lower than the current cards. I hope gamers realize they are being overly selfish by buying these power sucking monsters and buy something less power hungry. We are going less power hungry in processors, but when do we expect such a trend with graphic cards?? [Fusion?? Larabee??]

Do You Believe ComScore?

Lately I have seen a lot of tech sites talk about the popularity of different sites based on information from ComScore. ComScore is an internet marketing research company and it uses surveyed computers to study online behavior.

This made me enquire into how ComScore was collecting data and how it was monitoring the sites. I also wondered about the sample size that ComScore uses to report to its clients. ComScore is popularly used by a few tech blogs like GigaOm, TechCrunch and hence I wondered if these tech sites have reliably tried to find out how ComScore accumulates its data.

ComScore states that it installs monitoring software on computers with user's consent and tracks their behavior. In return the users get security software, virus-scanning and even cash prizes and goodies. This is the good way of monitoring, but then it makes me wonder how many computers can have this software installed ?? :-0

In the past, ComScore have also used not-so-righteous ways for monitoring user behavior. They have used spyware from DollarRevenue and also had something embedded into iMesh for reporting. They even gave away proxy servers to the world, so that they can be monitored. College dorms, libraries and public internet cafes are popular places where the tracking/monitoring softwares could be installed... This means that obviously sites where college/young students visit like Facebook and Orkut would get higher pageviews.

I have used many different types of web-tracking softwares and was once part of a web tracking application project. During that I realized how impossible it was to create a meaningful and true picture of the net-surfer's behavior.

Cookies distributed through popular sites is one way to track users, but is an expensive affair. Google easily does it due to its rule over the web and nearly everyone using analytics or urchin gives Google all the data. I'm wondering when Google would start selling its tracking data and become an internet marketing research provider!!

Run Windows Programs Without Booting Windows

Just found at Wired.com, about this new virtualization tool called "HyperSpace". Its a new hypervisor much like VmWare's ESX Server which is a layer just above the BIOS and can boot multiple OS. HyperSpace is something similar but not entirely an independent virtual machine. Instead it currently allows only Windows applications to run above it.

HyperSpace is developed by Pheonix Technologies, which is famous for developing BIOS for a host of motherboards. Pheonix Technologies says that this product has been developed considering that the boot times for Windows has increased so much that people need 5mins just to login to their computers to check emails. Also, Pheonix provides an argument that Windows has become bloated and people who want to use only simple applications, don't want to load that bloat...

Although all of the above arguments from Pheonix may be true, it doesn't make much sense to me. With quick sleep and hibernate available in Windows today, it really takes 4-5 secs to start using windows after you wake up from sleep. Even with hibernate, it takes less than a minute and in that time you just stretch your arms to start typing!!

I think virtualization should be directed at multiple testing environments and servers with different applications. Virtualization should ideally allow you to switch between operating systems by the click of a button. To me, this approach of virtualization is not very useful and does not have a large market. May be some people will use it, but Quick Sleep and Hibernate are for the general masses!!

Microsoft's Animated Search MSDewey is Fun!

Microsoft is not very well known for doing different things and more so not for less publicity... But here is one thing I found out, thanks to Trak.in called "MsDewey" that is microsoft, but yet hasn't been publicised... Infact the thing was launched way back in October 2006, a year back and nearly everyone I asked hadn't heard about it!!

MsDewey is a funny women who talks and emotes quite a lot of stuff depending on what you are searching. Basically it's meant to be a search engine, based on Microsoft's Live Search, but I don't look at it as search. Its more like an interactive UI that is more of a keyword test for Microsoft. Go here(msdewey.com) and have some fun listening & watching Ms.Dewey do all her drama!!

Featuring as Ms.Dewey is Janina Gavankar who does different kinds of short behaviors whenever you search for sometime, or if you ain't doing anything, she'll tell you what you should be doing!! :)) The search results are cornered to a small section of the screen, and really it's not about search as much as its about the character!!

And if you just wanna watch all the kinds of things that Ms.Dewey can do, then keep clicking "Best Of Dewey" button and have fun!! Its definitely a better way to "feel lucky"!!

Xoom's Fee-Free Transfer To India For Diwali

While I was reading about, "Withdraw Paypal Funds to your Indian Bank Account" for which I had received an email from PayPal, I also remembered an email from another online money transfer company called "Xoom". A lot of people from India, who had money in their paypal would use Xoom to transfer it to India as check from the host of pickup locations that Xoom provides in India...

For their service, Xoom would earlier charge $10 or somewhere close to that. But soon after the announcement of paypal transferring money to Indian Banks, Xoom also started a fee-free service... They say its only for this Diwali season, but I think it'll be longer than that, atleast for paypal transfers!!

From Xoom's announcement:

Choose from any of the 3 options to make it convenient for them to receive the money:

• Deposit money to ANY bank in India
• Send money to any of our over 4,000 pickup locations across India
• Get it home delivered at no extra cost

PLUS: Fee FREE money transfers above $700 and enjoy a FREE 5 min phone-call with
every transaction.

Xoom is a nice service for transferring money to India... But with paypal making it free for amount more than Rs. 7000/-, I think most Xoom customers transferring money from paypal, would be using paypal's service rather than Xoom!!

Tips For Programmers To Save You From Death ;-)

You generally do not associate life-threatening situations due to a job with programming. But last week, I realized programming can be really stressful and if the stress isn't reduced, your physical existence is in question!! That is the reason why I haven't been able to write a blog post for the past week or so... Death is an exaggeration here ;-), but then it could be painful!!

Programming is about finding solutions and sometime it takes longer that you thought. Don't get stressed out. Plan for these mishaps before jumping into the project!!

5 Tips To Relieve You From Stress

1.) Sleep: In My Opinion this is the best stress reliever... or atleast it's been in my case. I had been working about 18 hrs a day with sleepless nights at times. It all took its toll and now I realize there's nothing more important than sleep... The IDE, Programming Language, The Solutions, The Algorithm, The Project Design etc... are all secondary when you compare it to your sleep!!

2.) Take Enough Breaks: Getting off your seat often is quite a nice thing to do... Don't think you'll loose the idea that was coming to you. Your subconscious mind is still thinking on the problem and when you come back to your seat, you'll implement it!!

3.) Skip Coffee At Times: Coffee can be your best friend when you are feeling a little tired. But the habit of coffee is another reason that can make you feel ill. Skip coffee, and be careful that you don't make it a routine to drink coffee when tired!!

4.) Workout: Give time to your body as much as you give to your mind... I have realized this quite late I guess, after I put on some 10 kgs in the last 4 months!! Now I know, just walking reduces all the stress and also the weight!! ;-)

5.) Vacations, Movies, Friends & Dance: These are extremely important for being a good programmer. Go on vacations, watch movies and talk to friends about life and not programming. I love dancing, so turn on the music and burn those extra ounces. Do anything that you love to do other than what caused you the stress!

I'm not an expert on stress management. Infact, I never knew programming was stressful. But it's my personal experience/doctors from the last few days and I thought I'd pass it on to other friends I know from my field...