Delayed? Don’t think there is a problem with delayed as most of us don’t consume from the real-time fire-hose, but catchup the feeds slowly over the week.

When Rupert Murdoch announced ‘The Daily’, a daily digital newspaper for the iPad, it was derided by many, who said, “Who wants delayed news these days?” Though, the current version of app is buggy and only available on iPad, but, this is a good start in reducing the information overload.

Here’s the super bowl commercial announcing it’s nationwide launch.

Why I like it?

• Delayed relaxed reading of news on the tablet, rather than chasing of ever scrolling feeds
• Like a newspaper, but digital. Opportunity to personalize. Food, Wine, Travel, Delete. Comics, Technology, Politics? Double-it. Ditto for other categories
• This is the best digital version of a newspaper, rather than the slow loading, ill-fitting e-Papers
• Better curation than everybody linking to the same story in real-time

I do not have iPad, and eagerly waiting for the Android version. Until then, reading it via this.

A large part of Indian society has been left out of the economic development of last 20 years. Imagine the situation when informed but uneducated 300 million Indians take up cudgels and come out on the street. For the lack of education and lack of skills they would fight for the same unskilled jobs in the urban areas. This creates imbalance in the cities, leads to migration and disrupts the economics of smaller towns.

Moreover, as India tries to regain it’s position in manufacturing & development after an upward IT led growth, there is going to be a huge requirement for skilled and semi-skilled manpower to move and operate the machines. Skilling the uneducated becomes necessary. Trained manpower increases customer satisfaction at even the smallest touchpoint with service / product consumers.

NSDC’s effort is rightly timed, considering the recent UNDP Human Development Index report points out that the mean years of schooling for Indians is a paltry 4.4 years. Illiteracy and corruption are India’s Achilles’ heel. NSDC’s vision is ambitious and they have access to large corpus. They need ideas and executioners to take it forward. Let me know, if you have something going and I can connect.

If I remember it correctly, there was only one instance during launch which was m1.small:

the equivalent of a 1.7 GHz Xeon processor, 1.75 GB of RAM, 160 GB of local disk and 250 Mb/second of network bandwidth. You pay just 10 cents per clock hour

During it’s peak and several months before and after I have paid a lot of money to Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure specially to EC2 and sucked in a lot of bandwidth. Happy that today, I complete 4 years as a paid-user of Amazon! Here’s a snapshot of my Access Key which was created on Sep 27, 2006! Viva Amazon.

I followed up with some, called up some, emailed up some. A failed piece of furniture from Home Town (a unit of Kishore Biyani’s Future Group) gets fixed after 15 phone calls only to be broken again. A non-delivery of 1Mbps Internet connection from Tata Indicom leads to only 75% of the subscription amount after several phone calls and 8 months of delays. God knows how much the cellular operators are cheating in billing for short minutes and dropped calls. Every month I get charged for roaming even when I haven’t left the home cellular network. The biggest grief is against some of the large public sector companies operating as corporations who do not even have a ‘tangible’ customer service line. The so called mega retail stores have the shoddiest of services without any accountability from the local Food & Drug or health departments/administration.

Where does the hapless customer go? As usual, there is no recourse except knock the local forums and show frustration at the process. The government of India has left it’s consumers to figure everything out on their own. It burns at least an effort of at least 100 man hours to get things resolved at the local consumer forum. If the amount is few hundred rupees, it is too much a chase.

There is corruption on one side where the government does not provide the service for which the officials are paid for and then there are systemic issues in corporations who dupe the customers.

At the minimum, the government should allow class action lawsuits and give an opportunity to service-deprived individuals to take action against companies and get compensated. The judiciary already has public interest litigation against the inaction of government. Now is the time to litigate against large corporations who do the business on their own terms.

I’m not alone when I get frustrated on inactions from the companies. If you troll through the forums, there are plenty with similar problems — They are fighting for the cause individually, to get their own money back. This needs to be fixed at a much bigger level.

The thumbnail is pic of a tree taken in 1972, wilting due to water and air pollution in Utah.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

– Arthur C. Clarke

I ran a cheap command to time the creation of a 1GB file. Here are the results. In both the situations the small test was run on /mnt which is considered to be a dedicated spindle.

On m1.small

[root@]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=1 bs=1024M
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
real 0m11.298s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m3.390s

On m1.large


[root@]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile count=1 bs=1024M
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
real 0m2.982s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m2.350s


Read about the various EC2 instance types here