Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I have been reading a lot about the recent announcements from Apple, including the iPhone, as well as about other technology topics that I wanted to share with you. I know you are getting tired of me talking about Google, but I seem to be discovering and actually using a lot of their “stuff”, so I want to talk about them…

First – iPhone. I am sure you have heard about it a lot, so I am not going to be yet another drooler about a brilliant idea. In case you missed it, you can read about it here. My interest in this device is how is it going to affect us. Obviously, there will be a few gadget freaks who will go for it and before we know, we will be asked to support it. However, if you read the specs right, the email support seems to be pretty straight forward. Any POP3 and IMAP servers should be able to feed the mail to this device and it supports HTML email. it is not clear what type of calendar support it provides. Regardless of all of this, my feeling is we will be asked to support this before we know it and hopefully this is not one of those support heavy devices.

A more complicated question of interest to us is, will our store be able to sell this device or do Cingular stores have exclusive access to sale of these devices for the first two years. Cingular will be the ONLY cell service provider for iPhone for the first two years…

Also, IMHO, Cisco is being silly to sue Apple on copyright infringement over the name iPhone. They should frankly concentrate on better customer service and deliver the ordered goods on time….

Digital Cinema – Some of us attended a fascinating ATR presentation on the pros and cons of film prints in various digital formats by Lisa Dombroski and Scott Higgins in November 2006. Here they showed us how the digital prints still have a long way to go to match the film prints. However, I recently read an interesting article about how Digital Cinema is transforming the way people watch movies in rural India. India produces about a 1000 movies a year – primarily in three or four major languages. The problem has been that? the number of available prints were too little to serve the number of movie theaters in all of India put together. So, what happens is, there is a chain of markets – the big cities first get the print and then it goes down to the second tier and some of the villages get it after many weeks.

And the villagers for whom movies are about the only form of entertainment were tired of waiting. As a result of this, the illegal VCD/DVD market was flourishing. Somehow (there are many theories about it), VCDs and DVDs were produced as soon as a movie was released and was availabel to the villagers and the entrepreneuers in the village with big screen TVs and a computer were showing these movies and essentially bankrupting the theater owners. Besides, when the hand me down film prints arrived in the village, the quality of the film (with many scratches) had a lot to desire and the theater owners didn’t bother to change the hardware often enough (I believe carbon rods burned to produce the bright light to project the film), so lighting was poor. BTW I had to go through all of this when I studied in a village in South India during the 70s…

So, some companies have now struck a deal with the producers and theater owners to deliver the movies in digital format. Rather than me repeating what is being planned, you can read about it here. It is pretty interesting…

Google… A couple of news of interest. I love Google Earth, but I have always wondered the value of the satellite images beyond the coolness factor. When I read that the terrorists used it to plan attacks, I could almost hear many people saying “I said so”… I am not sure what the answer to this is whether its “good” uses outweigh the “bad” uses. Google’s response is that this information is available in many other public forums. True, but it is not as easy to get to it as Google!

I was listening to the parents of the three accused Lacrosse players from Duke on 60 minutes last Sunday.? One thing that caught my attention was one of the parents saying regardless of the outcome of the legal proceedings, their children’s reputations are essentially irreparable. And he was referring specifically to Google and how when one searches for one of their children’s names what appears are all the hate postings. This reminds me of the few requests we have received from our students asking how we can remove past content so they don’t appear in Google… Here again is an issue where the answers are not straightforward and is a case where technology is way ahead policy and practices…

In the event you have a Google Account and you are logged in, all Google Search results have another link called “Note This”. You can use this to add the interesting link to your Google Notebook. You can get access to your notebooks from anywhere on the web, and also you can share your notebooks with others…