Termespheres

Termespheres is the website of an artist who paints from the perspective of watching a scene on a reflective sphere...

Theme Park Maps

This website has Theme Park Maps from different years and different countries. There's one from India as well...

DTH Future

exchange4media has a comment on DTH Future, one thing they seem to have completely forgotten is Digital Cable. Star's Cable venture (albeit through convoluted crossholdings) Hathway, is right now promoting digital cable. The service is being aggressively advertisedon the local cable channels. It uses a set top box and a smart card for access. I have tried to get in touch with the cable operator for this, but he is yet to respond on the timelines.

Sony PlayStation Portable Price Watch

The PSP is actually cheaper in the grey market in India than in America. I walked into Palika Bazaar on Sat. One of the shops was willing to sell the PSP for just 10.5K (unnegotiated) (thats abt 240 US at current rates). He didn’t have any games or else I’d have snapped it up pronto…

From Engadget…

 

You can’t reasonably be expected to wait until March for Sony to release the PlayStation Portable here in the States, can you? You’ll be gouged no matter what you do, but in order to help you out if you really, really need to have one right now, we’ve compiled a list of import stores and their current prices for the PlayStation Portable (though we suggest that you at least wait a few weeks for the hysteria to die down and for Sony to release a few more PSPs into the marketplace). We’ll update this list daily, and if you have know of any particular legitimate vendors not listed here, please let us know so we can include them.

Current list as of December 24, 2004 - 2:00PM EST

This will be our last update to our daily PSP price watch, we may revisit the prices every few weeks or so until the USA launch.

[Engadget]

The Quick and the dead

I had occasion to clash with the author of this blog a few months back... He seems to have had a pet hate for The Times of India and by extension to me. Seems that this gent has now shut shop... I guess i could say I had the last laugh... Ha Ha Ha...

Back to Delhi

I'm heading back to delhi from Dehradun tomorrow after a forced vacation of three weeks.. I had some follow up surgery to be done. Whihc is now through. I only wonder if it was worth it. I guess we will know in a few months time...

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Just finished wathcing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It is a completely fab flick. Must watch...

Santa Outsourced

This is priceless... Just give it time. One day not far away...

Blogspot/Blogger webring

The next Blog button you see on top of this blog is clearly a webring. What I figure is that the frequency at which a certain blog appears as part of ring is in someway relate to the number of times you post. i.e. the more you post, the more your chances of turning up in the blogger webring.

 

 

I wonder if this conclusion is correct. Because every time I publish, someone new comes along some minutes later, with a reference of another blogspot site. and this is not a high traffic blog, so it makes u wonder...

 

ipod, HD3 or the PSP

 I missed my chance to import an iPod this week and it seems that it was for the better only... I have two other options...

 

The Sony HD3. It is not only smaller than the iPod, but also with a longer battery life. It plays protected Artrac from the Sony Music Connect stores and mp3's. The Mp3's have a wrapper which prevents you from copying the mp3 files to other computers.

 

The PlayStation Portable. Strictly speaking not a mp3 player, but it looks like such a dream... and at 200 USD it's an absolute steal. I figure I can live with about a 1 gigs worth of music at a time (the memory stick for this is quite expensive though.

 

Will have to wait a bit though... By then Apple would have launched the next slim line of iPods... and that will make things really really difficult. :)

 

But Sony will be launching the HD3 sometime next year, so at least I'll be assured of support in India which is not available for any other player on the market.

 

Decisions, decisions

ha ha ha... I'm clairvoyant

I was going through some old posts I made. About a year ago I commented on the news of Walmart entering the PC business that it was time for IBM to quit the (PC) business. Sure enough a year on, IBM has quit.

I guess the B-school aducation was not all waste.. ha ha

Odd Even returns

It seems that a lot of ppl are wanting to know how odd and even are a pholoshpical illusion they keep dropping in to one of my posts

Who will win... Apple or Napster?

Neither... All this ensures that the open format mp3 will definitely survive for some more time to come... and Maybe MS will be the big winner.

All this hoo haa about real networks files not being played on the iPod and Apple blocking them, reminds one of the format wars on in a related industry: Consumer Electronics. There too we are debating SACD vs DVD-A and HD-DVD vd BD-DVD. In that market, I'll ultimately buy a device which plays both the competing formats (if they survive the war). So I will buy a Pioneer that plays both DVD-A and SACD not a Sony which plays only SACD. the most compatible, either on the hardware end. if that is not available then I'll look to whichever format has more software (This has parallels in the Betamax story)

And MS will be the big winner. Why? Because every manufacturer (Apple and Sony excepted) that makes Digital Audio Players supports Secure WMA. Soon enough (god only knows when) the numbers will tip in that direction. Moreover this phenomenon will be led from Asia, where there will be a huge market for cheap Digital Audio Players. Now once there is a critical mass of ppl who have such players and they can see that music is available from several stores (MSN, Napster, MusicMatch and what have you...). You can see which way the wind will blow. It is also logical that lots of companies (indirectly) promoting the format (Secure WMA) is better than only one company promoting it's own (Apple AAC).

Don't forget some of these players are giants, MSN, Samsung (via Napster), they have huge distribution muscle across the world. Samsung sells consumer electronics, Apple so far has been catering to an expensive niche in a computer market. Samsung has even more distribution muscle than Sony in India, while Apple has next to no distribution in markets like India and China.

Some business analyst actually said that people will end up switching from the PC to the mac after the iPod. Which is a silly notion, in fact the reverse is equally likely to occur. Why? The installed user base of Windows is really huge, along with this user base comes a huge developer community. This developer community after years of hacking around in Windows is more or less at home with anything to do with Windows. e.g. recently a hack doing the rounds is changing the picture/icons on the iPod screen. WIndows only. All the MacHeads are furious that how is it that a it is available on Windows first and not on the Mac little realising the source of the hack (they assumed it was from Apple, while it was from an independent Windows Programmer). Now repeat this instance over and over again... hundreds of programmers, hudreds of hacks. not all will port to the Mac. So what does a mac iPod user do if he wants to do all the fun things that a windows user can do? The choice is obvious...

I feel that Apple is doing great dis-service to the iPod by not letting other formats get on board and not licensing their proprietary codec to other manufacturers. This venture too risks going the way the other Apple businesses operate, i.e. in expensive niches.

Update: Damn! I should have turned off the comments... All rude, abusive posts have been deleted and will be deleted again if posted again. Be sane people, it is just an OS, it's not worth getting uppity about... regs CP