Nano launches in India

It’s here. The world’s cheapest car. More symbol than product, more ideal than industry, over 6 months late and yet a decade early (for India), The Tata Nano.

The car that sat idling at the eye of a tumultous storm in West Bengal, and did more to showcase the contradictions of India in its abrupt cross country journey to Gujarat than any Discovery Channell documentary, the car that people said could not exist, should not exist, (and for the west, was daft to try) is here.

CAR magazine has a first ride.

Some points I want to address:

1. Congestion. I disagree with the notion that its going to make the road congestion problem worse. It’s not. In India, driving a car requires more lane discipline and a more conservative approach than a 100cc motorbike. Sure, the per-capita-road-volume-occupancy is going to go up, but its also going to get a lot more orderly.

2. Pollution. Again, no. If the stats are anything to go by, the Nano is impressively clean. In the long term, it will take a lot of non-mass-public-transport (aka autos and taxis) off the road, as well as motorcycles. Along with the at-long-last adoption of subways and metros by India (done in New Delhi, hopefully will happen one day in Bangalore), will eventually do good for overall vehicular emissions.

I do have 2 reservations on it. I’m not sure how ready India is , economically or socially for the mass adoption of four wheelers. Whethers its the adequate training and responsible granting of licenses to people, the ability of people to abruptly replace their 60,000 motorcycle with a 1,30,000 car and the other financial burdens that come with it (service, maintenance, parking fees..) is a genuine cause for concern.

Another problem I have is the woeful lack of power the car has. Surely, the experience of the m800 should prove that a certain minimum power and acceleration is needed, at least to overtake a bus if nothing else?

A few quick rants

This guy wants Africans to give up superstition and witchcraft. He also happens to be the same guy who tells Africa to ‘pray’ instead of use condoms for family planning. The irony gods have spoken.

The Indian Premier League is not going to be held in India. While not as bad as an outright cancellation, it is still a massive loss for the IPL. It’s unlikely they’ll be able to pull in the same huge india-centric viewership holding it at another country at a non-prime-time. Not to mention gate receipts.

Go feel pathetic about your life.

IE8 Released, Hacked

“IE8 gets people to the information they need, fast, and provides protection that no other browser can match.”

So says Steve Ballmer, at the full public release of Internet Explorer 8.

But he made the mistake of releasing it during PwnToOwn 2009. Some guy called “Nils” took down both IE8 and Mozilla.

Even with the double-whammy and singular pleasure of taking down a browser the same day that its released, “Nils” was pipped by our friend from last year, Charlie Miller. SECONDS into the start of PwnToOwn, and he takes down Safari/Mac with a single malicious link, taking control of the Macbook. Now he does have to relinquish control since he owns it. literally.

So its the same old, same old. Apple is thrashed, Windows is clubbed, and Open-Source escapes with a black eye.

Mobile OSs still to come on PwnToOwn. Watch this space.

A.I.G should pay out their bonuses

I agree with the New York Times, especially this point:

“So as unpalatable as it seems, taxpayers need to keep some of these brainiacs in their seats,”

Because the bottom line is that these guys are just that, brainiacs. Amidst all the derision that the financial industry is facing, people seem to forget that the financial industry did do a lot of work. The models, the theories, the ideas, i think have not yet been found wanting. Only a collective sense of judgement and caution. Nothing’s wrong

So. these brainiacs need to get paid. Earlier they got paid to take huge risks and make proportionately large profits. Now they need to be paid to do it again.

Cheers to Marginal Revolution for the link.

The Arts and Technology

get promiscous:

It came at the end of a conference on the future of cinemas and other artistic venues in a digital world, while we were enjoying a DJ set from Captain Buck Rogers. The music we were listening to was being streamed live into the virtual world of Second Life, and being played out in replica of the renowned Baltic Mill gallery, situated on a newly-opened virtual Tyneside island developed by a local company, Vector 76.

Avatars from around the world were dancing to the music we could hear, while we watched them projected onto the wall of the cinema bar, so I got out my laptop, logged in to Second Life and made my way to the virtual Baltic, where I joined in the dancing.

I could see my avatar moving around on the screen of my computer, but I was also clearly visible among the crowd projected onto the wall, dancing like every teenager’s embarrassing dad in cyberspace while drinking a deliciously cold beer in the real world.

….

In the new digital world I suspect that artforms, artists and cultural organisations will succeed by occupying the liminal space between offline and online, building a compelling presence in both that allows something unexpected to emerge where they meet and blur together.

Rather like dancing in Second Life while drinking a beer in the the first one.

As reported by the BBC.

Anyone who reads my blog knows that technology and art rank pretty high up in my interests. And while I wholely agree with the end point of the article, I think what artists really need to do to succeed is involve the consumer. Artistic expression will have to universally become more than a uni-directional flow of creativity from the artist to the viewer.

Crowdsourcingpainting anyone?

I want to read this book

Via 3Quarksdaily.

While it sounds good, I’m also hoping it does fall into the same oh-woe-is-me-and-my-community-and-all-that-is-lost self-pitying mood that killed Khaled Husseini’s The Kite Runner for me. I can deal with anguish and a sense of loss. In fact, I welcome such moods in literature, as powerful as they are. But what I don’t want is the creeping guilt with Hesseini flagellates himself in the Kite Runner.

If you can feel loss for what was, anguish for what might have been, and yet stand up, accept, look and move forward; more respect from me to you.

New Ipod Shuffle only works with Apple earphones (updated)

Via BBG and Techcrunch.

The earphones of the new super-small Ipod Shuffle contain a DRM chip. Without which the shuffle won’t play music through the earphones. Now the old “in-line” (whatever the hell that means) adapters no longer work with the shuffle. Now only manufacturers who have a licensed chip (from Apple, of course) can make shuffle compatible earphones.

Way to go arseholes Apple.

Update: The latest on BBG is that 3rd parties will need to license the chip from Apple to get the ‘Made for Ipod’ tag, but equipment will work without it as well. so they say. not as crass as originally thought, but very RIAA nevertheless.

Virtual Army Experience?

Just what in the hell is this?

I always knew their US army had its ways of indoctrination (like any army) and loved equating real combat to video games, but this? this is ridiculous. They are trying to make war (i.e – death, killing, people die in front of you, getting blood on your hands) look like REAL ULTIMATE FUN RIDE ON THE HAPPY ROLLERCOASTER.

From this article, this statement is priceless:

“Events like LAN parties are useful because we want [the recruits] to see the recruiters as regular folks, like themselves… and to help future soldiers to stay the course,”

Wrong. What it really does is at some level get kids to equate real-life war with a video game. What you’re telling the public is: “You want to know what its like to be in the army? Play this really cool video game.”

Gopher – the forgotten internet

So this lazy sunday morn’ I was skimming through a week’s worth of slashdot feed articles. Chasing down links I came across this article which spoke about something encountered and long since forgotten in the semi-drunken insomniac blur of college life: Gopher.

Gopher actually pre-dates the internet, and interface-wise isn’t too far from FTP. It started as a nerd information sharing system between universities, and promptly died under the glare of the early interweb’s awesomeness. Today, it consists of a little over 100 gopher sites. Some of them, I was pleased to discover over the last couple of hours, are real gems.

Like I mentioned, gopher isn’t that big, barely a 100 pages. But it is a completely different protocol, just like FTP is different from HTTP. Firefox and Camino users are in luck since these browsers support Gopher. Everyone else either get an alternative or use the Floodgap Gopher proxy.  I suggest something equally old-school; the text-only browser Lynx.

(note: Unless you have a compatible browser, most subsequent links in this post won’t work).

The google of the Gopher-verse is the Veronica-2. There’s the search itself, and then there’s the eminently more fun  (for Gopher) list of all gopher servers known.

I won’t pretend to have surfed the entire Gopher-verse, I don’t have such an attention span. I did find a few nice pages:

1. The Necron Card Game

2. The Online Book Initiative

3. Venus Ventriloquist (a band)

4. Public Gopherspace

so yeah, go enjoy.

I wrote about these guys before

Aviary is up to tricks again. As Techcrunch writes, the maker of browser-based design applications, notably Raven and Phoenix, is now getting its talons into sound with the acquisition of Digimix, a browser-based audio editor developer.

As I’ve said before, there’s a yawning gap / niche between the horror of free tools like Gimp and MsPaint and fully-loaded enterprise-level tools like Photoshop, Illy and Final Cut Pro (to name a few) and Aviary are starting to more and more look the part for filling that niche.

They have a large collection of ideas here. While I am suitably impressed by their ambition, I do have a couple of reservations.

Both Raven and Phoenix, as well as Myna; have great potential as mentioned earlier, they fill a fairly important niche between bad, hard-to-learn, free tools and very good, harder-to-learn, really-expensive tools. However,  tools like Tern will be going up against the very good, popular and free Terragen. Penguin will be battling against super-established players like Google Docs and even (being free) OpenOffice. I wish them well, but I frankly am not that hopeful. I’d rather see them focus more on Raven, Phoenix, Myna and a few others where they really have room to grow.

Another concern I have is that some of the things they are trying to do, like terrain generation and video, are fairly data and processing-intensive. I’m curious to know where Aviary is going to be doing all the processing (server/client) and manage all that data transfer without killing usability. too much. Anyhoo, good luck to them. Hope they succeed.