Desi In Toronto

On the Okaley Show at 640 AM, there was a discussion going on about the possible terrorist plot in Toronto last weekend. The discussion was centeredon why the government officials chose not to inform the public.

John was of the opinion that what the government did was right. There was no need for the public to know that there was a non-credible threat.

And I agree with him. When you are not certain that the threat is legitimate, there is no need to clamp down the city. Take precautions (like Union Station was clamped down on Sunday because of an unclaimed bag next to the train tracks) but don’t blow things out of proportions. When a terrorist strikes, he/she is not going to call first. And if an accomplice has a change of heart and does call the authorities, that person would probablyprovide specific information rather than give vague information.

But the outcry from MSM and a few listeners was quite confusing. Their argument was “if there was even an iota of a suspicion, it’s better to err on the side of caution”. But what they don’t realise is that the moment the authorities start to inform the public on every little suspicion of threat, there would be, first, be a pandemonium and then it would be like the storyof the little boy who cried “wolf!!” just like in the US.

I think what the authorities did was absolutely correct. The threat was deemed non-credible and was handled with proper care.

I have, time and time again in the past few years, come across some reference to the Y2K issue in the media. And all the references have been negative in nature.

“Y2K? That was nothing.”

“Y2K? Just a tactic to get people scared so that corporations can make more money.”

“Y2K was a fake bomb.”

Having been in the IT sector for more than 8 years I have to say that I have had enough of these accusations and will try and set the record straight.

Y2K was a legitimate threat to various software and hardware systems around the world. To those who were not aware of what Y2K was, here is a little synopsis :-

Programming took off in the manufacturing and financial
industries in the 70s and 80s in a big way. That’s when
the standards and procedures were hashed out and laid
in stone. These were the times when programmers pretty
much decided on what rules to put on stone without really
looking at the consequences 3 to 4 decades hence. So the
programmers of the day merrily went on to create stellar
software and hardware products. These products basically
continue to be used in one form or other till today including the
practices and procedures of the 70s and 80s were also
used leading to devastating situations.

In the early 90s, reports came out of America that some tests
which were being carried out for a company with the simulated
date as 1st Jan 2000 had failed with some catastrophic results.
Why? Because one of the procedures that was practiced by
all the programmers and hardware experts, on a fairly large
scale, was to use only 2 digits for the year instead of 4. Why
is that an issue, you ask? Because of this form of representation
of the year, the year 2000 would have been read by these
millions of products out there in the market as ‘00′, in other
words the year 1900!!

Imagine your insurance policy was to mature on 1st Jan. 2000 and you were expecting to receive $75,000. But the application which calculates the matured amount failed to recoganise ‘00′ as 2000 and recoganised it as 1900, your actual matured amount is calculated as $75!! This is but a small example of the problems that could occur in 2000. The problems could occur in programs in Insurance companies, hospitals, airports, emergency services etc. The list is endless.

The key to Y2K solution was recoganising that there was a problem. This was quickly established by numerous experts in all sectors of various industries around the world. Studies were carried out and education of the customers began in earnest.

Y2K was a demonstration of recognition of the problem, organisation of the resources, laying of plans of carrying out the Y2K project, executing the plan by all the companies around the world bar none. That is a fact. I have worked in a IT shop that created software to help companies have their applications Y2K ready, I have worked for a company that executed a Y2K plan, I have worked for a company that consulted other companies on how to be Y2K ready. The organisation of all these companies I worked for was exceptional and everyone, from CEO to junior programmer, rallied around the task of eliminating the Y2K problem. And this was not the case in one or two companies, this level of organisation was witnessed around the world. This is why, nowadays project managers often consult the documentation related to Y2K to enhance their current projects.

Why were Y2K projects so successful around the world? Simply because everyone recoganised the problem. This was the most striking part of the Y2K issue. Everyone, including a small shop owner in the middle of Bahrain’s slum shopping areas, knew what the problem was. This helped management pass some difficult decisions. E.g. the decision to curtail some expensive project and move the resources to Y2K project; The decision to stop all projects until the Y2K issue was over etc. This was a mass movement which, to a degree, helped IT garner more attention in the eyes of the senior management and the public at large.

So the next time someone tells you that Y2K was a hoax, you know better. Y2K was a problem to which the world rose to the occasion and helped tame the problem. The problem was that the MSM needed a doomsday scenario in order to sell more newspapers and TVware. Which is why it was hyped so much and when there was no problem (as a result of stupendous reaction from all the organisations world over), the responders were blamed and not the “hypers”.

Indian bloggers are seething today. They are seething because a profitable management institute (read corporation) is gunning after a blogger who posted about an article by JAM which had carried out an expose on the profitable management institute. The short of it is that the institute, smarting from the expose, ran amok and served a legal notice to the blogger and the editor of JAM has been a target of malicious attacks by supports of the institute.

So what is the truth? I think Atanu has put it the best so far.

Are the allegations (whatever they are) against IIPM true or not? If they are, then anyone bringing it out into the open is clearly a threat to IIPM’s carefully constructed value of their degree. If they are not, then unless the allegations are made by some huge media giant such as the NYTimes or the Washington Post or Hindustan Times, no one would bother to believe it and no harm will be done. And if the NYT or HT were to publish lies about IIPM, then they have sufficiently deep pockets that suing them for defamation would be worth it.

So by IIPM going after a blogger, it has done two things. One, it has admitted that there is a good chance that the cap may fit. Two, it has guaranteed that a lot more people would know about the existence of the cap and the question of whether it fits and so in a sense would be trying on the cap in public any day now. I am not a betting man but if I were, I would bet that the cap will fit.

So, the new video iPod has been released. This new version comes in 30GB and 60GB and looks pretty slick. However, the main news was not the release of the new iPod, but the fact that Apple has tied in with ABC to release their TVware. Under the deal, Apple will release the sitcoms and series featured on ABC on iTunes a day after they are aired.

What does this mean?

This means that slowly and surely Apple is becoming a major player in the entertainment industry. But would that be a bad thing, you’d ask? Probably. If the authorities and the other major players are not careful, Apple could be what Microsoft is to the software industry……Profiteers on other people’s successes.

Everyone knows the deal Apple made with RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). The songs that RIAA controls (which is about 95% of the released material in North America) were made available to common man at the cheap price of 99 cents a song or 9.99 dollars for the album. This utterly revolutionised the on line music industry and for the first time RIAA actively supported people downloading music as long as it was from Apple. But they had put in a spanner in the works.

The songs downloaded from iTunes come with DRM - Digital Rights Management technology. This technology forces a user to use ONLY APPLE PRODUCTS for his/her music. Although there are many ways to get around this “lock” for the vast number of user, iTunes locks them into Apple players products. This is exactly what happened with Microsoft. IBM gave Bill Gates exclusive rights to use DOS and now IBM PC business is kaput and Bill Gates is a multi billionaire and the king of software industry. To be fair it was RIAA that forced Apple to introduce DRM into iTunes but it is Apple that is raking in the money.

And now Apple has a deal with ABC on TVware. I am convinced that the TVware available on iTunes will also have DRM (or something similar) so we will not be able to download these TVware and watch it on out computers unless we use Apple technology. You see where this is going?

Apple has always been a technology innovator. Even though it is a small player as far as PCs are concerned, it has always done well because of superior products. They are like the Ferrari of software and hardware industry - they may not sell as many units as Ford or GM, but their superior products keep them in the business of making profits. But lately it seems that Apple is looking into mass marketing. Mass marketing invariably involves cutting corners and cutting corners is always a slippery slope. The next thing you know, like Microsoft, Apple will be buying innovative (read, small) companies with better products and launching them as their own. This is going to do irreparable damage to the online music industry. I hope that RIAA and ABC realise soon what they are doing.

Rhea is now a full time job. She always was but nowadays we have to put in over time too!!

She is learning quite a few words these days. She and I were at the Meandowvale Town Center yesterday and at the parking lot she and I spent time learning the signs on the shops. Words like “auto”, “movie” and “dominion”. The last one sounded like how I would pronounce the word if I had had a few drinks to many. We went into the library as well and spent half and hour there. The major activity was: me sitting at the low table on a cushion and Rhea bringing a book from the bookshelf, making an attempt to read the first line, grabbing the book from my hands, placing it back, bringing another book, making an attempt to read it…….repeat the cycle. This went on for almost 15 minutes before more kids came into the library and she settled down. It was quite a pleasant experience. I hope I can go back to the library often.

Rhea has also become very opinionated. I guess all the kids go through this phase. I remember my cousin Nupur in India was a very difficult child at 2 - 3 year (I have heard she still is!!) and it used to be a major task for her folks to try and calm her down. Rhea is a little like that. She is very vocal and impatient. If a job is not being performed the way she likes it, she looses it and makes an attempt to be destructive. I hope this is a phase and she will grow out of it.

Her passion for TV is always a bone of contention between us and her. We let her watch TV only if we are too busy with something or the other. The only alternative is to take her out and with winter coming in I don’t know how long I will be able to sustain it. Which is why I tried the library yesterday and it was quite different and she loved being there. The funniest part was when she started to talk to loud and I shushed her and she immediately started to talk to me in whispers!!! I had to laugh at that. I hope we can go there often.

More updates later……

Someone has balls!!!

There is a controversy going on in the blogsphere. The controversy has raised a moral question which needs to be answered.

The young American soldiers in Iraq are going through hell at the moment. No matter what the Bush administration says, Americans areat war in Iraq. And with war comes destruction of the body and mind. We are all well aware of the kind of destruction wrought by war on the mind. We have seen the soldiers come back and break into pieces (I will be linking to the specific articles soon).But now the blogsphere is slowly waking up to the destruction of the body.

There is a site called nowthatsf**kedup.com which is an amateur porn site. From what I gather the site let’s users view pictures of everyday people as long as you pay a certain fee. Another way to view the pictures is to trade. In other words, put on your pictures and you are allowed access to the other people’s pictures. A year ago soldiers from Iraq started to approach this site with the proposition that they would post pictures,completely uncensored, of the war in Iraq for access to porn pictures to the site.

The end result, the site manager agreed and let the soldiers post pictures. If you are curious you can go to the site and see the pictures yourself. BUT I MUST WARN YOU. Isaw only a few pictures and I almost threw up. There are pictures of ordinary Iraqis or actual terrorists with faces ripped off bodies; men in their cars with their heads on the ground, a terrorist’s arm nailed to the wall, a charred body, aftermath of the scene immediately after a suicide attack and the one that made me almost throw up: a picture of a body turned inside out belonging to a little boy or a girl caught in a suicide attack. The pictures were absolutely horrendous. I have never seen anything like this before in my entire life and the images, especially, the last one is likely to stay with me for a long, long time.

The worse part of the picture was not the bodies that were ripped apart, but the fact that in each and every picture there was an American soldier or a group of American soldiers with huge smiles on their faces giving a thumbs up. The glee on these faces next to horror was so surreal, so out of place that it throws the American moral superiority right out the window.

This story was brought to everyone’s attention by John and Joe of the americablog.com. They also have censored versions of the pictures in case you want to see sanitized versions of the horror. And now they are asking their readers a question.

I was discussing this with Joe in DC earlier today. Now that the Pentagon has decided to totally ignore this scandal, to sweep under the rug the fact that US troops are making the electronic version of ear necklaces from the dead, is it time for AMERICAblog to publish the worst of the photos on our site?I’m talking, there are photos of faces ripped off of bodies - leaving only the face behind, not the skull, the face just lying on the ground. Guys sitting in their cars, heads totally blown off.This is gruesome stuff folks. Probably the worst thing you can imagine. But I’m seriously wondering if the only way to prove how bad this is is by creating a scandal by publishing the very visible and very uncensored death photos on this very public blog.What do you all think? I could go either way

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I think the pictures need to be brought to the public’s attention. It will show the other side of the glorification of the war that the Bush administration is actively promoting. But at the same time, the pictures need to be censored witha link to the uncensored version. The way that the pictures were censored on AMERICAblog.com showed the true gruesome nature of the whole situation in Iraq…..a “censored” shattered body and gleeful American soldier. War is not kind to the human soul andsoldiers go through hell. I have seen one of my close relative battle with his own demons after a stint in Sri Lanka with the Indian Peace Keeping Force. To be able to face such horror and come clean it just not possible. It’s even more damaging to the mind when your government is perpetuating a lie and asking you to die for it. That just not right.

What do you think?

I read this little snippet this morning which I thought was quite weird.

Tara Reid finally spoke about the fashion accident last year when her dresses slipped off her shoulders when she was on the red carpet for P. Diddy’s show. The dress fell off her shoulders and she was not aware that her breast were exposed and the photographers were having a field day with it. She said that she didn’t know what the big deal was. She said “It’s not like my breast popped out and shot Gandhi?

Huh!!?!!! What’s the connection here? Please, god of Hollywood, enlighten me!!!