Bharath Ganesh

Microsoft’s new Double Click Patent is amazing. Its quite justified. Probably these patents were not claimed at the early stages because Microsoft never thought of these kinda competition before. It was a kind of Monopoly before. But now it has no other go.

And Microsoft’s decision of licensing the patents is also highly justified. Companies like IBM, AT&T have been licensing their patents for the past 50 years. So why cant Microsoft??? Whats wrong??

People from the Open Source community claim that such kind of patents will prohibit fellow competitors (Open Source people) from carrying out  further research in the related areas. I think that’s senseless. Consider the hardware field. The patents of Texas Instruments, IBM, Intel are all licensed. In Spite of that R & D is going on in full swing. 

Patent licensing has NOTHING to do with carrying out research. Just pay-and-use!!!!

Even code of UNIX is patented by SCO( some by AT&T). But that did not prohibit Linus Torvalds from improving the UNIX and developing LINUX.

So at the end Technology and R&D don’t have any boundaries and patenting can never act as a barrier in research.

Microsoft has filed a nomination for a patent on its FAT filesystem. That’s absolutely superb. Hey Microsoft nearly spends about $7 Billion / Year for R & D. It is only after this that they are able to come out with innovations. Then how the hell can any Red Hat or Mandrake sell Linux with FAT for free???????????????????????????????

For that matter even the ext2 is patented by AT&T.

So LINUX is nothing but a combination of innovations and patents stolen from a collection of companies. They have stolen modules (cut-copy-paste) and linked then all together.

Still do you feel its wrong to get the double click and FAT patented??????????????

Its was amazing to hear. I could not believe it. Microsoft has come for campus recruitment drive at my college.( My college is based in Chennai, India)

The test and interview were held at Sathyabama University and all the Engg. Colleges of the same group were asked to participate in the placement drive.

Do we have that kinda talent here?????????????????? I think ‘NO’.

Recently I read an entry in Srirams Blog abt the lack of Passion towards work in Indian IT firms. And I also saw that most of the IT employees abroad blog to promote their work. Certain companies have their own blog site providing blogs to fellow employees.None of the employees of any Indian IT company blogs to promote his work/research. That may be because Indian IT firms are mostly Service based and not Product based. Again that can be attributed to lack of creativity among Indians. They say Visual J++ was developed at Microsoft, Hyderabad. But even in that case the idea, Project Initiative, and Project Managers were from Redmond. The Indian employees just did what they were told to do from US. Recently I read in a speech of Bill Gates at the CEO summit regarding the merits of blogging.

http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2004/05-20CEOSummit.asp        

He said "Another new phenomenon that connects into this is one that started outside the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS. This is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they'll wonder why I didn't put their name on it. But, then again, I don't want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I'm saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out. Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don't know to come visit that Web site, and it's very painful to keep visiting somebody's Web site and it never changes. It's very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it. And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you're interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn't interfere with your normal Inbox. And so if I do a trip report, say, and put that in a blog format, then all the employees at Microsoft who really want to look at that and who have keywords that connect to it or even people outside, they can find the information. And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail -- that it's too imposing -- and yet the drawbacks of the Web site -- that you don't know if there's something new and interesting there -- this is about solving that. The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it, and we're progressively getting better and better at that by watching your behavior, ranking things in different ways."                                                                                                    

But again one of the key requirement for blogging and passion towards work.(i dont mean working till midnight) is creativity which we Indians dont have.

We may be holding several records like the "Country producing maximum number of Movies" , the Land of best ones like Sathyajit Ray, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, the Burmans, Kishore Kumar....

But today India no longer need to be proud for its achievements in Cinema. The state is worst these days. Be it Bollywood/Tollywood/Kollywood/BengalWood... Iam not talking about the vulgarity in particular. Everything- the music,story,script....has sucked a lot. Vulgar movies may have some story. Yesterday i saw Mallika Sheravaths famous 'MURDER'-thats not a bad movie yaar. *dont want to comment more on it* What i feel is u can watch a film like Murder or Kwahish instead of watching stupid Tamil Movies like those of Vikram, Vijay, Madhavan or Suya. What do these people think of themselves???? They say 'machi Ghilli super-a-irrukka' . Here the name of the film can be substituted by any such 3rd rate film like Arul/Autograph/...... Probably these people dont know whats good film and good filming??? I pity these people for not getting a chance to see some good films.

I still remember some good movie artists. Amithabh Bachchan has done some really good movies.

Even now in Malayalam there are some really good films. Last year i saw a malayalam movie titled 'Padam Onna Oru Vilapam' .The actress in this film is the same Meera Jasmin who acts in these worst Tamil movies. The films budget is less that 50000/- with meera getting about 10K. It won the state award. Thats a movie... Priyarshan is probably on of the best directors in the world. (of the fame 'Thenmavin Kombatha', 'Kilukkam', 'Chitram' ). Thenmavin Kombatha is one such movie where u can really experience perfection. Again no director can do a job alone. Mohan Lal is again the man who helped Priyan. He a wonderfull actor who has a lot of good films to his credit. But even for Mohan Lal whose one of the best when it comes to Subliminal acting has done some *bad* movies which are big hits like Narasimhan, rakshasa Rajvu and has done some good films which turned out big flops like Vanaprastham!!! So ultimately the fact is that the audience is responsible for this degradation. Great Veteran directors are forced to make bad cinema in order to make big hits. Isn't it the time to wake up and bid farewell to these kinda filming????????