Good bye iMac
The computer that came in 15 different hues and revolutionised the home computing market - not to mention Apple's fortune - is finally being phased out. [BBC]

Ah, all good things end eventually.

Why Al Jazeera Matters
...In truth, it seems that New York’s exchanges have a broader complaint, heard in various forms elsewhere ? that Al Jazeera is insufficiently supportive of America and its war in Iraq. As the only uncensored Arabic television in the world, Al Jazeera does indeed slant its debates and discussions in a way that can be hostile to the West. It is not Fox News. But if the U.S. hope for the Arab world is, as the Bush administration never ceases to remind Americans, for it to enjoy a free, democratic life, Al Jazeera is the kind of television station Americans should encourage. [IHT]

Free speech and nationalism, its rock and a hard place indeed...

Betting on Saddam's life - Updates
In an earlier post, I had talked about bookies betting on Saddam's life, literally. I managed to locate a site today. Visit radeSports and then click on IRAQ.SADDAM.MAR03.

Body Count
Praised by Boston Globe and Associated Press, Iraq Body Count is fast becoming a authorative source about civilan casualties in America's unjust war in Iraq.

Free as in free speech stuid...!
Go to any gathering of open-source developers and someone is bound to tell you that free software isn't free -- not free as in "free lunch," anyway. Free as in "free speech." Such politics have sparked another technological transformation, this time freeing a DVD from the constraints imposed by copyright-protection technology.

The documentary film Revolution OS was released Friday on DVD. The film features interviews with Linus Torvalds of Linux fame; Richard Stallman of the GNU/Free software project; Eric Raymond, author of Cathedral and the Bazaar (a treatise on marketing and open source); Rob Malda of hacker discussion and news site Slashdot; Larry Augustin, co-founder of VA Linux Systems; and others.

In the spirit of open source, the DVD was released without CSS, the content scrambling system used on most commercial DVDs. J.T.S. Moore, the film's creator, said it's an experiment in going "CSS-free" -- one he fervently hopes won't blow up in his face. He hopes his film won't be pirated, and that his success will encourage other filmmakers not to use CSS. [Wired]

Pretty darn cool I think

Freedom food?
Republican members of the US Congress have asked Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to boycott a French firm catering for the US Marines. The firm in question, Sodexho, has a $881m contract to feed the Marines. "My colleagues and I abhor the idea of continuing to pour American dollars into a French based firm when those dollars could be feeding our wartime economy," wrote Representative Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican. [BBC]

Hahaha...!

Codebreakers
MATHEMATICS is often desperately abstract. Yet it has a great deal to say about the world, from bombs and bridges to cars and codes. Keeping things secret is vital not only to spies, but to anybody who uses a computer or a credit card. The codes employed are all based on numbers, so understanding the science of numbers, known as number theory, is fundamental to the making and breaking of codes. That is why a workshop on number theory organised in Palo Alto by the American Institute of Mathematics was not quite as esoteric as it sounds. [Economist]

Dual Use
Take pencils. The schoolchildren in Iraq can't use pencils because some bloody genius in Bush Senior's administration figured that pencils contain lead, and lead can be used in a nuclear weapons programme. My ass.

...Okay, how about this? Chlorine, an essential ingredient of any half-assed water purification plant, is banned. It's banned because Hussein could use it in a chemical weapons programme. My ass.

...Next, we've got X-Ray machines. That's right, the same gizmos your friendly neighbourhood clinic uses to locate cervical cancer and ovarian cysts.The Security Council consistently blocks X-Ray machines, claiming their Cesium isotopes (as well as their on-board computers) could be used in a nuclear weapons programme. My ass.

...As weapons inspectors turn Iraq upside down and inside out, the Iraqis plead that plastic slippers should not be considered "dual use" items. Reacting to this grievance, CNN anchor Paula Zahn comes up with one of the most objective and incisive comments ever heard across mainstream media: "they are effectively lying."

I'm not making this up. Paula Lobotomized Zahn actually said that. [FTW]

I am convinced that Bushies have a dual use for their arses, "thinking" is one of it. :P

No Wonder
Shanti had posted earlier today that its a good first step that US & UK were asking Pakistan to stop infiltration across the LOC, being a skeptic I disagreed. Here is the reason why.

Rediff first posted this around 0900 IST
The United States and Britain on Thursday strongly condemned the recent massacre of 24 Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir and asked Pakistan to stop infiltration across the Line of Control.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, in a joint statement in Washington, said Pakistan should also do its utmost to discourage any acts of violence in Kashmir.

Then BBC posted this around 0743GMT (1303 IST)
Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is reported to have turned down requests by US President George Bush to help the ongoing military campaign in Iraq.

Suddenly everything seems clear. US and UK wanted India to be a part of their unjust war, take a hike I say...

Al-Jazeera Webcast
All day long Al-Jazeera feeds can be found here. But its a paid service Euro 0.10/min.

:(

What is going on?
LONDON/NEW DELHI: In an indication of the apparent tightening of visa regulations across Europe, officials in London have confirmed the arrest of the head of an Indian software services firm on alleged visa-related offences.

On Wednesday, the British authorities arrested London- based Senthil Kumar, CEO of i-flex Solutions Ltd. Kumar remains in judicial custody.

Kumar, whose firm transacts a lot of business with the Netherlands, is understood to have been arrested by Britain at the request of the Dutch authorities. A spokesman for the Indian High Commission said, ?We are in touch with all the concerned authorities and are trying to facilitate the matter.? According to sources, i-flex is accused of importing Indian staff into Holland on irregular visas. The Dutch authorities suspect that the visas of the Indian IT professionals did not permit employment. [TOI]

Con Condi
WASHINGTON--The coalition that is currently engaged in the hard, dangerous work to disarm Iraq is strong, broad and diverse.

Nearly 50 nations are committed to ridding Saddam Hussein's regime of all its deadly, destructive and illegal weapons. To put this in perspective, the combined population of coalition countries is approximately 1.23 billion people, with a combined gross domestic product of approximately $22 trillion. These countries are from every continent on the globe, representing every major race, religion, and ethnicity in the world. [OpinionJournal]

What crap is this? The other day I heard Fleischer giving this same shit, his country count was 34 then, at a White house press briefing.

GDP of coalliation = approx $22 trillion
GDP of the world = $31.3 trillion*

Population of the coalition = 1.23 billion
Population of India & China = 1.0 billion + 1.3 billion = 2.3 billion*

Ok fine so coalition is richer than the countries not supporting the war, but dont even get me started on the population figures. And if I remember my civics lesson correctly, it doesnt matter how rich or poor you are, in a democractic world every vote counts and has the same importance. So if you wanna put forward figures, majority of the world is against war.

Condi go and give this shit to ignorant fools from Alabama, I for one do this very complex thing called thinking.

*src: World Bank

Hacking for War
Hackers attacked the Web site of Arab satellite television network Al-Jazeera on Tuesday, rendering it intermittently unavailable, the site's host said. [Washington Post]

As I had said earlier, sounds fun.

Baby Saddams
Many Palestinian couples in Nablus, the largest city on the West Bank, have begun naming their newborn babies after Saddam Hussein.

According to the London-based pan-Arab daily al Quds al Arabi, the favorite name for Palestinian families in the city these days is Saddam. The paper said male infants born in local hospitals in the last few days have been named Saddam in honor of the Iraqi president.

"Many Palestinians are proud of this name," the paper's correspondent, Ala Badarneh reports from Nablus. "Many families are also keen on keeping posters of Saddam Hussein in their homes. Usually you would find pictures of Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat together at previous meetings between the two. Many people are buying these pictures in the market and keeping them at home." [Jerusalem Post regn req]

Cool eh?

Soldier Blogs
LONDON, March 26 (Reuters) - There's a new breed of combat personnel at the war front: soldier "bloggers".

Once the narrow domain of geeks and technology journalists, "Web logs" -- or diary accounts published online -- have gone mainstream, making it possible for even soldiers to transmit daily updates to Web sites about the rigours of battle.

War-themed blogs, appearing on sites such as www.blogsofwar.com and www.sgtstryker.com, have become a popular alternative news source since fighting broke out in Iraq a week ago, sometimes beating newspapers and television with war developments. [Reuters AlertNet]

I checked out a few of these. Pretty neat I say, I like know from both the sides.

Whats your stake?
NEW YORK (Reuters) - While pundits around the globe speculated on the fate of Saddam Hussein, others were putting money on it. [Yahoo! News]

And they call him evil, go figure...

War Blooper #5
US F-16 fires on own missile battery.

On second thoughts
I had said CNN's forbidding Kevin Sites from blogging amounts to taking away his right of free speech, but now I have second thoughts. I believe its got to do more with conflict of interests rather than crubing free speech. If he were to write poetry I dont think CNN would have objected, but hes covering the war officially for CNN and at the same time blogging about it unofficially. Its like stopping financial analysts from running a private consultancy while working for an I-bank. I believe, in years to come, forbidding employees from blogging will be on the employment contracts, especially for journos.

BBC has taken a more balanced approach, by taking the blogs under the official umbrella or rather they are making the reports appear as if they are blogs. Thanx for the link Vyom

Human Cc:



A company claiming to have created the world's first cloned babies has distributed a photograph of one of the "clones" for the first time. [BBC] [Clonaid]

War Blooper #4
The official Syrian news agency says five Syrian civilians have been killed by an American missile on the Iraqi side of the border. Syria has delivered an official protest to the US and Britain over the attack which it has condemned as a "terrible aggression". [BBC]

The American smart weapons are as smart as their president. Two or three more of these and am buying warbloopers.com

Americans Not Allowed
BANGKOK (Reuters) - A hotel on the Thai holiday island of Koh Samui has banned American tourists in a protest against the U.S.-led war in Iraq, its owner said on Friday.
Virach Pongchababnapa, owner of the 62-room Pavilion Resort on the island, 550 miles south of Bangkok, said U.S. visitors were not welcome because he was against the U.S. campaign to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. [Reuters]

Hes either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid...

Hacking for Peace
The number of web defacements has leapt up since the US-led war against Iraq began.According to security firm F-Secure, more than 1,000 sites have been hacked in direct relation to the Iraq conflict. Many of the hack attacks contain anti-war slogans and some have direct anti-USA or anti-Iraq slogans. [BBC]

Sounds fun. Take up the cause of any downtrodden guy on earth and start hacking... ;-)

A few good souls
March 21, 2003
SALAM'S BLOG
UPDATE. A reader writes: "I see the current entries on Salam's blog using Mozilla. With IE, it forwards to the Feb posting. There is a recent post."

I've gotten a bunch of emails telling me that Salam's blog is down, or that they are having problems accessing it. I had no problems, so I disregarded the emails. But now there does seem to be a problem. I keep getting referred to an entry in February. I have NO idea why that's happening.

Civax created this mirror site. Not sure whether this reflects new entries, if there are new entries, but it is the best we can do under the circumstances. Civax has contact info on his blog; email him with questions. He seems to be a computer expert, or at the very least, technically adept. (Anyone's more technically adept than I am.)

I cannot not not not get over the irony of this war and how we are all communicating with one another. I am a sort-of-hawk (at least, conditionally pro-war), and I am communicating with a Baghdadi from New York City; an Israeli puts up a mirror site for this Iraqi; the guy in Baghdad wishes an Israeli woman and her family well while he is about to be shocked and awed by my country's unparalleled ability to wage war; she puts up a website from the IDF Home Command for him to download a PDF survival guide in Arabic.

The wrong people are running the world but that's nothing new, is it? [gotham]

Above is a really touching entry I found while trying to find a mirror for Where is Raed?

18 holes at what cost?
The United States is the most wasteful water user in the world, according to figures released at the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan.

And a key reason behind America's placing is the country's love of golf. Keeping fairways lush and greens green requires vast amounts of water. But the overall benefit of such water use is largely restricted to the golfers and the club owners. In other words, golf is a highly inefficient use of water. The US has about 23,000 golf courses - far and away the largest number in the world. [BBC] [BBC Water]

Golf is by far the most boring and lifeless sport I have seen, rather than me saying anything more I suggest you download some George Carlin and Robin Williams.

War protest from Sydney


After being led down from the sails by Police Rescue, British astronomer Dr Will Saunders, 42, and Australian David Burgess, a 33-year-old environmental campaigner from Bucketty, NSW, were charged with malicious damage and "climbing a structure and painting it''. The malicious damage charge carries a maximum penalty of 5 years jail. [SMH][-via itsjoy]

Charu's Angels Accomplish Mission
The evidence is everywhere. In homes across the country, the eves are glued to their telly, following the fortunes of the Indian team. In restaurants, pubs and coffee shops boasting big-screen TV sets, giggly girls and matronly home-makers alike watch cricket cheek by jowl with their beer-guzzling, coffee-drinking, chain-smoking male counterparts, wildly cheering India. Teachers keep track of scores via sms and young girls are betting on the fortunes of the Indian team. Even the Indian media corps covering the Cup in South Africa is packed with women hacks.

It's also just what Sony Entertainment Television (SET) MAX, the channel that's spent close to $255 million to bag the Cup and other icc tournament rights till 2007, ordered. Get a load of this: over 2.2 crore women have watched the matches being played in South Africa on MAX and Doordarshan and the numbers are increasing. Female viewership comprises an astounding 46 per cent of the total. trps for female viewership for India matches till last week climbed to a phenomenal 9.8, up from 3.9 during last year's NatWest Trophy in England (see graphic). "This rating surprised us all," confesses SET executive VP Rajat Jain, "though we'd strategised to get women to watch as much cricket as possible." [Outlook]

Urine 'Remedy'
The Cameroon health minister has deemed it necessary to warn people that drinking urine may not be good for your health. [BBC]

In Singapore if you go to a drink stall there will be cartons which read - Dutch Lady Chocolat Susu, Strawberry Susu, etc. hehehe... Well, in Malay "susu" means milk, but even after 4 years I cant wipe off that silly grin off my face everytime I read it... :D

Google Stalkers
Savvy Web users are using Google (http://www.google.com) and other powerful Web search tools to track down or keep tabs on long-lost acquaintances -- be they former lovers, classmates, friends or enemies.

These searches, which once might have required hiring a private detective, have become increasingly easy as the amount of data available on the Web grows. Sites like AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com), which indexed about 20 million Web pages when it was founded in the mid-1990s, now has information on billions of pages.

....Indeed, if someone's public information has never been published on a Web site, even the best search engine won't help.

And, what if you don't want your information to be found?

"If you don't want people to know about your personal details, don't put them out on the Web in any way, shape or form," said Sullivan. "People say they can't believe their resume is online, but they put it up on their homepage."

People who run their own Web site can insert codes that warn off the search engine "robots," as small computer programs that cull data from the Web are known. But not all search companies respect such standards.

Users can also contact search engines and ask them to remove results from their databases. [Reuters]

Yes people, I shamelessly confess that I am one. Its one of my favorite things to do on those days when I have nothing better to do, and trust me there are many of those :P. Jokes apart, this is a pretty serious issue, about which a lot of people hardly seem to care, even IT professionals..! Especially when it comes to blogs I have seen people giving out excessive information about themselves e.g. signing off posts with their full names, giving out names of friends and family, publishing email ids, to name a few. I swear to god I have seen blogs which have full addresses right to the last digit in the postal code...!!! And now that Google has bought over Pyra its just a matter of time that you start getting targeted ads on top of your blogs. Abhi to shuruat hai, aage aage dekho hota hai kya...

As for me, I am pretty paranoid of anything about me showing up online without me knowing about it, it doesnt have to be structured, bits and pieces here and there are good enough to make a complete picture. As far as I know there are at the most two relevant hits related to me out there and I am happy about it.

ICC opens
The world's first permanent international criminal court opened at The Hague yesterday when its 18 judges took their seats on the bench of global justice."Without justice, there can be no lasting peace," the court was told by Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general.

...The US has already signed agreements with 24 nations ensuring immunity for its civilians or soldiers to ICC prosecution for complaints lodged in those countries, while Congress has empowered President Bush to use "all means necessary" to free Americans taken into the court's custody. [Telegraph]

hmmm..."All means necessary". I wonder what that means?

Sea Lions not SEALs
With the military build-up in the Persian Gulf showing no sign of abating the US Navy has unveiled its secret weapon - a crack troupe of sea lions.

....And in the event of a US-led attack on Iraq the US army plans to ride chickens into battle in cages atop Humvees, used as early warning gas detectors.

The US Army calls the strategy Operation Kuwaiti Field Chicken - or KFC - but the plan has been put on hold after 41 of the 43 chickens deployed to the Gulf died within a week of arrival. more

Ni putes Ni soumises
...Since the beginning of February, the movement has staged demonstrations across France to highlight their plight. It arrives in Paris Saturday, coinciding with International Women's Day.

"Until now, nobody's really been talking about what's been happening in these suburbs," said Sarah Benichou, secretary general of the Paris-based group SOS Racism, which works to eliminate discrimination in the suburbs. "We were always talking about suburbs from a masculine point of view -- as hubs of violence or Islamist extremism. Nobody's been addressing the women, who are victims."

The group's slogan is brutally frank: "Neither whores, nor under submission." Indeed, according to French news reports, that it has frightened off many ethnic immigrants it hopes to enlist.

Its message: A normal French lifestyle, complete with makeup, short skirts and having boyfriends, does not make these women prostitutes. And they will no longer tolerate a stifling, male-dominated culture they say is common in France's impoverished housing projects. more


Time Magazine did a special report on Sisters in Hell in Dec 2002. link

Its quite ironic that all this oppression is happening in the land of liberty, France and none of the dailies I visited so far have any comment/article on the demonstrations. My two cents worth for International Women's day.

And they say Mathematics is boring...
While reading about Euclid's Algorithm* today I found these two poems

Euclidean Algoryhme
You're given two numbers, and now you desire
a method for finding their common divisor.
(The greatest, of course, is the one you must name.)
To do it, you'll keep shared divisors the same
while repeatedly shrinking each number in turn
'til one of them's zero, and then you discern
that the other's the greatest divisor they share.
So how do you manage to lessen the pair?
You divide large by small, then large is ejected,
small becomes large, as remainder's injected.

Multiplicative inVerse
Now if clever you are can take this lots farther,
by some bookkeeping work which is not much a bother.
Each number you deal with, depict as duple
to dot-product with the original couple.
You start with one-zero, then zero-one,
then each new remainder's the combination
of the smaller one's duple times minus the quotient
plus one times the larger one's duple. The notion?
If the numbers you're given are relative primes,
the gcd's duple holds inverses (times).

--Mike Speciner [taken from Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World]


*Euclid's Algorithm is a method of finding the greatest common divisior (gcd) of two numbers x and y. The idea is to repeatedly replace the original numbers with smaller numbers that have the same gcd until on of the numbers is zero. The remaining mumber is the gcd. The algorithm is also used to find multiplicative inverses mod n

Exodus
An old article I found while reading Easyguru's archive, talks about the phenomenal numbers in which Indians are leaving the country.

Where do I stand on the issue of immigration? Being in a foreign country myself, I dont have problems with Indians immigrating to some different place. As long as their loyalties lie with the India, ofcourse their first duty would be towards the new country, if they choose to be citizens there. As long as an Indian version of Zionism keeps going on I am ok with it.

Sportsmanship
Thanks to that friend, and about half a dozen emails this morning, I now have some sort of clue what it is all about. Apparently, Rameez Raja said on air that if Pakistan couldn't get Tendulkar out, they should look at injuring him; that it was in order to deny him a runner if he asked for one; that cricket is a hard game.

What's to say? Raja appears to have done all the saying necessary -- and in the process, given a rather clear indication of the kind of material he is molded of.

In cricket, it is perfectly in order to target any weakness. If for instance a batsman has a hamstring problem, you bowl the good length more often, to constantly bring him forward, and put pressure on the injury; if his mobility is impaired, you ensure that your fielders push him harder, constantly throw to the end he is running at.

Since I didn't get to hear what Raja actually said, I'll take the charitable view of it -- maybe this is what he was talking of; maybe it was just unfortunate phrasing.

But it is interesting that he talked of the possibility of denying Tendulkar the runner; the suggestion proves how short memory can be.

Remember Saeed Anwar -- the batsman who scored a good century yesterday at SuperSport Park, and was so exhausted at the end of it that he never came out to field? Throw your mind back to May 21, 1997 -- the Independence Cup game between India and Pakistan, at the M A Chidambaram stadium in Chennai.

On that occasion, too, Pakistan won the toss -- and batted first. Anwar was just about into double figures when he began cramping; clearly, not an injury suffered in course of play.

He asked for a runner, and got one. Anwar then went on to add some 170 runs to his total, in five-star fashion -- hit the shot, let the other bloke do the hard yards while you rest before the next shot.

The Indian captain who permitted the use of the runner, on that occasion, and who was subsequently slammed for it in the media, was one Sachin Tendulkar. And the Pakistan captain was Rameez Raja.

Sportsmanship is like that -- you either have it, or you don't. [Rediff]

Its time SetMAX fired Rameez Raja....

p.s. suku, thanx for sending me the link.