Daniel Craig is the new James Bond for the upcoming film "Casino Royale" (James Bond [21]), a re-make of sorts (as the earlier Charles Feldman production was more of a comedy.) I doubt he has the poise and the style to succeed Pierce Brosnan. I hardly think anyone could give so much charisma back to the Bond character as he managed in Golden Eye. The next two were also worth watching for his Remington Steele style. He even had the same poise for Taffin. While Craig at best has played the bad guy (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Road to Perdition) and IMO doesn't suit the looks or the charisma one would want to see in James Bond. Being a Bond fan, I seriously wanted to have the likes of Clive Owen or Hugh Jackman playing this role. Sort of a disappointment, no matter how stylised he can look; I'll miss the uncanny style of Brosnan. Next 3 Bond movies (incl. 'Casino Royale'[21]) are a no no for me. This MTV story seems to confirm that a sizeable number (at least half of all) 007 fans are unhappy about this decision.

The Telecom industry has grown to adopt several reliability standards. Most devices including terminals (mobile phones) and switches enabling their networks, and servers providing the critical services are supposed to follow extremely high reliability standards. The Five Nines Reliability standard is close to the high reliability requirements of the telecom industry.

However looking at recent natural disasters, terrorist attacks, where telecom networks either are blacked out or are overloaded, the whole "reliability" count goes for a toss. A thunderstorm frying a power transformer supplying any network/telecommunications equipment is a smaller example of what might happen. To back-up the high reliability of these "essential" services, newer cabling standards (powerlines with cabling) are being introduced, so that node failure is not the cause of a blackout. Employing a restorative grid at such scales (switching entire underground cables and switches to embedded grid-like systems) doesn't seem too feasible; although IMO undoubtedly necessary. If powerful natural phenomenon (storms, thunderstorms and earthquakes) are going to persist, besetting the destruction I believe that we should be changing the way we want reliability of "essential services" is provided. In the "Information Age" (preceded by the "Industrial Age") communication has always been a vital tool in any activity; hence its reliability in this age is a major concern.

Geologically and Metereologically the earth goes from phases of stability to instability in cycles whose periodicity is unpredictable with the data and models we presently have. Global warming according to some can start an ice age, and according to some can actually cause a predominantly marine environment. Either way climatic patterns and weather of today is no longer similar to models laid down. Almost every part of the world has been experiencing climatic anomalies, swelled up storms at a far higher frequency than recorded earlier. It might take us years to find all the influential factors to mathematically model climatic and geological behavior which would be vital to human survival; as the "essential services" would be too.

The Linux Standards Base (LSB) was started with an intention to allow Linux users conveniently share packages across distributions. Presently even if you have an RPM compatible distribution, you cannot install one from, say SuSE to Mandriva. This has been due to a lot of issues of incompatiblity (including libraries, paths and dependencies that need to be standardised.)

The First strong effort that succeeded in getting compliance for pathnames was the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) which eased the way distribution maintainers had to patch packages to fit their different path requirements. It served its purpose and slowly grew detailed to include more paths within the standard and most new distributions at least provide FHS compliance to some extent. This means you can create your new application without bothering too much about whether you will overwrite other app files or other apps overwriting yours.

This Itworld article attempts to cover the initial motivations of LSB. I was enthusiastic about participating in the effort, hoping that it would go in the right direction in letting people cross-install packages across distributions and make Linux ubiquitous. But after attempting to participate and contribute, I realised the wisdom of Ulrich Drepper's comment that the LSB is not bound to work. The reason although it appears simple enough to me, didn't hit me before. Without community and ISV participation, one cannot work on a unifying standard. It's as simple as that. Drepper points out to bad coding as far as the test-suite goes, and he is disinterested in working with bad coding (a community feeling, it's been in all community/Free software projects before.)

Further, due to the lack of community involvement there are the wrong people chairing subprojects and projects. There are people involved who've just started using linux less than a year or two ago. These people are going to find it too difficult to work with community developers and ISVs who have been involved for at least 5 or more years and are tuned into the way the community operates. Even a rational argument from these people is not going to be accepted as they would be alien to the community.

No single body or team (however technically adept) can create an adoptable standard. I believe the only way linux standards can be reached is the community working from developer to the distribution (grassroots->top) rather than (top->down). The Debian derived distributions have been able to adopt a Debian Common Core(DCC). This is probably what could grow into a more widely adopted standard in the future rather than disparate attempts like the LSB. If the LSB really wants to achieve its goals into the future, it has to work through the distributions and the community rather than away from them and actually create a similar common core. And then there's the argument between "standards" and "choice" (the freedom to keep things one's own way that has driven the Open Source Community so far.)

I have encountered (perhaps indirectly) phenomenon that was very close to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a novella by Robert Louis Stevenson. Having read this classic as a kid, I always wondered how RLS had landed on a dual-personality (classical interpretation) almost forgetting that the trigger had been chemical. I never really thought along the lines of modern intoxicating drugs such as LSD. This was until I did some lookup of the behavior of people before and after consuming alcohol (or in some cases controlled substances.) It then occurred to me that RLS himself might have had a personal experience that inspired him to write his all famous novella. I turned to the most-resourceful Wikipedia and found a match. RLS was under treatment with ergot during the time he wrote this book. Historically ergotism has been associated with diseases (in cattle - ergotism) in humans - like "St.Anthony's Fire". And further, LSD itself was first synthesised (though much later) in 1938 from Ergot. The link goes further suggesting that Kykeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries was an ergot infected hallucinogenic drink. The closest link that could have played a role in inspiring RLS was the Dancing Mania. Although the reasons for this are speculated (to be Ergot intoxication), foaming of the mouth, intense convulsions and violent behaviour were common symptoms of this, primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and the 17th century.

The usage of both intoxicating drugs and liquors have been common throughout the known timeline of human history and have always created distinctive changes in behaviour which were superficially observed; and most importantly contradicted moral or social inhibitions. The creation of civilisation allowed man to have "fermented" drinks (the very early alcohols.) There are also biblical references were the God of the Old Testament is thanked for "herbs" [the closest reference perhaps is II Kings 4:39 (there are more)] (which many modern scholars believe was marijuana.) I remember a conversation with a few friends of mine who debated with me that our behaviour is a reflection of what we consume (referring to our diet in the most part.) Their referalls were to vegeterianism, consumption of red meat and alcohol, each having its own behavioural effect. At that point, I wasn't too convinced as I believed that one's mind always had the tether to control and regulate behaviour. Now I am convinced otherwise. It is possible to experience intensive behavioural changes based wholly on ingested food alone; and in the case of intoxicants, violent or irrational behavior or both that the all powerful mind is weak at tempering. RLS in his novella also points out a habitual addiction to the mode of behaviour (of Mr. Hyde) that finally is inevitable even without requiring the chemical itself. This is extremely common in those who have been addicts or victims of substance abuse - where an instant relief from the abused intoxicant is impossible without substituting and disengaging its neurochemical effects. The insight one can draw from this work of 1886 is indeed intriguing and verily applicable to similar substance abuse by a far wider spectrum of population in modern times.

I get into these moods at times. I've tried to keep myself out of the traditional "office environment", and do the same coding and a bit of 'remote control' management. All this in the hope of escaping Job burnout. It has been good in a way that it has worked all along, keeping stress levels low and letting me concentrate objectively on the problem at hand. Many of my friends who left prior jobs for newer ones due to dissatisfaction, either were experiencing something similar or wanted to get out of "overpromising/underdelivering" cycles usually trickling top-down.

The big advantage of working remotely or from home is that you can easily dissociate mentally from the problem (remembering Sherlock Holmes' amazing intellectual strength of dissociation) and concentrate on something else. Even if this were a short while, it's easier to do this when you're away from the _buzz_. Despite all of this, I find that things can actually get to your nerves once in a while.

In my case this happens when I get the right information in place to let someone take a decision, so you can start hacking away at code. And when the decision doesn't happen because the decision maker isn't able to understand it, you get stuck. In short, you're in a situation where you (at least in your mind) have a clear path of things to do, however someone else deciding this (inevitable when a community or organisation or company is involved) ends up being a speed breaker. Ulrich Drepper's recent rant that the Linux Standards Base (LSB) project was going nowhere, points out to the lack of shouldering responsibility by people involved. Looking at these Meeting Minutes (the list itself being sporadic), one clearly understands that nothing much is achieved and yet nobody steps up and says, lets stop these agenda-skewed low-achievement meetings and work offline using email to its fullest. Software project failure and abandonment still continues to happen, and I believe it's closely linked to this inability in management & decision making, rather than Alan Cox's comments that modern software is not as thoroughly tested as the hardware it is to run on. (It's easy to keep dissociating intertwined elements for the sake of argument, yet in practice software and hardware go together.)

I find that teleconferences, videoconferences and face-to-face meetings many a time, do not achieve much. Unable to list out result-oriented agenda (but rather agenda for agenda's sake) for a meeting or open discussion with goals to be achieved is sufficient (and too common) creating rifts. I still do not understand why offline email discussions (though they too require objective goals) are less often used and people try and settle issues in realtime. Add to this, I see a dearth of people documenting what is being discussed or decided (or writing the "minutes" which hardly even addresses a problem statement.) The element of structured thought seems to disappear in a meeting room, when (at least in the IT industry), the item discussed involves structured engineering of a software component.

All of the above seem superficial edifices of a completely different problem. The inability at a very early stage to love what you do, do what you love and work with a team who are as passionate, enthused,objective and identifiable with oneself is at the heart of the flame of dissatisfaction. Add to this, the whole world seems to force into everyone a caring for oneself above others (while every religion or theosophy or spiritual philosophy teaches universal brotherhood). Everyone is expected to accept a rift between the "ideal" and the "practical". Those who refuse are deemed idealists and in the extreme of cases weirdos.

Before I tried out a "remote working model" (not just working from home, but far away from work or rather geographically dissociating from the team you work with), many suggested that I use weekends to "dissociate" from the problem/job at hand and "socialise" or "chill out". Essentially we believe all of us primates should ape other primates (you notice this from childhood, at junior grades, at school, and take it with you to work); a fervent belief and practise of stereotypism. From my perspective, that's akin to postponement. It just lets you meet the same elements and conditions of inertia later, which affects your self assessment of progress and almost everyone else involved. Everyone who creates an organisation or company or team start working on a goal. When they haven't documented it as they go about it (or made it extrasomatic or created a tangible resultant) and have stopped achieving it, they slowly seem to fall into the same quicksand that stereotypically affects a good number of people and organisations alike.

The big difference between achieving "Peak Performance" and the all important "Self Satisfaction" seems to be everyone willing to compromise with what they do, just to stay adrift on a survival raft in an overtly complex economy. Modern industry seems to be an extension of the factory phenomenon of the industrial age. It seems we are still not too far away from Henry Ford's great achievement (Fordism) of making human automatons. I am still searching for a way to keep structured problem solving and delivery of solutions whilst not deterring from providing as much personal freedom as possible. It seems we have all the necessary resources and technology, it's just the locked mindset that need to be freed.

Enough said, we all seem to have created a "Brave New" dystopic Orwellian world around us without realising the very consequences we face. The boastful Indian software industry is criticised for being an outsourcing wing that geographically displaces jobs, and now is slowly becoming more of a software sweatshop. We just don't realise that Big Brother(s) is(are) everywhere. It is high time we start believing that we can all make the world a better place just by doing a bit more and placing ourselves behind the rest of us in priority; yet not compromising with health and fitness (mental and physical) and personal satisfaction. Idealism is deeprooted from the Greco-Roman perspective pervading our thought process; and yet it has been the one thing that has let us change perception and remodel society. At least I'm happy I have a chance to mould things differently, not just for me but for quite a few others while I can. In most part, writing this long winded journal entry has been inspired by Steve Jobs' 'Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish' speech.

I see people around, a lot of people I'm connected with, and the ape that we are; we seem to love aping other apes. Stereotyped living has probably been what we keep calling "civilisation". Every leap into a new cultural generation is created by an oddity (or rather an eccentricity) within the earlier generation.

I think the one piece that needs to be seeded into culture, is the freedom to be different; to avoid being a stereotype, to avoid doing what others have done or are doing. That's the only way evolution (or memetic evolution or whatever you choose to call it) could progress. Every earlier civilisation or culture that vanished without a trace tried to get organised, classified into specific types. Yet, we have to both diversify, build that into our mindsets, and still achieve interdependent living; now seems to be the right time to try and get it right, without trying to create a whole new romanesque world. If we don't start doing this now, science, technology and civilisation is all bound for the next loop by whatever might stop it.

We no longer need fear Nukes, there's Nature, Toxic Life forms, there's the Cosmos, anything can make an organised and settled civilisation disappear. We can't plan for everything if we just sit back to make a better world.

I had the opportunity of accompanying my Dad on a visit to Kerala. The monsoonal rains have persisted well over a month this year. I could see the place in its full splendour from the aircraft with green carpets over its beautiful hills and a lush mangrove forest covering the coast interred with backwaters.

Calicut was the town I was visiting, which had educational institutions, a thriving textile industry and yet the town was filled with people who seemed to hate urbanisation. It was a large town, but nothing close to city settlements elsewhere in the country. Owing to the recent rains that hadn't yet stopped, every building had moss covering the stone walls of its compound. This, being my first visit to Kerala and particularly this part of the western coast, impressed me enough, though I had almost no time except while driving between the hotel and the meeting hall.

I was most curious as to the reason for the beauty and such rich & lively terrain. It turns out that the western part of the plateau has been most affected by the very volcanic activity that created it. The soil and its richness are a resultant of this phenomenon. The people who have lived here for generations, have been directly influenced by the richness of the soil which seems to have passed on to them a passion and glow in all their activities. It was a pleasure interacting with them and joining them for a weekend meeting.

All the while, I've been impressed and drawn to the idea of hive minds in fiction - be it Star Trek's Borg or Stephen Baxter's Coalescent or the spiders from Stephen Spielberg's Arachnophobia or Orson Scott Card's "Formics". One might still call it flights of fancy or dismiss it as one of the surviving (though not super-evolved) relics of evolution (in ants, bees, their insect cousins and even in mole rats [mammals].)

But the eerie thought has crept through my mind, that civilisation today is almost one great hive. The direction of civilisation, subdivisions and the problems are suddenly beginning to unite. Pack structures (as we refer hierarchy in most mammals including wolves) are prevalent in primates, but so far no one has seen strong evidence on the emergence of a hive mind like behavior.

Yet the formation of tribes, and then of nations and their further aggregation into a global village (as an ongoing process today) seems to suggest that we humans, although not living in caves, or ant-hill or bee-hive replicas; are showing signs of hive behavior. We are all trying to unite into one hive, which effectively would have its own purpose and further not require telepathy or chemical transmitters, but merely work through our present sensory framework.

Part of my feel is heavily influenced by reading Baxter's Coalescent. Partly it all seems to be so real, the drone-like attitude and stereotypism that is prevalent even through changing cultural waves. The family structure, even it's breakdown and an undeniable similarity to a 2000 year old past, be it Roman or Historic Indic roots. Perhaps the problems of the present will be dealt with by our coalescent nature; and maybe I'm just dreaming; but it's too real to be a dream. Even the Gaia theory (of the earth as a living consciousness) seems to hint this way. Religious ideas and clues within them also reveal that our ancestors seemed to realise this. Perhaps it is more comforting to feel that you are part of a greater being, a hive and still can keep your individuality (I don't know whether classified hive creatures have the same perception.)

The evolution of new generation communication technology, the internet, convergent communication, anywhere/anytime connectivity seems to be creating a new backbone for a unifying hive. The one thing that bothers me most is that hives rather pejoratively create stereotyped classes (humanity has insofar never been able to shed hierarchy and probably never will.) I fear that our individuality might slowly be lost as something else takes over - The religious second coming of the Lord maybe the creation of a new hive! Right now it scares me.

I've been dealing with some people who are really "busy" (involved in hundreds of issues, but still find time to attend to each at the right time and place.) Everytime I've placed a query to these people, I found that they replied relevantly on time or that they would do so at an appointed time. It has always been nice dealing with such organised people as you learn something from them (that you can emulate.)

I've also been dealing with people who're just scaling up to get more "busy" but have no knowledge on handling themselves; nor how to swim the sea of time. The only answer I get from these peope are that they've been "very busy" and will do it as soon as they can. I've started hating this ASAP acronym (As Soon As Possible). I see it as an excuse meaning, "I've other important things to do" and indirectly meaning "You're issue is not on the 'important' list right now."

Worse still, I see this happening with haphazard people who sometimes are "businessmen" holding key roles in a corporate organisation, responsible to themselves and other stakeholders. Primarily I see this lack of respect for time as a serious issue. It seems rampant in "India" and is definitely a heavy impediment to any growth that is planned for this country.

This happens with

• Automobile service agencies
• Software Companies (I deal with quite a few of them.)
• Maintenance and Support Staff (for any equipment you own.)
• People attending meetings (turning up as late as an hour later after the appointed time is considered quite normal.)

I am reminded of longfellow's lines:

Art is long, and time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.


No one really has enough time, we all swim in the same complex ocean of time and space; and we need to set our directions and our priorities right. I hope to promise less and offer more and not get sucked into this spiral of "overpromising and underdelivering" both in time and space that seems rampant in society around me.

Beyond the poverty, beyond the lack of intellect, this lack of a sense of responsibility is probably what will take India (and many companies, organisations and nations with a mindset likewise) to their graves.

I have recently found a trend of increasing tele-evangelism on TV channels available in India. In the most part, I find it a bit annoying; religion being preached and "advertised" (evangelised) over Television media.

In my opinion religion has always been a personal and individual part defining the relationship between man and his quest to solve the 'riddle of existence.' While there are significant socio-religious issues, the fundamentals of religion remain moral, spiritual & philosophic and therefore very personal.

Annie Beasant, a founder of the "Theosophical Society", comments that "As civilisation evolves, religion must graduate to meet its objectives." In similar lines, Walter Leslie Wilmhurst suggests that the declension of interest in religion in modern times is not due to irreligiousness, but rather the unsatiated need of human intellect for deeper religious philosophies and understanding of the mysteries of the universe.

While religion at a superficial level seems to address the general spiritual and socio-religious needs, the deeper philosophical needs of unsatiated intellect have always spurred the creation of alternative orders and religious cults(none of them completely addressing the need).

Tele-evangelism seems to sell "prayer" as a remedy for the "distressed." Such generalisation does not address all of them, but a good majority. "Prayer", a component of religion does help in calming down people in distress situations and is also necessary for a good spectrum of the population. However, in most of these programs, religious morality and philosophy in entirety are slowly getting ignored in the attempt to gain media time and revenue (for charitable trusts, prayer funds, ...) in the name of religion.

The whole question of religious evangelism in any form of media is still a sensitive issue. Many countries have drafted constitutions (including the new 'democratic' Iraq) labelling themselves in the name of a religion. This lack of graduation of religious philosophy and more so, communicating it to those who follow the religion is also a factor in terrorism today.

During the recent week, I have been spending time, getting my TV Tuner card installed on my favorite Linux desktop. Installing has been a rough ride of sorts - requiring me to guess tuner chipsets and wiring GPIOs. Fortunately BTTV Gallery hosted by Gunther Mayer had the necessary information to help me out.

Then came the task of watching and recording Television. I found three applications suitable to my needs, MythTV, tvtime and XawTV. Each come with specific features that are useful. The first two offer postprocessing, recording and Alpha blended OSDs. All three of them provide support for remote controls.

Despite the availability of these applications, I found that the use of non-standard frequency bands by the CATV operator made it difficult to scan for channels. Existing channel scanners from tvtime (tvtime-scanner) and Xawtv (scantv) supported scanning of the entire frequency range, however due to unresolved bugs did not render the scanned output useful. CATV operators multiplex digitally decoded channels into frequency bands convenient for transmission. However this differs from operator to operator and town to town making a simple patch of my favorite tv viewing applications infeasible at present. (I would require to modify them to read xml frequency tables, though tvtime does support this, there are bugs.)

This led me to try and write my own set of scripts to use "mplayer" as my tv player (having used it extensively for video playing prior) and a modified version of "scantv" for scanning frequencies. This took me at least 5 days, and now is available on public domain as tveasy. I must say, that this would not have been possible, without Open Source products, for I ripped off pieces of scantv for my own usage with ease. Having benefited so from "Free Software", I obviously had to give something back, and hence wrote a set of scripts for the same. I love "Free" Software.

Taking a look at Intel's immediate roadmap it is now evident that they are decidedly not revving up the clock speeds. Their whole strategy seems to be going multicore. That's not all, these new multi-core processors are derived from the "Low Power" Pentium-M core (the one engineered at Israel and marketed with the Centrino chipset.) The Intel+Apple marriage is a direct resultant of this low-power strategy.

I infer two critical points from this heading.

• Intel has taken the AMD-64 blitzkrieg in the desktop market as a serious threat and resorting to secure other markets [laptops,handhelds,...] (by concentrating on low power).
• Intel is learning that there are fabrication limits and there is a possible 3-5 year lull before adopting any technology (molecular transistors, ...) that might help continue Moore's law (or rather its traditional interpretation.)

The buck doesn't stop here. Intel is attempting to go the multi-core (multi-microprocessor-per-core) way, but is stepping in rather cautiously without over-doing it. Traditionally, the multi-core trend seems to have evolved from the embedded SoC following. Network processor companies in their eagerness to exploit data/control plane parallelism this way, have made power hungry behemoths (rather toasters).

However, the problems faced here are dissimilar. Bus speed bottle-necks, Higher penalties per error [in both design & fabrication] and fundamental Operating System Software abstractions are a hindrance to go massive multi-core. The STI alliance's 'Cell' that was originally designed to be massively multi-core hasn't turned out so on the first shot. Clearly, Intel's caution in venturing here seems to have given them some time (to probably learn and avoid mistakes.) Even the 'Cell' seems geared on low power CPUs and higher power GPUs which seem to tell the same story. It finally seems (that until some major breakthrough comes up), processors aren't about to rev-up faster. I'm thinking, ain't it time ARM tried their hand on the desktop/laptop market? (with their great track record on power-saving.)

What is to be noticed is that revving down the clocks is something AMD has done already. Dynamic processor clocking (Speedstep for Intel) is also following AMD who could synchronous clock their CPUs without stepping between specific frequencies like the Intel counterparts. The only catch here is that AMD is yet to come up with the power friendly chip. So, can they pull out a rabbit out of the hat?

We all knew that an energy crisis spurred by vagaries in oil production/distribution was imminent. Most people quote Hubbert's Peak as a sort of prophecy of what was to come. The original year Hubbert (in 1956) predicted was 1971, which after further study was moved to 2004 (in the 1990s.) This year 2005, we are told that the Oil Crisis is here.

I believe that this is only a start to a major energy crisis we are all about to face. Attempts at Nuclear Fusion Reactors (though due only in 2016) are on, and alternate sources of energy are vigorously being explored. The world's economy has been anchored on Petro Dollar recycling that we hardly notice its effects. However, with oil production reaching critical levels, this system could have adverse effects on the international macro-economic system.

Roughly put, the economy of many countries who are not self-sufficient in oil production during the fall, will suffer. This would include countries gunning for near 10% growth (think China, India?, the developing world.) Consequentially, the consumer economy that has been driving growth in these developing countries would reach a stand-still.

• Potential IT markets, which bank on content and service delivery to the consumers will need to restructure their costs.
• Computing equipment will need to be more power savvy than they have been in the past.
• IT development and service centres will no longer be able to sustain within a single city as power distribution problems (in crisis) creep in.
• Life cycles of computing devices and software will consequentially increase. (A sort of stretch in the pace of development is bound to occur.)
• With hardware manufacturing costs (and shipping costs) hitting an all-time high, the focus will be on making better software on available computing hardware.
• Distributed development hanging on to less reliable communication networks will be the order of the day.

The production of oil might take another two(2) years to start dropping (the prices during this drop will fluctuate as predicted by markets, with a possible low within this year.) The energy crisis (as any crisis - be it war, famine or natural disaster) presents an opportunity to Techpreneurs. The reason being, the environmental variables are poised for change and opportunity with adaptability will present itself (despite the scale of difficulties that will exist.)

It will also be interesting to observe strategies adopted by various countries to outlast the crisis and move to multiple alternatives. (The bitter lesson has been that we have relied too much on a single source - fossil fuels for energy.) Standard crisis procedures including rationing, socialistic government control of key industries may be a common backdrop.

Everyone knew this was coming sooner or later; and it seems AMD has finally taken the initiative to file Antitrust against their 'unfair' competitors - Intel.

Any business player who seems to gain a significant market advantage tends to use that advantage (fair or foul) to retain the market. This seems to work as simple as the owner of high ground would rather hold it (in the military sense) no matter what their strengths (numbers, technology or warrant.) I was hoping to see Intel (who labeled themselves 'The Paranoid') brought to trial for antitrust as soon as Microsoft was pulled up. The Wintel alliance, being the one which gave them the high ground in the first place (despite all chance that caused it.)

Reading "Inside Intel" by Tim Jackson, I learnt that AMD were just 9 months behind Intel with a similar business model. The big break into the global market, becoming the "chosen ones" by IBM (like Microsoft.) In the 48 pager (27-Jun-2005) from AMD, you read the usual story: "coercion" on OEMs, retailers, Hardware vendors to retain their higher MDFs and "threats" to refuse to supply on cooperation with the competitor.

Well, this ultimately DENIES the consumer of having 'reasonable' choice and the ability to choose a better performing product. I resorted to a Pentium4HT desktop, coz I couldn't find enough motherboard choices to hold a nice AMD64 (most had been coerced to be 'Intel compatible.')

Thinking of it, Socialism/Communism where the Government runs companies that have all market share and become monopolies operate similarly. They have no need to provide customer service on demand as there's no one else. Capitalism was supposed to provide a competitive environment where the consumer profited by choice, competition and assured growth. Monopolies violating this spirit inside a capitalist world are merely appeasing communism and are against the very spirit that created them.

Being a techie, I notice that Intel's compiler (which comes from an acquired company, Kai?) refuses to perform optimally on non-Intel, yet equally compatible hardware. That is surely taking it too far. I am hoping the gcc gurus (who helped amd64 get an Opensource OS first off), give them a helping hand and get better performance than Intel's (pay for use) compiler that doesn't do it's "promised" work on compatible hardware.

I've earlier jotted down in my journal that Bernie Ecclestone evened the odds for Formula 1 Racing to avoid making it look like a parade. This USGP, he might have failed to do just that.

The Michelin runners had safety problems with their tyres (evident only after practice) and by rules could not change their tyres. (Forget the fact that you can't change your engine or drivers or chassis once the race weekend begins.)

They wanted the stewards to modify the race circuit, so Fourteen(14) [a majority of them] using a specific company's tyre, could race or change the rules so they change their tyres.

The stewards asked the michelin runners to run chicane 13 slow (where cement joins tar) to avoid tyre problems. But 'Michelin' strongly advised all fourteen teams against this to muscle the F1A to change the rules for them. The F1A didn't budge; (and expecting Bernie to budge was waiting for it to rain dogs.)

The Michelin runners (on safety advise) refused to take the race. They could have changed tires and started from the back of the grid and charged at their opponents. Not so. They retired from the race after lap one creating the first F1Asco of the worst proportions of sportsmanship. Whining babies and Temper tantrums. The Bridgestone runners Six(6) of them finished the race, with nobody to race with actually, Ferrari being the most superior.

Now this just points out that everyone using one kind of tyre (like they used bridgestone some time ago) was recipe for disaster and is still. Now blaming FIA or the other Six(6) who ran .... I hope Ferrari goes out and takes the championship!

Technical Issues: Michelin has always relied on higher track temperatures. There are going to be situations when one portion of the track is going to be colder than the rest of it (like here in Indy where it was because of a different surface causing further problem.) If Michelin can't think of a solution with their existing compound and tyres, Let the French go back to their biking tyres and stop whining.

And point to note: The Ralf Schumacher accident (Ralf running into walls or gravel is not too uncommon in his racing career) occurs on "Friday Morning". Michelin's Analysis is complete on "Sunday Morning" 0630 hrs. Now, how the hell is the FIA supposed to respond after Michelin has outqualified its Bridgestone opponents on Saturday - let them fly? Maybe Michelin should be banned for the next two races (for further fun and frolicking.)