It's time for Microsoft

Microsoft lost half a billion Euro case against it by the European Commission. The case is about Monopoly, as everyone could imagine! Microsoft uses it's monopoly over Windows Operating system to extend it's market over other services (like media players, in this case). Their strategy is simple: hide some core protocols called "server interoperability protocols". Now others cannot operate on Windows - as smoothly as Windows applications do!

It's only a tip of an iceberg. Somehow there should be an end to this monopoly of companies like Microsoft in IT field

What the 'hackers' did!

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The continuation of the story of iPhone.. Look what the 'hackers' have done!

Sales spike expected from iPhone price cut

Some experts:

"Australian sellers of iPhone unlock hacks are bracing themselves for a deluge of orders after Apple cut the iPhone's price tag by a whopping $US200 ($240).

The 8GB and 4GB models now retail for $US399 and $US299, respectively, but the latter will be discontinued once existing stocks sell out.

The price drop is expected to infuriate those who paid $US599 for the iPhone around its launch just over two months ago..."

whopping $US200 ($240) per Phone within 2 months! That's phenomenal. What' s the reson could be? Apple fears loss of monopoly over its 'locking with a particular network'.

How do we judge the scenario?

Little more about iPhone

After reading my previous post the parent wrote to me to have a look at the following issues too..

the two issues which i expected you would address was

1. the media hype given - which to my opinion is not good for modern world

2. he having to trade it to a competitor company - he could have informed iPod about it

I will address the second question first. The hacker didnt trade it to Apple. Instead he went to a competitor. What's its implication?

Of course he could have informed Apple and could get remuneration for his work. It would be of great interest to Apple too. They would like to know how their code could be hacked - as another piece of intellectual work.

But the hacker didnt do that. He preferred a competitor. His motive may be to challenge Apple's monopoly.

I do believe that Apple has got all the rights over their product (iPhone). But the issue here is, they are compelling the customers to choose a 'network' to use their product.

Microsoft had the same issues in the past. They used their monopoly over PCs to promote their own other web based services. As we all remember there was fierce legal battle over the issue and finally Microsoft lost it. Now its the term of Apple, that's all.

It's bit complex.

And also the word 'hacking'! It may be like 'sex'.

Is 'sex' bad? answer is 'Yes' and 'No'.

Within the marriage bond it is good and it's good use should be promoted. But it can also be 'bad'. The context and motivation will decide it.

I do try to understand the confusion of a PARENT in this situation. How to guide his siblings? It's a real challenge - to teach him to differentiate between the 'right' and the 'wrong', in this complex world. Good conscience formation with the help of genuine religious values only will help the child to survive positively in this ever changing world.

Media always make hype - especially, if its regarding Mac products! I wish they give at least as importance as this to the suffering people in the world. They wont - especially the Western Media. Sorry.

iPhone Hackers and the moral dilema

The IPhone has been hacked!

READ THE LINKS:

Teen trades hacked iPhone for new car

Code crack opens the iPhone floodgates

A Concerned parent wrote to me:

"Dear Fr. Jaison,

Living in the modern world on many occasions we get confused reading the stuff like the one below

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070828/ap_on_re_us/odd_iphone_unlocked

"We grew up listening to the stories of early Christians loosing their life for sake of their beliefs but now he has traded on the flaws of a company's product to get rich, people like you who tech savvy and religious are ones who should address to this....I have a son aged 1 yr 5 months but i am not sure how i am going to impart the values which i gained to him when I myself don't find enough words to explain that what we just read is wrong even though i know it is wrong. How will i be able to justify... seems people no more think about the cardinal sins."

What's the morality behind this event.

The apple has locked their new phone to a particular service provider. It's a business decision. The goal is very clear - giving the monopoly of it's new phone to someone. If someone wants to use iPhone, they have to choose the 'provider' as well. How morally upright that position is?

A BIG QUESTION?

The sole aim is making more profit - by using intellectual property right.

Now, some kids wants to use their brain to show that they can break that code. They may be called hackers! But what they are doing is also intellectual work. They got a right over their skills too... isn't it. We may have to legalize it, that all.

It's an open ended question. A lot of moral principles may come in play. But I would like to side with the kids... The preferential option for the poor!

Examiner Report of my Minor Thesis (its pretty good!)

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July 4, 2007

Minor Thesis::Jaison Paul Mulerikkal

Dear Sirs,

The minor thesis of Jaison Paul Mulerikkal investigates a very relevant and original research topic. Due to the permanently increasing traffic in the Internet as well as the increasing bandwidth and processing power of end systems, it makes much sense to implement content delivery networks based on end system functionality. The minor thesis proposes an architecture, where systems deployed both in the customer and operator premises are used. The architecture has been evaluated by simulation experiments. The architecture design is rather straight forward and should be considered as a first attempt to develop a good solution for the addressed problem. It would have been nice to see a somewhat more innovative solution, but this was probably not possible due to time constraints. It is somewhat surprising that the author did not really find scenarios, where the benefits of the proposed approach become more obvious. On the other hand, the results also suggest that there is significant need to further investigate the problem. The results presented seem to be quite complete and the reader gets the impression that the evaluation has been performed very carefully.

The thesis is very well written and structured. It is easy to read and understand. The results are presented and discussed in an appropriate way. The conclusions are logical and consequent. The related work has been discussed very well. The author seems to have a very good background on the related research in the field. Overall, the minor thesis is of good quality, the results are interesting, and the student proved to be able to perform research in a systematic way. Therefore, I propose “pass” as the result for the thesis.


Examiner

Distributed Content Delivery Network

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here is the abstract of my Minor Thesis. bit technical, but will give an idea about what i'm doing.. have a look.. good luck..

Abstract
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Commercial Content Delivery Networks create their own network of servers around the globe to effectively deliver Web content to the end-users. The peering of Content Delivery Networks (CDN) would increase the efficiency of commercial CDNs. But still the high rental rates resulting from huge infrastructure cost make it inaccessible to medium and low profile clients . Academic models of peer-to-peer CDNs aim to reduce the financial cost of content distribution by forming volunteer group of servers around the globe. But their efficiency is at the mercy of the volunteer peers whose commitment is not ensured in their design. We propose a new architecture that will make use of the existing resources of common Internet users in terms of storage space, bandwidth and Internet connectivity to create a Distributed Content Delivery Network (DCDN). The profit pool generated by the infrastructure savings will be shared among the participating nodes (DCDN surrogates) which will function as an incentive for them to support DCDN. Since the system uses the limited computing resources of common Internet users, we also propose a suitable load balancing (LB) algorithm so that DCDN surrogates are not burdened with heavy load and requests are fairly assigned to them. Simulations have been carried out and the results show that the proposed architecture (with LB) can offer same or even better performance as that of commercial CDN.

Techno Stuff

My techinical blogs goes here...