I'll pay the price...

You switch on your computer. You start a internet browser. It's time to take the daily dose of internet surfing, chatting and some social networking. But imagine if these "free" to access websites switched to become "paid" services.Will you the pay the price? Here's how some of the services may change for the worse!

Facebook: Social Networking @ $0.99 . What's on your mind? Post it down at $0.99. You were tagged in an album, Mohit likes your post, pay $0.99. They can keep signing up for the account free though. They may change their tag line on the website to : Worth the price and everyone can join!

Twitter: What are you doing? Tell the world in $ 3 only.

You Tube: You heard that a sneak peak of a new movie was exclusively available on You Tube. How about if You Tube shows you the 'trailor of the trailor'? Will you pay the price?

GPS with Google Maps: You start to move on the directions calculated. At a point the application asks you, Left or Right? Pay $2 to know!

Instant Messengers: The Instant time wasters in fact. How about if they become paid? Horrible Idea.

What basically brings me to the point of free and paid online services is realization of the fact of how we use these websites. Google Maps now routes the directions in India at most places. So nothing but just for fun, let's find the directions between our workplace and home. Or endlessly sit down to watch repeats of a T.V. program on YouTube. If these services would have been paid, we would have perhaps been more sensible in our approach to using these websites. What's your say? Leave your comments or e-mail me at muditbhargava09@gmail.com. :)

Raining: Cloud Computing

Even if your technical knowledge is limited, you are eligible to read the article!

You might have come across the term "Cloud Computing" in various tech columns recently. If the too technical language has left you perplexed, here's an attempt to present the simpler version.

The more technical and complex definition could be picked from wikipedia.org :P.

In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them. Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on Internet, and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet

More simply, Cloud computing consists of hardware and software resources made available on the internet managed by Third Party Services. These services typically provide access to advanced software applications and high end networks of server computing. This enables availability of high end technology at economical prices.

Some features that set it apart from other internet services include:

1. Demand and Supply: User pays for the time he requires.Generally by minutes or by hours.
2. Flexibility: User gets what he precisely requires. Available round the clock.
3. Hassle Free: Owned and managed by a third party.

Cloud can be either public or private. Public cloud is available to anyone on the internet. A private cloud is available to a limited number of people only. A public cloud used to create a private cloud is called virtual private cloud.

Cloud Computing can be divided into 3 Categories:

Infrastructure as a Service
Platform as a Service

Software as a Service

You've might have actually used a Cloud Computing Service before. Some of the popular ones include:

Amazon EC2 - Virtual IT

Google App Engine - application hosting
Google Apps - software as a service
Apple Mobile Me - Network Storage

To explain, what these services do I would need 4 new posts (can go quite boring). So instead you can just click on the above links to find out more from the official websites.

Getting back to the 3 categories of Cloud Computing.

Infrastructure as a Service: The customers use the providers application program interface (API) to conifgure and manage their virtual servers. Since you pay for what you use, this is often referred as utilty computing. One of the examples is the Amazon Web Services, which provide virtual servers with unique IP addresses and blocks of stotrage.

Platform as a Service: If you've downloaded an app from the Apple App Store or used some Google Apps, you've used a product of this service. Devellopers create applications on the provider's platforms. One way to do that is to use APIs. The app for the iPhone is build through the Software Development Kit (SDK) provided by Apple. Where the provider is Apple, and the interface -iPhone.

Software as a Service : A software hosted on a providers server is available for a stipulated time period. You pay for what you use. This cuts down the cost of large serves.

What we can conclude is actually that Cloud Computing is "utility computing". Which allows sharing of resources and is also economical.

(This is intended to be just an introduction to "Cloud Computing". )

A postcard from Bangalore

Thanks to the COMED-K exam, I got to travel to Bangalore thrice the last year(2009).

The first thought that comes to my mind, when I recall about my trip to Bangalore is the city's awesome weather. I was in Bangalore in the month of May. At the time the temperatures soar to around 45 degree Celsius in Delhi, but Bangalore it was just around 20-22 degree Celsius Any Delhite would understand,why I really loved Bangalore's weather.

But apart from the good weather, here's my version on some of the features of the city:

The City: Bangalore being tagged the Silicon Valley of India, as a first time visitor you might expect it to look like a really hi-tech city with a modernized outlook. (At Least I did). Though it's not an extra ordinarily advanced city yet it's good and much like Delhi. Small sized housing societies are more popular here unlike big towers you find in the NCR. It is a picture perfect situation: Great whether and a lot of greenery around. Palm Trees are a common site.

The food: This is one thing I can't stop talking about.I had the actual version of the South Indian food and believe me this is far better than what you might have had elsewhere. Bangalore has very good restaurants. I might be a little biased here. The reason being you can find very good Pure Vegetarian restaurants of cuisines from round the world. For a vegetarian like me, it is a feast! I had lunch at a very popular Italian restaurant "Cable Cars". Though I don't remember the name of the dishes, but the food was really good. Dosa, Idli, Vada, Sambhar are intended to be snacks. So these where obviously not a part of the dinner menu of a hard core South Indian Restaurant "South-Indes" that served food from the four South Indian states namely Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka. It came to me as a surprise though. Again the food was really good. Another specialty is the filter coffee, which is served hot in small sized steel glasses. And not to forget some of the really good and new dishes I had at Jijaji's home and prepared by Deepali Didi. :) I should have had another post for the food sections.

The Language: People in Bangalore communicate in Tamil, Kannada and English. But there is sort of uncomfort with Hindi. There are no communication problems though as a majority of people understand English.

Public Transport: VOLVO buses run through out the city. Radio Taxi's are readilly available at any point of time. The local buses are a little better than the DTC buses. The Bangalore Metro is under construction. And the Autowala's do not run by meters.

Shopping: There are two popular market streets in Bangalore. The Brigade Road and the M.G. Road. (Did you know that the MG Road in Delhi is better known as the Ring Road ?) These are two perpendicular roads. What's special about these market streets is that apart from the branded stores like Levis, UCB and others, you can easily shop for tradinational stuff. Malls are a less common site though. Another popular market street is the Commercial Street.

Sight Seeing:

Though this was a exam oriented trip, I managed to take a walk around Ulsoor Lake. The lake is located near the MG Road and spreads over a space of 1.5 km. It was constructed by Kempegodwa II during the second half of the 16th Century. It's now famous for it's boating facilities. In fact this is the only place I went out to. But the other places include Tipu's Summer Palace, The Fort, Cubbon Park and some temples. You can find more details on this web page:http://www.discoverbangalore.com/sightseeing.htm .

Bangalore is also a city of Cafe Coffee Days. Why I am saying this is because I could see a Cafe Coffee Day outlet every 5km.( I traveled a lot through out the city because both the examination center and the counselling center were quite far away from Didi's house.) Amazed by this I found that out of 845 Cafe Coffee Day outlets in India, 141 outlets are in Bangalore itself. In fact the first outlet to be opened was in Bangalore (Brigade Road).