Author name: S Anand

There’s no point buying faster PCs, since there aren’t many applications that need more computing power, says this NY Times article. via Scripting News

In the past, the bulk of PC sales came from replacements. I’ve seen PCs being replaced because they didn’t have enough RAM for Windows 3.1, or Windows NT ran too slow on them. Today, I’d rather spend the money on a digital video camera and an additional hard disk. My 1.6GHz processor is faster than I need anyway.

What I like best is that three years from now, I don’t need to feel embarrassed about owning an archaic 1.6GHz P4. It’s enough for me!

I have an over-developed dorsal striatum. That’s the brain part that makes you want to eat when you’re not hungry, just because the food’s there. via Plastic

The Social Life of Documents. Interesting article by Xerox’s PARC on the role of documents in the New Economy.

Infosys, Wipro and TCS are “expected to see a higher than expected rise” in their revenues. Hmm… I didn’t know that was logically possible.

A neurological experiment indicates that we can make better decisions sub-consciously, even if we can’t explain why.

Forbes: netizens don’t value privacy all that much. The average surfer that I meet does not know about privacy, and does not worry too much when explained either.

Broad and insightful talk by Diamond on why history unfolded differently across continents. Note that he’s talking about why and not how. Based on his book: Guns, Germs and Steel.

Today, I couldn’t access Google. When I tried, I got this site instead.

We keep hearing about India’s and Hindu’s peaceful history. But if India’s poor treatment of Buddhism is anything to go by, we’re no better than any others. Guess we were lucky to have Gandhi and a non-overthrowable British Government. Otherwise, we’d have gone to war as well.

Bottomquark’s review of distributed computing projects. What’s striking is that there are commercial distributed projects — where companies pay for the use of your idle time. That’s a powerful concept. Instead of buying computers from a vendor, or even computing time from a vendor, these projects are buying computing time retail.

The reason I guess this works is the dis-aggregation of computing time. When I buy a computer, I need its use for about 12 hours a day. But I’m paying for its availability 24 hours a day. Since I have that spare power, I can sell it as long as there’s a liquid market for such power.

Shortly, there will be companies creating this market — focusing on aggregating the retail computing power, and using them across several projects. (Google is already trying to do that through its toolbar, and so is Intel.)

Further, projects that earler could not be executed for lack of computing resources, but generating sufficient interest across the world, can now be undertaken. Like Internet Movie Project, for instance. Because people who are interested in the project will pay for it through their spare computing time.