The Hindu Business Line : Moral tone on mobile

Sample these news headlines from the vernacular media: ‘Cell phone revolution: Satan in palm. Tragedy caused by cell phone. Seller of cell phone memory cards with obscene pictures arrested. TADA for jeans… POTA for cell phone! The plight of colleges under excessive controls.’

Citing these shrill voices, Gopalan Ravindran observes that the Indian news channels miss no opportunity to blow the moral panic whistle with regard to their coverage of new media. “Some sections have gone overboard in turning isolated incidents of wrongful uses of mobile phones and the Internet as a basis for constructing scare stories about new media technologies,” he adds, in one of the essays included in Living the Information Society in Asia, edited by Erwin Alampay ( www.idrc.ca).

In the majority of cases where Indian media and authorities have constructed mobile phone moral panics, only the young users have been blamed for causing threats to the accepted norms of social behaviour, Ravindran frets. “They are seen as the ‘folk devils’ armed with mobiles. Every young user of mobile phones is pictured as a potential deviant in the eyes of family elders, media, authorities of educational institutions and law enforcement agencies.”

He rues that ‘the cultural politics of new media modernity is emblematic of the creation of subjectivities that are made to distrust the same technologies which are being put to (mis)use by the institutionalised panopticons for surveillance and control.’

For the research-avid.

Bright outlook for Indian IT-BPO

At the current pace of adding nine million phones every month, the target of 500 million connections by 2010 is well within our reach, observes The Penguin CNBC-TV18 Business Yearbook 2009, compiled and edited by Derek O’Brien ( www.penguin.com). Surpassing the US, India now has the second largest wireless network in the world, and the Government is now looking forward to achieve the target of 600 million telephone subscribers by the end of the Eleventh Plan and to achieve a rural tele-density of 25 per cent by means of 200 million rural connections.

The chapter on industry notes that, among the sectors, electronics and IT (information technology) are the fastest-growing, in terms of production and exports. “With complete delicensing of the electronics industry with the exception of aerospace and defence electronics, and along with the liberalisation in foreign investment and export-import policies of the entire economy, this sector is not only attracting significant attention as an enormous market but also as a potential production base by international companies.”

Quite reassuringly, the publication finds the outlook for Indian IT-BPO to be bright; “and the sector is well on track to achieve its aspired target of $60 billion in export revenues and $73-75 billion in overall software and services revenues by 2010. Key factors underlying this optimism include sufficient demand, strong fundamentals, and a favourable policy environment.”

Informative read.

Say bye to brute force

Real-world programs that address even moderately complex business processes need thousands of lines of code and raw coding in a native programming language is not for the faint-hearted, cautions Prithwis Mukerjee in Business Information Systems: Systems engineering for business managers ( www.jaicobooks.com). “But even the smartest and swiftest of programmers, working alone, cannot write all the programs that are needed. That is why we have teams of programmers — some writing code, others testing the code that has been written and making sure that each program works in harmony with the other programs.”

Coordinating complex and simultaneous tasks by multiple people, checking and spotting errors, getting errors fixed and making sure that fixing errors in one part of the code is not causing new errors in another part of the code is a daunting task, the author informs.

“After a point, this brute force approach to application development begins to suffer from the law of diminishing returns.” Which is where OOP or object oriented programming techniques become relevant, Mukerjee introduces.

Starter material written in a friendly style.

Online dating

About a decade ago, at the age of 33, when Darren Richards thought that the Internet could be the perfect way of meeting other singletons in his area, in the UK, he was in for a disappointment. His search for an online agency to join led him only to companies in the US. “Even worse, none of the sites seemed to take the idea of meeting a new partner online seriously, encouraging members to use silly nicknames such as Sexy Babe and Hot Pants,” recounts Rachel Bridge in one of the chapters included in How I Made It: 40 successful entrepreneurs reveal all ( www.vivagroupindia.com).

Richards thought that he couldn’t be the only person who wanted to use the Internet to find a serious date. And that resulted in a blueprint for a British online dating service.

“The first few Web site developers he approached told him it could not be done, but he eventually found someone able and willing to do the job. Richards gave the designer a 20 per cent stake in the company in return for creating a new interactive Website, and it was launched in 1999 at a cost of £2,500. Within three months it had 40,000 members.”

Facilitating payment by credit card was the next big hurdle he faced. Barclaycard was not interested in the idea. “It was a nightmare,” reads a quote of Richards. “I knew the company wouldn’t survive unless we could take credit-card payments. But we were turned down three times by Barclaycard because they felt that a dating service was a high-risk area in the same category as gambling and pornography…”

Now, www.DatingDirect.com is ‘the UK’s largest dating Web site, with more than 5 million members, each of whom has a detailed personal profile on the Web site.’

Motivational stories.

Rule chains

Packets entering a firewall can be processed through three tables — viz. filter, mangle, and nat — writes Ashok Kumar Harnal in Linux: Applications and administration ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com). A filter table reads packet content (packet header to be accurate) and based on the information content may decide to accept, reject, or drop it, he explains. “A mangle table reads a packet and may modify it in some way. Use of mangle table is rare. A nat table is a special case of mangling in that it may alter either packet’s source address or destination address.”

Visualise each table as having rows or rule-chains, the author elaborates. “Each rule-chain, in turn, is a series of rules.” For instance, filter table uses three rule-chains, viz. Forward, Input and Output. “When a packet enters a network interface from outside, a routing decision is taken on whether it is to be passed over to the other network interface or whether it is to move over to one of the processes within the system…”

Recommended addition to the hands-on techies’ shelf.

Tailpiece

“They refused to believe that IT has been hit...”

“Even after you showed them the pink slip?”

“Yes, and I also tried to make my point by spraying a popular mosquito repellent, but in vain!”