Technological Digest XI

1. The Coming Death Of Indian Outsourcing - in a Forbes article, carrying this ominous title, Sramana Mitra predicts that due to rising salaries and costs in India will drop further (it already dropped from 1:6 to 1:3), to a point that by 2015 it won't be worth the effort. I already have customers who started outsourcing to China and the Philippines. What's next?
   
   
2. Fresh Air - as you must have heard by now, last week Adobe launched Air - a web/desktop development environment. Along with the open source Flex 3, it provides an infrastructure to develop both web and standalone applications.
   
   It will directly compete with efforts like Microsoft's Silverlight, Mozilla's Prism, Google's Gears and a Sun effort called JavaFX (although, when was the last time you saw a Java applet on a web page? And I don't mean horrible legacy applications like Cocnur).
   
   If Adobe would be smart enough to keep all development tools and IDEs free, like Microsoft's Express studios, they may get every Flash/Flex developer on board easily.
   Read some more about it in this NY Times article.
   
   
3. Do Gamers Enjoy Dying? (virtually, of course) - this article describes a psychological research, conducted amongst FPS (First Person Shooter) gamers. In this case, people were playing James Bond Nightfire (cool game, IMHO) while their facial expressions were recorded and measured.
   The research claims that people felt relief when their digital self was shot - a sort of unburdening feeling.
   I don't know what they're talking about and who were the research candidates. Probably it was conducted amongst pacifist psych majors.
   Every time I die in a game (currently, Call of Duty 4 - best game of 2007), I curse in 4 different languages and set out to kill my killers .
   
   
4. Miyahoo - according to this eye-opening NY Times article by Randall Stross, Microsoft should pursue SAP and not Yahoo, if it is to survive Google and the coming market changes (thanks to Yaniv for sending the link).
   
   Meanwhile, an internal Microsoft email is trying to convince employees that pursuing Google is the right move.
   
   
5. IPv4 Running Out of Time - IPv6 is an initiative that was launched by the IETF, in an effort to prepare for the day that IP addresses run out. About a month back, it was announced that IPv6 is now supported on main internet routers.
   
   An IP is the Internet Protocol address, allowing your computer or domain to be connected to the internet (to find out your IP address, open a command window and type IPCONFIG).
   
   The address scheme we use today (known as IPv4) will be able to coexist with IPv6 for a transition period, but eventually will have to be dropped. This article claims that IPv4 will run out of addresses as soon as 2010.
   
   IPv6 supported by almost every Microsoft operating system out there (needs a download for XP and 2003, comes built into Vista and 2008 read more here), Mac's Leopard, and Ubuntu.
   
   But it will require a lot of effort from organizations and a lot of new equipment (routers, firewalls, switches) to support IPv6 addresses. This may be another Y2K issue lurking in the shadows (think about every IP field in every database and every piece of IP authentication code...). Good time to be a consultant .
   
   Read more about IPv6 on the official site.
   
   
6. Online Intrusions Going Up - banks and financial institutions in the US report an increase in damages caused directly by online intrusions, according to this Washington Post article.
   Pretty soon it won't be worth it to actually rob a bank - just sit at home and break their online defenses.
   
   
7. What Would Warren Buffet do? - a bunch of MBA students, from leading colleges, participate in a raffle once a year. The prize? Fly to Omaha, Nebraska and spend some time asking Warren Buffet, the financial wizard, any question they want.
   
   This year, a student from Atlanta's Emory college called Dang Le, summarized the conversation in his blog. Since publishing this post, it received plenty of attention (Digg, Redit etc.)
   
   I read through it in one seating - the man makes a lot of sense and every answer is full of experience and knowledge. I wish I could ask him some questions too - but I can't afford to pay $250,ooo to have lunch with him.
   
   Here's just one quote from this fascinating post. When asked how does he define hapiness, Buffet answered:
   

   Buffett: I enjoy what I do, I tap dance to work every day. I work with people I love, doing what I love. The only thing I would pay to get rid of is firing people. I spend my time thinking about the future, not the past. The future is exciting. As Bertrand Russell says, “Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.” I won the ovarian lottery the day I was born and so did all of you. We’re all successful, intelligent, educated. To focus on what you don’t have is a terrible mistake. With the gifts all of us have, if you are unhappy, it’s your own fault.
   

   And again, thanks to Yaniv, who actually won the raffle this year, but couldn't go to Nebraska. Good luck in the mid-terms!