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I have not used Floppy Disks a lot - but I have had my share as I started of my experience with computers in CLIs. Over the years, the scope of data storage from a consumer perspective has grown in scale - from floppy disks to TeraDisks. Not long back, Vinyas had written about Blu Ray disks, and now Sourjya writes about TeraDisks in the near future.

Let us look at how the storage was used by people, how they are used presently, and what would the TeraDisk mean in that perspective.

Floppy Disks

There were two types of floppy disks. The partially flexible 5.2″ floppy disks that could store 1.2 MB of data. And then, there was the 3.2″ floppy disk that could store 1.4 MB which came in a sturdy plastic casing. This was quite enough during those times (back in late 90s) when the OS could be booted out of a floppy disk. It was quite sufficeint for the restricted consumer market. At most, it was used for storing RTF (Rich Text Formatted) documents, and spread sheets. The more common use was to store documents in vanilla ASCII format. The The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle amounts to just around 576 kB and contains 12 novels. This is not the usual size of the documents that people would work with. It would range around 1 kB to 10 kB. That meant, one could store around 100 documents in a single floppy disk.
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Yes - we are all in a rather excited mood after engadget reported that iPhone could be unlocked and we could use other SIMs than that provided by AT&T. I am not a iPhone user, and I do not much care about it. But it made me remember of the days as communication engineering student, and I thought I would share it here.

What is SIM?

SIM or Subscriber Identity Module is a IC (Intergrated Circuit) chip that is used to identify a GSM subscriber with in a network. GSM is considered the second generation in mobile phone telephony protocol - more on that in a later post.

Pushing aside all these technical lingo aside, what does this mean to us users? SIM allows us to change a phone - the device without changing our number, with out changing our subscription to a particular network. It also means that, it allows us to change our network and still keep using our phone.
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Social Networking Sites, as much as they build bridges between people, also are a cause for deterioration of behavior of the community as a whole.

It is basically not just Social Networking Sites, but any site that foster interaction between people - is a place where community behavior could take the wrong turn.

Could you imagine how in appropriate it is, for people in real life, when they meet each other in person, in a public place to rant out ‘colorful’ words at each other? From the mild ‘you suck’ to anything highly profane - uttered in public would be ridiculed. It is not that people do not use such words at all - but it is acceptable in some places. Say a intoxicated people in a drinking place, or may be on a free form wrestling ring.

The anonymity or the layer of insulation that the internet gives is sufficient for the people to go over the edge. It takes all forms and shapes - and is quite amusing to study. Even credible people cringe at the thought of the Digg userbase. It does not take long for a userbase to turn into a mob. All rationality is thrown to the winds and what remains is something that is much closer to a deranged beast.

Of course, I have made a lot more friends online than the times I have had to face such nuisance. But I have to admit that the chances that you run into a person with retarded behavior is much more than your neighbor being a psycho killer. (No, it is not based on any statistics )

Social Networking Sites have quite a few features that are quite common, even if it is a general site or a site on targeted niche.

Basically these sites have the following features.

• Profile
• Friends List
• Messaging
• Discussion

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You are a member of at least one social networking site - be it Orkut, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, Bebo or some other. You are a member of one or more of them. It makes one wonder, what is it about these sites that make it so desirable to have a place for yourself there.

On a very basic level, social network sites is a list of friends, family and other types of contacts. It is just an extension of your life. You have friends and family in your real life (not to say that online is not real), and you connect with them in various ways for various purposes.

You want to change and move to a new house? Call your friends and drop them a word. Very soon you will have a list of houses you can move in to as your choices. And how many times have you suggested a friend to another when they wanted a roommate? We seek contacts and store them just in case that we might need them at some point in future.

Having a network can some times me more of an asset that having something tangible. And it comes as no surprise that this has extended to the online world.

The internet might have made the world a smaller place, but it is these social networking sites that have brought people of common interests closer.

In few following posts, I will be trying to analyze these social networking sites, and just the people networks in general, so that we can have a better understanding of them.

The much awaited Simpsons movie was released few days back. After years of airing, and numerous episodes, as mentioned in their site, the stupidity of Homer Simpson would only fit the wide screen.

Well, like most story, the movie had a beginning, middle and an end. The protagonist (Homer) had challenge, went on a journey, overcame the hurdles, and met an ending.

It was a wonderful experience, and it entertained me. It has entertained several of the fans. But does that leave the hook of the movie story, the thing that cause Homer go to Alaska and come back, seems to have been forgotten. Many story tellers and movie directors usually have allegory in the story, and no one does it more in-your-face than Matt Groening. The hook of the movie was about pollution.

It was about the pollution destroying the rivers, and it was about the pollution wreaking havoc on the ecosystems. It was about how we call global warming a myth and try to shut our eyes to it all. We shut our eyes as the movie character Mr.Cargill shuts the whole of Springfield.

But when has shutting something down ever made a problem go away? It is when we face the problems, that we can find solution to them.

What do you think? What can we do for protecting the nature? Did you think about this when you watched the movie?