Husssshhh… Don’t say anything about it. It isn’t mother of all scams but with all kinds of allegations flying thick and fast, I truly believe that it is a “manufactured” dissent. The culpable media is the biggest culprit because we have had scams before or the ones that have not been unearthed as yet. Or is out of public scrutiny or knowledge. Anything goes in the country with right “connections” and will to roughshod over the established procedures.

It the The Pioneer that has been after Raja for over a year now and they have permalinks on their homepage detailing the nitty gritty of the telecom auction. Rules were changed at last minute and it only goes on to say and prove the massive clout that these companies have.

Even though Raja is the face of great Indian Telecom scandal (more than Sukh Ram, if the readers care to remember who had no place to stash his ill gotten wealth), the nameless faceless wheelers dealers and fixers are not known. They would NEVER be known.

Pioneer interestingly had an editorial imploring Man-Moron Singh to sack the wily minister ( in interests on keeping the discussion clean, no one calls him a bastard). It is a scary thought. Companies have access to the corridors of power. At beck and call. They practically own the nation. They RUN the nation. Democracy is notional and till the time we don’t wake up to change the system, it would feed on you and me.

The ill gotten wealth is lost in a black hole. We wouldn’t know the quantum of it because it’s hard to believe the media. Yet, the money gifted away would be recovered from you and me. We would have to pay these buggers in way of “surcharges” or whatever they fancy.

TRAI, as usual, would look the other way. They are in any case, ahem….you know what.

Pioneer breaks the “scandal” causing a ruckus in Parliament.

Google News updates.

This is it. In a few hours, Canonical would “unleash” the power of free open source software. Atleast, it now looks like “Apple Mac Os” surpassing Windows way ahead. I have included the video for those who are coming in from the Windows world. For those upgrading from Koala version, it ought to be more of an incremental update.

Definitely, there is a lot of buzz around it. This being a Long Term Stable release would be supported for 3 years in the long run. There have been stories about 10 million active users of Ubuntu and it is slowly catching up and displacing the hegemony of Windows.

I believe that the next boost is going to come from mobile platform. We need better chips and a longer battery life to support all the fancy applications. Even then I realise that I am quite happy with my E63 running an old tired version of Symbian that has got gone open source. There are no easy answers to the choice of platform but I must admit that Apple iphone remains top of wish list of most of people.

It is because of the radical design factor and the fact that is well integrated with the applications. Ubuntu is going in right direction to update and step up investment in design and integrating social networks in the much talked about “me menu”. With release of Gnome 3 and Gnone “shell”, it would definitely rev up the acceptance specifically from the Mac users…or atleast I hope that it would get a “positive buzz” from those people who sit back on their ivory towers.

All the best Ubuntu. You guys rock!

There have been readers over here claiming that the much advertised Tata Photon Plus and it’s ilk with Reliance Incorporated doesn’t offer the “same speed” as promised.

One has to be completely naive to believe it. Truly. There are enough pussies who believe the dished out crap and once they realize that they have been “shortchanged”, these assholes whine on these columns. I have to delete tonnes of crap piling up because of my prolonged absence from here.

I have been pushing for a community Wifi which is freely accessible. Yet, in the scheme of things, everything needs to be rationed. The only thing which is not is mercifully condoms which I believe, finds a lot of “reluctance” with the populace and explains the burgeoning population in the land.

A free community Wifi would definitely ease up the access. It would lead to content generation and perhaps new ideas. There can be ideas explored to fund it publicly or some advertisement driven model. Google has shown some way. Optic fiber is cheap. But there is institutional lethargy to implement new ideas. The existing apple cart would be sorely upset because the services are nationalized. But then, as I have repeatedly pointed out earlier, public money ought not to be spent on black holes like Employment Guarantee (NREGA) but where it matters the most.

It is a pathetic waste of spectrum for 3G. The existing players have gobbled up, no new players have come in the market and there is a whiff of a huge telecom scam. Much larger in scope and extent than the current IPL hoopla.

We are like this only.