DRDO vs. Armed Forces

There was a flare up on the "Technology Day" between the Defence R&D Organization and the services high ups in the presence of the prime minister and the defence minister.This has been a on-going feud. I remember it so vividly from the time I was part of DRDO.

On the one hand was bad management of DRDO projects. I sincerely believe the main problem was project management. That's how we have these horror stories of never ending projects like the main battle tank. some of the missile programmes and so on. Many a times the technology proposed would be comparatively old. There was always the risk of our enemies being technologically advanced.

On the other hand we had the problem of faith in the indigenous technology by the armed forces. Beside, there was this lure of getting trained abroad when technology was imported. There were obviously some added considerations too when such technology purchases are decided. All in all it used to like, DRDO cannot deliver anything worthwhile! Things changed somewhat recently when at least some meaningful systems were delivered to the forces and they got inducted.

Until DRDO is able to deliver comparable technology to what's available in US, Europe etc. this feud will remain. I also have a strong feeling that, unless the R&D model follows what US and European countries do, is followed, the devlopments would not meet the world standards.

IITs Going Online

Today's papers talked about a plan by the premier technical education institutes to go online so that a much larger segment of students can access the course material. This is going to take couple of years. What is of concern though, is if the standards of the students taking these courses will be at par with the students who sit in the classes and take the regular exams etc.

This is central to all off-campus curses conducted by any university. It is generally considered to of lower grade than attending full time at a brick and mortar institution. Today, you can have any kind of access, touch points that a regular institution provides through  the Internet. The central issue is if appropriately designed. I am sure any educational plan designed by the IITs can take care of such issues.

More crucial question is can the standards be maintained with such on-line access.Unless that can be done, when a graduate coming out through the regular program and a student finishing the course on-line are indistinguishable, such a program can be meaningful. This problem is central to the perception that all such distance learning courses suffer from. I wonder how they are going to ensure the uniformity of the quality!

ARM amazes Me!

A silicon processor that is not fabricated by the designer company is an amazement in itself. Thar the processor has been around for such a long time and has undergone improvements over time adds to that amazement. Though it could not make dent in the PC space, it is almost omnipresent in the mobile telephone handset segment. There are two interesting evolutions taking place as of now.

The first of these is that the personal computer may be undergoing an evolution in front of our eyes. The tablet form factor seems to be generating a lot of interest and there are a lot of devices on offer or about to come into market. The leader in this space is the iPad of course who seems to have sold more than a million devices, since its introduction a little more than a month ago. This form factor is likely to become the device of choice for people.Will the recent netbook form factor be as popular as it was at the launch of the products?

The other evolution that is happening is that tablets are getting designed by not Intel processors. The highly popular iPad is built around a processor, the A4, that has ARM at its core. There are tablets that use NVIDIA's Tegra processor that has two core ARM and graphics processors to take care of handling 1080p video. So, an interesting speculation is if ARM is going to take over the Tablet space!

While Atom from Intel powered the netbooks predominantly, the netbooks were designed to be mainly for net surfing rather than personal productivity. Thus the underpowered Atom was a good fit. But, now it is threatened with tablets. Tablets are designed to be able to personal productivity applications as well. That is a genuine threat to netbooks and Intel has already come out with a dual core Atom which can overcome the low horse power of the original Atom chip.

Let's wait and watch if ARM is going to take over the tablet space after conquering the mobile kingdom!

There's a New Species Evolving in PC Space Right Before our Eyes!

These evolutionary changes were happening for sometime now. The classic Wintel (Window + Intel) species have ruled the PC landscape for quite some time now. I am assuming the laptop to be a simple variant of the same PC model. Real change came with the introduction of the netbook. While the OS remained the Windows predominantly, there was a new processor, the Intel Atom. But it was still WinTel. It was sufficiently different variant of the PC. It was designed to be lower powered, meant for the surfing, mail and such Internet based applications in a very convenient, highly portable format.

Suddenly, there is a lot of activity in the Tablet format. Not that the species evolved just now. It has been around for some time.There were periodic attempts at  creating a tablet that will catch the fancy of users. The scene fairly exploded recently with the coming out of the iPad. Just today I read a report it has sold a million pieces in the 28 days it has been selling. There are many tablets in the works. Here are some examples. As with any evolutionary situation, some tablets are getting killed too! Microsoft seems to have killed its version for the tablet space. So did HP apparently, they killed the "slate" model they were readying for the market. Netbook sales seem to have flattened. So is tablet the next avatar of the personal computer. looks like hat. I personally think that's what's going to to happen. Let's see!