Thought Garage

Link to story at NewsFactor Magazine Vonage, the well known VOIP phone company and The Cloud of UK, leading provider of Broadband wireless will be unveiling a new service in May that enable making cheaper VOIP calls on mobile phones.  The service however only works with new handsets that support dual band (GSM + WiFi) and when the user is in the zone covered by a hotspot.   The Cloud is reported to have around 7000 WiFi hotspots across UK, providing an excellent footprint for greater use of this new service. The starts a new era of making cheaper and mostly unlimited Mobile calls for a fixed monthly subscription when you are around hotspots. Considering the fact that 70% of mobile calls are made inside buildings, airports, home etc, if there are enough wifi hotspots, user can make most of his/her calls when using wifi-hotspot and hence they are almost free.  There are interesting stories from other service providers across Europe that started similar VOIP on Mobile services for ...

B2Day : The Quarter: Google Versus Yahoo How Google is outperforming Yahoo, in numbers. The difference is huge and gap is widening at a rapid pace. This blog posting has very instructive numbers comparing peg to peg to see the difference. Here is why Google commands a $130 billion market cap, whereas Yahoo's stock has been treading water for a year, with a market cap of $47 billion:                                            Annual                            Annual   1Q06                Google         % change    Yahoo       % change Market Cap        $130 billion       +114            $47 billion            -8 Direct Revenue    $1.5 billion        +93               $1.1 billion       +33 Net income         $529 million      +60              $160 million       -22 Search share           43%              +6               Â...

Mauritius is heading the list of top 10 Foreign Investors in India with Rs.313 Billion with US lagging behind in the second position at Rs.99 Billion. See the graph below:  Link: http://ia.rediff.com/money/2006/apr/21kbk.htm?q=bp&file=.htm Â

Celebrating The Moments  by Grady Booch Dick Gabriel passed this on to the Hillside Group: I got this from a colleague: "As you may have noted, on Wednesday, at two minutes and three secondsafter 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. Unless you are very young, or live a very long time, this is probablyyour one chance to observe this date. Whoop it up." Luckily for people in India and across Europe ( for that instance any country that follows DD/MM/YYYY calendar format), you can seize the moment on 4th May, 2006 at 01:02:03.

[ Read about the first part of this Passionate vs. Professional Programmer here.] Again only few came up with ideas while the rest are busy in discussing them. It would be better to know a thing about the software product in question to understand these suggestions and how they can impact the product. The product is a set of around 20 very complex soft real time applications that integrate with another 5 third party products. Out of them 4 applications are key applications that can greatly impact the overall performance. Applications are written in C/C++ and run on unix platforms. Here is the list of suggestions(not in any particular order). 1. Do line by line code review to identify bottle necks. 2. Initialize uninitialized variables to prevent faults. 3. Remove unused local variables to improve performance. 4. Use of profilers to profile the code under run time with near-real time load and identify the 20% of the code that is executed 80% of the time. This 20% code will be reviewed ...