Internet telephony to open up in India
Yes. It is a dream come true for Indians!
IP Telephony or internet telephony has long been expected to materialize in India in full flow so that cheap telephone calls to and from India become a reality. So far,there has been a restriction on calls through internet terminating in a local telephone service. Now that restriction has been removed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the statutory governing body. In other words, it was PC to PC or Phone to PC in India; now it can be anything to plain old phone in India! So services like Vonage will become a reality in India too. And it will turn out to be a boon to the Non-resident Indians (NRIs) who are spending through their noses currently to keep in touch with their kin residing in India.
Here is the news as it appeared in IndiaTimes:
In a significant step that will have bearing on Indian telecom services and push the rates down further, Telecom regulator on Monday recommended complete opening up of Internet telephony.
The Internet service providers (ISPs) have been permitted to provide unrestricted Internet telephony which means they can terminate Internet telephony calls on PSTN (public switched telecom network) and vice-versa.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has even allowed the national long distance (NLD) operators to connect to ISPs through public Internet (Internet cloud) for unrestricted Internet telephony. But for that to take place, ISPs and NLDs will have to thrash out mutual agreements for unrestricted Internet telephony, said TRAI.
The move will further boost competition in the domestic long distance segment and result in lower STD tariffs. The move will permit calls from personal computers to fixed line and mobile phones. Currently, a voice call can travel between two computers but not from a mobile or a fixed phone. This is expected to open huge channels of revenues for ISPs.
NLD shall make suitable commercial and technical arrangements with access providers i.e PSTN/PLMN (public land mobile network lines) for unrestricted Internet telephony said the regulator in a statement.
You can read the rest of the story here.
The next web
If you are keen on getting a “Wow” from your date and flaunt your geeky erudition to the gullible, you should nonchalantly drop such pieces of jargon as Web 2.0, Mashup, Semantic web and all that jazz.
But it seems the exotic Semantic Web is really round the corner and is sure to revolutionize the way we use the web to get information. Simply “Googling” for it is going to be passé. Here is what ZDNet has to say about the phenomenon that is ushering in a paradigm shift on the internet:
Google is essentially a media company - as Tom Foremski succinctly points out here - logging your actions for Ad Word generation like a supermarket rewards card program while leveraging brute force search of the indexed web as you search for your keywords and phrases.
Wikipedia is essentially a single destination site, which means lots of laborious single issue searching.
The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.
This semantic, machine-read next generation enables much richer search. So if you are looking for information about pinball machines for example, this Freebase example gives you a rich contextual grouping of related and highly relevant information.
Read more about on ZDNet.
Saturday Links
- Running the numbers - a fantastic visual treat! (but be patient)
- The “HowTo” search engine
- Free Excel spreadsheets for your everyday financial management tasks
- Who’s your daddy?
- Test your survival acumen in some extreme circumstances
10 most annoying programs on your computer
Techrepublic has listed 10 most annoying programs to a computer user, both on the system and on the internet.
I have slightly changed the list and put them in the ascending order of the degree of annoyance. Though the intensity of pain in the ass that these bugs produce is purely subjective, there is no gainsaying that there exist some specimens of terror in digital form which inflict universally on the hapless users.
10. Flash
Flash is a good program. There is nothing to replace Flash movies - SWF or FLV. In fact the Youtube revolution has been made possible only by Flash. And Flash embedded players have ushered in the phenomenon of podcasting. In fact your cyber life would be thrown light years backwards with out Flash.
But having said that, there is no forgiving truckloads of Flash movies in intro pages of web sites. They trickle like molasses in December!
9. Yahoo and Google Toolbars
Read more
Webmonkey is back!
You may remember how I lamented about the conking out of one of the most renowned web tutorials on the internet, The Webmonkey. I fact I posted twice about it here and here.
But the good news is that Webmonkey is back with vigour. It is re-emerging in the wiki format. Read about it in the all new Webmonkey website!
Web 2.0 for Dummies!
The machine is Us/ing Us!
YouTube - Watch - Kansas State University Video
The Barometer Problem
It is one the urban legends doing rounds around the internet. It has attained such a longevity that it pops up over and over again in different versions, sometimes attributed to a celebrity to bestow it a bit of respectability!
Here is the story:-
Some time ago I received a call from a colleague who asked if I would be the referee on the grading of an examination question. He was about to give a student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the student claimed he should receive a perfect score and would if the system were not set up against the student: The instructor and the student agreed to submit this to an impartial arbiter, and I was selected.
I went to my colleague’s office and read the examination question: “Show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer.”
The student had answered: “Take a barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower the barometer to the street and then bring it up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building.”
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About Me
I am S.K!
Ok, what's the big deal, you may ask! But you may miss a good deal if you do not dwell deep into this web site, specially hand-crafted for you. But what about me, the person? Wait, I am not good at making things up. If you stumble upon a good-sounding résumé, please pass it on to me!
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Real happiness is when you marry a girl for love and find out later she has money. -
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