Whats your limit anyway ?

Yahoo has announced that Yahoo Mail users will get limitless storage space !!!

Its almost 10 years since I created my yahoo account. I remember creating it in my college. And in those days, creating an email account was like the most toughest thing on earth and you needed support from people to help you create it. And if you were the unlucky one who was late to join the party and didnt have an email account, you were looked upon as inferior souls who were missing the most important thing in life !!!

Well, in a way now email has become ubiquitous and is everybody's second identity [ or should I say first ? ]. Its really so hard to imagine a world without email. But hey, emails have been around, atleast in my limited world, for only about 10 to 12 years !!! Technology can certainly paint this world in a completely new color :-)

The interesting part of the announcement was in the details given there about how the industry has started creating goods that can just store more and more data. I liked the way he has depicted the growth in stages for the past 10 years. Imagine storing a 100 hours of video, thats like atleast 35 Hindi movies, in a small iPod that can fit into your pocket. Compare this with the delimma we had in college when we had to store 2 pdf files in our 1.44 MB floppy !!! Will one floppy be sufficient to hold them ? or should I just borrow another floppy from my friend ?

Moore's Law rocks !!! If anyone had any doubts in the value of compounding returns, they just have to take a mathematical look at how the storage space on a single device has grown from 1.44 MB to 80GB in a span of 10 years. Infact, on taking a more closer look we have even beaten the 18 month cycle and reduced it to 10 months !!!

Strangely enough, even with these huge jumps in memory storage capacities, I still find instances where I end up having the same delimma of less storage space I had in college. Will one memory stick of 1GB be sufficient to store these 2 movies ? or should I just borrow another 1GB stick from my friend ?

Parkinson's Law rocks too :-) Wonder how soon/long it will take for Parkinson's Law to dawn on Yahoo Mail's unlimited storage space. Is there anything bigger than "limitless" ...

Wah re bengalooru

Back to blogging after a long hiatus ...

In the past couple of months when I had been extremely busy, I had the chance of travelling outside Bangalore on a few occasions. And this time for a change it was in a bus. While travelling I realised the truth in the saying "A nation is as developed as its roads."

The national highway that connects Bangalore and Hyderabad is so very well done you wont feel any bumps and can have a very peaceful sleep even when travelling in a bus [ the hi-tech, non-volvo type of buses ]. Its a huge 6 lane road all along very neatly done.

There are quite a few other roads that connect Bangalore to other neighbouring states. Most of these roads are state highways. I was shocked to see the condition of these roads. They are so pathetic that no vehicle travelling on it can be in a good condition after a ride. The condition of the people travelling in those vehicles is beyond imagination and are left to the mercy of the driver's maneuvering skills on how best he can find the path with the least number of bumps. What was disheartening to see was that the roads were in this condition even as close as 30 kms near to Bangalore.

It goes to show the extent of neglection of the authorities. When they are not bothered to fix these things about 30 kms away from Bangalore, imagine the plight of the people living 300 to 400 kms away from Bangalore !!!

Everyone has problems with the crumbling infrastructure in Bangalore and all the money is being poured to fix this, as if this is the only place in the entire state that has problems. Even after all this fire fighting by the authorities, the people end up wasting their time stuck up in huge traffic jams.

In the same trip that i travelled on that pathetic state highway, it was such a relief to find our bus making less noise when we were near Bangalore. Within 15 minutes of this pleasure, we were welcomed to Bangalore with a traffic jam at a railway crossing !!! To cross that small stretch of 0.5 kms, we had to wait 30 minutes in the bus that was moving slower than a snail. I really pity the bus drivers who first have to drive the noisy bus on those pathetic state highways and then counter with such rude and senseless traffic jams. No wonder, these bus drivers are being taught meditation to have their emotions in control.