Changes coming

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836_page_5.htm

This can lead to huge changes in the way consumers, and ultimately businesses, do computing. And I don't mean the web browsing kind of computing. On the personal computing front google et al have already put forward their vision: everyone would have a box with little computational power and a broadband connection. Then all the actual work a typical user does will be done on a remote server with the box serving as the monitor interface. This is the kind of dumb-terminal mainframe approach of fifteen years ago, but probably will be cheaper than a PC with the added advantage that the user wouldn't have to upgrade his PC every two years.

Industrial designers happen to use huge computing power today. VLSI design, automotive design, aircraft engine design and several others are examples. All design cycles are, well, cyclic. You conceive a product, you do some back of the envelope (or equivalent) calculation, you define the architecture (usually in a divide and conquer approach, by breaking the system into smaller subsystems, and then into individual blocks). Till this point not a lot of computation are needed. But beyond this point serious computational power is usually needed, so much so that it becomes a bottleneck. After this point individual blocks have to be designed to their individual specs and verified. Usually there are iterations to check manufacturability and reliability. Then the blocks are put together in sub-systems and verified again. At this point some block specs may change and design iterations done again. Also exhaustive verification for a sub-system may be too computationally expensive and in many cases is not possible because computational resources will be too expensive to aggregate.
In the end sub-systems are put together to form systems, and these are not even verified with the actual sub-systems present. At this stage models of sub-systems' behaviour are used to simulate the systems. That is itself is extremely taxing on the computers.

Several, if not all, of the verification problems can be solved if more powerful computers are available to the designers. However several of the computationally toughest problems are not frequent enough for the design companies to invest in hardware and memory, thanks to the fact that design is cyclic. If the design companies can rent some computational power in such times that will be extremely beneficial to them.

In addition cost of infrastructure (hardware and software) is one of the biggest barriers to entry in the design field for entrepreneurs. A rental service will tackle such costs, and this means entrepreneurial activity all over the world can take off in design space.

I will eagerly wait to see what this move harbingers.

Frankly Internet was a more or less useless place till about 2000 (save the email), then wikipedia, amazon etc. made it useful. Fads like Facebook existed ten years ago, and went away with time. The real usefulness of the information revolution lay in connecting information held by people, not people themselves who were already connected by phone and email.

The present great change set to happen is death of communications as we know them once VoIP through technologies such as WiMAX takes over. That will be the next great thing happening on the Internet. It'll become The Communication Channel, by having all of the world's communications passing through it.

The foreseeable future is elaborated to some extent in the Businessweek story at the top. Internet will become a utility, a computational and communication utility, for everyone. And that will be the next revolution, a true IT revolution.

IT @ Bangalore

This week's Outlook Magazine is devoted to Bangalore's hatred for IT. The whole IT industry has been blamed for all the ills of Bangalore. Had it just been some stupid reporter or a bunch of idiot politicians it wouldn't have mattered much. However Prof. CNR Rao contributes a piece too and much as I respect him and his work, the piece is full of noxious garbage.

Here is the link to the article :http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20071217&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29&sid=2

I'll enlist his charges here:

1. "There was more poetry and music here before the IT boom" with the implication that IT is somehow responsible for getting rid of the music and poetry.
2. "there was more science here than anywhere else in India. Nowadays, nobody talks about it." implied: IT took science away from the city.
3. "Lots of intelligent people are doing jobs that are much below their intellectual capabilities"
4. "Right in the beginning, the IT industry should have planned their campuses in towns like Ramanagaram (40-odd km from Bangalore). They should have created IT satellite towns, but they all wanted land inside the city."
5. "IT people have a responsibility that they are yet to fulfil. If they're making so much money, why shouldn't they create an outstanding private university equivalent to Stanford or Harvard?"
6. "Our people have lost respect for scholarship. Money and commerce has taken over. If IT is going to take away our basic values, then you can burn Bangalore and burn IT. "

Let's analyse them one by one:

1. I don't see why or how would IT boom take away music and poetry. Neither does Prof. Rao enlighten us on exactly how IT industry happens to have achieved it. From the few plays I have attended in the city I can say that most of the audience comprises of IT engineers. I would rather say that the IT sector is patronising the arts than killing it.

2. Again I don't understand why or how would IT industry take away science. If Prof. Rao is talking about the HAL, DRDO, ISRO and the like, then he should see that they still are in Bangalore. If anything several companies are giving money to IISc to run its labs. ISRO and the ilk don't get that money for the simple reason that they are not allowed to.

Whether that means there was more science in Bangalore than anywhere else in the country is another matter. The record of all of the "more science here" worthies in hard output terms is dismal to say the least when one accounts for the money spent on them. On that note even if you don't account for the money spent the record of DRDO and HAL in terms of scientific research is really bad. Project are routinely late and practically never achieve the results. No significant research of fundamental nature is conducted at any of these places. And being an engineer myself I can tell very frankly that most of their employees are rather stupid who wouldn't qualify for the aptitude tests of the IT industry and so stick around and waste taxpayers' money.

When compared to rest of the country it gets worse the moment you exclude IT. Bangalore was never a major industrial centre except for government mandated industries. Textiles (and the innovation in it) is concentrated in Mumbai, Ahmedabad and generally the west of India. The petrochemical industry and its associated research is in the west too. Green Revolution was spearheaded by labs in the north. Steel and metallurgy industry and research is largely in the eastern parts. No atomic research labs exist in or around Bangalore.

The only industry that Bangalore can be proud of came through government mandated development. The only centre of technical intellect I can think of in Bangalore is IISc. And the less said about IISc's research the better. One wonders why Prof. Rao has to blame the nascent IT industry for not creating a Harvard or Stanford when his colleagues failed to put IISc on international research map with all the support our country could provide in six decades.

3. I must say this is a better situation than what Prof. Rao's dream would be: lots of monkeys (also known as DRDO scientists) wasting taxpayers' money in the name of science and national defence.

Moreover this actually is not the situation by and large. One complaint IT industry has is that it can't find enough people who are good enough to do the job. They have to poach from each other at nearly every job level. Clearly such a situation means that even in IT industry most people would be working on jobs they are just about good enough to do.

That doesn't mean there wouldn't be a small number of people who are doing stuff beneath their intellectual capacity. However number of such people is limited, it is unlikely that without IT industry their intellect would be challenged even to the extent it is challenged today, and IT industry does offer them better living standards than Prof. Rao's dream Bangalore ever did.

4. That is not actually the fault of the industry. Prof. Rao seems to think that IT industry is a wasteful HAL that will be given subsidised land of huge acreage with development funds and no accountability. The industry started small, with people working from small rooms, and then grew. When it did become big it moved out of the city.

But even so, in 2000 Koramangala was a remote and cheap part of the city, so was Indiranagar and the whole of Marthahalli. IT sector was present there even then. So to the extent it could the industry stayed away from the city anyway. It is just that where the industry succeeded, the city followed. And now it is claimed the IT industry took it away.

As far as going to Ramnagaram and other odd places is concerned I would say Prof. Rao is out of his mind. Where are the roads, the schools, the hospitals in Ramnagaram? If he is so incensed about the issue why doesn't he press the government to create all these basic amenities? Why should the IT engineers who happen to pay a third of their salaries in direct taxes, more in state's indirect taxes and then more in the locals' extortion be expected to pay again for these amenities when the taxes are supposed to take care of the infrastructure?

5. I have already written about that above, CNR Rao's friends had six decades to improve IISc to the levels of Harvard and Stanford with all the help government could provide. They couldn't do it. Why do they expect IT industry to do it for them?

On the other hand IT (and the whole "new economy") has been doing its work, not necessarily in Bangalore, but elsewhere. ISB in Hyderabad is one example, IIIT system is another. NIIT is a creation of the IT industry as are the assorted training centers all over the place. Infosys, Wipro and TCS run their own huge training centres, others run either smaller sessions or on the job training.

Can they match Stanford and Harvard in their research prowess? Of course not. But can Stanford and Harvard produce as many trained men as these organizations do, at this cost, and in such a quick time? Do we really need the kind of research Harvard and Stanford do (frankly US government thinks even US doesn't exactly, and that is why research funding in US is going down)?

6.Our people haven't lost their respect for scholarship. If anything such respect is even more. Scores of IT engineers try to gain admissions in US universities every year for higher studies.

However people have lost respect for charlatans and leaches that would rather sit in their ivory towers, waste taxpayers' money, breed corruption, go to conferences all over the world where they wouldn't have been invited in the first place had it not been a courtesy to invite idiots from the developing world, and then claim they are technical intellectuals while the ordinary man uses his intellect to worry about daily bread. If that means men like CNR Rao lose their privileges, then so be it.