iTelescope

Local Direct Dial (LDD) is an operator-enabled service that helps you save on your mobile phone bill when you call an international visitor in your country. Such a person, often called an inbound roamer, can be dialled locally, instead of having to make an overseas IDD call. The only known country where this feature is currently available is Singapore. (continue reading…)

Code obfuscation is the technique used to make source code elusive. Advantages of doing this are protecting intellectual property, reducing security exposure, size reduction or minification and library linking (to avoid DLL Hell). It is also considered a form of security. Types of obfuscations include simple keyword substitution, use or non-use of whitespace to create artistic effects, clever self-generating or heavily compressed programs, and programs that are valid and operate similarly in multiple programming languages. (continue reading…)

Farmshoring refers to a specific variety of outsourcing where, apart from services being sourced outside of the contracting company, they are outsourced from urban to rural locations. Governments, especially in the US, offer incentives for shifting employment from offshore to rural communities. It is conceptually similar to onshoring (also referred to as domestic outsourcing). (continue reading…)

The Yellow Line

Driving is perhaps the most frustrating act anybody can indulge in Mumbai. Although, it is worse in some other cities including Delhi & Pune, it needs to get better in Mumbai. The biggest problem I see is that people don’t respect the yellow line. (continue reading…)

RFx is a generic term used to refer to a ‘Request for’ some document. Most commonly, that document is a proposal, quote or information and in rare cases for the bid, thus the acronyms RFP, RFQ & RFI. These are used by companies to seek information from vendors in order to analyze their solutions and ability to meet the business needs.

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It is the operational crises that results when the warehouse flaunts data abundance, and yet adds no values to business. The crises is also termed data-in-jail (DIJ). This is mostly on account of poor availability or presentation of data. (continue reading…)

Crowdsourcing is a newly-coined term for delegating tasks to the open user community, and optionally rewarding results. Typical tasks include testing, verification, development, promotion and evaluation. Free-lancers in IT and contributors on the web, believed to be a key constituent of the Web 2.0 mass collaboration ideology, are central to this process. The ethical, social, and economic implications of crowdsourcing are subject to wide debate. (continue reading…)

A runaway query is a query whose execution time is taking longer than the execution time estimated by the optimizer. Runaway queries can lead to excessive consumption of processing power and yeild nothing.

A couple of days back I read in the newspaper that Brazil’s hot-selling soap opera is one based on the Indian caste system. Caminho Da India (that’s not Punjabi! It Portuguese for ‘India’s Way’) set in Rajasthan revolves around a dalit boy who falls in love with an upper-caste girl facing opposition from their families and society. The Portuguese show has its entire production team and actors from Brazil, yet revering traditional Indian values by not kissing on screen. The show has gained so much popularity that Rajasthani trinkets make a fashion statement on Brazilian streets. Also, chai, theek hai and bhagwaan ke liye have become household parlance. (continue reading…)

Graceful Degradation, in computing, denotes the fault tolerance capability of a system, technology or product. It web-designing, it refers to blocking advanced features, that cannot be handled by older browsers, without garbling the display or generating errors. Forward compatibility as offered by HTML, is a nice way of browsers ignoring stuff that cannot be understood. In multimedia, it demands bit-rate adaptation based on available bandwidth, without jitter or freezing.