In Economics, there’s no free lunch… but Linux is!

A batch mate of mine went through a revelation about Linux yesterday. He had come to get some codec installed on his lappy since he couldn't view video files.

And while we were downloading a codec pack off the internet, he's like, "How come these guys can give all these things for free?!" It came as a shock to me at first though; considering the fact that I've been a freelance page designer since long enough, and most of my projects have been done for free (yes free), I couldn't understand how to make him understand the concept of open source.

So I began with Linux, and said that a codec pack is virtually nothing, and that there are OS's that are also available for free. Initially he was quite surprised and like most people who've been using Microsoft product since ages, also thought that the OS must be substandard in its working. First of all I had to make him understand what actually the concept of 'free' meant as far as Linux was concerned. Free didn't mean that the software didn't cost a thing. More than that, a free OS meant freedom; freedom to modify it, change it, label the changes under your name, and even re-distribute it to the masses so that others too can benefit from it.

Come to think of it, Linux, is more like knowledge, which grows when shared. While windows is like an online tutorial, where you pay to get something, Linux is like a forum, where one just needs to register and the knowledge is shared freely on message boards.

The fellow still had the persistent question as to, "How do these guys make money?"

I stopped trying to make the fellow understand that it wasn't about money, but it was more about the passion and the irreverence towards the concept of 'closed source'.

Instead I just told him that Linux is a brand, and the fellow didn't ask for more. Sometimes when you try to derive syllogisms for a phenomenon people just don't get it, but when one uses jargons, they just seem to understand the whole thing in a split second. Weird I tell you!

Hackint0sh… Insanely Mac… osX86 project

It has been 3 days since I've been trying to install a Mac OS X on my PC (yes you read it right… I'm trying to do it the other way around)

And sadly I've gone no farther than the setup main page. I've borrowed flash based hard disks, formatted, wipe cleaned my HP DV6000 thrice in 3 days, and the poor thing didn't even squeak; shifted between vista, windows xp and a dash of ubuntu, but no luck!

15 days before the placements begin and I thought this endeavor (which I thought I'll surely scrape through) would cheer me up. Seems its adding to the anxiety. But I'll get a Mac running on my PC before I leave this place… that's a promise…

What's interesting to see is how the Mac OS simply refuses to succumb to our wish and will. Technically it should be detecting a FAT32 partition. But it's not for some weird reason. We used a flash based 8GB hard disk formatted in Mac Journal (the format type which is meant for a Mac) using someone else's MacBook… No luck~!

We used an emulator to run the thing. No luck~!

We used a virtual machine (similar to Parallels on the MacBook to run Windows) called VMWare… No luck~!

And the best part of all, it behaves differently on different machines. We have 2 HP laptops up for this Vista-to-Mac-on-PC experiment, both with same specs, except for the fact that one is an Intel, the other is an AMD. And the darn thing behaves different every time we try to load it up.

Usually computers have a pattern for showing up errors. Once u find that out, you know where the problem lies. Here there's no freakin' pattern! At all!

Its getting on my nerves. Will update if things improve!

Crop Forecasting!

Alright! Now for starters, despite the IT boom (and bust) and the retail boom and stock market boom and other booms that you may think of, the fact still remains that India is an agrarian economy, that is a large part of its income (still) comes from agricultural produce.

So logically farmers should perhaps form the richest cluster in the Indian 'wealth' pyramid no? Well logically yes, but factually that's not the case. One farmer commits suicide in India every 8 hours. Gruesome as it may sound, but a large part of the fault can be attributed to the farmers, who out of sheer lack of information sow anything that are either safe bets like cash crops, or sow something that gave them the highest revenue the last year.

Now when every farmer starts thinking in the same direction, the law of demand & supply comes into the picture. The supply of a particular crop goes up and the prices comes down. The farmers as it is are exploited at the mandi's even during boom time, so when the market is running low, one can hardly expect anything good for the farmer in terms of his returns for his produce. So low prices, low income, and inability to pay off debt puts the farmer in a stressful situation.

Now, let's take the other side of the spectrum; that is the companies who buy the produce. Let's take the example of a 'ready to eat' vegetable mix. Now for a 'ready to eat' packet, the MRP is fixed, the margins to the wholesaler, the retailer, the distribution costs are more or less fixed. So there's little leeway that the manufacturer can work upon as far as the entire chain is concerned. What he can do is he can get the best input price to maximise his margins.

To get the best price for his inputs he needs to know well in advance as to what the output of that crop would be nationwide. Now estimates of any crop production can be either got from the official estimates that the government is supposed to give, or the trade estimates that the traders give over a period of time. Trade estimates work like stock markets do; based on the aggregation of trader's opinions who might be bullish or bearish as per their whims and fancies. Official estimates have a drawback as far as time is concerned. The Central Statistical Organisation, a government body releases the final estimate of the total crop production after 6 months of the harvest and when 70% of the crop produce has already passed the farmer's hands. Such type of data is hardly useful in purchase decisions for any organisation. So if we come back to our 'ready to eat' mix, the crop production estimates from CSO are of no use, and we'll have to do the purchasing without any proper data. In short, we'll never come to know what would be the best price we can get for any produce, and it all would depend on the mandi that a company would go to.

So essentially in crop forecasting, time is of the essence, rather than accuracy or depth of coverage. Sadly people just don't seem to be getting it! There's loss of value at every stage; the farmer loses because he was dumb enough to sow what every other farmer did, the government loses because it releases an estimate value which anyone would hardly use, the companies lose because they don't get to have the best possible price for the raw materials.

Sad isn't it?

Vietnam Tumblers

Another superb example of branding:

Most people from US, when they go to visit Vietnam, bring back metal coffee tumblers as a souvenir. Think... why would anyone bring metal coffee tumblers? Quite simply because during the Vietnam war, a lot of American planes were shot down. The Vietnamese used to extract the metal from these planes to make tumblers and other stuff.

True as on today the metal from those planes must have already been used up and today’s tumblers must be manufactured from some other metal obviously, yet the sentiment of the same still remains. And the Americans buy the tumblers since they feel they bought back something that rightfully belonged to them in the first place.

Without a line of interaction

In Service Marketing there’s something called ‘a line of interaction’. If we take the example of a restaurant let’s say, there can be numerous lines of interaction. A line of interaction basically means point where a part of the service comes into direct contact with the customer, or in plain motherhood statement it’s the ‘moment of truth’. The waiter is one, the menu is another, the food is the next, and the bill that comes towards the end is also a line of interaction.

Now most people say and I’m sure even you’ll agree that lines of interaction are extremely essential to the service organisation’s success.

Now let’s turn the tables on this statement and look at it from the other way around. There’s this hotel in Korea, the name of which I forgot, has defied this whole idea of line of interaction. The hotel has virtually scrapped all the lines of interaction which one might call essential.

If you want to book a room, you call the number, and the voice on the other side is an AVR (automated voice response system). This means there’s a computer on the other end to take your call rather than a real person, so the first line of interaction is compromised. The AVR gives you an automatically generated code, which you note down and is a reference for the room you booked in the hotel. You drive your way down to the hotel, go to the basement where again there’s no security guard at the gates, since the gates are automatic. You key in the code given at the gate, and this is where you officially check into the hotel. You go ahead and park your car specifically at the slot allotted to you, and to make sure you find it, the lights of that slot start blinking. So line of interaction (security guards) compromised again.

Then you go up the lift, into your room, and done! Not a single human line of interaction in the entire process. You finish all your naughty business and get out. The payment is made by an escrow so the hotel never comes to know the real identity of the person. Dainty no? Now who told a line of interaction is essential?