Anurag Bhandari

Ratan Tata striking a pose with Nano (Image courtesy: bradstinyworld.com)

It’s finally out. The world’s cheapest car is up for the taking now, thanks to the hard working guys at Tata Motors who made the launch possible without much delay (which was being expected due to the shift in manufacturing plant location). Touted as the “one lakh-worth car”, it’s price start from Rs. 1.3 Lakh and goes upto Rs. 1.8 Lakh. Well, that’s a decent price for an entry level car, taking in consideration the various features it has to offer.

This cute little car can speed upto 105 km/hour; pretty decent speed within a city and some highways. It also promises to offer a modest economy of 23 km/litre of petrol. As the engine has been shifted to the back of the car, it makes for huge leg space for the front seats; comfortable driving, you say?

It will be made available in 3 models – Basic, CX and LX – mentioned in increasing order of prices. Don’t expect air-conditioning system in the basic model, and the center-locking system is available only in the LX model. Being a really small and light-weight car, power steering has not been made available in any of the three models. Wikipedia is probably the best source to explore all its features and specifications further.

An interesting thing related to the launch of this small car is that initially it will be made available to only 1 lakh customers until the manufacturing capacity is increased further or more factories are setup. Obviously, the initial bookings are set to exceed this1 lakh mark, so the Tata people came up with a plan. Each potential customer will have to book the car by sending a form to Tata Motors. Out of all the applications received, a draw will be held to select the lucky 1 lakh guys! Whoa! And the forms come at a price – Rs. 300 each. Another money making scheme by the Indian giant conglomerate?

One this is sure – the car is poised to begin a new era of small & cheap cars, and will spark a new revolution in a country where not even every middle-class family can afford a car.

Software come and go. We like some, despise some and are neutral to others. Most of the good and useful software obtain a huge following and userbase, and usually survive for a very long time until either a better software appears or the technology changes. There also are software that are based on innovative ideas, but do not get sufficient attention, due to the lack of which they perish sooner than others.

And finally, there are software that initially create waves, catch all the attention due to the wonderful concepts they are based upon, attain significant fan following, and then… disappear! In this article, I am going to talk about just these kind of software, err, that were. These are such software that I would have hoped to see flourish till, at least, a couple more years. And yes, all these softwares were free.

Microsoft Reader

MS Reader was Microsoft’s noble attempt to change the way ebooks were read. Reader offered an actual book-like interface that was easy on eyes. It had two other advantages. First, the ebooks created in Reader format (.lit) were considerably smaller in size than an equivalent PDF. Second, it introduced text-to-speech in ebook reading (it would read the book word-by-word with adjustable voice speed).

In my opinion, MS Reader was a novell software. Many popular ebooks were published in “lit” format, but as time passed, such ebooks also disappeared. Today, the most ebooks we see are in PDF format.

Read more…

Blogging after quite some time.

• Been busy recently with making certain important decisions about the future of Granular Project.
• My temporary obssession of packaging RPMs has returned. Packaging updates and new RPMs since a few days now.
• I try to start each day with studying, but miss it. The I try again to study after returning from college, miss it again. Completely frustrated because of that.
• Playing table tennis (TT) continuously since past two weeks. Beginning to realize excess of everything is bad. :Sigh: why TT is so addictive?
• Trying to complete all tasks in my long to-do list. Completed quite a few (and got some satisfaction), but most of them are still pending. God knows when I’ll be able to finish them.
• March ’09 has been quite a happening month till now for me. Expecting more to come in next few days.
• Changed the blog’s theme to iNove.