Hottest year and religion of global warming

There is lot of press on 2007 is supposed be a hottest year ever recorded because of El nino, you can read about it here, here and here.

But interesting thing or discussion is about if it is related to global warming or just natural cyclic phenomena we have not recorded before. You never know, it is all about relativeness in science/ truth (anekantavada). As it stands, it seems like there is a notable temperature increase in recent years. Everyone, depending on where they stand (or how they make their living) provide an analysis, twist, quirk on the news, observation etc. Some people are equating the fear on global warming to religion, saying what Gore’s preaching is not exactly science and people are blindly following him.

For me, who cares? if global warming is the magic mantra that makes people to think twice about their everyday consumption of natural resources, that is good enough. Even if it is totally farce, just does not matter as long as people start to drive fuel efficient cars, forces the factories to emit less green house gases, that is good enough. (Aparigraha)

Of course, religion also supposed to make people better with blind faith, alas some hijacked it and made it a cause for more destruction. Hope environmentalism does not lead to similar things.

iPhone or aPhone (new phone from Apple)

Everyone is talking about the iphone from apple. There are some good coverage at engagedat etc, but good place to see the demo is of course apple web site.

One, I was amazed at the some of the simple things that other cell phone manufacturers/providers could not think of. Like visual menu to voice mails. It is probably not all that hard to do if they really had thought about it. It is too early to say if this becomes successful, but I am sure it will start a new page in the usability of cell phones.

When I tried to buy a new phone couple of months back, initially I purchased a smart phone that runs the M$ OS. It sucked was a understatement. I cannot really say if it was because of the hard ware or software, but the experience was awful. So, I just went back and purchased a samsung phone without much of the bells and whistles. My thought was, if it is a phone, let it be just phone not a internet device which is hard to use for browsing. With smart applications that are built for mobile device, I might change my stand, but as of now I feel that let phone just do the “talk/sms” part properly. Of course, having music in the same device seems natural.

As many have pointed out, make or break of this device depends heavily on
* Touch screen usability: apple claims that they have patented and smart technology, we can only say if it really works after few months.
* Exclusiveness: of course it is OK in initial days, but hope there will be unlocked phones
* Price: Paying price of a computer for a phone, nah! it is not an easy sell. But then again, looking at iPod’s success, you never know.

Price point of this is probably too high for now and I dont like their exclusive deal with Cingular. But if it is what is hyped to be, then you are really see a new trend of common people avoiding PC altogether

It also brings up an interesting thing, at one point everyone wrote off Apple because they adamantly controlled both hardware and software. Now, looks like tables have turned, it looks like everyone wants to control both (MS xbox, zune, sony ps, nokia, motoroala etc). Apple is showing it can be to your advantage.

It is pretty apt that they changed the name of the company to Apple inc. from Apple computers.