Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is getting its first Hollywood interpretation — I don’t know how well Clooney will render Kelvin’s role, but given Soderbergh’s Traffic, he oughtn’t make a total hash of things. This book is probably one of the most beautiful works of literature ever produced under the SF umbrella, and it’s a shame that publishers continue to characterize it as SF. (Solaris is SF no more than A Voyage to Arcturus is). This is one movie I’ll look forward to.

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Bollywood waits for a December miracle. I don’t get these guys. For the past 50 years they’ve been feeding us rehashes of the same old song/dance + romance + token conflict, and they seriously expect audiences to take it sitting down year after year? C’mon guys, give us a little credit, if we want bad programming we’ve got cable TV. Why can’t I see a film like Bridget Jones’ Diary (random example) or Twister (another random example) in Hindi? Oh wait, one’s got too much talk about sex (taboo here, 1e9 population be damned) and another’s got too many special effects that cost money to create and which Bollywood is no good at anyway. Whatever they do, I don’t think that churning out the same old indistinguishable bubblegum romances (with the same motley crew of wannabe actors, er, stars) is a recipe for profit. Oh well.

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Chidanand Rajghatta of the ToI is writing breathless, inaccurate articles in bad English (this guy’s a foreign editor? He could use some editing himself) about how Indians are God’s gift to software development, and how MS is determined to keep the Indian development community in their bag, and how much keeping the brains of India firmly wedded to Windows matters to MS.

But its not so much the revenue bucks from India that matter to Gates as the brains. From all accounts, he is now convinced that India has it to be the next software hub. So the new Microsoft strategy is not only to aim for the market, but just about every level of the playing field, from the central, state to the local governments, to schools, colleges and universities. Earlier this year, the company chose senior faculty members from the best tech institutes in the country, including IITs and RECs, for what was dubbed a Microsoft Research faculty summit in the US.

So why aren’t the shared source programs for Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows .NET Server 2003 available in India?

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NYTimes:

Though not exactly ordinary, Ms. Ryan’s story is familiar around here. Campus veterans marvel at all the poolside apartments that have sprung up since Georgia popped the income cap off its merit awards. Professors are testing their hypothesis that instead of increasing college enrollment, the state’s $1.7 billion scholarship program has been a blessing for the automobile industry — since so many families roll the savings into buying new cars.

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Dave: Please don’t tweak the little white-on-orange icon. Duh, if it wasn’t meant to be tweaked, maybe it oughtta be trademarked. It is otherwise open to re-interpretation. (Even if trademarked, the right to reinterpretation does not vanish totally.) I wonder if my graphic is “completely different” enough for Dave.

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Ravikiran on really stupid security policies. I’ll add another: Indiatimes email. This site is popular in India because it’s hosted there and is fast, with a low latency connect. If we’re behind the same HTTP proxy, I can read your email (provided I know your sign-in name and you are not logged out). Considering how many people use this site for personal email at offices (where proxies are common), I don’t think is a good thing.

Update: Actually, if there are any BOFH types at office, they can probably read personal mail already - a well placed packet sniffer can do wonders, thanks to most web sites transmitting passwords essentially in the clear. (If not passwords (Hotmail and Yahoo have https secured logins), then the mail is sent in the clear anyway.) Very few mail services offer POPS, IMAPS or HTTPS access to email — MyRealbox being one, which is why I’m such a big Realbox fan.

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Wired:

More than 30,000 employees at Indian call centers, among whom Radhika becomes Ruth and Satish becomes Steve, are told to adopt American names and say they are calling from a U.S. city in order to put their American customers at ease.

Their training includes a smattering of U.S. history and geography, along with speech therapy so that they will sound “American.” Some call centers are adorned with American flags to give a cultural feel to the place.

Along the way, these employees are exposed to a way of life that can come into direct conflict with their conservative values and, sometimes, their sanity.

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Is there a single News Aggregator out there that supports HTTP User-Authentication (Basic/Digest)? Yes, NewzCrawler 1.3! I’d still like shared cookies, though - they are the de facto standard of logging into most intranets (along with NTLM in MSFT dominated shops).

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From Mark Pilgrim via Adrian Holovaty (who by the way has a great highlighter for visitors from Google):

The next time someone stands up in a design meeting and claims that you don’t have any blind customers, ask them if they care about search engine placement. Then remind them that Google is a blind user who reads the entire Internet every month, and then reports what it sees to millions of its closest friends.

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From the nifty Windows tricks dept: Quicky typing the first few letters of a filename in Windows Explorer moves the highlighter to that file. Like autocomplete, except without hitting Tab. (This beats typing the first letter again and again, like one had to do in Windows 3.1) This works in Windows 2000, not sure about earlier versions. Wish it worked with the Start menu, too, though.

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