Chotaaay!

It is about a telecom company advertisement in which a "chota" is made to run to get to the client end. Not many things wrong with it but the part which "pinches" me is the way little boy is made to run and looks completely spent while he reaches the client who tells him about some convenient mobile service, acquiring which , his "ustaad" won't have to send him over and over again. The picture of running-low-on-oxygen boy panting hard ,make me realise hardships of hundereds of thousands of danty hands working in our workshops and may be bearing hardships of far greater proportions everyday. The boy's face in said advertisement gives me more concern than any amusement. Your thoughts are welcome.

Silverlight

So if you have not been living in a cave for some time you must have heard about Silverlight. I have been working with it for some time now and would like to give you my two cents about it. I would call it an initiative by Microsoft to tap into the market for which Adobe Flash has been dominating for almost a decade now. That seems to be the main motive behind Silverlight's launch however there is more to it. Silverlight is a browser plugin which makes it a client end technology. Its a scaled down version of .NET Framework (a humble 4 MB download) with support for programming languages such as C# and VB (traditionally its been all Javascript). Within the plugin it gives the feel of a desktop application however security bar remains the same as it is there for any web application. Now a million dollar question . Would Silverlight be able to replace Adobe Flash or get a big chunk out of AJAX market? I think for now people would go for a hybrid ( pages hosting both AJAX and Silverlight content ) approach and who knows in future it might be the next heartbeat of web.

ciao!