blog@Yantrajaal

The term “platform” is very ambiguous when used carelessly by programmers and consultants in the information technology business. Under various circumstances, TCP/IP, Linux, Oracle and Java are all referred to as platforms even though they are neither similar nor comparable to each other. Even within the narrower definition of IOT we can look at platforms from at least three directions. First,  we have hardware based platforms like Qualcomm’s AllJoyn , Intel’s IOTivity , Apple’s Homekit  and Android/Brillo from Google. Second, we have different data transport protocols like XMPP - used in Internet Messaging (IM), MQTT - a publish / subscribe model for messages, DDS - another pub/sub model for data distribution services and AMQP - Advanced Message Queuing Protocol. Finally we have integrated, cloud based platforms from big and small companies like IBM Bluemix, Carriots, n.io, thethings.io, thingworx and many others that claim to provide end-to-end solutions to transfer in...

The Advaita-Vedanta School of Indian philosophy posits that every sentient mind is interconnected as a part of a universal consciousness. Mapped into modern technology, this could be viewed as the biological equivalent of the World Wide Web consisting of computers connected over the internet. The web that we see today had its genesis with the Ethernet, invented in 1973 and TCP/IP adopted in 1983. How far away are we from a similar network of minds? Controlling machines with thought is the first step and Craig Thomas’ 1982 sci-fi novel, Firefox, was the first to predict thought-controlled aircraft. In just about 30 years since then, technology has progressed to the point where we have thought controlled-wheelchairs, not in research labs, but as a do-it-yourself project at Instructables ! In fact, this technology has now reached the consumer level and companies like Emotiv sell headsets that pick up electrical signals from the brain and work as an input device, similar to joystick ...

North of the ruins of Angkor Wat, that we have described in previous posts [ 1 ], [ 2 ], [ 3 ] is the relatively small mountain range, Phnom Kulen [ the "Mountain of Lychees"] that most visitors give a miss to because there are no ruins of any massive temple that the Angkor civilisation is famous for. But for the rulers of Cambodia, these mountains were very significant. Jayavarman II, the first powerful king and the de facto founder of the Angkor dynasty, announced his ascendancy to the throne and the assumption of the title, Chakravartin -- the Supreme Ruler as per Indian / Hindu traditions -- from the top of this mountain in the 8th century and even the communist Pol Pot regime, that virtually destroyed the country in the closing years of the 20th century held on to these mountains as their last redoubt before they were ejected by the invading Vietnamese army. Why are the Kulen Mountains so important ? If you go back to the early years of the first millennium, yes, so...