prady

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I grew up in India where for the last 27 years of my life I have always been told by parents and the world at large that electricity is scarce and it needs to be conserved. This prompted continuous harping from my parents that I should turn off all the non essential electrical appliances when I leave the room, that I should shut off the switch on the wall even if the appliance switch is turned off etc. I have known the difference between lighting and heating points for a long long time. In the age before CFL's we always were careful of the tungsten based bulbs we bought. 100W for places that need lot of lighting for a short period. Im not sure if people in the US, Europe of my age were as aware when they were kids ? I would guess not. In the pre liberalization days India was severely short of power, it was acute and "smaller" cities like Bangalore used to always rave about how cool it was to be in Bombay which had power 24x7. Needless to say electricity was expensive. As a family we tried real hard to stay within a particular slab for the month, where the cost per unit was almost half of the next slab.

However, we never thought about our monthly power bill when we had to buy a new electric appliance. Be it a computer, washing machine, iron box, exhaust fan etc. We never thought how much it might add to our powerbill because the increase in the cost of power was nominal when compared to the benefits the appliance brought it in.

So here we are buying more electrical appliances still being very cautious in how much power we can save. But there was a problem. We had no idea whether our efforts were ever successful. The only parameter at the end of the month was the grand total at the bottom of the power bill, and that did not say anything. Sometimes we would realize that the power company increased the cost per unit leaving throwing our minimal understanding of power conservation out of gear.

What we lacked was tools ! Tools to know how much we are consuming right now and tools to know how best we can optimize consumption.

Today the world has suddenly woken up to the notion of consuming power from an environmental standpoint and there are some studies that look into how it would change peoples lifestyles to be more "power consumption aware", about how mindsets need to change. But in India the large middle class is already "power aware". But they still lack the tools to be more power aware.

Summary: With all the buzz around smart grids I think India presents a tremendous opportunity on the demand side management of power. Indian lifestyles and mindsets together with the fact that there is a shortage of power could present an opportunity and a starting to point to have a smarter grid.

• 15:02 I find this concept of paying for time, wierd .. #
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• 15:21 Im kind of new to this microblogging business. Can't really figure out what to write here. #

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First it was the BJP putting OSS down as part of their manifesto. And now this. Flipping through the pages of The Hindu this morning, I came across this opinion piece about the BJP's awkward embrace of Free Software. http://www.hindu.com/2009/04/10/stories/2009041055960900.htm .

Whats more interesting to me more than the contents of the article itself, is the fact that this is being debated as an issue. In less than 10 years Frees Software/OSS has gone from being hobbyist to now being a national issue. Cool ! 

Stumbled upon this. A pleasant surprise.

Quoting http://lwn.net/Articles/260118/

The third paper measuring performance looked at the performance characteristics of an RT_PREEMPT kernel on an industrial controller board. In addition, the measurements were validated using a paint robot. Their conclusion provides a nice summary of the progress the Linux kernel has made for realtime applications:

Ive been reading all over the place for the last couple of years about Open source having already gone mainstream. I dont disagree one bit. Linux, Python, PHP, Apache, MySQL etc .. just some of the poster boys of the Open Source community that have seen massive successes in being adopted by industry. I have been through these times as a student when evangelism was the order of the day, install fests aplenty. Things have definitely changed now. With heavy weights like Google, Yahoo and a whole ton of start-ups throwing their weight behind the use and deployment of OSS. OSS got "hot".

Ok now looking from the other side of the glass, as an employee in the Automation industry, things are a whole lot different. Traditionally the IA world is slow in adoption of technology that originates from the "consumer" world. There is good reason for this. Product life cycles here are of the order of decades rather than years. Safety is a big deal and a whole lot of other considerations that are very valid.


But things are changing. I believe we are now at an inflection point and things are going to change for the better. There is a lot of interest from automation and automotive companies across to the board. The Hanover Fair this year has a pavilion dedicated to Open source in the automation indsutry. OSADL is organizing a Congress which will feature talks from some of the most recognizable names in the OSS world.

Being invoIved with this, I can now really imagine the kind of effort that organizations must have put in to make that shift to move away from deploying proprietary software to OSS.