Lights! Camera! Mousepad!

By Vivek Bhatia

And the Oscar goes to Silicon Graphics? Digital Equipment Corporation? Sun Microsystems? Don't be surprised. When the Motion Picture Academy of America hands out the Academy Awards on March 23, 1998, the CEOs of the largest cybercorps of the world could well be smoothening their tuxes and waiting for the envelope. For, the existing Best Visual Effects category has now become a race for the slickest special effects that can be created on a computer.

For the hardware majors, therefore, the Oscars represent a potent marketing platform. As before, it is the $3.70-billion Silicon Graphics--with three nominations for effects churned out on its thoroughbred graphics workstations--that leads the race. However, the surprise package this time could well be the $14-billion Digital--recently acquired by the $24-billion Compaq Computer--which shared the honours for the spectacular virtual reality created for the mega-blockbuster, Titanic.

In fact, James Cameron's $212-million opus represents a new milestone in cyber-celluloid. Until now, computerised special effects were used primarily to depict scenes that could not be staged in flesh-and-blood or wood-and-steel. From Dave Bowman's spacewalk in Jupiter's orbit in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the monstrous twister of Tornado, computers were called upon to generate impossible scenes.

Titanic, of course, has plenty of that. But it also has something new: the use of computers to create normal scenes that would either have been too elaborate and too expensive to stage, or too difficult to control. Thus, some of the crowd scenes in Titanic weren't shot through a camera at all, but rendered on Silicon Graphics computers.

Also starring in the maritime disaster were Digital's Alpha workstations, which ran the celebrated freeware operating system, Linux, generating exterior images of the luxury liner for more than 300,000 frames. For the 160 computers--each about 12 times faster than a Pentium 200 PC--that meant an aggregate computing time of 26 years. A total of 350 Silicon Graphics and 160 Digital Alpha machines were used by the California (US)-based special effects boutique, Digital Domain, for the film.At this rate, Hollywood will soon have to call itself Hollysilicon.

Evaluating The E-Law

By Vivek Bhatia

Whereas the laws OF CYBER-commerce are so different from those of the real world, the Government of India has decided to explore the emerging issues of the legal framework governing electronic commerce thoroughly. That should be good news for Webpreneurs.

The conclusion of a study conducted by the Department of Electronics (doe), which mines all the available literature on the creation of laws for cyber-commerce: Net-business poses a serious threat of obsolescence to many centuries-old legal conventions. Take signatures. Indian law is attuned to establishing authenticity and legal responsibility through physical signatures. While there are many ways of establishing authenticity over networks through e-mail, none has legal sanctity yet.

A second critical issue: cryptography, on which the transfer of all confidential information, including digital signatures, intellectual property protection, and electronic funds transfer, are based. So, the legal recognition of individual cryptographic techniques will have to be statutorily defined. As the doe paper--available at http://www. allindia.com/gov/doe/default.asp--proves, e-business will force the cybercode to be redrafted completely. Caveat emptor!

Dressing Up For Digital Deals

By Vivek Bhatia

E-commerce is dressing up in new clothes. The technology tailor: the Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC), which is setting up an electronic data interchange network to exchange shipment and funds data with the global trade network, the Global Electronic Data Interchange System (GEDIS). The AEPC network will link its 23 offices in India to the GEDIS, and will even allow individual exporters to connect their in-house systems to it.

Physically, the network is based on Very Small Aperture Terminals--a.k.a. VSATs--which will work through INSAT-1c, using a central hub provided by HCL Comnet. The connection to the global gedis will be through a backbone provided by the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited.

The pay-off for the country's garment-exporters: the power to plug into the on-line system that enables every trader to track not just shipments, but also transmit data and documents instantaneously and accurately. That should help level the playing field between Indian traders and their foreign competitors so far as speed is concerned. Transcontinental digital deals are just a mouse-click away.

Accelerating on the I-Way

By Vivek Bhatia

The big bandwagon beckons. With computer networks becoming the circulation system of corporate India in the information age, reliable and inexpensive bandwidth has become the Holy Grail for CIOs. And how their appetites are growing! While 9,600 bits per second (bps) modems--approximately equivalent to a quarter-page worth of text every second--were quite satisfactory even half-a-decade ago, using 65,500 bps leased lines--a page-and-a-half every second--is now likened to dousing a fire with a drinking straw. Nor is bandwidth cheap: 64-K leased lines cost Rs 56,000 per km every year.

Now, however, hi-tech has booted up a new alternative, in the form of a technology named High-speed Digital Subscriber Lines (HDSL). A very high bandwidth (two million bps), short-range solution, it is ideal for limited range networks--over an extended industrial campus, or for connecting offices in and around a city, for instance. The secret? HDSL modems treat the line--a length of normal copper wire connecting the two points directly without going through a telephone exchange--as a digital line instead of an analog phone line as normal modems do. Crucially, HDSL has more than enough bandwidth even for multimedia applications like videoconferencing and video-broadcasting. In fact, a single HDSL line can easily carry upto 20 two-participant video links.

There is a downside, of course. HDSL is suitable only for short-range communications: the bandwidth drops with distance. At 50 km, it lets through only about 100 kbps. Even so, it is the best option to beat traffic-clogged communication lines--and even existing technologies. What makes HDSL viable is the fact that both the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam and the Department of Telecommunications provide what they call "non-exchange point-to-point pairs" for about Rs 1,100 per km. It's, obviously, time to log into V-F-M networking.

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