Deepawali or Diwali is certainly the biggest and the brightest of all Hindu festivals. It's the festival of lights (deep = light and avali = a row i.e., a row of lights) that's marked by four days of celebration, which literally illumines the country with its brilliance, and dazzles all with its joy. Each of the four days in the festival of Diwali is separated by a different tradition, but what remains true and constant is the celebration of life, its enjoyment and goodness.
The Origin of Diwali
Historically, the origin of Diwali can be traced back to ancient India, when it was probably an important harvest festival. However, there are various legends pointing to the origin of Diwali or 'Deepawali.' Some believe it to be the celebration of the marriage of Lakshmi with Lord Vishnu. Whereas in Bengal the festival is dedicated to the worship of Mother Kali, the dark goddess of strength. Lord Ganesha, the elephant-headed God, the symbol of auspiciousness and wisdom, is also worshiped in most Hindu homes on this day. In Jainism, Deepawali has an added significance to the great event of Lord Mahavira attaining the eternal bliss of nirvana. Diwali also commemorates the return of Lord Rama along with Sita and Lakshman from his fourteen year long exile and vanquishing the demon-king Ravana. In joyous celebration of the return of their king, the people of Ayodhya, the Capital of Rama, illuminated the kingdom with earthen diyas (oil lamps) and burst
These Four Days
Each day of Diwali has its own tale, legend and myth to tell. The first day of the festival Naraka Chaturdasi marks the vanquishing of the demon Naraka by Lord Krishna and his wife Satyabhama. Amavasya, the second day of Deepawali, marks the worship of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth in her most benevolent mood, fulfilling the wishes of her devotees. Amavasya also tells the story of Lord Vishnu, who in his dwarf incarnation vanquished the tyrant Bali, and banished him to hell. Bali was allowed to return to earth once a year, to light millions of lamps to dispel the darkness and ignorance, and spread the radiance of love and wisdom. It is on the third day of Deepawali — Kartika Shudda Padyami that Bali steps out of hell and rules the earth according to the boon given by Lord Vishnu. The fourth day is referred to as Yama Dvitiya (also called Bhai Dooj) and on this day sisters invite their brothers to their homes.
The Significance of Lights & Firecrackers
All the simple rituals of Diwali have a significance and a story to tell. The illumination of homes with lights and the skies with firecrackers is an expression of obeisance to the heavens for the attainment of health, wealth, knowledge, peace and prosperity. According to one belief, the sound of fire-crackers are an indication of the joy of the people living on earth, making the gods aware of their plentiful state. Still another possible reason has a more scientific basis: the fumes produced by the crackers kill a lot of insects and mosquitoes, found in plenty after the rains.
The Tradition of Gambling
The tradition of gambling on Diwali also has a legend behind it. It is believed that on this day, Goddess Parvati played dice with her husband Lord Shiva, and she decreed that whosoever gambled on Diwali night would prosper throughout the ensuing year. Diwali is associated with wealth and prosperity in many ways, and the festival of 'Dhanteras' ('dhan' = wealth; 'teras' = 13th) is celebrated two days before the festival of lights.
From Darkness Unto Light...
In each legend, myth and story of Deepawali lies the significance of the victory of good over evil; and it is with each Deepawali and the lights that illuminate our homes and hearts, that this simple truth finds new reason and hope. From darkness unto light — the light that empowers us to commit ourselves to good deeds, that which brings us closer to divinity. During Diwali, lights illuminate every corner of India and the scent of incense sticks hangs in the air, mingled with the sounds of fire-crackers, joy, togetherness and hope. Diwali is celebrated around the globe. Outside India, it is more than a Hindu festival, it's a celebration of South-Asian identities. If you are away from the sights and sounds of Diwali, light a diya, sit quietly, shut your eyes, withdraw the senses, concentrate on this supreme light and illuminate the soul.
More About Diwali
The Spiritual Side of Diwali
10 Reasons to Celebrate Diwali
Diwali Around the World
Diwali Resources
Rangoli Designs - Diwali Decor
Diwali Wallpapers
Diwali Prayer (Aarti)
Diwali Gifts & Greetings
Top 10 Diwali Shopping Sites
Top 6 Diwali Books for Kids
Free Diwali eCards
Related Articles
10 Reasons to Celebrate Diwali
Diwali - Family Christmas
10 Reasons to Celebrate Diwali
Diwali - What Is Diwali
Diwali Festival - Celebrating Diwali 2010 in India
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Monday, October 24, 2011
The birth of the iPod
The destiny of Apple changed drastically 10 years ago with the release of a deceptively simple digital music player.
On October 23, 2001, Apple lifted the curtain on the very first iPod, which packed 5GB of music storage into a sleek white box no bigger than a deck of cards.
Macworld's Jonathan Seff, Rick LePage, and Jason Snell at the iPod unveiling.
Apple chose to unveil its portable digital music player in a low-key special event held on Apple’s campus in Cupertino. The press and Apple fans alike met the iPod with severe skepticism. Pundits openly wondered what business Apple had selling consumer music gadgets. Many proclaimed doom (not the first or last time Apple’s future was called into question, mind you).
By 2004, the iPod became a wildly successful product for Apple, and certain myths and legends sprung up about its creation. When historians 100 years from now recall the legacy of Steve Jobs, they will no doubt mention the iPod in the same breath. But while Jobs had an integral role in the birth of the iPod, no one man created the device. A diverse team of Apple employees and contractors brought the iPod to life.
A twinkle in Jobs’s eye
Apple’s relationship with digital music started innocently enough, from seemingly unrelated events in 1999. That year, Steve Jobs discovered the latent potential of a long-dormant Apple-invented technology: FireWire. The serial bus standard enabled data to be transferred at alarming speeds compared to common standards of the time.
Apple realized that with FireWire, Mac users could transfer videos shot with digital camcorders (which already used the standard) and edit them on their computers. The next round of iMacs, Steve Jobs decided, would contain FireWire ports.
Apple approached creative app giant Adobe to author a simple, consumer-friendly movie editing application, but Adobe declined. That’s when Apple decided to create iMovie and feature the Mac as the center of a “digital hub” strategy, where the Mac served as the nucleus of an ever-expanding digital media universe.
By the late 1990s, digital music had become big news. Illegal file sharing site Napster, in particular, shoved the issue in everyone’s face. Despite the legal issues, it quickly became apparent to most in the tech industry that Internet-downloaded MP3s were the future of music distribution.
Around 2000, Apple realized it had a large hole in its upcoming digital hub strategy when it came to music. To fill that hole, Apple bought the rights to SoundJam MP, a popular Mac MP3 player application, and hired three of its creators to work at Apple. One of these men, Jeff Robbin, would head development of an Apple-branded digital music application.
Robbin’s team simplified SoundJam and added CD-burning features to create iTunes, released in January 2001. As iMovie had done with FireWire-attached camcorders, the iTunes team naturally sought to allow users to transfer songs from iTunes to the portable MP3 players of the day. They had trouble.
The need for the iPod
Behind every successful product lies a problem in search of a solution. The inspirational problem, in the iPod’s case, involved the pitiful state of the young MP3 player market in the late 1990s.
Portable MP3 players had been around since the mid 1990s, but Apple found that every one on the market offered a lackluster user experience. Steve Jobs had a strong term for gadgets like that: “crap”. Everyone at Apple agreed.
The original iPod, announced on October 23, 2001.
Flash memory-based players of the era held only about a CD’s worth of songs. Hard drive players held far more, but were relatively big, heavy, and they sported difficult-to-navigate user interfaces that did not scale well when scrolling though thousands of songs.
Moreover, most portable media players (PMPs) used the pokey USB 1.1 standard to transfer music from a host computer to the player, which made the user wait up to five minutes to transfer a CD’s worth of songs. When moving thousands of songs, the transfer time could shoot up to several hours.
Considering the poor state of the PMP market, Jobs decided that Apple should attempt to create its own MP3 player, one that played well with iTunes and could potentially attract more customers to the Mac platform. He assigned Jon Rubinstein, then Apple’s senior VP of hardware, to the task.
Rubinstein began preliminary research for ideas on how to proceed. From the beginning, he had two ingredients in mind: a speedy FireWire interface to solve the transfer problem, and a particular 1.8-inch 5GB hard drive from Toshiba that could make Apple’s music device smaller than any other hard drive-based player on the market.
With most of Apple’s engineers tied up in Mac-related projects, Rubinstein sought help from outside the company to further determine the feasibility of an Apple music player. Through personal connections, Rubinstein heard about a man with the right qualifications and experience to do the job. He gave him a call in January 2001.
Exploring the possibilities
On that day in January, Tony Fadell happened to be riding on a ski lift when his phone rang. It was Jon Rubinstein calling. He invited Fadell to visit Apple to discuss a potential project, but he kept quiet about its exact nature.
Tony Fadell
Rubinstein felt that Fadell made an ideal choice to explore Apple’s portable digital player options due to Fadell’s ample handheld computing experience. He had worked at General Magic (on an OS for PDAs called Magic Cap) and later at Philips Electronics, where he led development of a Windows CE-based palmtop computer called the Nino.
At Philips, Fadell had seen the potential of digital audio players through an encounter with Audible, an Internet audiobook vendor that wanted to bring its digital audio products to the Nino. Fadell considered himself a devoted music fan; he enjoyed deejaying events in his off hours, and he fantasized of a day when he didn’t have to drag his bulky collection of CDs between gigs.
He began to wonder if Audible’s approach could be the solution to his problem and brainstormed ways that he could combine digital audio with music. Fadell explored the idea at Philips, but found little interest in the ideas among management. After a brief stint at RealNetworks, Fadell left to form his own digital music company called Fuse Systems.
Fuse developed a digital jukebox that would rip CDs to an internal hard drive, but the company had trouble raising funding in a time when venture capitalists fetishized software over hardware. Fadell had received the call from Rubinstein just as Fuse ran out of money.
Fadell went into initial talks with Apple in February 2001, thinking at first that Apple wanted to build a PDA. Soon, Apple offered Fadell a six-week contract as a hardware consultant. Just after signing, Rubinstein revealed Apple’s true intentions.
“Apple thought that they could bring a better [MP3 player] to market and they asked for me to do some designs,” said Fadell in an interview with Macworld. “How could one be built, what kind of components, how much would it cost, and to do all the basic research and design for what was to become the iPod.”
The Philips Nino, a Windows CE-based palmtop computer that Fadell helped develop prior to the iPod.
Apple paired Fadell with Stan Ng, a veteran Apple product marketing manager, to help him mesh with the company’s unique culture. During that six week period, Fadell met with almost everyone he knew in the handheld industry while keeping his true goals secret. He studied competitors’ products and settled on the need for a small, ultra-portable device with a large capacity and long battery life.
Fadell brewed up three prototype designs for a potential Apple music player, each model crafted from foam core boards with rough interface graphics pasted on. Lead fishing weights gave each mock-up the approximate weight of a final device.
“It was all very, very rough,” recalls Fadell. “I only had six weeks and it was only me really doing all the work.”
When his contract expired in mid April 2001, Fadell presented his prototypes to Apple executives, including Steve Jobs, in an important meeting. Fadell purposely offered his two least promising mock-ups to Jobs first (one of which would have used flash memory, the other with removable storage) and hid the third under a decorative bamboo bowl Jobs kept on the conference room table. As Fadell predicted, Jobs liked the third mock-up best.
During the same meeting, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, presented mock-ups of a player featuring the now familiar scroll wheel. Schiller personally thought of the idea as a solution to a troubling interface problem at the time.
Other MP3 players used plus and minus buttons that would move, one item at a time, through a list of songs, which would grow tedious if the unit held a thousand songs—basically, you’d have to push the button a thousand times. With a wheel, a quick flick of the finger would navigate through the list at any rate the user wanted—especially since Apple would make the scroll speed accelerate the longer you spun the wheel.
Steve Jobs liked the ideas he saw and offered Fadell a job at Apple to continue his work. After a period of uncertainty, Fadell joined Apple full-time in April 2001. The iPod project—then code named “P-68”—had officially begun.
On October 23, 2001, Apple lifted the curtain on the very first iPod, which packed 5GB of music storage into a sleek white box no bigger than a deck of cards.
Macworld's Jonathan Seff, Rick LePage, and Jason Snell at the iPod unveiling.
Apple chose to unveil its portable digital music player in a low-key special event held on Apple’s campus in Cupertino. The press and Apple fans alike met the iPod with severe skepticism. Pundits openly wondered what business Apple had selling consumer music gadgets. Many proclaimed doom (not the first or last time Apple’s future was called into question, mind you).
By 2004, the iPod became a wildly successful product for Apple, and certain myths and legends sprung up about its creation. When historians 100 years from now recall the legacy of Steve Jobs, they will no doubt mention the iPod in the same breath. But while Jobs had an integral role in the birth of the iPod, no one man created the device. A diverse team of Apple employees and contractors brought the iPod to life.
A twinkle in Jobs’s eye
Apple’s relationship with digital music started innocently enough, from seemingly unrelated events in 1999. That year, Steve Jobs discovered the latent potential of a long-dormant Apple-invented technology: FireWire. The serial bus standard enabled data to be transferred at alarming speeds compared to common standards of the time.
Apple realized that with FireWire, Mac users could transfer videos shot with digital camcorders (which already used the standard) and edit them on their computers. The next round of iMacs, Steve Jobs decided, would contain FireWire ports.
Apple approached creative app giant Adobe to author a simple, consumer-friendly movie editing application, but Adobe declined. That’s when Apple decided to create iMovie and feature the Mac as the center of a “digital hub” strategy, where the Mac served as the nucleus of an ever-expanding digital media universe.
By the late 1990s, digital music had become big news. Illegal file sharing site Napster, in particular, shoved the issue in everyone’s face. Despite the legal issues, it quickly became apparent to most in the tech industry that Internet-downloaded MP3s were the future of music distribution.
Around 2000, Apple realized it had a large hole in its upcoming digital hub strategy when it came to music. To fill that hole, Apple bought the rights to SoundJam MP, a popular Mac MP3 player application, and hired three of its creators to work at Apple. One of these men, Jeff Robbin, would head development of an Apple-branded digital music application.
Robbin’s team simplified SoundJam and added CD-burning features to create iTunes, released in January 2001. As iMovie had done with FireWire-attached camcorders, the iTunes team naturally sought to allow users to transfer songs from iTunes to the portable MP3 players of the day. They had trouble.
The need for the iPod
Behind every successful product lies a problem in search of a solution. The inspirational problem, in the iPod’s case, involved the pitiful state of the young MP3 player market in the late 1990s.
Portable MP3 players had been around since the mid 1990s, but Apple found that every one on the market offered a lackluster user experience. Steve Jobs had a strong term for gadgets like that: “crap”. Everyone at Apple agreed.
The original iPod, announced on October 23, 2001.
Flash memory-based players of the era held only about a CD’s worth of songs. Hard drive players held far more, but were relatively big, heavy, and they sported difficult-to-navigate user interfaces that did not scale well when scrolling though thousands of songs.
Moreover, most portable media players (PMPs) used the pokey USB 1.1 standard to transfer music from a host computer to the player, which made the user wait up to five minutes to transfer a CD’s worth of songs. When moving thousands of songs, the transfer time could shoot up to several hours.
Considering the poor state of the PMP market, Jobs decided that Apple should attempt to create its own MP3 player, one that played well with iTunes and could potentially attract more customers to the Mac platform. He assigned Jon Rubinstein, then Apple’s senior VP of hardware, to the task.
Rubinstein began preliminary research for ideas on how to proceed. From the beginning, he had two ingredients in mind: a speedy FireWire interface to solve the transfer problem, and a particular 1.8-inch 5GB hard drive from Toshiba that could make Apple’s music device smaller than any other hard drive-based player on the market.
With most of Apple’s engineers tied up in Mac-related projects, Rubinstein sought help from outside the company to further determine the feasibility of an Apple music player. Through personal connections, Rubinstein heard about a man with the right qualifications and experience to do the job. He gave him a call in January 2001.
Exploring the possibilities
On that day in January, Tony Fadell happened to be riding on a ski lift when his phone rang. It was Jon Rubinstein calling. He invited Fadell to visit Apple to discuss a potential project, but he kept quiet about its exact nature.
Tony Fadell
Rubinstein felt that Fadell made an ideal choice to explore Apple’s portable digital player options due to Fadell’s ample handheld computing experience. He had worked at General Magic (on an OS for PDAs called Magic Cap) and later at Philips Electronics, where he led development of a Windows CE-based palmtop computer called the Nino.
At Philips, Fadell had seen the potential of digital audio players through an encounter with Audible, an Internet audiobook vendor that wanted to bring its digital audio products to the Nino. Fadell considered himself a devoted music fan; he enjoyed deejaying events in his off hours, and he fantasized of a day when he didn’t have to drag his bulky collection of CDs between gigs.
He began to wonder if Audible’s approach could be the solution to his problem and brainstormed ways that he could combine digital audio with music. Fadell explored the idea at Philips, but found little interest in the ideas among management. After a brief stint at RealNetworks, Fadell left to form his own digital music company called Fuse Systems.
Fuse developed a digital jukebox that would rip CDs to an internal hard drive, but the company had trouble raising funding in a time when venture capitalists fetishized software over hardware. Fadell had received the call from Rubinstein just as Fuse ran out of money.
Fadell went into initial talks with Apple in February 2001, thinking at first that Apple wanted to build a PDA. Soon, Apple offered Fadell a six-week contract as a hardware consultant. Just after signing, Rubinstein revealed Apple’s true intentions.
“Apple thought that they could bring a better [MP3 player] to market and they asked for me to do some designs,” said Fadell in an interview with Macworld. “How could one be built, what kind of components, how much would it cost, and to do all the basic research and design for what was to become the iPod.”
The Philips Nino, a Windows CE-based palmtop computer that Fadell helped develop prior to the iPod.
Apple paired Fadell with Stan Ng, a veteran Apple product marketing manager, to help him mesh with the company’s unique culture. During that six week period, Fadell met with almost everyone he knew in the handheld industry while keeping his true goals secret. He studied competitors’ products and settled on the need for a small, ultra-portable device with a large capacity and long battery life.
Fadell brewed up three prototype designs for a potential Apple music player, each model crafted from foam core boards with rough interface graphics pasted on. Lead fishing weights gave each mock-up the approximate weight of a final device.
“It was all very, very rough,” recalls Fadell. “I only had six weeks and it was only me really doing all the work.”
When his contract expired in mid April 2001, Fadell presented his prototypes to Apple executives, including Steve Jobs, in an important meeting. Fadell purposely offered his two least promising mock-ups to Jobs first (one of which would have used flash memory, the other with removable storage) and hid the third under a decorative bamboo bowl Jobs kept on the conference room table. As Fadell predicted, Jobs liked the third mock-up best.
During the same meeting, Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, presented mock-ups of a player featuring the now familiar scroll wheel. Schiller personally thought of the idea as a solution to a troubling interface problem at the time.
Other MP3 players used plus and minus buttons that would move, one item at a time, through a list of songs, which would grow tedious if the unit held a thousand songs—basically, you’d have to push the button a thousand times. With a wheel, a quick flick of the finger would navigate through the list at any rate the user wanted—especially since Apple would make the scroll speed accelerate the longer you spun the wheel.
Steve Jobs liked the ideas he saw and offered Fadell a job at Apple to continue his work. After a period of uncertainty, Fadell joined Apple full-time in April 2001. The iPod project—then code named “P-68”—had officially begun.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
First Logo of Apple
Steve Jobs started his career as Co-founder of Apple in 1976.By his introduction of Apple -2 and Macintosh computers, he democratized computers i.e. can be used by any person who knows basic computer languages, much user friendly. Later he was out of Apple in 1985.Again he was back in Apple in 1997 as an Interim- CEO.This was the first step forward of Steve to save Apple from bankruptcy and reported losses of $700mn. Within two years as Interim -CEO, Steve changed the strategies of product lines and introduced iMac, Mac G3 tower and Wi-Fi product; turned around Apple and gained back its old legacy. Read More..
"I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come".
To Read More Spark of Corporate Profiles....
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Steve Jobs: Arab-American, Buddhist, Psychedelic Drug User, and Capitalist World-Changer
The culture wars kicked off by the 1960s are still with us. Indeed, much of the discourse of contemporary American conservatism can be boiled down to “damn liberal hippies ruined the country and they were wrong about x, y and z.” Fox Cable News and other conservative mouthpieces go to extraordinary lengths to badmouth the 1960s counterculture. They even blamed John Walker Lindh, the American member of the Taliban, on Bay Area culture. But note that Lindh from his teenaged years was interested in the dry legal aspects of Islam, and rejected Sufi spirituality. Children of liberal parents become fundamentalists all the time (in fact, Rupert Murdoch’s media are attempting actively to produce that outcome). Lindh wasn’t warped by hippie liberalism– he rebuffed it, and might as well have rebuffed it for evangelicalism.
Steve Jobs, who died yesterday, combined in himself all the contradictions of the Sixties and of Bay Area experiments in consciousness. It seems to me entirely possible that the young Jobs would have joined the OccupyWallStreet.org protests.
He is a one-man response to the charge that the counterculture produced no lasting positive change. Jobs’s technological vision, rooted in a concern for how people use technology or could use it more intuitively, profoundly altered our world. He used to say that those who had never had anything to do with the counterculture had difficulty understanding his way of thinking.
Jobs was the biological son of Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali (a Syrian Muslim then graduate student in political science from Homs, which is now in revolt against the Baathist regime).
That is, like Barack Obama, Jobs was the son of a Muslim.
Simpson, young and unmarried, gave Jobs up for adoption, but she and Jandali later wed and gave Jobs a sister. He never appears to have met his father a political scientist who later went into the casino business, but he did get to know his half- biological sister Mona. That is, Jobs’s childhood was wrought up with a) Muslim immigration to the United States and b) the sexual revolution, both phenomena of the 1950s that accelerated in subsequent decades. Of course, these two parts of his heritage had only an indirect impact on him.
His adoptive parents were Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian Jobs (his adoptive mother would therefore be of Armenian heritage.)
Jobs dropped out of college, gathered Coca-Cola bottles to turn them in for money, got free meals from the Krishna Consciousness Society (“Hare Krishnas”), and later made a trip to India, where he converted to Buddhism.
I’d be interested to know how that happened. There is very little Buddhism in India. Tibetan Buddhists have centers in places like Varanasi (Banares) in North India, because these monks are political or cultural exiles from Communist China. The Dalits or ‘untouchables’ of western Indian have had a conversion movement to Buddhism. Jobs is said to have gone with a college buddy to see a Hindu guru devoted to the monkey-god, Hanuman. I really wonder whether the Buddhism was not encountered in the US rather than in India, though the trip to India may have influenced his decision.
In the same period, he was doing psychedelic drugs like LSD, which he later said were very important to his creative vision.
So the whole world made Jobs, and he remade the world. Homs in Syria is the city of his biological paternal forebears. It produced scientists and historians. Hilal al-Himsi, who died in the 9th century, translated from Greek into Arabic the first four books of Apollonius’s work on the geometry of cones.
Indic spiritual traditions were important to Jobs, especially Buddhism. The quest for states of altered consciousness, which characterized some in my generation, was central to his creative vision.
The DOS operating system was something that only an engineer could love, a set of odd commands entered on a blinking line against a black backdrop. Jobs preferred icons, and changed computing forever. He, at least, was convinced that without the liberal social and spiritual experimentation of his youth, his creative vision would not have been the same.
Buddhist Mandala
iPhone 4
The conservative backlash of the past 30 years has put hundreds of thousands of people behind bars for drug use (though not for alcohol use, the licit dangerous drug), and Rick Perry’s insistence that the US is a Christian nation is an attempt to erase the Steve Jobses from American history. Herman Cain’s Islamophobia is an attempt to exclude people like Jobs’s biological father from American legitimacy. But you can’t take a Muslim Arab immigrant, a Hindu guru, Buddhist monks, and some little pills out of this great American success story without making nonsense of it. Multiculturalism and cultural and religious experimentation, not fundamentalism and racism, are what make America great. Jobs showed that they are not incompatible with that other American icon, business success. Contemporary conservatism has given us over-paid and under-regulated financiers who add no real value to anything, unlike Jobs. If the Perrys ever do succeed in remaking the US in their own image, it will be a much reduced, crippled America that can no longer lead the world in creative innovation.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)