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A report by an "influential" consultancy firm - Boston Consulting Group (BCG), has warned American firms to outsource work to cuontries like India, or face extinction.

In contrast to experts who have predicted that rapidly rising wages in China and India will dampen their appeal to corporations, Boston Consulting contends that the Indian and Chinese cost advantage "may actually increase" in coming years.

"If wages increase at an annual rate of 8 per cent in China, while in the United States and Germany they increase at annual rates of 2.5 per cent and 2 percent respectively in 2009, the average hourly wages will be approximately $1.30 in China, $25.30 in the United States, and $34.50 in Germany. So, in dollar terms, the wage gap will have expanded rather than shrunk."

The full article can be read here.

ZDNet is carrying a report on a talk given by a Windows proponent - Mark Russinovich, wherein he outlines the resemblances between the Linux and Windows kernel, and the general similarities in the histories of the two operating systems.

The talk, given by Mark Russinovich, chief software architect for Winternals Software and co-author of Inside Windows 2000, 3rd edition (published by Microsoft press), was clearly delivered to a home crowd, and its message was clear: Linux is paying catch-up with Windows and the gap is narrowing.

It all means, said Russinovich, that the kernel is becoming less relevant. Both kernels are monolithic, he noted, meaning that all core operating system services run in a shared address space in kernel mode. And, he asserted, both have a common heritage.

Full article : here.

The Cassini spacecraft has successfully entered into orbit around Saturn.

At 9:12 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, flight controllers received confirmation that Cassini had completed the engine burn needed to place the spacecraft into the correct orbit. This begins a four-year study of the giant planet, its majestic rings and 31 known moons.

Cassini traveled nearly 3.5 billion kilometers (2.2 billion miles) to reach Saturn after its launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on Oct. 15, 1997. During Cassini's four-year mission, it will execute 52 close encounters with seven of Saturn's 31 known moons.

Spaceref has this story. Images : Index, Saturn's F-Ring..

The Times Of India is carrying what has now become a controversial story on the decline of science and research facilities in India.

* Between 1980 to 2000, the number of scientific papers from India, indexed in the Science Citation Index, fell from 14,987 to 12,127. China's grew from 924 to 22,061.

* A recent much accepted top 500 ranking of world universities features only three Indian universities - one in the 251 to 300 rank slot and the other two in the 451 to 500 slot.

* Among the 149 top countries in science and technology, India ranks 119 when it comes to number of citations per scientific paper.

The article can be read here

Business Week has a pretty comprehensive story on the impact of projects such as Bhoomi, which are slowly but surely bridging the digital divide in rural India. With entrepreneurial initiatives such as e-choupal, Simputer, and a multitude of other privately-funded projects also beginning to take root, the rural Indian (who comprises about 70% of India's population), is slowly inching his way into the information age. The rest of the third world is watching & waiting, and taking detailed notes :)

An article on New Scientist covers a rather controversial finding that the speed of light "one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants", may have been lower a few billion years ago. The debate primarily rests upon evidence that the fine structure constant alpha, which is inversely proportional to c, has measurably increased in the last few years, thus leading to this conclusion. A good read.

The Wadia group is all set to enter the budget airline business and have applied for a license for the airline most likely to be branded 'Go'.

The group is in the process of identifying aircraft suitable for its operations and has applied for a licence from the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).

The group is eyeing mid-sized commuter aircraft (with a capacity of below 100 passengers), like the Canadian Regional Jet (CRJ), and the airline will start operations with about six such aircraft, sources in the know say.

Qovia, a company specialising in Internet telephony products, has unveiled a new product in anticipation of an hitherto unknown annoyance - VoIP spam.

Because voice over Internet protocol uses technology similar to email, it's vulnerable to the many of the same abuses, such as spam. To avoid overloading corporate mailboxes with junk voice mail, Qovia's technology would scan incoming traffic at the voice server, blocking spam before the calls are directed to recipients in the corporate network.

The patent-pending technology includes algorithms that look for call characteristics that would indicate spam, company officials said. For example, many calls coming at once from the same source would be an indicator, along with multiple calls of the same time duration.

Because VoIP spam doesn't exist, Qovia's technology has yet to be tested in the real world.

There must be a few boy-scouts in their ranks :P Techweb has this story.

Yahoo! has a report on a new gadget being sold in Japanese markets which claims to help sleepers choose what to dream.

Placed near the bedside, the dream-maker emits a special white light, relaxing music and a fragrance to help the person nod off.

Several hours later, it plays back the recorded word prompts, timed to coincide with the part of the sleep cycle when dreams most often occur. It then helps coax the sleeper gently out of sleep with more light and music so that the dreams are not forgotten.

Click here for the full story.

India's participation in European Union's (EU) multi-billion euro Galileo Satellite Navigation Project is still under negotiation, with New Delhi insisting on a say in its operational control.

New Delhi had announced its decision to support the EU project in the wake of the US war against Iraq in which the GPS was used extensively to bombard that country.

The GSP was developed mainly for military use and is under the exclusive control of the US. Although initiators and backers of the Galileo project stress it is only for civilian use, they do not deny its military application.

"They (EU) have assured us that they will not shut down operation of signals from the satellite because it is meant for civilian commercial purposes.

"Their saying is one thing but when it comes to a question of their interests getting affected, like situations of war, it will be altogether a different story," the official said.

"That's why we want to get into the operational control of Galileo."

The story can be read in it's entirety here.