If you can, get a Nokia E72 unlocked. If you can't get the E72, get any E series Nokia phone (I have E71).

Reason for recommendation:

* WiFi roaming is painless

* 1500mAh battery: WiFi *drains* battery. You absolutely need the phone with largest battery pack or you're looking at charging it twice a day. A large screen android/iPhone is fun for a week till you get tired of looking at battery bars. Nokia will last whole 3 days on GSM and will get you through the day on WiFi.

* Integrated SIP with same dialing/receiving experience as a GSM call

* VoIP apps: Pretty much every VoIP app is available including Fring, Talkonaut and Skype apart from integrated SIP

* Excellent sound quality

Cons:

* Small screen by today's standards (you get battery life in return)
* Abysmal inbuilt browser (you can have Opera Mobile and Opera Mini instead)
* It's not hip in US (however, if you want nerd points it'll score many - run wordpress on your phone with downloadable port of Apache2, MySQL4 and PHP5 - no kidding)
* Custom development is painful, but you get everything and the kitchen sink to write apps for the device (Python, Java, C++, ......)
* No touchscreen

A single low-end jury-rigged SMSC is well capable of over 5K TPS. 80K messages won't even break sweat on any telco's network.

That said, it's a pretty useless medium of communicating any significant amount of data. GPRS or even WAP are much more efficient and capable of dialup speeds. And hey, developing worlds have much better telecom networks than these kind of "for developing worlds" stories give credit for. At least in India, SMS is essentially free (costing less than $0.0001 (yes not a typo!) per SMS in volumes of a thousand.

Folks,

It is important to put the size of elections in India in perspective and how they operate to understand any meaningful amount of fraud or corruption possible.

The EVMs in question are extremely simple. They only have a breakout panel with 32 buttons (expandable upto 64 buttons with an addon breakout button panel). The machine only ever knows the number of enabled buttons. The names and party symbols are affixed as paper "stickers" on the buttons.

---------------------
[B] S First Last Name
---------------------
[B] S First Last Name
------...

The order and placement of stickers on the buttons changes from constituency to constituency. The machines are sealed/unsealed in presence of at least 3 officials, though in practice, it's no less than a dozen or more, as it's a public affair and often media is present.

Some numbers (courtesy http://www.indian-elections.com/facts-figures.html):
Number of EVMs used: 1.023 million
Max candidates per EVM: 64
Max candidates in election from one constituency: 35
Total number of candidates: 5398 (India is a multi-party democracy)
Number of parties: 220
Number of registered voters: 675 million

Cost of '09 elections: Approx $2 billion

Any 'fraud' analysis needs to take the process and numbers into account. EVMs in India solve a LOT of problems with regard to elections and drastically cut down on time, effort and cost involved. There are a number of places where several miles of journey on the back of mule is needed to reach the polling booths. It's much easier to conduct an electronic poll there rather than carrying several large ballot boxes that could be snatched.

So 1.6M processors with 1.6TB RAM means just 1 MB RAM(1.6e+12/1.6e+6) per processor. That sounds bogus!

Also roughly 12 GFLOPS of processing power per processor. WTF kind of cluster/super computer architecture is that ?? Sounds more like 1.6M Cell "stream" processors or something like that, definitely not something made from AMD/Intel parts. Of course, assuming numbers reported are correct.

1. I hope you understand what you gain and lose by switching.

2. I have had to endure the pain of selecting from a few LDAP servers few months back. Just go and download Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition 6.3 (DSEE). Buy a support contract of whatever level you need. Set it up (takes minutes, the docs are EXCELLENT!) and after that forget it even exists. This baby just works!

Who'd 've thought :-)

Google for visicalc.com and download from the second link.

BEWARE: DO NOT run it on your main computer. Use a windows virtual machine or dosbox on *nix. It runs perfectly in both even after these years.