musings

An interesting comment...

Saw this on Slashdot as a comment to an article on multinationals moving away from the US.

Look I am an Indian, and I think that there are a few things all of you need to know.

America is not going anywhere for now. The fundamentals of your future lie in the hands of your people, especially the select few who have a vision and can buck the status quo. As long as you have plenty of such individuals you are going to weather any geo-political storm.

Whereas in my nation life is so linear that it is a goddamn joke.

Almost every kid is expected to be an engineer and most of these engineers hardly even know what the hell they are talking about. As Feynman would say their knowledge is fragile.

Our educational system itself is a joke. Trust me on this.

At the same time entrepeneurs are discouraged and looked down upon. They are sorta treated with ice, as everyone wants a son in an MNC with a prestigous MBA. So, basically our society is choking itself. Sure, these people are awesome paper pushers, but despite the fact that some of them do have a decent brain they all seem to fail to do anything different.

No revolutions are put into motion. No brilliant new synthesis are formulated. No groundbreaking patents are filed. In short, the truly important stuff is in stasis.

Your society whereas pushes its outliers and that is why, as Kay once put it, most software is written on one side of the atlantic. I think that you should stop looking at IBM and start looking at MIT. That is where your future lies.

And seriously drop all of that economics mumbo-jumbo. As the foundations of society are the ability to create things, transport those things and dessiminate them. I think that those earning a living by making a killing in stocks are living a sham.

Oh and Thomas Jefferson would kill himself if he saw Bush in action. Despite his failings Obama is, at least, a breath of fresh air. So, value him for that. At least he had the courage (unlike me) to step up to the plate.

P.S. – /.s javascript is screwed, haven’t they heard of simplicity?

The comment itself is here

Multi-talented MAFIAA

Evidently, the MAFIAA (Music And Film Industry Associations of America) have a lot of talent. Read on.

As seen on Slashdot:

Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Anti-Piracy Dog Uncovers Huge Cache of Discs

So apparently recording agencies are able to do anything except record good music. They can bribe judges, hire lawyers, buy congress, complain, make commercials and now train dogs. You would think that with all this money they could come up with a working business model other then abusing the legal system.

Religious books?

Someone on one of the tech mailing lists I subscribe to portrays a couple of religious books as books that portray “murder, war, sexism, torture, genocide, sexual mutilation, slavery, revenge, rape, gambling, prostitution, and so on.”

Wanna take a gander on which books these are?

April Fool's Day: Too stupid to be true?

It’s so hard to tell which ones are too stupid to be true and so stupid they probably are true.

Taken from Slashdot | Conficker Worm Strike Reports Start Rolling In

Serendip

Serendipity – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a camel blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right. Now do you understand serendipity? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon’s, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table.”

Don’t know where “Seren” comes from, but “Dip” or “Deep” is similar to “Dweep”, meaning island is Hindi. Etymology is a fascinating branch of inquiry, and its amazing how words come about.

Which scares more?

Take a look at this picture. I can’t tell which is more scary. The Zune or the bug in the Zune.

Cheney who?

I have a vague recollection that we had a terrible vice president by that last name. I, for one, couldn’t tell whether he was happy or grumpy. Looked kinda constipated, actually. I do have a good recollection that we now have a new vice president. So why is this Cheney guy still talking?

Go home, man! Mow the lawn or something. Let the people in office do their job!

BBC NEWS | Business | Youngest billionaires lose money

BBC NEWS | Business | Youngest billionaires lose money

Wow! I got scared for a minute! Then I realized quickly, that I’m not a billionaire, so no problems there. I’m still very happy that I can buy Berkeley Farms milk at $2.99 a gallon.

TV as explained to the computer generation...

Slashdot | Confusion Reigns As Analog TV Begins Shutdown

A TV (or television) is like a computer monitor, except that it doesn’t need to be plugged into a computer to display a video signal. It uses a radio link to connect to a wireless access point, kind of like bluetooth or wifi, except the link is only one way, and the access point may be many kilometres away. In fact, the same signal is sent to many TVs simultaneously, in much the same way that a broadcast frame is seen by all of the computers on a LAN. They actually call the television signal a “broadcast”. Everybody sees the same stream at the same time. TVs have no facility to back up and replay the video stream. It cannot be paused, either.

Since the wireless link is a simplex link, everyone is stuck receiving the same video signal. A TV viewer is bound by the scheduling and content choices made by a person called a program director who works at the broadcast facility. In order to alleviate this obvious problem, “channels” were introduced. Each channel streams a different video stream. However, due to the expense of the transmitting equipment and the fact that they are all using the same transmission medium (the so called aether), only a handful of channels exist. Until recently, these video streams were transmitted using an analog signal. As such they were plagued with interference, crosstalk, etc.

To combat these obvious defficiencies, many places started streaming the video to the TV over a shared wire. This eliminated most of the interference issues, and allowed for more video stream channels to be sent to the television. Over time, the TVs became more like computers. The monitor was connected to a box which contained a hard drive, allowing video streams to be recorded and played on demand. The signals were transmitted digitally, which allowed for error correction, and it allowed for true internet connectivity and two way communication. Most people still use them only for simple video streaming, however. There are also quite a few people who (probably for quaint religeous reasons), still rely on the analog wireless broadcasts to receive their pre-scheduled, pre-chosen video stream.

Selling your eyeballs...

As seen on Slashdot…

...you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Google’s customers are the advertisers, and they’re selling your eyeballs.

Google Earth 5.0 Silently Changes Update Policy