What brought down the market

V Anantha Nageswaran expresses his opinions on how Global Market trends towards Decoupling have led to the Asian Market setback, in this article

The key here is that it would be a mistake to argue that high commodity prices are the only reason policy settings have ended up being too loose. Policy was set for recoupling in almost all markets in Asia, and yet decoupling in exports and GDP growth has persisted. Chart 3 (see below) shows an average core CPI for Asia ex-Japan. Clearly, once we account for the contributions of food and energy price inflation, Asia's inflation issues are not settled. Along with concerns about policy being too loose, growth decoupling has contributed to a surge in imports, which has been compounded by the rise in commodity prices, to result in sharply worse trade balances. Decoupling has ended up not being all that it cracked up to be.

According to him, expect a further slowdown till 2009

Be prepared for deeper and longer downturn
The troubling message from the chart above is that there is not much room to ease policy (and we include fiscal policy too) when they are likely to be most needed in 2009 - when the consumer in the U.S. wakes up to the reality. The absence of policy lever should lead to the acceptance that the economic impact on Asian households and the earnings impact on Asian corporations would be deeper and longer.

Now, where does India fit in this. As a country i guess we're extremely vulnerable to such turns, and RBI holds the key to turn this tide. It should make decisions (which will bring initial pain for sure) that change the economic setup and not just give into political pressure. Discuss...

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

LOST: A Theory

Have you been utterly fettered by the happenings in LOST. Well, a guy named Jason Hunter says he might have an explanation. He has developed a theory that might very well be the actual plot for the series. It revolves around time travel and fate correcting the timeline in weird ways. Anyway, you can check out the theory at this site

Happy LOSTing...

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Journalistic Idiocy Exposé

Print media majors have walked straight into a prank trap.

This was a letter sent by these guys to select print media organizations. It exposes how much 'research' is put into the rubbish the newspapers publish. Notable amongst the dunces are Times of India
and Deccan Herald.
Hell of a prank man! Well done to the team at penpricks.blogspot.com!

Meanwhile The Hindu sits on its moral high chair shaking its head.

DAMN! These are the guys we rely on for NEWS!!

-R

You think Oil is Expensive!!!

Email Fwd:

Over the weekend, I filled up my car’s fuel tank, and I thought fuel has
become really expensive after the recent price hike..

But then I compared it with other common liquids and did some quick
calculations, and I felt a little better.

To know why, see the results below - you’ll be surprised at how
outrageous some other prices are !

Iraq opens Oil Fileds to Global bidding

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/30/AR2008063000205.html?hpid=topnews

This invitation marks yet another significant increase in the growing Western Corporate influence in the Iraq Oil industry.

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Coming Soon!!!

So everyone thinks the hollywood hulla-gulla will end once "The Dark Knight" finally shows up.

Fortunately, this is not the case. Here's a small compilation of movies expected to hit cinames later this year...

Why has Manmohan Singh been acting so weird lately?

I'm a joke genius I tell you -

Why has Manmohan Singh been acting so weird lately?
Because he is P.M.S ing (P.M Singh).

Get it? Hah. I think its hilarious.
I shall continue laughing now.

-R

Sam Manekshaw - Prophet of Hate

In 1942 at the height of the World War II a fierce battle was raging in Myanmar, then Burma, at the Sittang Bridge. A company of the Indian Army was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the invading Japanese forces for the capture of a position, which was critical for the control of the bridge. The young company commander was exhorting his troops when his stomach was riddled by a machine gun burst. Afraid that his company would be left leaderless if he were evacuated, he continued fighting till he collapsed.

His company won the day and the general commanding the Indian forces arrived at the scene to congratulate the soldiers. On seeing the critically wounded commander, he announced the immediate award of the Military Cross -- the young officer was not expected to survive much longer and the Military Cross is not awarded posthumously. Thus began a historic military career that spanned the Indo-Pak wars and the Sino-Indian conflict, the wounded captain surviving to become India's first field marshal.

In 1947 when Pakistan invaded Kashmir, Sam Manekshaw was the colonel in charge of operations at the Army Headquarters. His incisive grasp of the situation and his acumen for planning instantly drew the attention of his superiors and Manekshaw's rise was spectacular, though not without controversy. He was outspoken and stood by his convictions. This, coupled with his sense of humour, often got him into trouble with politicians.

Energy positive building

Check this out.

As if the rotation wasn't sensational enough -

Dubai’s new masterpiece will feature 59 stories and as aforementioned, it will produce ten times the energy that it needs and this makes it a positive energy building.

It's also a positive energy building! I want one of those!!

Check out this video impression of the rotating building.

-R

Outside-in

An amazing collection of photographs by Pablo Bartholomew...

http://www.pablobartholomew.com/galleries/outside-in/

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

The end of an era

Software giant Microsoft will stop selling its ubiquitous XP operating system on Monday. But that doesn't mean the seven-year-old software won't continue contributing to the company's financial performance for years to come. Terminating XP was expected. It comes just 18 months after Redmond, Wash.- based Microsoft introduced a new, more advanced operating system called Vista. While the new system is powerful, upgrading means spending lots of time and money to rework applications designed to run XP specifically. As a result, some companies, including Microsoft partner Intel Corp, have balked at adopting Vista, preferring instead to continue using XP.

Though Monday will be the last day Microsoft sells XP or provides free support for the "hundreds of thousands" of computers that are estimated to run on it, the company has come up with a novel way to wring money from the aging operating system: It is killing XP but isn't letting it die. One way Microsoft will still make money from XP is by charging to provide support. Because the software continues to be popular, Microsoft's "extended" support program is sure to generate lots more revenue. Microsoft will offer the program at least through 2014. That will likely attract lots of big corporate customers. Meanwhile, Microsoft will make more money by supplying XP to computer makers Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and others. Because Vista has had trouble making headway in the corporate market, computer makers have asked for "downgrade rights" - the right to continue offering XP on their notebook and desktop computers after.

Source : Releaselog

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Beauty of CSS

CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) are no longer a piece of code that aligns or serves as custom template. They've evolved into an art form that can, at times, surpass works of flash or flex. Don't believe me...check this out yourself...

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Flashy

Funky flash applications on this site.

-R

Purest Form

found it on flickr

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Bill the ranting guy

Many e-mails were turned over in the anti-trust law suit against Microsoft. Some people at seatllepi.com got hold of one of the interesting ones written by Gates himself. Seems we're not the only ones fettered by Windows Usability. (Click here to go to the full article)

---- Original Message ----

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.

From Air India to the Nano

Air India was started by J.R.D Tata.. didn't know that..
Air India, Nano, JLR. Diversity thy name is Tata. Hell of a family eh?

-Ro

Of RBI and Inflation

I came across some interesting inferences from the current economic situation. Didn't understand much but hope you would. Feel free to leave comments...

Rather belatedly, Rbi finally increases CRR and Repo rate!

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

if (Compassion != Virtuous)

I came across this article(click here for full content) today and was taken aback by the implications it might hold. It touches upon an area about which i've pondered upon ever so often. In view, it appears to be non-sense. I mean, ofcourse compassion is a virtue. But upon deeper reflecting, one wonders if these were just words crafted long ago and we're just following morals blindly, whether or not they make any difference. They do, in a material sense, but if you think of yourself as a species thats is roughly 200,000 years old (we haven't tested our mettle against time even as long as the one thousandth of the time the dinosaurs did), then we might just be an insignificant leg in the ladder of evolution, blindly following someone's fantasies about a higher being or rewarding moralities.

The articles starts nonchalantly with,

Compassion today is widely regarded as a good, and those who display it as good people. Indeed, many see compassion or some related virtue (e.g., empathy) as the core of goodness, as the virtue of virtues. It's not only a private but also a public virtue, much cherished in our politicians. Even in international affairs, of all places, the apex of virtuous action is widely taken to be "humanitarian intervention" or the use of force to relieve suffering. Compassion has not always enjoyed so lofty and uncontroversial a status; will it someday once again relinquish it?

An ounce of loyalty is worth...200 Litres of Water

UP, India. Maya comes to power and the dalits are rewarded for their loyalties.

In Maya land, water comes at premium for upper castes (click here for whole article)

Earlier, these Dalits had to travel 10 kilometres to a well in another village to fill buckets of water. But now, things have changed. Every morning, six water tankers come to the village supplying each house with 200 litres of water.

This sort of thing makes you think "Well, maybe some good CAN come out of her". But of course, how can her actions not have another side to them.

Votebank politics and the battle for water go hand in hand in Bundelkhand. While Dalits have been rewarded for their loyalty, the upper castes are witnessing what they call is a complete upheaval of an age old social order.

"Age old social order". Pah!

Call it oversimplification, but serously, how many stupid allegories will we go through before we're man enough to call it downright discrimination. But the stupidity doesn't stop there.

Purohit says, "We will fend for ourselves, but we will never stoop low enough to bow down in front of other people and request for tankers to come here."

Way to go Grandpa!!!

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Who said that???

The Quotable Bill Gates...

Some of the most oft-repeated comments attributed to Bill Gates through the years were not uttered by Bill Gates. Take for instance "640K ought to be enough for anybody," which he supposedly said in 1981 to note that the 640KB of memory in IBM's PC was a significant breakthrough. Or his alleged comment that if General Motors "had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles per gallon."

The latter is listed at the snopes.com Web site as an urban legend, and Gates has addressed the 640KB quote in interviews. "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time ... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again," he told Bloomberg Business News in 1996. "Do you realize the pain the industry went through while the IBM PC was limited to 640K? The machine was going to be 512K at one point, and we kept pushing it up. I never said that statement -- I said the opposite of that."

All you wanted to know about the OPA/APM but never knew where to ask

What is the role of the Administered Price Mechanism (APM)?
The efficiency of the APM depends entirely on the ability of the system to keep the OPA in balance.

What is the APM based on?
The APM is based on the retention concept under which refineries, marketing companies and pipelines are compensated operating costs and are allowed a return of 12% post-tax net worth.

Now that APM has been dismantled, what is to be done with the OPA?
Post-dismantling of APM, the entire oil pool deficit has been transferred to the general budget.

Who will be the major gainers of the deregulation process?
The major gainers of the deregulation process will be old players in the oil sector with depreciated units like Cochin Refineries, Bharat Petroleum, Hindustan Petroleum and Indian Oil Corporation.

Why will the new refineries be hit after the dismantling of APM?
New refineries like Mangalore Refineries, Essar Oil and Reliance Petroleum will be hit post-dismantling as their refining margins under the market determined pricing mechanism would be lower than that under APM. In addition to this, net profit will also be affected by high interest and depreciation out-go.

Query

What is India? Is it:

• Overwhelmingly religious?


• Deeply anti-scientific?


• Exclusively hierarchical?


• Fundamentally un-sceptical?


• Rational or traditional?


• A Developing nation or an IT Super Power


• Unity in Diversity?

Can one:

• Measure India with western yardsticks?


• Comprehend the “Indian Standard time”?


• Expect a “No, Sorry, I can not” from an Indian?


• Recognize a typical Indian?


• Trace the colonial footprints on the Indian mind-set?

- VelaSwami

Fudging facts

by V. SRIDHAR

A DEBATE without data would be a meaningless exercise. But a debate with faulty or fudged data would be positively dangerous. The prolonged national “debate” over the need to increase petroleum product prices is exactly that. One of the most important arguments of the government was that the move was urgently needed to stem the bleeding losses of the publicly owned oil companies.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his televised address to the nation after the hike in the prices of petroleum products, justified it by citing the losses of the public sector oil companies, which he claimed amounted to about Rs.2,45,000 crore. He was, of course, careful in his choice of words; he termed them “under-recoveries”. In commercial parlance one hears of profit and loss, but not of under-recoveries. What, pray, are under-recoveries? The answer to this question would reveal the dirty secret that lies at the heart of the Indian petroleum-pricing regime.

Some simple arithmetic can set the record straight, but the Prime Minister has chosen to constitute a “high-powered committee” to examine the issue. Among the terms of reference of the committee is the task of “revisiting” the notion of under-recoveries. It has also been asked to “examine the reported deficit and real deficit faced by the OMCs [oil marketing companies]”.

Uniting against and uniting for

Sixty one years after our forefathers achieved freedom and Swaraj, we still struggle against the shackles of our own mediocrity and indifference.

The glorious achievement of 1947 was only so because we rose, albeit after hundred odd years of enslavement, and united against a common cause. The keyword here being against. The north, the south, the east and the west of India united in glorious harmony to overthrow the evil of the day – the British Raj.

Today’s India lives it life in a manner that would serve as a shameful blasphemy to the whole cause of the Freedom movement. And you have no one to blame but us. With the end of the British Raj, came the end of unity. India was born, a constitution coughed up, a government instated and so crawled and toddled little India. ‘Unity in diversity’ was proclaimed and celebrated. Freedom was cherished, pampered, spoilt and ultimately forgotten.

Decades later we see India disunited as never before. ULFA wants Assam. Telanganas and Telugus are at war. Tamil Nadu and Karnataka both want Kaveri. MNS has managed to brain wash a fair share of Maharashtrians that North Indians are responsible for their incompetence. Goa has sold off its land to the Russians. Gujjar’s are convinced that the only way they can move forward is by blocking others’ paths. The common ingredient in all of these tussles is unity of one group against another. Much like we united against the British. Discrimination against one group of people to justify the inadequacies or troubles of one’s own group seems like the only plausible solution.

European countries dissolve borders and promote a common currency. In India we construct imaginary boundaries stemming from the most trivial of differences and cling on to them as justification for our own inadequacies and shortcomings. Times like this make me truly wonder – Is the only thing we ever had in common as a country the British? If it were our only cause for unity, then our unity as well should have ended there. But it didn’t. The shadow dance continued.

We united once before – against a common evil. We now need desperately to unite again. Unite for progress, unite for smart governance, for the nuclear deal, for the masses, for countless reasons.
It all boils down to one question that begs for an answer – We once united against. Can we now unite for?
And in that answer lies the future of India.

-Rohan Saharia

Prison Break S04 Trailer

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNW9DQQZ-zA]

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Map of Online Communities

*to see full image, right click on image and select "View Image"

Source: XKCD

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

A raw deal for men in uniform

Praveen Swami

---

The Sixth Central Pay Commission recommendations devalue the security forces. Some of them, the personnel claim, are outright insulting.

---

Back in October 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh laid out perhaps the most lucid exposition, ever made by a politician, of the importance of internal security. “Our economic programmes and development,” he explained, “are wholly contingent upon upholding the rule of law in the country. The police thus have a very vital role to play in the development of the nation.”

But less than three years on, all three organisations responsible for security —the police, paramilitary forces and the military — are seething. The Justice B.N. Srikrishna Sixth Central Pay Commission report has infuriated women and men in uniform.

One part of the problem is a new grade-pay system, which in effect increases the disparities between the Indian Administrative Service and a security-focussed cadre like the Indian Police Service. While stating that it wished to retain the edge the IAS has by tradition enjoyed — some two years over the IPS, for example — the CPC has ended up significantly enhancing it.

They thought they were helping!

Every one of us, at one point of time in the time-space continuum, has appeared flustered, irritated or congenially frustrated at the silent letters that unceremoniously plague the english language. An excerpt from the "The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left" by David Crystal explains what might have happened...

"In spelling, the [English] language was assimilating the consequences of having a civil service of French scribes, who paid little attention to the traditions of English spelling that had developed in Anglo-Saxon times. Not only did French qu arrive, replacing Old English cw (as in queen), but ch replaced c (in words such as church--Old English cirice), sh and sch replaced sc (as in ship--Old English scip), and much more. Vowels were written in a great number of ways. Much of the irregularity of modern English spelling derives from the forcing together of Old English and French systems of spelling in the Middle Ages. People struggled to find the best way of writing English throughout the period. ... Even Caxton didn't help, at times. Some of his typesetters were Dutch, and they introduced some of their own spelling conventions into their work. That is where the gh in such words as ghost comes from.

"Any desire to standardize would also have been hindered by the ... Great English Vowel Shift, [which] took place in the early 1400s. Before the shift, a word like loud would have been pronounced 'lood'; name as 'nahm'; leaf as 'layf'; mice as 'mees'. ...

"The renewed interest in classical languages and cultures, which formed part of the ethos of the Renaissance, had introduced a new perspective into spelling: etymology. Etymology is the study of the history of words, and there was a widespread view that words should show their history in the way they were spelled. These weren't classicists showing off. There was a genuine belief that it would help people if they could 'see' the original Latin in a Latin-derived English word. So someone added a b to the word typically spelled det, dett, or dette in Middle English, because the source in Latin was debitum, and it became debt, and caught on. Similarly, an o was added to peple, because it came from populum: we find both poeple and people, before the latter became the norm. An s was added to ile and iland, because of Latin insula, so we now have island. There are many more such cases. Some people nowadays find it hard to understand why there are so many 'silent letters' of this kind in English. It is because other people thought they were helping."

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Sex

An excerpt from The Moral Animal, Robert Wright

"In species after species, females are coy and males are not. Indeed, males are so dim in their sexual discernment they they may pursue things other than females. Among some kinds of frogs, mistaken homosexual courtship is so common that a 'release call' is used by males who find themselves in the clutches of another male to notify them that they are both wasting their time. Male snakes, for their part, have been known to spend a while with dead females before moving on to a live prospect. And male turkeys will avidly court a stuffed replica of a female turkey. In fact, a replica of a female turkey's head suspended fifteen inches from the ground will generally do the trick. The male circles the head, does its ritual displays, and then (confident, presumably, that its performance has been impressive) rises into the air and comes down in the proximity of the female's backside, which turns out not to exist. The more virile males will show such interest even when a wooden head is used, and a few can summon lust for a wooden head with no eyes or beak. ...

"For a species low in [the need] for male parental [involvement], the basic dynamic of courtship, as we've seen, is pretty simple: the male really wants sex; the female isn't so sure. She may want time to (unconsciously) assess the quality of his genes, whether by inspecting him or letting him battle with other males for her favor. She may also pause to weigh the chances that he carries the disease. And she may try to extract a precopulation gift, taking advantage of the high demand for her eggs. This 'nuptial offering'--which technically constitutes a tiny male parental investment, since it nourishes her and her eggs--is seen in a variety of species, ranging from primates to black-tipped hanging flies. (The female hanging fly insists on having a dead insect to eat during sex. If she finishes before the male is finished, she may head off in search of another meal, leaving him high and dry. If she isn't so quick, the male may repossess the leftovers for subsequent dates.)"

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

WATSUP?

WATSUP - Windows Application Test System Using Python

The WATSUP toolkit is designed to allow the automated test of Windows applications. The system uses the "object-based" mechanism for identifying and invoking actions on controls and menu items.

So much has been written about the scope, robustness, scalability and outstanding usability of Python that I'll go no further with it here, only to say that if you haven't yet had a chance to use this comprehensive, open source language, don't miss out on the opportunity to take a serious look at it!

The examples in this document assume a basic familiarity with Python. If this isn't the case, have a look at a python tutorial or Mark Pilgrim's excellent Dive into Python.

Functional Tests

Testers/developers write automated functional tests which follow a prescriptive, possibly branching, possibly dynamic "user workflow". The script can check for changes in the gui itself, operating system environment, file system, database table and records, network, internet or extranet urls/pages/web services ... - in fact anywhere that there could be changes.

50 office-speak phrases you love to hate

Management speak - don't you just hate it? Emphatically yes, judging by readers' responses to writer

. Here, we list 50 of the best worst examples..

1. "When I worked for Verizon, I found the phrase going forward to be more sinister than annoying. When used by my boss - sorry, "team leader" - it was understood to mean that the topic of conversation was at an end and not be discussed again."
Nima Nassefat, Vancouver, Canada

2. "My employers (top half of FTSE 100) recently informed staff that we are no longer allowed to use the phrase brain storm because it might have negative connotations associated with fits. We must now take idea showers . I think that says it all really."
Anonymous, England

3. At my old company (a US multinational), anyone involved with a particular product was encouraged to be a product evangelist . And software users these days, so we hear, want to be platform atheists so that their computers will run programs from any manufacturer."
Philip Lattimore, Thailand

4. " Incentivise is the one that does it for me."
Karl Thomas, Perth, Scotland

5. "My favourite which I hear from the managers at the bank I work for is let's touch base about that offline . I think it means have a private chat but I am still not sure."
Gemma, Wolverhampton, England

6. "Have you ever heard the term loop back which means go back to an associate and deal with them?"
Scott Reed, Lakeland, Florida, US

7-8. "We used to collect the jargon used in a list and award the person with the most at the end of the year. The winner was a client manager with the classic you can't turn a tanker around with a speed boat change . What? Second was we need a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach , whatever that is."
Turner, Manchester

9. "Until recently I had to suffer working for a manager who used phrases such as the idiotic I've got you in my radar in her speech, letters and e-mails. Once, when I mentioned problems with the phone system, she screamed 'NO! You don't have problems, you have challenges'. At which point I almost lost the will to live."
Stephen Gradwick, Liverpool

10. "You can add challenge to the list. Problems are no longer considered problems, they have morphed into challenges."
Irene MacIntyre, Courtenay, B

Stand up for the Indian soldier

June 06, 2008

It is with a sense of disbelief that one hears the Indian minister of state for defence, sitting in his cozy air-conditioned seminar room, pontificating that 'it is unbecoming' of former soldiers to protest against the treatment meted out to them by the government. So here's a non-soldier making a public protest. One hopes that it is not below the dignity of the minister to read this.

The minister would not have dared to make such a comment had the protesters been a part of his or his party's vote bank. The fact that the Indian armed services do not go public with their grievances does not mean that they do not have any concerns and the fact that they have been forced to come to the streets should make the minister and his government acknowledge how desperate the situation might be.

The Indian government is fooling itself if it thinks that by dragging its feet on the issue of the armed forces dissatisfaction with the recommendations of the Sixth Pay Commission, it can make the issue go away.

A country that refuses to respect its armed forces will eventually end up getting forces that will not respect the nations' aspirations. A country makes a sacred contract with its soldiers that while he/she will lay down his/her life when called upon to do so, the nation will take good care of his/her and his/her family's needs to the extent its resources would permit.

Firefox 3

Get it now @ http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Got a few HTTP /1.1 unavailable messages...but worked after a couple of tries...

Nokia Morph!!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zto6aTZM9t0]

concept phone from nokia

--Prateek Waghre

10 New things to throw into that rotting skull!

1. Where would you experience the Tenzing service and what is its significance?
   An Emirates airline. It's the in-flight Wi-Fi Internet service that the airline provides. Emirates was the first to offer it in 2004.
   
   


2. Which company inspired by the programing concept of the "infinite loop" has designed and named its campus after it? An infinite loop is a sequence of instructions in a computer program which loops endlessly, either due to the loop having no terminating condition or having one that can never be met.
   Apple Computers. Its official address is 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino California.


3. What is common to the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation Tower (the APIIC Tower), the World Trade Center Tower 2, both under construction, and the Beijing Capital International Airport?
   All have been designed by the famous British architect, Norman Foster


4. What is common to Polo, Rolo, Breakaway and Drifter?
   All are confectionery products introduced by Rowntree & Co, which is now a part of Nestle
   
   


5. This concept cell phone is form-fitting and curvaceous. It wraps and around your wrist like a bracelet when you're not using it for calls. It also kills germs and looks out for your health by "sniffing" the surrounding air and analysing your sweat. What's this phone called and who's the manufacturer?
   Nokia's concept phone called Morph. A video of the phone plays now at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York.


6. Which company had a car model called the Cappuccino, which was in production only for six years?
   Suzuki Motor Company of Japan


7. Which company uses a programme called Ping-Pong in order to provide a structure to its innovation process? It splits the team into two groups. The first one proposes an idea to pursue a specific opportunity, and then the second group improves on the idea. The two groups knock the idea back and forth until they can envision no further improvements.
   CEMEX, the Mexican cement manufacturing company


8. This company was founded in 1951 in San Diego and is listed on the NYSE. It has a fictional CEO. Name him and the company?
   Jack, the fictional CEO of Jack in the Box, a fast food company


9. Name the retail chain in India that is celebrating its 60th year of service. It uses the punch line "A cut above the rest".
   The Canteen Stores Department (CSD) of the Ministry of Defence


10. Name the founder of a renowned hotel chain who served in France during World War I and wanted to purchase a bank in Cisco, Texas, in 1919?
    Conrad Hilton

--Source: Strategist Quiz, Business Standard

--Prateek Waghre

Divine Resignation

Dear Humans

This is to inform you that I quit. I have enjoyed being God for an eternity now – thank you for the opportunity – but I cannot bear the thought of going on and on like this. Enough is enough. I have informed my angels of my impending resignation, though I didn’t expect them to rush off to buy horns and black clothing right away. This Sunday will be my last day in office, after which I intend to spend some time with my family. (Ok, I’m kidding about the family. Heh.)

I started off badly, I confess. I was a beginning God and there was no roadmap, so what do you expect? My brief was to create a star, a planet and a satellite with a golf course. The rest of the universe wasn’t in the plans – that’s all the failed attempts. I was finally told that I could stop when I made earth, even though I got the golf-course wrong. Still, I’m sure there are other entertaining things you can do on the moon.

Then I was asked to populate the earth, and that’s when I had the most fun. I tried various funky things – I thought bacteria were pretty cool, and would rule the earth for sure. I also thought that of all the prehensile organs I gave my creatures, the penis of the whale was much more useful than the opposable thumbs of humans. I mean, how much fun it must be to grip something with that?

Of Statues and Cut-Outs

Maharashtra in all its wisdom :

http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/sagarikaghose/223/51716/123statue.html

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Naming America

I came across this and found the info quite interesting and somewhat ironical...

From Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange:

"In a final insult [to Columbus], the most enduring honor of all went to a fellow Italian who had befriended Columbus in his last years. 'He is a very honorable man and always desirous of pleasing me,' wrote Columbus, ever a poor judge of character, 'and is determined to do everything possible for me.' The man's name was Amerigo Vespucci.

"A well-connected Florentine merchant and a scion of the Medicis, Vespucci moved to Seville and outfitted fleets crossing the Atlantic. He sailed to the Indies several times between 1499 and 1502, under both Spanish and Portuguese auspices, and claimed to be a great navigator. But his true genius was for hype and self-promotion.

" 'I hope to be famous for many an age,' he wrote, in one of the embellished accounts he gave of his voyages. Vespucci invented some episodes and lifted others from Columbus's writing. Unlike the Admiral, though, he showed great flair for lubricious tales designed to titillate his European audience.

"Native women, he claimed, were giantesses--'taller kneeling than I am standing'--and impervious to age and childbearing, with taut wombs and breasts that never sagged. ... Best of all, they were 'very desirous to copulate with us Christians,' Not surprisingly, Vespucci's account became an instant best seller. ...

"[Unlike Columbus, who never gave up his belief that the lands he discovered were part of Asia], Vespucci referred to the [South American] region as 'a new world.' unknown to 'our ancestors,' ... In 1507, a year after Columbus's death, the German geographer Martin Waldseemuller published a text and map adding a 'fourth part' to the known world of Europe, Asia, and Africa. 'I see no reason why one should justly object to calling this part Amerige,' Waldseemuller wrote, 'or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability.' His revised world map had 'America' engraved next to a landmass roughly resembling Brazil.

"Waldseemuller later changed his mind and dropped the name from a subsequent edition. But 'America' was reprised in 1538 by the great cartographer Gerard Mercator, who applied it to continents both north and south."

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Why North Korea Won't Change

Excerpts from Andrei Lankov, "Staying Alive: Why North Korea Will Not Change,"...

"Beijing gives a few hundred thousand tons of grain to North Korea every year and sells it a large amount of oil at heavily discounted prices. ... In recent years, [South Korea] has also essentially assumed responsibility for feeding the North Koreans. From 2002 to 2005, it provided 400,000 to 500,000 tons of grain annually, an amount equal to some ten percent of North Korea's annual harvest. The North's agriculture is heavily dependent on mineral fertilizers that the country can no longer produce; about two- thirds of the fertilizer it uses comes from the South. Seoul may thus be essentially contributing as much as 40-50 percent of the calories consumed by the average North Korean. ...

"The Bank of Korea recently estimated ... that per capita gross national income in the South is 17 times that in the North. By comparison, per capita gross national income in West Germany before unification was roughly double that in East Germany. ...

"[Seoul] worries that if the North were to be reunited with the South, the costs of the North's reconstruction would wipe out the South's hard-won prosperity. In late 2007, a report prepared for the budget committee of the South Korean National Assembly estimated that the expense of unification would be $0.8-$1.3 trillion--a staggering amount and yet just enough to bring the North Korean's average income to only half that enjoyed by South Koreans. ...

"Were North Korea to reform, the disparities with South Korea would only become starker to its population. For decades, Pyongyang has based its legitimacy on its alleged ability to provide its people with a better material life. Even though for most North Koreans living well means eating rice every day, government propaganda has insisted that they enjoy one of the world's highest living standards and has presented South Korea as a land of destitution--a 'living hell.' It has managed to sustain the legitimacy of these claims with a self-imposed information blockade apparently unparalleled anywhere in the communist world, past or present. ... There are at least 150,000 political prisoners in North Korean labor camps today, that is, one political prisoner for every 150 citizens--a ratio comparable to that in the Soviet Union under the worst of Stalin's rule. ...

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Don't make film or tele serial on Aarushi case

From TOI:

NEW DELHI: Nupur Talwar, mother of slain Noida school girl Aarushi, on Monday moved the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) seeking restriction on filmmakers from making movies or television serials on her daughter's murder.

Talwar on Monday met Chairperson of NCPCR Shanta Sinha and filed an appeal to bar filmmakers from making film or tele serial on the incident.

Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chowdhary also termed such attempts by filmmakers as "unfortunate".

"This is very insensitive towards a minor. It is unfair to sensationalise the matter like making film and tele serials on the issue. The case is pending for further investigation and using the subject for anything like this is uncalled for," Chowdhary said.

"The whole situation is such that everyone should restrict themselves to talk about it unless there is some breakthrough in the case. It is inappropriate to talk about it when the things have only reached halfway," said the minister.

The minister has decided to take up the matter with the Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi.

"Under the Juvenile Justice Act, we will take the matter with I&B ministry. We would ensure that the ministry looks into the matter and no one makes a film or a tele serial on the issue," she said.

Obviously there are far more important matters to attend to when your daughter is murdered.

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

N-Deal not lucrative enough

An article from the TOI:

NEW DELHI: Despite the "energy" argument invoked by the Manmohan Singh government to push the India-US nuclear deal, concerns about the pact's implications for India's strategic programme and New Delhi's evolving relationship with the world's sole hyper power refuses to go away.

The case for nuclear energy has received a boost with rising oil prices and its compatibility with the climate change-driven demand for clean power to reduce CO2 generation.

A significant shift to nuclear energy, facilitated by cooperation with Nuclear Suppliers Group nations, has been seen to be the way forward India.

But India's nuclear power generation scenarios raise a few hard questions that could undercut the attractive argument that reducing use of hydrocarbon fuels will present a win-win situation.

Contributing as it does barely 3% of India's power generation, adding capacity is expected to be a slow, expensive and somewhat uncertain process.

Map of the internet

For more romance, sarcasm, math and language...visit http://www.xkcd.com

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Indian Oil Prices

An excerpt from an articles in the India Express. The Oil price Structure as explained by Vikram S. Mehta, Chairman, Shell Group of Companies...

"Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) calculates inter alia the landed import duty paid price of petrol and diesel every fortnight. This calculation is based on a formula that is linked to international prices. IOC’s landed price of petrol in Mumbai for the second fortnight of May was, for instance, Rs 38.1 per litre and for diesel Rs 48.8 per litre. The marketing companies had to, in other words, pay this amount to the refiners to buy the products. Next, the Central government imposes an excise and educational cess on the purchase cost. In May, this was Rs 14.4 per litre and Rs 0.4 per litre for petrol and Rs 4.6 per litre and Rs 0.1 per litre for diesel respectively. The total cash required by the marketing companies to purchase petrol and diesel in May was, therefore, Rs 52.9 per litre for petrol and Rs 53.6 per litre for diesel. The companies then sell these products at the ministry of petroleum mandated price of Rs 49.7 per litre for petrol and Rs 35.6 per litre for diesel (Mumbai prices). As such, they lose Rs 3.2 and Rs 18 for every litre of petrol and diesel sold respectively.

That, however, is not their total loss. They have to also pay sales tax to the state governments. In Mumbai, this tax is Rs 10.6 per litre and Rs 7.1 per litre for petrol and diesel respectively. Thus, the total cash loss suffered on account of the sale of 1 litre in Mumbai is Rs 13.7 and Rs 25.1 for petrol and diesel respectively. This is, in other words, the amount by which prices would have to be increased at the retail outlet for the companies to simply break even on a cash basis. Such a hike is, of course, out of the question."

How can the balance be redressed then???

Article from: IndianEconomy

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

The Scene

The Warez/Movie scene is a large community made up of groups of coders, reverse engineers, crackers, hackers and designers who release pirated copies of softwares/media. The distribution is done through private ftp servers and then leaked on to p2p torrents. The Scene has a set of standard rules and releases can be nuked(read:discredited) for various reasons like bad cracking, bad aspect ratio etc.

For the latest Scene release, go to Scene Releases.

-Aditya Raghuwanshi

Welcome

Remember the days when you were drunk and a friend came up with a weird plan to do something which you would later regret. Well, gone are those days, as now a drunken orgy leads to a blog.

This blog would see, in the coming days, a host of links and articles of interest. Some for the sane minds and some for abominations of nature. One can even mail contributions to linkmenot@gmail.com

By the way, this post is just meant to remove this annoying message "Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here." from the blog.