my favourite reading

Thought crimes act of US?

2007-11-29T17:38:00.000-08:00

Here is something really bizaare but could be quite real that has come out of as the most coveted free nation of the world goes about fighting the real and imagined war on terrorism. The writer makes an interesting case about interpreting a Democratic California Rep. Jane Harman's new salvo in the war on terror through her bill Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007," as being a pointless one but one that could also be equally damaging if taken to the logical extreme in attempting to get at radical ideas. "Homegrown terrorism" and "violent radicalization," as defined here, may encompass thoughts, ideas, and plans, not just acts or conduct.The point of this new legislation isn't just to interrupt existing homegrown terror plots but to do something about the radical ideas that inspire them. That may be a worthy goal, but it's assuredly a goal that implicates protected speech, the writer Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.com says

India should dissociate from Commonwealth!

2007-11-21T09:55:00.000-08:00

NO WEALTH IN COMMONWEALTH

There is a lot of fuss being made about Commonwealth Games being held in Delhi from (October 3-14, 2010). An unprecedented mammoth activity is underway with all the agencies of the Delhi government and the centre coming together to spruce up the city before the games. There is no usual budgetary constraint and no one can estimate at this stage as to how much money is being poured into Delhi beautification drive. Just one agency, namely the Delhi Jal Board is spending Rs 1000 crore to “clean up the water sources” in Delhi before the Games. The Delhi metro is scheduled to complete its entire project before the Games to begin. There are bigger and smaller projects going on everywhere and in case any slum gets cleared and thousands become homeless overnight, it is of little concern to anyone. Yamuna Pushta adjoining the Yamuna basin where for decades on end there was a flourishing colony of tens of thousands of poor houses is now a sleek freeway and the venue for a metro station. Did anyone ask where these hapless people went? In any case no delhite would want to complain as the bonanza of amenities is too good to believe.

Celebrations are fine and the pride that India has been chosen to host the Games is equally something but somewhere there is this nagging issue of what is that we are celebrating? What is this “commonwealth” business all about. Why there is so much of fuss about this organistaion and its activities? What is so "common" among the member nations of this Commonwealth of countries?

Look close—and it is absolutely necessary for any self respecting Indians to do so while the frenzy of the Sports is picking up—and you might find that the Commonwealth represents a reminder of the blot of history in the member nations of the 53 nation strong Global body, would want to forget, namely their slavery to the British empire. The common aspect of every single member nation of the Commonwealth is that they were once a former colony of the Empire!

It is an irony that even almost 140 years after the first colony was released from the British Empire, namely Canada in 1867, they are to be reminded about their bondage by virtue of their membership to this body. India celebrating its newly found muscle as economic power, by being an active member of the commonwealth is only reminding itself time and again that it once was a member of the British empire as a slave nation. There cant be anything more demeaning than this which leaves a bad taste in the mouth whenever one sees the Commonwealth Games posters and the festoons heralding the advent of the Games.

According to the official site of Commonwealth, though the modern Commonwealth is just over 50 years old, the idea took root in the 19th century.

In 1867, Canada became the first colony to be transformed into a selfgoverning 'Dominion', a newly constituted status that implied equality with Britain. The empire was gradually changing and Lord Rosebury, a British politician, described it in Australia in 1884 as a "Commonwealth of Nations"
Other parts of the empire became Dominions too: Australia (1900), New Zealand (1907), South Africa (1910) and the Irish Free State (1921). All except the Irish Free State (that did not exist at the time) participated as separate entities in the First World War and were separate signatories to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Subsequently, they became members of the League of Nations.
After the end of the First World War, the Dominions began seeking a new constitutional definition and reshaping their relationship with Britain. The Conferences of Dominions begun in 1887 were resumed and at the Imperial Conference in 1926, the prime ministers of the participating countries adopted the Balfour Report which defined the Dominions as autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
This definition was incorporated into British law in 1931 as the Statute of Westminster. It was adopted immediately in Canada, the Irish Free State, Newfoundland (which joined Canada in 1949) and South Africa. Australia and New Zealand followed. India, Britain's largest colony at the time, had still not achieved self-government and remained a Dominion under the India Act of 1935 until its independence in 1947.
Modern Commonwealth
After the Second World War, the shape of the British empire began changing drastically. India gained independence in 1947, the new state of Pakistan was simultaneously created, and a wave of decolonisation followed which saw several colonies become independent and sovereign states.
The London Declaration of 1949 was a milestone on the road to developing the modern Commonwealth. India provided an interesting test case: it desired to become a republic yet wanted to remain a member of the Commonwealth and this posed a fresh challenge to the entire concept. Would Commonwealth membership only be for countries "owing an allegiance to the Crown" as the Balfour Report had stated? A conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers in 1949 decided to revise this criterion and to accept and recognise India's continued membership as a republic, paving the way for other newly independent countries to join. At the same time, the word 'British' was dropped from the association's title to reflect the Commonwealth's changing character.
The first member to be ruled by an African majority was Ghana which joined in 1957. From 1960 onwards, new members from Africa, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the Pacific joined, increasing the diversity and variety that has enhanced the Commonwealth to this day.
With its commitment to racial equality and national sovereignty, joining the Commonwealth became a natural choice for many new nations that were emerging out of the decolonisation process of the 1950s and 1960s. Since then, the Commonwealth has grown in size and shape, expanding its reach and range of priorities. It is now involved in a wide spectrum of activities, all feeding the greater goals of good governance, respect for human rights, and peace and co-operation in the member countries and beyond.

The above is an excerpt from the website without any comments. Any intelligent person can draw a conclusion about the real import of what it means to be a member of Commonwealth, never mind the apparent economic benefit, the educaiton aid, food aid and so on which the member nations are bestowing on each other through the common kitty created by their contributions in the Commonwealth.

The upshot is clear, free thinking independent nations like India should set an example by first dissassociating with Commonwealth and if necessary found a new organisation for developing countries within the ambit of the United Nations or strengthen the existinig ones like SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) or ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) or any other regional or global body that serves the interest of developing nations. It is illogical and downright insulting to continue to foster the idea of a Commonwealth which subserves the interest of the British hegemony. Remember India is a free country and the second largest democracy and its newly minited generation does not need any reminder that British were once the nation’s masters. Three cheers and all that for the Commonwealth Games 2010!

Ranting about Ranking!

2007-11-21T09:37:00.000-08:00

A friend Rajesh Haldipur sent a link to me about a Times article on Ranking

an excerpt from this article

"This year, some educators in the United States began to question the impact of rankings on the college admissions process, due in part to the March 11, 2007 Washington Post article ‘The Cost of Bucking College Rankings’ by Dr Michele Tolela Myers, former president of Sarah Lawrence College. He quoted director of data research at U.S. News as saying, “In the absence of real data, they will make up a number,” in the same article. In higher education, college and university rankings are listings of universities and liberal arts colleges in an order determined by any combination of factors. Rankings can be based on subjectively perceived “quality,” on some combination of empirical statistics, or on surveys of educators, scholars, students, prospective students, or others. Rankings are often consulted by prospective students and their parents in the university and college admissions process. In addition to rankings of institutions, there are also rankings of specific academic programmes, departments, and schools. Rankings are conducted by magazines and newspapers and in some instances by academic practitioners. For instance, for ranking of law programmes, see Law School Rankings. Rankings may vary significantly from country to country. A Cornell University study found that the rankings in the United States significantly affected colleges’ applications and admissions.[citation needed] In the United Kingdom, several newspapers publish league tables which rank universities. Critics of ranking methodologies maintain that any published rankings should be viewed with caution for the following reasons: Rankings limit the population size to a small number of MBA programmes and ignore the majority of schools, many with excellent offerings. The ranking methods may be subject to biases and statistically flawed methodologies (especially for methods relying on subjective interviews of hiring managers). The same list of well-known schools appears in each ranking with some variation in ranks, so a school ranked as number one in one list may be number three in another list. Rankings tend to concentrate on the school itself, but some schools offer MBA programmes of different qualities (e.g. a school may use highly reputable faculty to teach a daytime programme, and use adjunct faculty in its evening programme). A high rank in a national publication tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some critics object even to publications who now offer lists ranked different ways: by salary, GMAT score of students, selectivity, and so forth. They contend that while this practice is useful, these rankings still are not tailored to individual needs, and their value is diminished if they use an incomplete population of schools, fail to distinguish between the different MBA programme types offered by each school, or rely on subjective interviews."

There has been mounting criticism about Ranking and Rating of business school despite also the increasing popularity of such services by the media. In India itself since 1999 when the first ranking of 50 schools was made by late Prof Dharni Sinha in Business Today followed by the largest ever such ranking and rating done in the media in the year 2000 by Business India, there has been as many as eight such offering at the national level and at least a dozen more at regional and state levels.

The Rankings are usually for 50 schools to a 100 schools and Business India for instance uses 20 ranks and the rest of the schools are rated.

Rankings andratings may be controverial but at the moment they serve the primary purpose of providing information about schools more than classifying them into respective categories. The reader/user of today namely the students andthe corporate have their own yardstick andalso sources of information and they may not easily be swayed by such rankings by media.In fact ironically, it is the same ranking which is riled is the basic source for both thecompanies and students to form their opinion. Increasingly blatant hypes about schools and their ranking to a much higher category than they actualled belonged is easily caught out by the users which only leads to the undermining of thecredibility of the media which publishes such rankings.

Clearly policing the ranking is best left to the reader of the media except that one should demand that the media uses its reach to provide more information and bring greater transparency in publishing data and information about the schools and not sing paens and praises of a few leaving out the rest or worse still selectively jack up the ranking of some schools leaving out the rest in the lurch. This would call for responsibility and a lot of hardword and committment on the part of media.

MPs and CEOs

2007-11-09T20:34:00.001-08:00

A close friend whom I am very fond of sent me a mail about how MPs are such a waste of money when compared with the CEOs and the later's salaries should not be a concern of the government. Her note is appended to this blog at the end! My reply to her!

Dear Bhanu
your note about the salary of MPs is fascinating but you should compare with the work and responsibilities they carry vis a vis a corporate executive whose only reason for existence is not to provide quality product but to maximise profits at all costs. The salary of a corporate executive is directly proportional to the profits he or she generates and the higher salary he or she seeks to earn the greater would be the burden on the consumer as this cost would be passed on to the ultimate consumer.
Also the perspective you should have is that for a one crore plus population we have just around 600 representatives and even assuming that each of us put in Rs 1 per day for upkeep and maintenance of our representative we would have covered their costs but we must remember that we may be investing not less than rs 5000 to rs 10,000 in extra costs that we have to spend for our products because the companies have to earn profit. Just one example, take the toothpaste. an average toothpaste tube of 50 gm would cost u Rs 40 and the cost of manufacturing of this tube would be hardly 30 per cent of the price and the rest would go for advertising and profit margin.
check this news headline
"Colgate Reports Strong 1st Quarter EPS up 14% to $ .56 on 6% Unit Volume Growth Highest Dollar Sales Growth in Seven Years"
This amounts to 54 per cent profit margin! Why are we made to pay so much because the average earning of a CEO as a percentage of total revenue of any industry is more than 12 per cent

"In 2004, the average CEO of a major company received $9.84 million in total compensation , according to a study by compensation consultant Pearl Meyer & Partners for The New York Times. This represents a 12 percent increase in CEO pay over 2003. In contrast, the average nonsupervisory worker?s pay increased just 2.2 percent to $27,485 in 2004."

What we should be looking at should be how to engage these "illiterate" representatives of people to do some good work for us as after all an illiterate Kamaraj was one of the kingmakers who made a lot of difference for us as Indians and one "illiterate" MGR and Karunanidhi have been successful chief ministers of Tamil Nadu ditto for AP (NTR).

Bhanu's forwarded note!

Have a look at this Salary & Govt. Concessions for a Member of Parliament (MP)
Monthly Salary : 12,000 Expense for Constitution per month : 10,000 Office expenditure per month : 14,000 Traveling concession (Rs. 8 per km) : 48,000 ( eg.For a visit from kerala to Delhi & return: 6000 km) Daily DA TA during parliament meets : 500/day
Charge for 1 class (A/C) in train: Free (For any number of times) (All over India )
Charge for Business Class in flights : Free for 40 trips / year (With wife or P.A.)
Rent for MP hostel at Delhi : Free
Electricity costs at home : Free up to 50,000 units
Local phone call charge : Free up to 1 ,70,000 calls.
TOTAL expense for a MP [having no qualification] per year : 32,00,000 [i.e. 2.66 lakh/month]
TOTAL expense for 5 years : 1,60,00,000 For 534 MPs, the expense for 5 years : 8,54,40,00,000 (nearly 855 crores)
AND THE PRIME MINISTER IS ASKING THE HIGHLY QUALIFIED, OUT PERFORMING CEOs TO CUT DOWN THEIR SALARIES…..
This is how all our tax money is been swallowed and price hike on our regular commodities.......

two tier internet?

2007-09-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

US Justice department today stirred up the hornet's nest by opinionating that there can be two different tariff systems for the Internet service providers, one for the normal services and another for premium services. The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic.

The agency said it was opposed to "network neutrality", the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net. The agency's stance is contrary to much of the internet community that believes in an open model for the internet.

The agency's stance is contrary to much of the internet community that believes in an open model for the internet.Last year, Sir Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the web rallied against the idea of a two-tier internet. "What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web," he said. "Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."

Internet somehow has managed to survive many attempts to divide it like the way the real world has become since the time earth came to be populated with human beings. Some of us who have been tracking internet from the time it became popular--I for one have been writing about it since 1987!(that is really ancient isnt it?)--have always been excited by the fact that the Net has once again given the humanity a chance to become one nation and one world since the time of the legendry Tower of Babel which is stated to be the reason in ancient times to divide human beings up.

According to Catholic Encyclopaedia the descendants of Noah had migrated from the "east" (Armenia) first southward, along the course of the Tigris, then westward across the Tigris into "a plain in the land of Sennar". As their growing number forced them to live in localities more and more distant from their patriarchal homes, "they said: Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven; and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands." The work was soon fairly under way; "and they had brick instead of stones, and slime (asphalt) instead of mortar." But God confounded their tongue, so that they did not understand one another's speech, and thus scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city.

Tower Babel is real or not, internet sure is heading the same way with attempts by the service providers, the software providers, the governments and agencies like the US Justice Department wanting to make divisions within the global community in the guise of empowering some in the name of "justice", in this case making the consumer pay for using the Internet by compensating the cost of its development for the service provider.

As internet users we need to take a stand against such tendencies and allow Internet to spread more "freely" as a "free service" so that high quality knowledge is created that would be used for developing the world. The deal is very simple make internet a global common like air water, atmosphere, earth and fire

How does Google manage its knowledge?

2007-09-04T03:44:00.000-07:00

To deal with the more than 10 billion Web pages and tens of terabytes of information on Google's servers, the company combines cheap machines with plenty of redundancy, the author of this article Hoelzle said. Its commodity servers cost around $1,000 apiece, and Google's architecture places them into interconnected nodes. more from http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3487041

how do you save what you read?

2007-09-04T03:42:00.000-07:00

There are ways of saving what you have read. The conventional method is to copy and paste into a word file and save, or print it or send it to your email.

But now you can "digg it", de-li-cious it, redd it and face book it! You can also RSS it and of course the conventional book marking is still around, there is also the blogging that has been added now, like this one you are reading. You can find out more about social bookmarking on Wikipedia. Wikipedia article on social bookmarking

For more details about each of these impressive sounding new ways of saving what you have read
Del.icio.us
To register, go to: http://del.icio.us/register For more information: http://del.icio.us/about/ Digg
To register, go to: http://digg.com/register For more information: http://digg.com/about reddit To register, go to: http://reddit.com/login For more information: http://reddit.com/help/faq
Facebook
To register, go to: https://register.facebook.com/r.php For more information: http://www.facebook.com/about.php

StumbleUpon
register, go to: http://www.stumbleupon.com/sign_up.php For more information: http://www.stumbleupon.com/about.html

Cyber crime tool kits go on sale

2007-09-04T03:12:00.001-07:00

Cyber crime tool kits go on sale
The following is an amaziing news item about how cyber crime is becoming a big business--well didnt we know about it already--no we are not talking about how widespread cyber crime and how much money these criminals make but this one is shockingly different. There is in fact even no crime in what these guys are doing. You cant have any such charge stick. The news item in BBC says there is a big market developing in cyber crime kits which is being sold to even people who are hardly techno savvy but are crime hungry!

The news goes as follows......
Malicious hackers are producing easy to use tools that automate attacks to cash in on a boom in hi-tech crime.
On sale, say security experts, are everything from individual viruses to comprehensive kits that let budding cyber thieves craft their own attacks.
The top hacking tools are being offered for prices ranging up to £500.
Some of the most expensive tools are sold with 12 months of technical support that ensures they stay armed with the latest vulnerabilities. more

more on internet crimes

We all know about spam - we all get inboxes full of it! Unsolicited junk e-mail is still on the increase.
Over the last three years we have seen the amount of spam flying around the 'net grow at phenomenal rate.
9% of all emails were identified as spam in 2002. A year later that had risen to 40%. And last year, a mailbox-busting 73% of all e-mail was spam - that is 9.2 billion junk messages! (from BBC click online)
Here is another link from the same source about how to keep yourself safe on the Internet from cyber attackers as nearly 2 lakh malicious programmes are said to be in existence most of which aiming at ordinary PC users. These problem programs can arrive via e-mail, instant messenger, through your internet connection or even your web browser if you visit the wrong website.

Like many subjects, information security comes with its own terminology and the jargon some of these are.
Adware
Blackhat
Bot
Botnet
Botnet herder
Bullet-proof hosting
Carder
Cash-out
Channel
Cross-site scripting
Dead-drop
DDoS
Drive-by download
Exploit
Firewall
Honeypot
IP Address
IRC
Keylogger
Malware
Man-in-the-middle
Packet sniffing
Phishing
Port
Roots
Script kiddie
Spyware
TCP
Trojan
Virus
Whitehat
Worm
Zero day
Zombie

China hosts nearly half of all malware sites
By Victoria Ho, ZDNet Asia Published on ZDNet News: Sep 4, 2007 8:57:00 AM

According to a report released Monday by antivirus company Sophos, China--including Hong Kong--hosted 44.8 percent of the world's infected sites in August. The U.S. ranked a distant second, hosting 20.8 percent of sites that contain malicious code.
The number of infected Web pages has also grown. Sophos said it detected an average of 5,000 new infected pages each day in the month of August.
The company warned that simply staying clear of sites hosted in the top three countries of China, the U.S. and Russia is not an effective method of avoiding malware.
"Hackers are hijacking Web sites around the world to make them point to malware on sites based in China, the U.S. and Russia," Carole Theriault, Sophos senior security consultant, said in a statement. (for more read source)

Relevance of social networks

2007-09-03T02:56:00.000-07:00

There is a lot going for social networks, a hybrid service new on the internet which is a take off from the personalised groups like yahoogroups etc.,

The way http://www.orkut.com/, http://www.facebook.com/ etc., has caught up with the people is ample evidence people want to be together in one form or the other even in the world wide web which technically promise a borderless world.

Here is a news item I just read about this from http://www.techtree.com/ quoted in rediff.com

The year 2007 has seen the launch of several new social networking Web sites targeting the youth in this country. Two such newbies: iShare, launched by Rediff in July, and the very recent BigAdda, launched by Reliance ADAG. Both portals qualify as social content sharing platforms, allowing users share videos, music, pictures, and more. They combine elements of various sites including Orkut, Youtube, Flickr, and Limewire, to name a few. Yet, they aspire to be more than just platforms for people to catch up with pals or find dates online. An increasing number of people are actually looking towards these sites as more than just meeting ground. One such aspect, video sharing, is gaining currency the world over. For instance, aspiring music artists get to showcase their work by uploading their videos. Others in turn, get to know of the existence of diverse and varied talent. (more from the techtree link)

I am reading more on the social networks and the way they are evolving and I cant at the moment make head or tail of the following news excerpts from various blogs but eventually I will I guess.

here goes

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=122. This is one is about someone trying to set up social network in Oracle
There is another which is chiding KPMG for its enterprise software saying the social network face book has been left out of the KPMG software. I quote from this entry
"KPMG’s report Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future? The Business Role for Social Software Platforms is a disappointment. Here we have one of the world’s leading consultancies publishing a 19 page glossy brochure that is short on substance and long on consulting sales bait. Perhaps it’s a reflection of KPMG’s belief about its clients understanding of the topic" more from this entry

watch this space for more!

I am simply copying back an blog entry I had made five days ago which is relevant under this head

Way Too Good for Facebook or MySpace? For the rich and well-connected who don't want to rub elbows with those who aren't, exclusive social networks pledge to keep out the riff-raff by Catherine Holahan Roger Allen Conner Jr. has little use for the common folk who frequent MySpace (NWS) and Facebook—you know, the clubs anyone can join. "A lot of social-networking sites are very low-quality," says Conner, the 22-year-old founder of a North Carolina consulting firm named SiloIQ. "The type of individuals that are on these social-networking sites are generally not well-networked themselves." Not even a business-oriented network like LinkedIn will do. To put it bluntly, Conner wants powerful friends: the kind of people who board private jets after cutting business deals. People who don't get stopped by the bouncer at New York's Bungalow 8 nightclub. People with connections who can open doors and get his company noticed. People with log-ins to aSmallWorld. While there's little argument that aSW is growing fast, what constitutes too fast is open to debate. In the three-and-a-half years since its launch, membership has grown from 500 users to about 260,000. But MySpace has grown to more than 100 million members over a similar timeframe, making it a major recipient of the $900 million that research firm eMarketer estimates will be spent on social-network advertising this year. For now, aSW appears to be an online gateway to the upper echelons of the social stratosphere. Although Wachtmeister won't name-drop when it comes to aSW users, a search of the site's member lists reveals plenty of twenty- and thirtysomething investment bankers, fashion-industry types, CEOs, and recognizable last names: Firestone, Rockefeller, Forbes, Trump (see BusinessWeek, 8/20/07, "High-Net-Worth Networking"). Notably, the site already features classified ads where people sell classic Jaguars, yachts, and Cartier watches. Advertisers include champagne producer Moët & Chandon (LVMH) and private-jet company Sentient. Yet to make aSW a financial success, Wachtmeister has to balance demand for exclusivity against an advertiser's hunger to reach more eyeballs. Wachtmeister says aSW, which has 35 employees, is nearing profitability. And he rejects any suggestion that standards are being lowered as it grows. "The new members we get today could be as good, if not better, than some of the members we got a year ago," he says. "We can go a long way before we have to worry." Safaricom: On a Tear in Africa The continent's mobile-phone operators are soaring -- witness the joint venture between Kenya's government and Vodafone, which plans an IPO by Jack Ewing Visitors to the headquarters of Safaricom in Nairobi must first face the scrutiny of a pair of imposing uniformed guards who peer sternly at vehicle occupants before lowering a hydraulically operated metal roadblock that looks strong enough to stop a speeding truck. The tight security is a reminder that Kenya, though relatively prosperous and stable by African standards, is still a difficult place to run a mobile-phone company. Safaricom, a 60-40 joint venture of the Kenyan government and London-based Vodafone (VOD), wrecks an average of one maintenance vehicle a month on the country's abysmal rural roads. Even in urban areas, cellular base stations require diesel-powered generators to compensate for unreliable or nonexistent electrical power. And Safaricom must surround the base stations with electrified fences and alarm systems to discourage theft of fuel, as well as the generators themselves. Blogs Will Change Your Business Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later By Stephen Baker and Heather Green of Business Week. MAY 2, 2005 Your Business Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later Monday 9:30 a.m. It's time for a frank talk. And no, it can't wait. We know, we know: Most of you are sick to death of blogs. Don't even want to hear about these millions of online journals that link together into a vast network. And yes, there's plenty out there not to like. Self-obsession, politics of hate, and the same hunger for fame that has people lining up to trade punches on The Jerry Springer Show. Name just about anything that's sick in our society today, and it's on parade in the blogs. On lots of them, even the writing stinks. There's a little problem, though. Many of you don't visit blogs -- or haven't since blogs became a sensation in last year's Presidential race. According to a Pew Research Center Survey, only 27% of Internet users in America now bother to read them. So we're going to take you into the world of blogs by delivering this story -- call it Blogs 101 for businesses -- in the style of a blog. We're even sprinkling it with links. These are underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers of this story's online version to another Web page. This all may make for a strange experience, but it's the closest we can come to reaching out from the page, grabbing you by the collar, and shaking you into action.First, a few numbers. There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. "Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo," reads one April Posting. Let's assume that 99.9% are equally off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush. How big are blogs? Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution. Some say it led to the Protestant Reformation and Western democracy. Along the way, societies established the rights and rules of the game for the privileged few who could afford to buy printing presses and grind forests into paper. Google (GOOG ) is regarded as a secretive company. So in January, when a young programmer named Mark Jen started blogging about his first days in the Googleplex, folks in the 'sphere instantly linked to him. Jen certainly wasn't dealing out inside dirt. But he griped that Google's health plan was less generous than his former employer's -- Microsoft (MSFT ) -- and he argued, indignantly, that Google's free food was an enticement for employees to work past dinner.Two weeks later, Google fired Jen. And that's when the 22-year-old became a big story. Google was blogbusted for overreacting and for sending an all-too-clear warning to the dozens of bloggers still at the company. A Google official says the company has lots of bloggers and just expects them to use common sense. For example, if it's something you wouldn't e-mail to a long list of strangers, don't blog it.Jen clearly flunked that test. "As the media got hold of it, I was quickly educated," he says. He says he should have understood the company's goals and concerns better and been more sensitive to them. Still, his adventure turned him into an overnight celebrity. He was wooed by recruiters at Amazon.com (AMZN ), Microsoft, and Yahoo! (YHOO ) A month later, Jen landed a job at Plaxo, an Internet contact-management company. A key part of his job, says a company spokesperson, is to help coordinate Plaxo's blogging efforts -- a pillar of Plaxo's promotional strategy. So what got him fired turned out to be his trump card. Plaxo, like many other companies, is now drawing up norms for blogging behavior, so that employees know what's in bounds, and what's not. The role of the blog startups is to build tools for this grassroots uprising. Six Apart, a four-year-old San Francisco company, leads in blog software. Technorati and PubSub Concepts are battling it out in blog search. The founders all insist that they plan to remain independent. But if recent history is any guide, most of them will wind up in the bellies of the blog-minded Internet giants -- led by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The latest to disappear was Flickr. A photo-sharing service that spread madly across the blog world, 13-month-old Flickr was still running its software in its beta, or testing, phase when it was acquired by Yahoo in March for an undisclosed sum. Caterina Fake, Flickr's co-founder, wrote about the deal in her blog the day it happened: "Don't forget to breathe. It's not the end, it's the beginning." David Sifry looks at it a bit differently. He's a serial entrepreneur and founder of Technorati , the blog search engine.For Sifry, it's not the growth of the same Web, but an entirely new one. It's wrapped up far more in people's day-to-day lives. It's connected to time. The way he describes it, the Web we've come to know is mostly a collection of documents. A library. These documents don't change much. Try Googling Donald Trump, and you're more likely to find his Web page than a discussion of his appearance last night on The Apprentice. The innovation that sends blogs zinging into the mainstream is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Five years ago, a blogger named Dave Winer, working with software originally developed by Netscape, created an easy-to-use system to turn blogs, or even specific postings, into Web feeds. With this system, a user could subscribe to certain blogs, or to key words, and then have all the relevant items land at a single destination. These personalized Web pages bring together the music and video the user signs up for, in addition to news. They're called "aggregators." For now, only about 5% of Internet users have set them up. But that number's sure to rise as Yahoo and Microsoft plug them. Winer also ushered in a second tech breakthrough, podcasting. A back-and-forth between Winer and Adam Curry, a blogger and former MTV host, led last year to a system that easily distributes audio files. Looking for National Public Radio's On the Media or the latest ska compilations from a disk jockey in Trinidad? Sign up on a Web page, and the program gets automatically delivered to you -- as an audio feed. Last summer, Curry created software called iPodder so these MP3s could hitch a ride on an iPod (AAPL ). That was the birth of podcasting: radio programming whenever and wherever you want it. Since then, some 5,000 podcasting shows have sprouted up. They cover everything from yoga to the blues. The big companies have what the bloggers lack. Scale, relations with advertisers, and large sales forces. They can use these forces to sell across all media, from general audience to bloggy niches. Already, Yahoo and Microsoft have been investing heavily to position themselves for niche advertising. And in February, the New York Times (NYT ) laid down $410 million for About Inc., a collection of 500 specialized Web sites that smell strongly of blogs. "What's to stop them from turning those 500 sites into 5,000?" says Dave Morgan, founder of TACODA Systems, an Internet advertising company. So why not start here? We've done our research on blogs, made our dire pronouncements. Pretty soon, someone in production will press the button. But this story should go on, as a conversation. And it will, starting on Apr. 22. We're launching our own blog to cover the business drama ahead, as blogging spreads into companies and redefines media. The blog's name? Blogspotting.net. See you there.

Internet scams and frauds

2007-09-03T02:05:00.000-07:00

Internet represents an open society and like everything else in the real world there are good guys and bad guys and you should know the difference.
There are people who constantly look for easy way to make money without realising that there is no such thing as easy money. There are after all no free lunches as the famous quote of Schuamacher goes from his Small is beautiful book.

Here is the latest one I received through e-mail!

Yahoo & Window Live Awards Centre
124 Stockport Road, Longsight, Manchester M60 2DB - United Kingdom
Tel: +44 704 5744 259, Fax: +44 705 380 5207.

Yahoo Awards Center124 Stockport Road, Longsight, Manchester M60 2DB United Kingdom. This is to inform you that you have won a prize money of Two Hundredand Fifty Thousand Great Britain Pounds (GBP 250,000) for the month ofSeptember, 2007 Prize promotion which is organized by YAHOO AWARDS & WINDOWS LIVE

yeah, I seek to have become rich by 250,000 pounds and if I convert it into rupees which is my country currency I wouldnt even know how many zeros to put in the final figure!

Well obviously I sent it to the spam box which is where such messages belong! and I did some digging to find out how serious is this fraud. Here is what I found from the net.

Go and collect 820k Euro from yAhoo Awards Center

Updated Aug 07.Yahoo Awards Center Lottery or Sweepstake is a Scam.

The following is the info from Yahoo regarding this scam:"No. There is no Yahoo! Lottery, and we would never send you information about a contest you never entered.That’s the definition of unsolicited: you never asked for it. It showed up out of nowhere. The message probably also displays two other hallmarks of fraud emails: it appears to be official (with company logos, even links), and it demands urgent action “to claim your prize”, or something similar more

Here is the link to what yahoo has to say about such unsolicited mails go for link

there is another genre of mails which come to you carrying a sob story about some air crash and the victim somehow magically will have your first name or surname--how they find out your name from the net is amazing-- and would be from your country. The scamsters would tempt you by saying as solicitors or advocates privvy to the bank account of the deceased they will help you to settle it with the bank and split the proceeds, usually running to millions--how come every air crash victim is a millionnaire is another amazing point, I for one travel a lot and I cant claim to be even a remotely a millionnaire!

Well a long trail of e-mails will follow with you and the scamster if you are dumb enough to answer the first one and someday soon the fraudster will send you a mail with all due respects asking you deposit some few hundred dollars to cover some expense or the other which he is unable to do owing to some currency problem or some such legitimate sounding excuse. The money being deposited by you will be the last act in this drama. All this guy was interested was not in the millions the victim purportedly had in his account when he died in air crash but the measely few hundred that you would be guillible enough to part with! a few hundred suckers like you every week from around the world and the scamster will surely become a millionnaire, air crash or not!

What remedy you have when you get some mail like this and you send your money in. practially none but you can certainly be able to tell whether you are getting duped or not right from the start. For one, please send such messages to the trash bin as soon as you see these. second look up the internet to find places which report on such frauds and learn the pattern of such messages for you to recognise these. There are good samaritan sites like these for you to learn about scams

1. www.hotscams.com
2. www.scambusters.org
3. Wikipaedia fraud reporting

such others

Please also follow the following article link which has classified the Internet frauds in to 12 categories and another overview article on the same subject

knowledge about Indian space efforts

2007-09-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

original image source and feature article

Indian space movement has one of the strongest in the world and it has gone on quitely making India one of the few nations capable of launching satellites into space. The latest is the GSLV rocket lifting off to launch a communication satellite of Indian Space Research Agency in space.

The history of space movement has been long and arduous and the milestones that it covered has been many. This blog entry will attempt to capture the knowledge about Indian space efforts from the beginning to date.

GSLV Rocket Lifts off from Shriharikota
September 02, 2007 18:56 IST
The Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle-FO4 lifted off from the Sriharikota launch range with India's latest communications satellite INSAT-4CR at 1821 IST on Sunday.
The launch was earlier postponed twice -- three seconds before the blast off and then to 1821 IST.
The countdown had stopped due to a "technical snag in parameters related to the launch", sources in the Indian Space Research Organisation said.
The GSLV will put into orbit the INSAT-4CR, which carries 12 high-power Ku-band transponders for direct-to-home television services, video picture transmission and digital satellite news gathering.
The last launch of the GSLV in July 2006 ended in failure, with the rocket falling into the Bay of Bengal shortly after blasting off from the Sriharikota launching range. quoted from rediff.com/PTI news item

INDIAN SPACE RESEARCH ORGANISATION (ISRO)

according to wiki entry The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is India's national space agency. With its headquarters in Bangalore, the ISRO employs approximately 20,000 people, with a budget around 815 million USD at March 2006 exchange rate. Its mandate is the development of technologies related to space and their application to India's development. The current Chairman of ISRO is G. Madhavan Nair. In addition to domestic payloads, it offers international launch services

ISRO centres
These centres are related to the ISRO:
Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC)

a feature link from Tribune

ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC)
Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SHAR)
Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC)
Space Applications Centre (SAC)
Development and Educational Communication Unit (DECU)

more

(ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC)
INSAT Master Control Facility (MCF)
ISRO Inertial Systems Unit (IISU)
National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA)
Regional Remote Sensing Service Centres (RRSSC)
Physical Research Laboratory (PRL)
National Atmospheric Research Laboratory (NARL) (previously National Mesosphere/Stratosphere Troposphere Radar Facility (NMRF))
Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL)

my favourite reading

2007-08-28T03:38:00.000-07:00

India's 50 Most Powerful People
The politicians, business leaders, film stars, athletes, and designers behind India's growing international presence in the world
By Nandini Lakshman and Manjeet Kripalani in Business Week

The list of India's most powerful players is rapidly changing. Tech leaders used to dominate the show. But a booming economy has thrown up new sectors, new heroes, and new businesses. Telecom, financial services, retail, and many more industries are thriving.

Demand for real estate has transformed villages into towns and towns into cities.With the government controlling a major part of the economy, including infrastructure, politicians still wield the most clout. But in India's 60th year of independence, the names on the list are representative of changing times. There are politicians who actually work, corporate types who think globally, athletes who aim high, and designers who ensure India is in season. And Bollywood is now teaming up with Hollywood for a whole new script.This is the new India, and these are its 50 top players.

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