Are we dead yet?

Ok, so is this dead?

Car Makers explore car-to-car warning

Now this is a pretty imaginative idea - but imagine how much havoc someone could wreck by spoofing these alerts from one car to another, causing some of them to suddenly change course or brake and thereby cause traffic disruptions and pile-ups.....


FT.com / World / International economy - Makers explore car-to-car warning

Chagrin

Chagrin probably is the word for this.

It happened while I was trying to negotiate a package for campus recruitment in PEC this year by my company, Evalueserve (http://www.evalueserve.com)

At IITs we offer an amount, say x. At BITS-Pilani, ditto, at IT-BHU ditto again. But at PEC, it has been decided for 0.82x. Though this isn't less, per se, but my point was to negotiate the disparity away. But I failed.

And among the reasons which I could gather is the severe lacking of brand. I mean look at the website, Late Ms Chawla going to space is the bleeding news at http://www.pec.ac.in

The discussion (or debate, if you may) then was directed to, "I beg, you please, at least keep a parity between BITS-Pilani ("a non-IIT", just as PEC) and PEC. But they disagree, rightly so, I now realize.

Came back to my seat and with a bruised spirit started looking at BITS-Pilani and IT-BHU presence on the web vis-à-vis PEC and man, I feel like a fool at even having the thought of going for that discussion.

Who or what is PEC, one can't know. Probably, it is Pondicherry Engineering College, for all they know. Just search for BITS and you come across pages talking of the "highest paid guy in the Indian Corporate" -- Vivek Paul - a BITSian, proudly says the website.

Man, I thought we had achievers too. I thought, Vivek Mehra who sold Cobalt Networks to Sun for $ 2 billion was from PEC. His wife, Sonia Bhanot, alumni of PEC, is a CEO of Verano, some Mr Paul Singh, PEC again, is a multi-billionaire. These achievers and many more, but these achievements don’t get fed back into the PEC brand.

But then why the heck isn't any brand there? I don't know. For now, I'm sitting here, chagrined.

MBAs - Life, liberty & pursuit of yuppieness

Jivha - the Tongue: MBAs - Life, liberty & pursuit of yuppieness: "In 1944, C.S. Lewis delivered a speech titled 'The Inner Ring' to the graduating class of Kings College at the University of London. He asserted that the strongest of all drives is the desire to belong to an 'inner ring' - an imaginary circle of the important. But, he warned, status is like an onion comprising endless layers. No sooner do you crack one ring than you become obsessed with getting to the even-more-exclusive ring inside that one."

The new new thing via Nilesh

Since Nilesh still maintains email is the best/easy way to convey ideas to a group of people. Here is one of his blurbs with his permission (Hyperlink is mine :D)

I had heard good reviews of Liar's poker... so I went out to buy it. As it turned out, the shop I went to didn't have the book, but they did have The New New thing - by the same author, Michael Lewis.
Being the shrewd salesman that he was, the guy showed me the New new thing although i didnt ask for it. Being the bibliophile that I am, I spent over 600 bucks and bought it.
Fortunately, ti turned out to be a good book,

The New New thing was written in the pre-April 2001 era and chronicles the story of Jim Clark.
All the geeks in this world can be neatly divided into 2 categories: those who know who Jim Clark is and the rest. (the rest should seriously re-consider their own aspirations and claims to geekdom and take approrpiate corrective action).

As with all big events in history, it all began with something so trivial, it was almost impossible that the event could have triggered a global economic frenzy unlike any seen ever before.
It all began with a boat.
It was a pretty boat and a really big boat - the world's largest single sail yatch. It was also designed to be completely controlled and run by computer. If you wanted to switch off a bulb, you'd punch in some commands and the computer(s) would switch off the light for you. Navigation, control, the engine - all were controlled by the computer. Needless to say, it was also quite expensive - which is how the story began.

Actually, the story began a long time ago - in the early 1980's. At the time, Jim Clark created a new chip - a geometry chip. It was the first chip to allow people to create elementary 3-d images on computer. The quality of the graphics were such as to leave even toddler's from today un-impressed, but back then entire armies of grown up engineers were drawn to it as were venture capitalists. The idea came together as a company - Silicon Graphics. The story from then on was quite simple - man invents the new thing, VC finances the firm, VC gains financial control of firm, VC fills up the firm with his CEO and his "managers", man slowly gets edged out.
This was about the time when Jim Clark discovered two separate things - his computer controlled boat and Mosaic.
(If you don't know what Mosaic was - DO NOT EVER CALL YOURSELF A GEEK!) Mosaic was the world's first web browser.
Jim founded a company with the guys who had written Mosaic and called it Netscape.

Because Jim needed money to buy his boat, he convinced his VC's and others to take the company public, even though it was bleeding money and that is how the Netscape IPO happened. The rest, as they say, is history. Netscape's IPO launched the dot-com boom. And it all happened because one silly rich man wanted to buy a boat !

The New New thing is a lively (and often funny) book that makes for entertaining reading.

H(p) = -plogp - (1-p)log(1-p)

H(p) = -plogp - (1-p)log(1-p)
by Scott Aaronson



I was reading an obituary of Shannon,
asking myself:
why did it take till 1948?
That the semantics of a message
are irrelevant to how to transmit it,
that the distribution from which the message was
chosen is all that matters,
is obvious.
Should've been obvious to the Babylonians,
Greeks, Egyptians.

Why, among the thousands of ideas put forward
by Aristotle, Augustine, Maimonides,
Kant, Comte, Marx, Nietzsche,
Mary Baker Eddy,
was there nowhere the almost trivial observation
that to encrypt perfectly you need a key
the size of the message itself?
or that almost all functions
have exponential circuit complexity?

I wandered out of the library
and saw a girl sketching the landscape,
breasts straining against the V of her sweater,
surrounded by laughing guys
who'd probably never even seen the entropy formula,
and then I knew.

The value (controversy) of Geo-Spatial Databases

This article in Newsweek is a good article on the topic.

An interesting website is listed in it.
Fundrace This uses the FEC's rule of logging campagin contributions to a map, allowing you to see who is contributing to whom and how much. I can now see what many of my neighbors do, get some idea on their financial background etc.

I know it goes against free speech and the principles of technology, but have we reached a stage where we need regulation (or atleast think about ) how & how much information can be interlinked?

-Ashish

HUMOR: What is the value of an admissions essay?

Found this here