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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Update regarding french Language course at IIIT

May not be the best place to post it, but this kind of premature annoucement couldn't be sent in a mail.

The course for French Language will not be a Humanities or Open Elective as far as offering it in this semester is concerned, It can be a non-academic credit, but the payment for that kind of course is not clear. The talk is on to have the college pay at least some part of the fees like it was for the German course last semester.

So in simple words the status of French course: The course with credits will probably be there is next sem. This semester it might come up as Non-Academic, but that is still being discussed and should be settled by this weekend, that is when I will send a formal mail, probably.

Please spread the word to other friends who were interested.

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Decreasing their credibility themselves?

In need of posting some hot news, some sites like this one end up putting authors like Varun Dubey write some crapy articles without any reference or background about what they speak. Here is the start of the article
The Linux community was left stunned when Windows Server Sold outsold Linux in the server market. Gartner, Inc. recently reported that sales of Windows systems accounted for nearly 37 percent of all server revenue in the last quarter while Linux accounted for 31.7 percent. Windows has a 5+ percent lead over Linux, which should be the cause for celebration at Microsoft.
Now what sense do you make about the author of the article and the site after seeing this actual figures from
http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;1754059524;fp;2;fpid;1
Sales of Windows systems accounted for 36.9 percent of all server revenue in the quarter, versus 31.7 percent for Unix and 11.5 percent for Linux,
My first impression is that the author needs some basics taught: Linux is not Unix dude. When was Linux's server sales ever even close to Windows. Linux has only crossed the 10% mark in this quarter. It is Unix that has lost the first rank to Windows servers.

Also below your article it would be great to write what your experience on a topic has been. Like authors of other great magzines do. And allow for some comments from the readers if you think the article can stand them.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

The worst ever Spectator

The spectators of Calcutta have shown the worst ever behaviour by any spectator, far beyound what could have been expected. Oh! I forgot Its not the first time, they did back the same thing in same stadium in a world cup match against Srilanka. When they threw bottles etc on the ground.
The least step that should be taken is to close the stadium for any ODI match from now on. You can't win the heart of ppl who have so strong regional feeling that they have to go anti-Indian team for expulsion of their so called prince.
Those lossers don't imagine how many places the match have been held in the country and if it is possible to keep at least one local hero in the team for each such match. Should the Hyderabadi people cry against VVS Laxman not being in team? And this way will it be possible for any player from Bangalore to be out of team when a match has to be held in Bangalore? Should a person like so called prince be in the team only for playing for the local spectators?
I used to be a Gangully admirer until recently, I only felt that he was passing through his bad time, and had his weaknesses that he can work around, but recent developments have turned truly me Anti-Gangully and anti his supporters. Every person who played in the team had at some team leave the team for the arrival for better once, why is then this fuss about Gangully.
India is a big country and the team can only have 11 good players, those player should be the chossen by performance and not by the number of supporters they have or the region they represent. If such is the sentiment of ppl from Calcultta, The team should better not accept any young cricketer from that part of country for its ODI team in future.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Time to grow up to Web 2.0

I visit regularly to the sites http://www.cricinfo.com and also other like http://www.ndtv.com/cricketcard/odiframenew.asp or http://www.cricketnext.com, specially during matches that Indian cricket team is a part of.

These site however good they might be in terms of data they are providing suck bigtime in there presentation. In a cricket match when a ball is bowled every 1 minute or less, the slow refreshing of page irritates me. I don't understand how they could be so foolish as to not apply simple AJAX technologies to update only the variable part after each ball, where the variable part could be the figures(numbers), or even ads.

Instead they want to load the whole shit page with loads of images (browser and proxy server might apply some intelligence internally) almost same in there content. They page display goes off for a while and the user is simply supposed to wait till the page refreshes.

Another bad thing that happens with cricinfo is some times it goes back in history and shows up old score. Not sure whos fault it is browser, or the website or the proxy server but basically it sucks when you wait for the latest score seeing the page reloading slowly and see a score 10 balls earlier.

It good time the lesser known site put these technologies and come up with a better interface when the old once just hang around the old interface. Or rather some of us could write a better webpage aggregating all these scores from all the sites and displaying them properly ?

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Everyone wants to be slashdotted :)

They say google gets slashdotted everyday, We should also have some flashy annoucements to make. M$ announce live *, ok basically ajax et al. and Yahoo announces awards to its engineers for not giving up to google maps and gmail.

Seems like net competition is catching up. Well thats good for us, customers. Google we are looking more slashdot stories but not like this one. So how many times they get slashdotted possibly this should tell.
Yahoo
Google
Microsoft.

As of now I am not satisfied with blogger, and wordpress looks a perfect option, will move sometime.

Friday, November 04, 2005

Ph.Ds don't grow on Trees

UGC asked('recommended') universities to increase the number of Ph.D scholar by 5 folds in next 5-10 years time. University principals and chancellor came back saying "Ph.Ds don't grow on Tree" giving reasons why this is difficult or impractical. Some points are worth discussion/pondering. (Times of India 4 Nov. 2005)
1) Students are not sure of Job after spending 5 prime years of their life doing Ph.D, govt should ensure jobs for Ph.D candidate (will argue below)
2) Funds are not sufficient (No argument its practically true)
3) Many Professors are not getting time to guide research students because of their heavy involvement in general Academics( worth thinking)
4) Most faculty are already guiding maximum number of Ph.D's they can guide(6) [ discussed below]

Point 1) wtf? Job seeking after doing Ph.D. Are we making people do Ph.D to do normal jobs? AFAICT a person who does a Ph.D should be worthy of choosing his company and pursue work on his area of interest ( some slight adjustments might be needed). Lectureship should be a great job(?) in itself. IIRC current demand of Ph.D in Education sector is around 20000 to 30000 (source Dr. U.R. Rao's talk at IIIT). That is good enough for targetting 500-2000 Ph.D per year.
Point 2) is Correct. Companies in India are not mostly worthy of Knowledge but of experience, I am quite sure if a B.Tech with 5 years of work exp is seen more value adding than a Ph.D by most companies, 'coz all they want to do it work which doesn't require any knowledge or brain application but just work which can be done by any person after training(for 2-3 months), sometimes I feel a 12th pass with 4year experience would be considered better than a B.Tech too.
Point 3,4) As said the solution is the increase in number of Ph.D lecturers in each college.

Infact a better way to increase number of Ph.D is the research exchange programme. The idea which is used by many countries from Syria to Ethiopia to get people to go abroad on government expence do Ph.D and come back and teach in the country for sometime.

People who have passion for research can find very good professors to work under abroad and in 5 years they will gain good enough knowledge to come back and share and enlighten 5-6 people per head(they might be obliged to do this themselve or by bond or contracts in lieu of government's expenditure on them). This process seems to have worked for China, Why can't it work for India. When there is sufficient number of people in India itself and research atmosphere is set, people can come up with good research work by working in the country itself probably.

Another point: IIRC IITs and many other government colleges seems to get lots of Fund from UGC( or government) for producing the MTechs. Noting that most of the M.Techs from IITs end up doing nothing but simple software jobs, which many graduates can do without doing a M.Tech, why not think of better way of spending this money? What I mean to say is if all M.Tech is doing no good to the intellectual strength/improvement of the country why not scrap the support for that program and support lesser a number of people doing Ph.Ds or Master of Science by Research (assuming MSbR does motivate many people to join Ph.Ds) ?