http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu Thu, 06 Sep 2007 10:01:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en From today's news (courtesy WSJ): The dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology resigned after admitting she misrepresented her academic degrees, the university announced today. The dean, Marilee Jones, had worked at the university since 1979 and served as dean of admissions since 1998. She has been an outspoken ... http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2007/04/26/perils-of-credentialism-mit-example/ The police in Chennai seem to have a lot of time on their hands, for here comes the news Unauthorised telecom network busted, one held Their crime? Apart from Internet connection, the duo had also installed the voice over internet protocol with which they gained access to international calls, thereby causing ... http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2007/03/11/the-crime-of-voice-over-ip-telephony/ I attended a short presentation on the book "No Asshole Rule" by Professor Robert Sutton. I have personally followed something similar to that rule.I believe anyone can be effective in their job, and be effective leaders without being assholes. One thing Professor Sutton mentioned was that the pervalence of ... http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2007/02/16/credential-requirements-create-a-new-caste-hierarchy/ OK, answer this without consulting Google: Explain the principle of operation of the galvanometer. That is part of the standard syllabus for our public exams in Physics for 12th standard students. I saw that question in a newspaper supplement, which provides sample question papers to prepare students for the all-important public ... http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2006/12/19/on-galvanometers-and-exams/ Here is a typical news story This Diwali is Costlier than Ever Before from The Hindu. Along with inflation comes nonsensical "explanations", from unnamed "economists" (emphasize mine): Quote: This Diwali, skyrocketing prices of essential commodities have left the "aam admi" [common man] very concerned. Be it sweets, dry fruits, ... http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2006/10/20/rising-inflation-in-india/ NY Times reports on India's Torrid Growth. Some excerpts (highlight mine): Quote: India is now growing faster than most other economies in the world, and is close to rivaling China, whose emergence as a manufacturing center has left India racing to catch up. ... In a study published in ... http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2006/09/29/on-indias-growth-story-and-socialism-dying-hard/ I often get sales pitches from vendors offering to sell us tools to measure programmer productivity. Typically these tools tend to be plug-ins to various IDEs, version control systems and the like. They may get fancy, and assign different weight to comments, white space, and lines that contain just a ... http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2006/09/23/measuring-programmer-productivity/ Raw disks cost ~$0.5 a GB, and sinking fast. A high-end redundant storage system with all the bells and whistles cost anywhere from $20-50 per usable GB, coming down much more slowly than the price of disks. Only about $2 of the gap could be attributed to redundancy and the ... http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2006/07/30/price-of-storage-thumper-from-sun/ Seth Godin has run his classic post on Factor L in his blog. He has been an inspiration for me for a long time, and this post tells you why. I just cannot resist quoting him: Quote: Why do some products and services succeed while others fail? Why do ... http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2006/07/27/seth-godin-on-the-luck-factor/ Our service provider had an outage, and our toll-free lines are down. We are working with them to get this back up. If you have urgent support issues, please use the forums, and we will respond ASAP. (Update): The cause turned out to be power black-outs due to the heat wave ... http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2006/07/26/toll-free-lines-down/