Atanu Dey has an interesting report about PanIIT 2006, which is the meeting of all IIT alumni. A.P.J Abdul Kalam was one of the speakers there and this is an extract from his speech
His introductory remarks lasted for about 10 minutes in which he panned IITs. He used an interesting device. He said that he called up a bunch of people the previous day and asked what was the first thought that came to their minds when they heard the word "IIT" His respondents included, among others, a General in the army and a former director of an IIT. The responses he received ranged from "very low value addition" to "largely irrelevant" Not exactly the sort of thing that the organizers of PanIIT wanted to hear, I am sure. But then, Kalam had warned that what he was about to say was going to be "mixed"
Do you know what a Nutrimatic Machine is and do you want to own one ? Do you know what the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is ? And do you know of a liquid that tastes "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea". To summarize the summary, if you answered all the questions in a yes, you need The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Tertiary to Quintessential Phases . Share and enjoy, but don't ask me any questions
I was reading Steve Pavlina's blog post about "Making Money Consciously" and I came upon a nice defination of social and personal values.
If you want to earn income as a contributor, you must contribute social value, not personal value. Many would-be contributors get stuck on this concept. Personal value is whatever you say it is — you're free to decide what has value to you personally, and it doesn't matter if no one agrees with you. Social value, however, is assigned by social consensus. If you believe your work has tremendous value, but virtually no one else does, then your work has high personal value but little or no social value. Here's the key point: your income depends on the social value of your work, not the personal value.
This reminded me of an article by Paul Graham called "Mind the Gap". Graham says in that article
In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things.
This brings me to what I have been thinking about. There are people
who say that they are not recognized or rewarded well enough for their
work. If we ignore the edge cases, in most of the cases that I have
seen, people do get rewarded for adding value to the organization they
work for or for adding value to their customers.
Another thing that I have heard quite a few people whine about is how
IT-people or the techies (grr — how much I hate both those terms)
make so much more money than the other people in different occupations
but with the same years of experience. Maybe the techies are adding
more value to their customers or the organizations and that is why
they are getting paid more.
The time right now is Fri Dec 29 00:31:08 IST 2006 and this blog post is brought to you from my emacs and a small php script using the magic of xml-rpc . I have not figured out how to set the blog categories using the mt.setPostCategories call, but I am still trying.
If you use Bloglines and you have not been seeing any updates from Reddit on it then try to get your reddit feed from this rssmix feed. I have no idea why Bloglines is not showing updated feeds from reddit.
I was just reading a very interesting article from Jeremy Allison of the samba team called The Land of "Nothing for free". A very interesting quote
My panel was rather uncontroversial, Microsoft, Bruce Perens and myself being on our best behavior. The only sparks that flew where when Microsoft made it abundantly clear that they would use their patent portfolio to prevent the spread of GPL software. Section seven of the GPL (the implicit patent grant of the license) now looks like the most prescient writing Richard Stallman has ever done. If you're not familiar with it I'd suggest you read it and understand why using the GPL to protect your Free Software is so important.
I've heard it said - and find this to be true in enough cases to be
useful as a rough guide - that men often try to stimulate conversation
by disagreement, while women generally do the opposite (this provides a
highly amusing view of teenagers' conversations involving the apposite
sex, which tend to illustrate this, or something very close to it.) If
so, then the Net often appears to be full of 12-year-old boys, stoned
out of their minds on their brand-new experience with testosterone and
desperate to be noticed.
Unluckily ( ) Yahoo! Bangalore has seen a big influx of "freshers" these days. Most of them come across as idiots, but I guess it is just their eagerness ( perhaps desperation would be the correct word) to get noticed.
) Yahoo! Bangalore has seen a big influx of "freshers" these days. Most of them come across as idiots, but I guess it is just their eagerness ( perhaps desperation would be the correct word) to get noticed.