Reporting? If you say so!

Even assuming that all the implied castigations of hindu’s protrayed in the article are true, where are the facts of matter regarding what various Christian missionary groups are doing in the affected area?  Is this called reporting? Somini Sengupta – shame on you!

Hindu Threat to Christians

The title of the article is even more loathsome.  “Hindu Threat”?  Did NY Times have an article titled “Muslim Threat to US” post Sep 11, 2001?  NY Times has gone down a notch in my eyes. 

Does the timing of the ceremony held at Vatican recently to canonize Sister Alphonsa have any relevance with regards to what has been happening in India?  May be to re-invigorate more conversions?

Update: TVR Shenoy on the shenanigans & tension amongst religious groups here in India.

 

Dead? No problem, you still qualify for loan!

From Newyork Times

One of the remarkable things about the report is the absence of evildoers, even though the cumulative effect of their behavior is now threatening to upend our nation. Early in the broadcast, we hear from Mike Francis, an executive director at the residential mortgage trading desk of Morgan Stanley. “From our standpoint it’s like, there’s a guy out there with a lot of money. We’ve got to find a way to be his sole provider of bonds to fill his appetite. And his appetite’s massive.”

The story then turns to another Mike, Mike Garner, a bartender in Nevada turned mortgage bundler. Mr. Garner said that market appetites for anything that resembled a mortgage pushed loan standards down: “No income, no asset. You don’t have to state anything. Just have a credit score and a pulse.” (Mr. Blumberg pointed out that the pulse thing was optional: 23 dead people in Ohio were also approved.)

When can we expect the next derivative based on the netherworld recovery ratios?

Though there is a big question – who is the “You”?

 

Can I get curd rice and rassam in new jersy(sic)?

Well this guy knows how to ask a totally tangential question on totally unrelated entry..  Preserved for posterity  

 

As long as it is just my computer..

As long as the damage is not to my income

 

Is this for real?

A telling quote from todays Newyork Times about a new rule instituted at Merrill Lynch. The rule says that analysts should have a 20% “underperform” stocks in their portfolio.

“I don’t think that is likely to change any more than you would expect human nature to change,” said Mr. Melcher, president of Balestra Capital.

Merrill Lynch, not surprisingly, disagrees with that view. Candace Browning, president of Merrill Lynch Global Research, says that her analysts’ work “serves an important function in the capital markets” and that the changes would make investing recommendations from the firm even more useful.

“What the new system basically does is it forces analysts to rank their stocks top to bottom,” she said.

I think the “forces analysts to rank” is going to just create a new set of issues. Whenever I have seen that there are rules that “forces” someone to do something, people just invent clever new ideas to comply but just in letter but not spirit. Trading current set of issues for a new set of issues, at best

In my industry, there are managers who just keep the underperformers in their team forever. Just so they do not have to go search for other underperformers come next round of appraisals. So would analysts copy the same trick and keep underperforms consistenly so and thus creating a vicious circle for those stocks?

 

Yahoo!, Microsoft, Me

I have a Yahoo! id and have used it for the past 9 years atleast, primarily Yahoo! Mail.  I don’t use any other Yahoo services, except for Finance, that too once in a blue moon.  I also have a hotmail id and a gmail id.  But don’t use them much.  I check them,  like,  once in a month or so, just to delete spam

And what will Microsoft do if its bid for Yahoo! is successful?

• Retain Yahoo! mail as it is (least likely?)
• Retain Yahoo! mail ids but migrate the platform to Microsoft technologies
• Migrate Yahoo! mail users to Windows Live Mail (most likely?)

Now I am seriously thinking of making gmail my primary account going forward.  I don’t how many Yahoo! Mail users are currently thinking of moving away from Yahoo! Mail, given that Microsoft has made a hostile unsolicited bid for Yahoo!  And thats the irony.  What use is acquisition of Yahoo! to Microsoft, if many users like me ditch Yahoo! services for good?  Seems like Flickr users are already banding together to start a campain asking Microsoft to keep its dirty hands off.

How do I download the current mail content in my Yahoo Inbox to my local hard drive?  Pointers welcome!

Update: http://www.tnl.net/blog/2008/02/01/non-obvious-winners-and-losers-in-microsoft-yahoo-deal/ - first comment!

 

Wireless dis-service centers

Yesterday took one of my colleague to a T-Mobile service center/kiosk. My colleague needed to cancel his service as he is heading back to India. The reps there had to call into their call center to cancel the service and when the call went on for long, they advised my colleague to call the customer service call center directly.

Thats just ludicrous. Ain’t it? What the heck is the service center for? Just lure us in and make us go through 14 levels of hell?

Hey folks, wake up, smell the coffee and treat us right!

 

Mommy, he won’t let me!

Whats up with requiring that commenters should have a blogger account to comment? So those with non-blogger blogging accounts or those with no blogs at all I ain’t invited to the party?

Thats not fair. Mommy

 

No white skin – No entry!

The Hindu reports that UK is considering passing a new law that will require immigrants to be fluent in English. There is no mention of which English though – Kings English (or is it Queens), London, Scots or some other mostly-unrecognizable-to-those-from-out-of-region Or God forbid, American Or Australian

Been never been to UK though. So I do not have a first hand knowledge of how many such dialects are there. May be I should try for an assignment over there in the UK just so to experience UK first hand.

From the news article,

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith told The Sunday Telegraph that the move was intended to encourage greater integration and indicated that the rule was likely to be extended to low-skilled workers as well.

Ha. Why stop there? Let us go all the way and ensure the following.

• All immigrants henceforth should have the skin the color of natural English people. They should try all the possible ways to do so. Even then they may be rejected. Like Shreya rejected Rajini after he took so much pain to become fair. She had an ulterior motive though. Is there any ulterior motive here? However, there lies an opportunity for an enterprising man/woman to start businesses catering to making-people-of-different-skin-color-to-have-the-natural-English-color
• All immigrants henceforth should behave as the English(British) would behave. They should take classes if need be. Of course at 200 GBP per hour from the English. Hey there is a good and endless source of revenue.
• Breed like rabbits just within the boundaries of UK with the original settlers and leave everyone else out. Those currently in the country but not yet integrated, please shut down the airports and ports while going out, please. There is no need for integration. Every new born is already integrated. Rather well.

Now it is your turn. Dare to be creative.

 

WGA – outage and outrage

Joe Wilcox is one of the ex Jupiter Research analyst that I follow.  I find his writings to be a succinct.  He is focused on Microsoft and analyzes many of its actions and lays out his thoughts very well.

In one of his recent posts, Windows Genuine Crack he has quoted Alex Kochis from WGA – So What Happened? regarding a semantic hair splitting on whether what happened was an outage or something else.  I really do not care whether they call it an outage or outrage.  Well north of 10000 users seems to have been affected with WGA failure.

More important to me is the following Q & A from the WGA entry.

How did this happen in the first place?

Nothing more than human error started it all. Pre-production code was sent to production servers. The production servers had not yet been upgraded with a recent change to enable stronger encryption/decryption of product keys during the activation and validation processes. The result of this is that the production servers declined activation and validation requests that should have passed.

So, somehow pre-production code ended up in production servers.  Servers that are exposed over the internet to millions of Windows Machines.  This from a company that touts secure computing initiative and spends billions of dollars to make Windows Secure.  WGA by its nature is also a part of Windows eco-system.  Is it not?  As I understand, without WGA,  most of the Windows machines will be running with reduced functionality and that is not what Microsoft wants users to experience in Windows Vista.  They want Windows Vista to be a “Wow” factor with their customers.

That being the case, I am not able to understand how such a big organization spending billions of dollars on secure computing initiative let untested pre-production code into the production environment.  What happened to the vaunted checks & balances and controls built in their SDLC?  Is it an isolated incident or does it happen across all product lines?  What are the implications?  Did they really think twice before letting the Q&A appear in the blog entry that will raise these sort of questions (kudos for honesty though)?