Scared Heart School – Thou Shall not Lie

Following the Ruchika suicide case, it is interesting to node that Scared Heart School claiming that they expelled Ruchika on the basis of school fees not getting paid. Well, i went to St Anne’s School in Chandigarh, which had pretty much the same setup as Sacred Heart, kind off similar management background, and all that. And from what i can remember now, fees in those days used to be Rs 150 per month. Or maybe Rs 250 per month. Personally i find it very hard to believe that someone cannot suddenly pay Rs 250/month fees, when they have been paying all along for so many years.

Also, it is interesting to note the following statement from the school:

The school also promised to supply all documentary records required by the administration, but subject to availability, as the matter is two decades old.

Well if they already know that Ruchika was expelled on the basis of non-fee-payment, what other documents are they looking for? If i were them, i would definitely look into the documents, and make sure the tall statements i make are backed by solid facts.

All i can say is this freaking Principal Sr Sebastina is a big fat liar. They had expelled Ruchika to save their ass. What really really hits me hard is the fact that one of the supposedly better schools in Chandigarh is stooping so low, and making false statements, even when they in their heart know it is them who were responsible for the suicide. Sr Sebastina has no right to be a principal and should be ashamed of herself calling a principal. What good will they teach the students of the school, when they themselves sellout at the very first instance of danger. We dont want and dont need these kind of principals and their cronies in Chandigarh, or for that matter in India.

I ain’t no fan of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (Bajrang Dal), but it is good to know they(among other people) are acting against this injustice.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Monetizing Content – How much would you Pay?

Yesterday, Fred Wilson made a good post on monetizing content. However one point he did not touch upon is how much would people really pay. Hope Fred will put up a poll for that.

Anyhow, my idea is to pay somewhere in the range of $10-20/year for the year to publications like NyTimes. WSJ’s pricing($150/year) is out of the reach for the most. Besides the cost, i think there can be another reason high priced model will not work:
From my experience in news content creation at StartupSquad.com, any time there is money to be made from content, there is stiff competition. As, companies like NyTimes move towards a paid model, you will see rise of smaller players, that will scrape, rephrase and publish NyTimes content, and making easy Ad dollars.

So, as a user you would have 2 options –

1. Pay $100-$150 to NyTimes
2. Pay nothing to a blog that reports perfect human generated(meaning not a dumb copy paste bot) news 5-15 minutes late

I will take the option 2.

Filed under: Freemium

Firefox Extenion Updates – What is the right timing?

Given the fact Firefox is getting lot of heat from Chrome, it’s time Firefox fixes one of the most nagging issue – Reboot Time. For most of the times, Chrome comes up in 1-2 seconds on my PCs. As compared to that Firefox can take 30-60 seconds.

Without going into the internals of product, one area where Firefox definitely wastes time is updating extensions when the browser is rebooted. I understand the need for newer features, but most of the dot releases of extensions dont offer quantum jump in feature-set to justify the slow bootup time.

Firefox should instead give the extension update control to users as to when they want their extensions to be updated-

1. When browser is starting up(Basic Users – Default)
2. When browser is in use for 10 mins(Advanced Users)

Filed under: Browser

So, you want to start a Revolution?

Reading the news article on NyTimes.com – Chechen Rights Campaigner Is Killed , got me thinking what different Natalya Estemirova could have done to survive and keep fighting for the rights of Chechen people.

My idea – Always learn from what leaders in any space are doing or have done. And for this case, i think the best example is – Mahatma Gandhi. Go, read the complete Wikipedia page on him. Read books on him.

Anyhow, my observations on Mahatma Gandhi – He had a real good plan for India. He could see what would happen in the next 30-40 years, and how he will get India it’s independence from British rule. If you look at the years 1916–1945, he did 4 major campaigns in India – Champaran and Kheda(1918), Non-cooperation(1920), Swaraj and the Salt Satyagraha (Salt March)(1930), Quit India Movement(1942). By the time Quit India Movement was all said and done, it was virtually guaranteed that India will get it’s freedom.

My key takeaways:

1. Dont try to be the lone wolf: Which means, if you are fighting for a cause, and the cause does not have a big following, you can very easily be taken out by the people whom you are fighting against. In other words, lone wolf can easily get shot, which is what happened in this case.
2. Survive: If you get killed, so will your dream/campaign. So plan for survival
3. Look for big opportunities, not the first opportunity: It’s the same way big companies work. Microsoft does not start competing with every startup. They work for billion dollar market areas.
4. Plan for years: You cannot fix a broken country or society in 5-10 years. Heck, you cannot even fix a company in that much time(example Motorola). So, plan for big campaign, implement them(2-3 years), stop, take rest for 5-10 years, network, and then come back with another big campaign.

Filed under: Politics

News @ India

Some interesting news articles on India in TribuneIndia.com, which seems to be the only newspaper doing any worthwhile reporting.

Exit of ‘Dons’ worries political parties:
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090303/main6.htm

SC to CBI: Why did you go to govt?:
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090211/main2.htm

Misuse of CBI:
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090225/edit.htm#6

Filed under: Uncategorized

New Runtime language @ Google App Engine

Looking up the roadmap at Google App Engine, i see the following entries:

* Service for storing and serving large files
* Datastore import and export utility for large datasets
* Billing: developers can pay for more resource usage
* Support for a new runtime language
* Uptime monitoring site

As anyone can guess, Google would like to be secretive about the entry 4 above – Support for a new runtime language . But, come on, if you really going to release the new language, what is the harm in telling it right now. In my PoV, since it is going to be a major launch, better make developers prepared for it. If the new lang is going to be php, i for one, would put on hold few projects to make use of the Google App Engine. Anyway, as it seems, we would just have to wait for the launch.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Freemium