Jaimini: June 2008 Archives
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So lets think about how we do our groceries. I buy my groceries every sunday for the coming week. Say, I spend some 100 bucks on it. Now, lets assume the cost of general food products sky rocket on monday because....well...now every farmer is after corn and other "fuel-friendly" crops. anyway i digress. I panic. My cost of groceries is going to go high too. I start looking for a night job. "will code for food" u guys. But on thursday of that week i read the papers and the story reads, the food crisis is now over as scientist have found a way to cultivate in Alaska. and that too in a organic way. oh my.
so humble readers of my blog can you tell what was my actual cost of groceries for the week of this mayhem. I am no math wiz but my answer came to 100 bucks. and I tried it out on a calculator. now adding some economic (?) analysis to it, I come to a conclusion that if I buy something in advance and that this is going to last me for X number of days, no matter how the much the prices fluctuate during this X days, my cost of the the item is not going to change. It will increase when I buy it the next time but can never mathematically and accountingly( i like coining new words, someday somebody may use it) increase for the stuff I have already paid for.
Standing on the fact that my above theory stands true, what I dont understand is why does the price at the gas station next to my house changes on daily basis in proportion to the price per barrel for that day. Its more real time than the nasdaq ticker at times square. I am sure there are so many intermediary companies in between this gas station and the OPEC people. I am also sure, of these companies almost all of them should be importing oil in advance and in bulk. Doesn't that mean that any changes in the prices up there should at least take some reasonable amount of time (weeks ?) to affect prices at my local gas station. right? Either I am terrible at math, accounting, economics and how the world around me works or there is something terribly wrong with the system (I like using phrases like "wrong with the system"). can someone smart help me explain whats going on here?
its bad. substandard. stuck in 19, i dont know, 20's.
Well i was on a lookout for a good website for getting my daily dose of india's news. I figured I should checkout the website of the major indian news papers. I use google reader to follow all my feeds. The places I looked were Times of India, Indian Express, Hindu, Rediff. This is what I found, none of these sites provide full content feeds. The news feeds just contains a line or two and then you have to jump to there crappy, ever slowing, GIF ridden website to read the full story. The Hindu is even worse, its feed just contains the title of the story. Just the title !!
The way this site support news feeds is as if they are trying to discourage the users from using it. Furthermore, the "summary" content is not even a summary of the full story. At times its just the first line of the story from the actual article truncate abruptly. This doesn't help. If the reason this sites do not provide full content in the feed is to drive traffic to there website than at least they should provide enough information in the summary to make me interested so that I follow thru on the actual article. With almost no useful information, it completely defeats the purpose of subscribing to feed.
The problem is even worse for the people who are used to reading there news on there mobile devices (like me). As, for any news story you want to read, you will have to go to the actual site on your cell phone. and THAT IS A FAIL. These sites are loaded with images and other moving things. GIFs, Flash animations, popups. Anything and everything which will distract you from reading the actual story. I mean what's the point of all this. Are this newspaper companies so much in need for ad money that they are have to resort to this kind of things? I am not against ads on web pages. I am not. I cannot be coz everybody knows that is the only way people know to make money on the internet (oh no i dint). But there are definitely better ways to do this. Please, there are people who specialize in such things. People, please, bring down the bling level on your website. We are there to look at the news and not the pretty graphics.
end note: have a look at all the news site listed above, they look SO much similar. That is not a good sign.
Well i was on a lookout for a good website for getting my daily dose of india's news. I figured I should checkout the website of the major indian news papers. I use google reader to follow all my feeds. The places I looked were Times of India, Indian Express, Hindu, Rediff. This is what I found, none of these sites provide full content feeds. The news feeds just contains a line or two and then you have to jump to there crappy, ever slowing, GIF ridden website to read the full story. The Hindu is even worse, its feed just contains the title of the story. Just the title !!
The way this site support news feeds is as if they are trying to discourage the users from using it. Furthermore, the "summary" content is not even a summary of the full story. At times its just the first line of the story from the actual article truncate abruptly. This doesn't help. If the reason this sites do not provide full content in the feed is to drive traffic to there website than at least they should provide enough information in the summary to make me interested so that I follow thru on the actual article. With almost no useful information, it completely defeats the purpose of subscribing to feed.
The problem is even worse for the people who are used to reading there news on there mobile devices (like me). As, for any news story you want to read, you will have to go to the actual site on your cell phone. and THAT IS A FAIL. These sites are loaded with images and other moving things. GIFs, Flash animations, popups. Anything and everything which will distract you from reading the actual story. I mean what's the point of all this. Are this newspaper companies so much in need for ad money that they are have to resort to this kind of things? I am not against ads on web pages. I am not. I cannot be coz everybody knows that is the only way people know to make money on the internet (oh no i dint). But there are definitely better ways to do this. Please, there are people who specialize in such things. People, please, bring down the bling level on your website. We are there to look at the news and not the pretty graphics.
end note: have a look at all the news site listed above, they look SO much similar. That is not a good sign.
