Portrait mode on the iPhone 11, is a blessing for any wannabe “good photographer”. I have been taking photos with it, for the last 2 months and am in love with it.
Here are some shots I took of my lovely Beagle. 🐶🥰🐶
Category: Miscellaneous
Donald Trump Lost Most of the American Economy in This Election
A very interesting and shocking revelation indeed:
“The divide is economic, and it is massive. According to the Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America’s economic activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won combined to generate 36 percent of the country’s economic activity last year.”
Jim Tankersley, writing for The Washington Post. Do read on.
Uber to partner with Maruti Suzuki
A very interesting move by Uber indeed. Very much inline with Modi’s push for creating local jobs and opportunities.
Top sources in know of Uber’s plans told The Economic Times, “Uber has around 200,000 active driver partners on their platform currently and they want to increase this to a million by 2018. They are beginning with this pilot with Maruti Suzuki and will extend this going ahead”, said an executive in know of developments.
Ola – what are you up to?
Picture Courtesy: financialexpress.com
Live transcription of OpenVis Conference
OpenVis Conference is a 2 day annual conference, held in Boston, about the practice of visualising data on the web. A must for all the Data Visualisation professionals amongst us.
This time, what is interesting is, they are Live streaming the Conference, in the form of Transcript, on their site, as shown below.
The conference is being held today (Apr 25) and tomorrow, and there are some really interesting Talks lined up. Some of these concepts have direct implication to Cyber/Information Security too.
I am hoping that the Presentations will be made available for people who couldn’t make it to the conference.
7 Time-Wasting Habits You Need to Cut Out of Your Life for Good
Worth a read post by @chadworks, for all the “productivity chasers” among us. ‘Checking emails frequently’ tops the list.
On Mark Zuckerberg’s thoughts on Net Neutrality
It is very reassuring to see the power of social media and internet, taking over this whole debate on Net Neutrality in India. The last few weeks have been amazing, and to see so many people raising their voices on various platforms on the web, makes you feel that these are probably the best times in the history of social communities, where every individual has an equal right to share their views for or against a particular cause. The power of Internet, hasn’t been more evident than in the last decade. The uprising in Egypt in the year 2011, is one of such important even which has changed the lives of the people there, forever.
I believe that this whole uprising in India for Net Neutrality, has already won half the battle, because many of the “partners” who signed up for these “Zero Rating” services (Airtel Zero and Internet.org), have backed out. This list includes big names like Flipkart, ClearTrip, NDTV and Time Of India group.
Recently, this whole debate got a new voice, when Mark Zuckerberg took to a famous Indian Daily called Hindustan Times, where he tried to defend Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, as some sort of world changing CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) activity.
What Mark is basically saying is the purpose of setting up internet.org is to provide “free internet” to the poor, so that they can leverage the benefits that “Internet” (through internet.org) has to offer. It sounds pretty good and noble, but the fact is that internet.org is not the whole Internet. It is primarily Facebook and a few hand-picked sites, which are identified by Facebook and its partners.
I see this whole definition of purpose as – “Internet.org provides free access to Facebook to the poor and under privileged so that they can leverage the benefits that Facebook has to offer.” Now does that sound noble to you?
Indian journalist Nikhil Pahwa responded to Mark’s post on Hindustan Times, and he elaborates on this whole misconception that these Telcos and companies like Facebook are trying to portray . It’s a definite read.
Image Courtsey: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com
Pappu and Feku – the Best We Can Do?
This is an offbeat topic, from my usual blogging category, but I found this article by Writer and IIT Delhi professor Rukmini Bhaya Nair quite interesting and I want to take a perspective on this.
The Indian Political environment has changed dramatically, in the last 5 decades. The free and open (yeah I know the “openness” can be debated) access to information that we have today, thanks to the global growth of internet in the last 2 decades, the Politicians and the Politics in India has been exposed to tight scrutiny by media, by citizens and fellow politicians, have come under a lot of focus and constant attention. And as professor Rukmini says, maybe it is that politics today is all screen-spectacle.
This wasn’t the case 5 decades ago, and the politicians and national leaders during our Independence movement weren’t exposed to so much of attention and constant criticism and audit. But I think there were a lot of other types of sources which contributed to similar attention, focus and criticism. For ex., during the period 1920-47, there were a lot of independent journals, news papers, books, articles, poems, essays, speeches, street acts and stand-up shows, providing enough sources of such attention to national leaders in those days.
But as professor Rukmini states in her post, the leaders during that time had a great deal of mutual respect and trust between them, and so there was always a sense of dignity and respect when they conversed and referred to each other. This sense of dignity and mutual respect is something that we don’t see much, in today’s political space, and that’s unfortunate.
This must change, and I am hopeful that it will. I completely agree with her following lines:
My view is that India is a dynamic country with a very young population which deserves truthful as well as entertaining accounts of the challenges facing us. We may have come a long way from the times of the freedom movement, but India still needs freedom from dire poverty, illiteracy, gender abuse, caste factionalism, regional prejudice. In these times of social ‘churn’, I therefore think our politicians still have a crucial lesson to learn from our past: they must respect each other – and us, the aam janta – just a wee bit more.
At the moment, our politicians are outdoing themselves trying to disgrace their peers. What’s needed from them is the exact opposite – grace and generosity. If a more coherent vision of the future of India fifty years down the line emerges from this exercise, that would be great. But if not, our political leaders should at least do us the honour of telling us the truth.
Do checkout professor Rukmini’s post on NTDV’s Opinion section, here: http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/pappu-and-feku-the-best-we-can-do-756650?pfrom=home-lateststories
Image Courtesy: http://i.dailymail.co.uk
harinotes.com – My Blog
Just like many other people, I read a lot of stuff every day. Most of it is about technology, as that’s what I do as a profession. And I have always liked sharing interesting stuff from what I read, with friends and colleagues.
And I always knew that a Blog will give me an opportunity to share such interesting stuff, with multiple people, using one common platform, instead of multiple social media platforms.
So I have been thinking of Blogging for quite sometime (quite sometime = almost a decade!), and now I finally decided to do so in 2015. (no it was not one of my new year resolutions 2015 :))
So this is it. This is my Blog where I share my thoughts and curated articles on Technology, Startups, Information Security, and Travel, and sometime on off-beat topics like Politics and others too.
So Hello World!
Hari Notes 