Thursday, August 28, 2008

Imperfect Religion?

All the Religions in the world follow one or the other sets of doctrines, very unique to others but with the same objective at the end – Peaceful co-existence.

Religions are supposed to be the means for peaceful co-existence among the different races present in the world, but the perpetual existence of hatredness and jealousy among human beings, certainly should make us think if Religion can be perfected. Jealousy, Hatredness... Of course... One man's achievement is other man's cost of opportunity. But, where to draw the lines?

Why are religions imperfect? Perfection is a relative concept. A religion perfect to you could be imperfect for another. Not because that you can't answer his quagmires or doubts but for the reason that he/she can't relate the same with his/her.

If I expect a bike to give me a mileage of 40km/litre and if I really achieve it so... I would rate that machine as perfect. Now, on the other hand for the same machine which gives 40 or so, if someone else expects it to give 50km/litre or more – to him/her it would be an imperfect. This analogy goes true with the religion. Each one of us differs with what we expect from life, some a simple life and some a little bit more into it. The point is, we differ and so our needs and the ideas of how these needs are to be fulfilled. If end results were all which mattered, then we certainly would save a lot of troubles. But, means to achieve the same with rules to abide by makes the whole idea of reaching the end of the tunnel an obfuscating one. End result remains the same – the end of the tunnel.

When I think about the imperfection of any religion, the first thing that comes in my mind is that it has never served its purpose to unite the whole human race. Infact, it has become a medium to differentiate among us. Anyhow what matters is how we reach the end of the tunnel! But, Religion serves as an impediment to what we could have done without the religion or a uni-code of religion if we at all had any. However the fact remains the same, we don't(a single religion).

When we talk about Religion, we certainly need to account the existence of scores of other believers (of the religion) as well. And that's where lies the crux of maintaining a whole list of perfect religions. We certainly know a person firmly following Religion-A wouldn't follow Religion-B, simply for the fact that he believes his is the best for him. And so does it goes true for Religion-B followers. Why would they infact? Wouldn't you change for a perfect thing, if you knew that it existed?

So, there it goes... there's a room for improvement in each and every Religion of the world. Not because there are too many, but certainly because there are too many of us.

To end with :-

"Religion is a disgrace to human dignity. Without Religion Good people do good things and Bad people do bad things. But, for good people to do bad things there's Religion".

  • ( Anonymous )

Read more...

Arunachal Towns – A Google-earth view



Itanagar


Pasighat


Roing


Along

Read more...

The Damned Saga of Dam

In most of the Debates, arguments or healthy discussions as I would prefer to say it so; I could notice one inviolable lineament we Arunachalis have developed of age. Yes, we prefer to sound or make ourselves heard that the developments has to efface at any cost. A rational thought process at work and quite obvious with the proportional frustrations we have amassed over all these years, due to the sheer apathy of the Politicians and the corrupted bureaucrats, who by no choice also have to satisfy their rational needs, no matter how corrupted we might quote it as.

Now, being rational has a subjective relation with the laws of any governing economics. The orthodox conception defines economic rationality by maximization of exclusively materialist objectives, namely profit by producers and utility by consumers. An analogy with respect to Dams makes the big players, namely NHPC, Reliance etc as the producers and at the lower end – we the consumers.

But, how rational is our choice which we (consumers) with no proper reasons try vaguely to equate and balance the misbalanced economic hierarchy much prevalent in any Capitalist society and India being no exception?

A medium, to get over the impoverishment and utter underdevelopment (due to subsequent governance by corrupted governments all these years) and capable of making us rich overnight – is a proposition hard to resist. And Dams construction all over the places in Arunachal Pradesh which hasn't witnessed any significant developments till date is one such proposition. Well, that's what we are at least made to believe.

A question which I keep asking myself most of the times is – Should the developments be at any cost? One shouldn't forget that " AT ANY COST" itself is a bigger cost which we ultimately might have to pay at the end. What sort of development are we talking about? Is development only about being have lots of Cash? If "Yes" then Dams could be the only choice. But, if you think we should assess properly the kind of developments we need, then a " No " for the Dams at this moment is must. We need to understand that Dam isn't the only damn thing that can develop us. Developed societies around the world didn't need Dam to make them what they are today.

A quote that very well goes with this:-

" What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so". ( Mark Twain )

I would like to keep this post this short only...

Read more...

Monday, August 18, 2008

Search engines War

Google's boasts of more than 45% of the market share in the search engine business , followed by yahoo and then MSN. It would be a suicidal for anybody to even think of challenging the google's market share, least to say, without a proper strategy backed by huge capital and resources.

But will google carry on its legacy till eons ... ? A question best left for the time to answer. Does immense popularity of google makes it the unquestionable leader in the search engine wars. Well, at this point of time it does. A head on collision with google to grab the market share of the search engine segment should eventually be kept in shelf for the time or say years to come.

In marketing management's etymology, several Attack strategies have been identified. And the prominent ones among those can be broadly distinguished under : Frontal, flank, encirclement, bypass, and guerilla attacks.

Frontal attack on Google search engines would be catastrophically devastating, given the higher probability of the side with greater resources winning such collision. At least in Search engines and the resources allocated for its development, we can be quite sure of the numero uno position of Google. A better search algorithm than Google should be the only reason for any company to opt for Frontal attack on Google, but this however would be followed with mega promotional campaigns and high success rates of visible results.

Encirclement attack again is more similar or less different than the Frontal attack and it makes sense when the challenger commands superior resources over its rival and certainly to the willingness and the strategy backing the attacking company to divert resources for the specific campaign till the target breaks down. Again coming back to Google, this certainly can't be the best or rather say an intelligent design.

Bypass attacks is a sort of indirect assault strategy of bypassing the enemy altogether. Google started its search engine campaign much after Yahoo or the MS, but they had bypassed both Yahoo and the MS by providing the most reliable search engine with better technological features, when both the software giants (Yahoo & MS ) were busy foraying into other segments of Internet, such as mail and other internet services. Quite contrary is the fact that Google has a substantial chunk in the email users share.
So, by-passing Google at the technological front can be the option provided Yahoo, MSN and the other market followers.

Flank attack, is all about identifying the Achille's heel of the enemy and directing attacks precisely over those weak flanks. The basic idea behind any search engines is to provide useful search results. It's no doubt that, Google has the best search engine algorith till date. However, there are room for improvements - till we find the satisfying definition for "Perfection". To me perfection, is a relative concept. And things in this world are perfect at least in their own context for every moment of existence. The perfection of "XYZ" can be the perfection which "PQR" had perfected long back. So, there is this element of time that makes perfection a relatively obtrusive term and so do I find it with, Google, Yahoo or anyone else. Not that, I have seen better search engines than Google, but my expectations from search engines of the near future, at least gives me points to say, Google and all the creations in Earth has room for improvement.

Well, I know you might have 'googled' numerous times for a certain Keyword ( topic )just to be returned with thousands of web pages, only a handful of which would be actually helpful to you.


Now, after every search engines.... who's going to read and verify those millions of search results... Now will you call that search engine an effective one... which gives you results which you and neither google would have no idea about. Google certainly doesn't have the idea of your needs.. thats the whole reason why you get spams after spams...with Google glorifying those results right at the top: " 1,22,988 results in 0.4 seconds ".

I would rather be interested in 10 helpful results in 1 ( make it 2 ) second. Times below 1 seconds are beyond the perceivable limits of human beings. Google, I hope can cut out the rudimentary figures they so much boast of.

I dont get the essence of even telling the people about the millions of results that I have on my hand now. Now, I doubt, if anyone has every crossed at least 10th page of the search result listings.

You did? You must be an Alien then. And this article is solely for the poor lazy earthlings that want everything at the click of buttons and in one instance at least. Well, that should certainly make us efficiency hungry creatures. So much for good.

Now, consider these two cases.

1) A search engine that gives you only 2 pages of search results ( which makes it to 20 listings, 10 in each), with a guarantee that it would be highly useful for your every search queries.

2) A search engine that gives you millions of page results but with no guarantee that the first 2 pages or at least the next 5 pages would suffice our requirements. You certainly can't expect guarantee along with the spammers.

So, which one would you go for ... I don't think I need to hint out that the sole philosophy of search engines should be to make your search easier; not of giving thousands of unwanted results.

Ya, you guessed it. All the search engines lack the most important element - " Human intelligence and its power to contextualize".
Imagine a search engine, with a spider that indexes only those pages, which any human being( intelligible off course) should be able to filter it as "relevant" - ultimately saving you time and keeping you bay from the impossible dream of " YOU ARE FREE TO SEARCH THE THOUSANDS OF PAGES WE JUST SERVED - courtesy Google, yahoo, msn and gang. "

Jim Wales, Cofounder of Wikipedia, envisages to create an open source search engine called Wikia that uses human deduction as well as a machine driven algorithm. Wales puts forth that humans are better at weeding out spam search results and so it sounds so convincingly true. Another such example is of "ChaCha", founded by MIT research scientist Scott A.Jones and has been quite successful in Korea, where Google has made few inroads. ChaCha's human guided searches offers a smaller set of focused and relevant results, with the help of its 25,000 part and full time employees. Investing in such ventures can be daunting, since it demands intensive human resource. However, with the outsourcing business hitting high in 3rd world economies, a serious player can certainly find labours at much cost effective rates.

A serious search engine war seems inevitable, with so many things left for improvisation.

Read more...

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Domain name hijacking

I don't know what term this specific thing that am going to describe, should be termed as. To me it simply sounds "Domain name hijacking" or Sabotaging of the same.



It was 2days ago that I'ad changed my blog's domain name from www.rome-dec.blogspot.com to a more specific name for the arunachal stuffs that I blog about, ie, www.arunachalblog.blogspot.com. Infact, over few months I'ad enjoyed good google ranking in the search listing for the keywords of " arunachal + blog, or blogging or blogs attached to arunachal pradesh".

But, the very next day( after changing the domain name) all I could find was that someone now owned my discarded domain name(rome-dec.blogspot).
The obvious reason being that, people looking for arunachal and the blog keywords, at least for next few weeks would be directed to his new blog not mine with the "arunachalblog.blogspot".

Well, this guy ( Derrick Pizur ) has numerous reasons stressing much upon " the benefits of using expired domain names" .
You can find his post here : Expired domain names

He certainly has made some valid points - you certainly can enjoy the popularity of some good expired domain names, at least using the same to create free blogs, and giving the links of your blog so as to direct the traffic to his/her main website. A sort of "mini website" as he(Derrick) puts it.
Well, I made of folly of myself of changing my domain name without keeping the older domain for some a free blog that would direct the traffic back to my blog.
Anyway, this has been a healthy learning... and I suppose I can learn a bit or two from it and in the course, give you folks the tit-bits of using gray matter, when it comes to changing your domain name.

Derrick, is also of the suggestion that you can use these expired domain names to sell it to someone for a better price, which in this case of mine, I feel he would find none... unless a person ( there are lot many of them I presume) with a name ROME, born in DECEMBER decides to have a blog with the domain name "rome-dec", and a usage of "-" making the probability a further obtruse figure. However, he certainly can reap the benefit of the google listing, from the people who are curious about the blogging community of Arunachal, which as of now is a domain of very few user.

My point isn't about using the expired domain name's popularity to get more traffic,being ethical or not. But, its certainly about the part of accountability of google to take care of the same.
My argument would be, when a new blog is created it takes time to get listed in the search engines. First the crawler has to spider the pages, upon someone making a search.

Shouldn't it be applicable to an entirely new blog, which somehow finds an old expired or discarded domain name?

If this isn't the case, then I don't get the essence of Google's blogspot giving its user an option to change the domain name, whenever required.

Anyway, all I can wish Mr.Derrick, is a happy blogging and hunting - of the expired domain names of course. And you bloggers to be aware of this.
I hope this Post of mine can fetch some Traffic to Derrick's site.
:)

Read more...

Followers

  © Blogger templates Newspaper III by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008

Back to TOP