BinaryDay

A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

If you wait to do everything until you’re sure it’s right, you’ll probably never do much of anything.

These 3 quotes pretty much answer all the questions that I had in my mind. I may be safe in my job but I will never be happy. I know I am not sure if I will succeed with my current idea of movie search engine. But I also know that the only way to find out the answer is to take the plunge. Anyways if I fail then what the hell…I can get a job anyways. I would have lost a couple of years but couple of years are not much in a career of 30 odd years.

So expect to see me fulltime in 4-5 months.

Abhishek raises a very important and relevant point about freinds cheating him for a MLM profit. Basically his very good freinds made false claims about making lot of money from a particular pogramme and lured him into joining the programme. After making a payment of 32k and joining the programme, he realized that all that was told to him as false. To make money he will have to tell the same damn lie to his freinds. Abhishek refused to do and hence lost 32k.

While he talks about questnet in particular, I think the problem is more wide spread than that. I am sure at one point of time or other someone you know quite well has tried to force you to join some similar programme including questnet, amway and several other programmes. I know that not all of these are fraud schemes. Even if it is not a fraud scheme, you may losse some really good freinds to these schemes.

The issue is when you somehow convince someone to join a programme without doing a proper analysis of his own skills . It may be asking an introvert to join a marketing scheme or asking someone averse to regular desciplined work to join blogging. You manage to convince him that he can make money from the programme. However when he tries to get things done himself, he fails to do so and looses money. The way human psychology works (I am no expert), people do not want to accept that they made a wrong choice. Rather they try to find someone else to blame. In this case they blame you because you asked them to join the programme in the first place.

Does it mean that you should never ask a freind to a money making scheme? You must let your freinds know about any genuine scheme. However first try to imagine if the person is likely to succeed in the scheme. So if I know an outgoing, natural salesman type person, I will recommend MLM to him and if I know a well read person I will ask him to blog and earn through adsense. Secondly I shall give him a realistic picture of amount of work invloved and chances of failure. If required I will err on the side of pessimism.

Everything said and done do remember that good freinds are really important in life. Hence be cautious while you are mixing freindship and business. To abhishek, 32k is a really small amount to pay to learn about 3 people that you considered freinds are not your freinds. So be happy that the incident happened. And thanks for making all of us aware about a fraud programme.

Just came across this amazing video demonstrating Nokia’s Morph concept … Well, right now it’s just a concept but I really wish it becomes a reality soon … I am pretty sure it will

Just watch the video and you will also say … “WOW, I want one of this, it’s awesome !” .

Do you want to resize your hard disk partitions without removing your current installed operating system? Do you want to create new partitions again without destroying your current operating system?
Do you want to install a second operating system? Or you computer refuses to boot and gives messages like “NTLDR missing” or “no bootable media found” (not exactly same messages…I don’t remember the exact ones )…
Well there’s a nice solution to all these...GParted (GNOME partition editor) .
It has three versions… installable, liveCD and liveUSB. I found the liveCD really good because using it you boot your system from the CD and not from the HDD so even if your OS gets corrupted you can use it . Also it has a very simple to use and intuitive GUI.
You can read more about GParted, Download it, check its screenshots here at its home-page.

What if the other shoe drops but no one hears?

Standard & Poor’s analysts tested the tree-falling-in-an-empty-forest scenario, as it lowered the outlooks for Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers to negative while markets were closed.

Standard & Poor’s analysts Scott Sprinzen and Diane Hinton affirmed their AA-/A-1+ rating for Goldman Sachs Group (nyse: GS – news - people ) and A+/A-1 rating for Lehman Brothers Holdings (nyse: LEH – news - people ), pointing to strong underlying businesses and acceptable first-quarter earnings. But S&P also lowered the companies’ outlooks to “negative” from “stable” on expectations of 20%-to-30% drops in net sales after write-downs going forward.

The analysts also revised their outlook for the U.S. securities industry at large to “negative,” meaning there is a one-in-three chance that there will be a rating change in the next two years.

Goldman shares closed Thursday ahead by $13.14, or 7.9% , to $179.63 and Lehman stock added $6.42, or 15.2%, at $48.65.

Analysts, while acknowledging the Federal Reserve’s support for U.S. broker-dealers boosts confidence in capital markets, said negative outlooks for independent securities firms are appropriate since the potential for decreased profitability is still substantial.

The slashed outlook may be especially difficult for Lehman Brothers to stomach. The financial services firm, whose business mix most closely resembles that of virtually collapsed Bear Stearns (nyse: BSC – news - people ), has dismissed recent rumors that it’s headed down the same ditch as Bear (See: Financials Fall Into Bear Pit). Analyst Sprinzen says Lehman has done a better job managing its liquidity than Bear. As of Feb. 29, the firm’s excess liquidity structure was $34 billion.

“Lehman is among the largest proportionately of the U.S. broker-dealers, and its sources-to-uses ratio is the strongest of the five,” Sprinzen said, adding that earnings have held up and Lehman’s fixed income business remains profitable despite being directly affected by the economic slowdown and problematic asset-related write-downs.

Sprinzen called Goldman Sachs’ leftover mortgage and leveraged finance-related commitments “manageable” and praised the strength of its liquidity position.

“However … the firm’s emphasis on trading activities and its aggressive risk appetite leave it open to the possibility that major missteps could ultimately occur, leading to a change in investor sentiments,” Sprinzen said.

Although Goldman is the most profitable U.S. broker-dealer, Sprizen said last quarter’s profits were weak, with sales off 35% from the previous year.

Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday March 20 show that Goldman’s President and Co-Chief Operating Officer Jon Winkelried sold some 30,000 shares at about $173.85 each, totaling approximately $5.2 million, from Wednesday to Thursday. Vice Chairman Michael Sherwood unloaded some 7300 shares at a per share price of about $174.85, totaling close to $1.3 million Wednesday. Goldman could not be reached for comment

Citigroup Inc. plans to lay off an additional 2,000 employees from its markets and banking unit, and in this latest round of job cuts, senior investment-banking officials won’t be spared, according to two people with knowledge of the decision.

The latest round of job cuts at the New York-based bank brings its layoffs since the mortgage crisis began to more than 6,000, or about …

Holi is one of the biggest festivals in India. It is not a festival of a religion or a caste . Infact on the contrary it celebrates the spirit of unity and oneness. It is a festival of colors…A celebration of all the beauties of Nature and Human Race.
So get off your seats, go out and ENJOY !!!

HOLI HAiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii………..

Amidst demands for raising the cap on H-1B visas for skilled professional, authorities have issued a new rule prohibiting employers from filing more than one petition for a single employee in a fiscal year. The change is intended to promote a fair and systematic process for H-1B petitioners, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said on Wednesday while announcing the new rule.

This rule ensures that companies filing H-1B petitions will have an equal chance to receive consideration for an H-1B worker. The current cap on new H-1B visas is 65,000 per fiscal year with a few exceptions. US businesses utilise the H-1B programme to employ foreign workers in fields that require theoretical and practical expertise in specialised occupations requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher (or its equivalent), such as scientists, engineers or computer programmers.

The first 20,000 H-1B petitions filed on behalf of foreigners with US-earned masters’ or higher degrees are exempt from the H-1B cap of 65,000. The USCIS administers a separate “20,000 cap” for such exempt petitions.

The USCIS said it would use a random selection process for all the master’s degree or higher cap-exempt cases received on the first five business days available for filing H-1B petitions for a given fiscal year, if necessary. If the US master’s exemption limit is reached on the first five business days, the USCIS will first conduct the random selection process for such petitions before it begins random selection for petitions to be counted towards the 65,000 cap.

Petitions eligible for the US master’s degree or higher exemption that are not selected to receive an H-1B visa number from the 20,000 cap will be considered with the other H-1B petitions in the random selection for the 65,000 cap filed on the first five business days, the announcement said.

The USCIS further said petitions for new H-1B employment are exempt from the cap if the foreigners will work at the defined institutions of higher education or a related or affiliated non-profit entities, or at non-profit research organisations or governmental research organisations. Thus, employers may continue to file petitions for these exempt H-1B categories regardless of H-1B visa number availability.

The USCIS said it will start receiving H-1B petitions from April 1 for FY09 beginning October 1. When it is determined that the caps have been reached, the USCIS will employ a random selection process to choose among the petitions received on the “final receipt date”.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, among others, has repeatedly urged the US Congress to let more foreign engineers, including Indians, to work in the US as immigration restrictions were forcing US high-tech firms to outsource jobs overseas.
The current cap of 65,000 H-1B visas aimed at highly skilled professionals “is arbitrarily set and bears no relation to the US economy’s demand for skilled professionals”, he told a Congressional panel recently. “If we increase the number of H-1B visas that are available to US companies, employment of US nationals is also likely to grow as well.”

A recent study by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), in fact, shows that American businesses are finding it hard to fill skilled positions even as H-1B visas that bring foreign professionals, including a large number from India, are creating jobs in the US. Confirming Gates’ contention that an arbitrary cap on H-1B visas is forcing high tech firms to outsource jobs, the study found major US technology companies today average more than 470 job openings for skilled positions in the US while defence companies have more than 1,265 each.

A second complementary study by NFAP found after examining H-1B filings and year-by-year job totals for the technology companies in the Standard & Poor (S&P) 500 that hiring skilled foreign nationals on H-1B visas is associated with increases in employment at US technology companies.

Just happened to come across this new seach engine called searchme It’s a very new search engine with right now, just an index of 1 billion and is still in beta. But the best thing about it is its user interface and graphics. …yeah not just the graphics but the UI is also nice. Have you seen the cover-flow design on itunes? searchme uses the same beautiful cover-flow for its search results unlike the text only results in Google. (It has text only results also if you want that).
Searchme is backed by Sequoia capital.
As I said right now it’s in beta so u can’t use it directly . However you can register on it by giving your mail id .

Happy surfing

You don’t have to log into Gmail every time you want to see if you’ve got mail. Google’s gmail notifier is an application that can alert you if you have new messages. It shows an icon in the system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows their subjects, senders and snippets, all without your having to open a web browser.

You can Download it here

Alternatively if you use firefox then you may use gmail notifier to read the mails.