BCEMBA 2012’s seem to have started their orientation pretty good. They built prosthetic hands for the Haiti victims.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/10/05/0524_mbapay/index.htm

Violent Death in the Insect World: Stunning Photography | Scienceray

Awesome photographies with awesome quotes. This page shows how complex the life is and how wonderful to be a human. This article again proves that food and reproduction are the basic instincts of any life form. Of course both actions could be either construed as gross or beautiful depending on how you look at it.

On the contrary, the following is a disturbing video put out by PETA. Warning: It is extremely graphic.
After watching the above, the following video shows how cruel the exotic animal skin trade makes the animals to suffer. I don’t have problem watching gory videos with blood, but this video troubled me a lot. I’ll definitely think twice/thrice before buying any leather products. This video makes the above photographs beautiful in retrospect, don’t you agree?

eBook Reader was the biggest category of devices in this year’s CES 2010 at Las Vegas. We have witnessed tons of companies introducing competing eBook Readers. And if you follow engadget or gizmodo you see there are more and more companies jumping on to the band wagon.

There is also this confusion about what constitutes eBook Reader. Is iPad (Jesus Tablet) an eBook reader? Is iSlate (HPs iPad equivalent) a eBook reader? In my book, if a device has an LCD screen

The headline in WSJ screamed “Euro Hits 10-Month Low” at $1.34. Does not look so good for EU countries. British pound doesn’t fare very well either, it is at $1.49. The woes at Greece and now with Portugal heading that way doesn’t bode well for EU countries. Portugal’s rating downgrade by Fitch weighing heavily down on the Euro over all.

This is a fascinating discussion between Michael Shermer and Sam Harris on one side and Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston on the other. Highlight of the discussion: A quantum scientist (Leonard!?) asked Deepak Chopra if he would like to have short course on Quantum mechanics to straighten his “misuse” of quantum notations. The scientist went on to say the term “consciousness non-local” is not correct. Deepak’s definition of “Consciousness”: Super position of possibilities. The scientist replied “all right, I know the meaning each of those words but not with them together”.

Apple pushed the shipping date of iPad from March 17th to April 2nd. No body knows the reason, it is one more example of Apple’s famous secretive culture. The rumor is that, Apple couldn’t source enough components to manufacture for the anticipated demand. Well, is that really true or are there are bugs that apple is trying to resolve? Even if we take the rumor at the face value, is Apple’s supply chain that weak not to anticipate the demand? There are also rumors that say iPad pre-orders are not as strong as expected. So is it the case of “wait till we reach” the predicted, impressive pre-order rate? A sort of ego issue for Apple to reach certain number of pre-orders before start shipping them?

I‘m not going to buy iPad for three, out of many, reasons:

1. eReader: It is not. In my book, eReader (Amazon Kindle or B&N’s Nook) should have e-ink, paper like, display. iPad has traditional LCD display which doesn’t qualify as eBook reader. Prolonged reading on this device will have same effect as any prolonged reading in laptop will have on your eyes.

2. iPhone OS: Did any one tell Apple that this OS is single threaded? Except iPhone OS all other OSs, (Android, Windows 7 Mobile, WebOS) in the mobile space are multi-threaded. Why do I care? It is annoying enough in iPhone for me to detest the single threaded OS. For example, let us say If I’m playing a game in iPhone and in the middle of the game I want to look at some information in Wikipedia. iPhone OS closes the game and launches the browser. Everytime I switch between these two the application closes the one that I’m using and launches the one I’m switching to. This means, the wikipedia page reloads everytime and the game relaunches every time. Quite annoying, how many OSs in the world are single threaded now?

3. Over priced: The price of decently featured iPad stands at $900. I could buy a nice multi-touch Windows 7 tablet laptop from Dell,HP or even Lenovo for little bit more. In fact, I already own the Dell XT2 Tablet which is a charm and zippy with the new Intel SSD disk.