Tech Shows, Nonsense, Code

I happened to read on the BBC that they’ve managed to do a lot of spooky stuff on facebook with an application ( social networking sites are shit anyway ) which brings me to my current topic:

Why do hosts of “Tech Shows” in India look like the channel’s CEO’s friend’s son who needs a job ?

I am seriously pissed by the nonsense that they air on Headlines Today. The nutcase who hosts the show has no idea what he’s bickering about and one common phrase I hear is “This is the next generation of <insert something that half the people won’t care about>”. I remember an episode where he tried to demonstrate a few appliances you could use to record media and he said, “You can save TV shows on this device in all formats like MP3 ( ! ), MPG, WMV etc”. I was stunned as to how the editing staff, the host and everyone else missed that.

Then comes the great “Times of India”, whose staff knows everything there is to be learned. I once read an article some hare-brained guy wrote on software design:

Let us pick a hypothetical case. Anitha bought a CD and she wanted to play it on her computer. But then she realized that there was no way to skip to the next song. This is bad design on the part of the CD (!)

Then of course, who can forget the paper’s coverage of the Mohd. Haneef case where they detailed a list of uses a 320 GB hard drive could offer.

A 320 GB hard disk is very large memory and can act as a Webserver as well

I was like WTF ? I mean why do these bozos take to writing this stuff if they know nothing whatsoever? Why don’t they verify what they are distributing across a few million households in the nation ?

By, the way, I’ve found a few sums from Berkeley’s ICPC qualifier rounds and they seem to have a few decent questions on string manipulation. I’ve asked them if I can post solutions to their problems on my blog and if it goes down well with them, then it’ll be great ! Else, there’s a lot more places I can look at for problems.

By the way, MIT walked away with second place at this year’s ICPC. Sources at the department of EECS have shown concern over whether next year will be as fruitful as this, considering that the programming heavyweight - Shriphani Palakodety won’t be arriving on the campus. When last asked, Shriphani wasn’t available for comment.

Goodbye anyway !