Archive for December, 2009

Chavez Gives An Ultimatum To Kick Out Toyota, Ford & General Motors

by Sarosh Waiz on December 24, 2009 in Random with No comments

Now that’s what I call being bold and in the face. Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s President as ordered car manufacturing giants including Toyota, Ford and General Motors in a public address that if they don’t fulfill the demand, they will be kicked out of the market.

He further stated that he will kick these giants out and bring in the Chinese, Russians and the Belorusians making is statement stronger. Although their would definitely be something that is stopping the car manufacturers overall productivity, and one of those things is stated as the currency controls in Venezuela that is restricting the imports. The car makers have not responded yet.

Although its a very bold statement by Chavez, but who do you think is right in this case? Any views?

Copying Is Not Theft? Is it Fun? Yeah Right!

by Sarosh Waiz on December 18, 2009 in Random with No comments

Okay so what do you think? Is copying theft or not? Well its commonly known as plagiarism if we copy someone else’s work are try to show it as our own. Yes that is what is commonly accepted.

I was surprised to watch a very interesting video today. It’s named “Copying Is Not Theft.” The video is made by an animator named Nina Paley, who recorded the video track in her voice. She is asking the internet world to make music for this video however anyone wants it. Its a very catchy song with a cute animation. But the lyrics actually made me laugh into tears. I mean, the way she sings the song and the lyrics are written it makes you think for a second that copying is actually fun. Check out the video below before we carry on with our discussion:

Nina Paley is an animator and she has experienced that it is much more profitable if people remove the copyright restrictions. Nina experienced it herself when she launched her film “Sita Sings the Blues” for free over the internet. She believes that if everyone is allowed to sell your content, screen your content or make copies of your content, it eventually helps a person more rather than going through a traditional distribution channel. For further details on “Sita Sings the Blues” and how Nina benefited from that campaign, check this out: http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution

So what do you think? Isn’t copying fun? In my opinion, it depends how you leverage the platforms that are available.

Apni ISP Copyrights Issue

by Sarosh Waiz on December 16, 2009 in Internet, Random with No comments

ApniISP.com

Being a regular internet user from the sub-continent its highly likely that you have heard about a website known as “ApniISP.com”… And if you know about this website, you would also know what it is famous for. Yes, it got famous for offering people with the option to download pirated latest Indian songs. You are most likely to find all the new songs there, and with that aspect, it is a great offering for the internet public.

As a business idea, it is great as it is offering people what they need. I respect the person who launched it and I do respect people who are coming up with such wonderful ideas to cater to a certain need in the market and make money. The website drives tremendous amounts of traffic and is ranked 8,896 by Alexa out of the millions of website. It is ranked 100th most visited website from Pakistan.

A few days ago, someone I know, pointed out that ApniISP.com used to make money out of Google Adsense. It still is making money by Adsense as it currently has a banner or two on its website by Google. Now my question is, isn’t offering pirated material against the Google terms of service? Google bans such accounts if they find that someone is violating its TOS. Its funny that its been ages but no one pointed this out.

But the good part for ApniISP.com is that they have diversified themselves in terms of their revenue streams by selling ads to local clients. I don’t know if Google will ever find this out, but until they don’t, ApniISP.com is going to continue making some good money out of this.

Adious!

Amir Khan Got Me Hooked To Boxing!

by Sarosh Waiz on December 15, 2009 in Boxing, Random with No comments

I have not been a ‘boxing’ fan all my life. In fact, I found it rather boring because I never understood the rules and how it really worked. Similarly, I was never a WWF or a WWE fan, although I did try to follow it will ‘all-my-heart’ because of peer pressure at school. All I could remember today are three names: The Undertaker, Hitman Heart and The Rock. The Rock is an interesting character overall.

It wasn’t that as a kid I never used to like fighting sports, but it was more like it looked ‘lame’ when I saw these guys fighting on WWF. As I grew up, WWE was nothing more than a funny entertainment for me, which of course doesn’t mean that I was a fan.

I liked real fighting as compared to the lame ones. Ask me about Kung-Fu sometime. I loved it. I also happened to practice the basics of Kung Fu for sometime. It was an interesting experience, but I will leave the Kung Fu story for a later date.

Coming back to ‘boxing,’ the sport never inspired me because maybe I never saw it earlier. Or there was no peer pressure that made me follow it. Or another possibility can be that because of PTV only in those days, we never had access to a lot of games and information. All I knew about boxing were two synonymous names of champions, who were Muslims: “Muhammad Ali” and “Mike Tyson”

It was not until recently that I partially got hooked to this sport. I had been hearing about this British Pakistan youngster named “Amir Khan” who made history by winning the WBA World Light-Welterweight Championship in July this year. He is also commonly known as “King Khan” or the “Pride of Bolton.” Well I never knew all this until Amir Khan defeated Dmitry Salita on 5th December 2009 and the hype reached my ears.

Amir Khan

Dmitry Salita was the first challenger of Amir Khan’s title, who was a much senior and a more experienced fighter. Dmitry Salita is a Ukrainian American from New York, who is an Orthodox Jew. Now with Amir Khan being a practicing Muslim, the media termed this fight as the “fight of faith” and the “holy war.” The interesting part was that Salita was never defeated in his entire career and a lot of people did not think that Amir Khan would be threatening enough for Salita.

Dmitry Salita

The fight was expected to last for 12 Rounds of 3 minute each as this match was being considered as one of the toughest matches. As soon as the match started, Amir Khan knocked Salita down with his first punch in less than 10 seconds. It was hilarious. Salita managed to get up, but he was knocked down second time again by Amir Khan within seconds. The third time he got up again, and was knocked down thrice in the first round. Amir Khan won the fight and retained the title.

Khan & Salita

It is a must watch match. This got me hooked up to boxing. It won’t even waste a lot of your time if you are not a boxing fan. Here is the complete video of the match between Amir Khan vs Dmitry Salita:

My Experience as an Adjunct Faculty

by Sarosh Waiz on December 14, 2009 in Random with 12 Comments

Since I quit my job in April 2009, I had been working on a a few projects as an entrepreneur. Although I still haven’t been able to crack that open opportunity that I have been trying to exploit, I am still going to go on and capture it until I succeed.

Since I had no office place to work at, and I couldn’t afford one as well… I was using the library at SZABIST (my university) as a business incubator to carry on with my work processes. To cut the long story short, I was lucky to be present at the university as aspiring new entrepreneur, when I got the chance of teaching the “Entrepreneurship Course” to the BBA students.

To be very honest, I was one of the weakest speakers in my class and when I got this opportunity, for a second I was fearing the consequences that could have happened. With my heart beating at a 4x faster rate, I kept on working on my first lecture for a week. I always intended to teach, and had also been teaching Maths after I did my O’levels when I first started a Maths tuition center named “Mathemagics” at my home with one of my ex-teachers. But that was an entirely different experience.

To teach at a university level, was something that I thought of doing a few years down the line. But as they say that, opportunity knocks the door very few times in a lifetime, so I thought of going ahead with it. It was the summer semester, and I was all prepared for my first lecture when I reached in the classroom well before time. Students, as usual, came in late … and some of them had this surprised look on their faces as they couldn’t realize I came in to teach them. Either it was the name, or it was the fact that I wasn’t an old chap… but it was funny as some of them confirmed it from me more than twice whether I am the teacher for Entrepreneurship. Extremely nervous in my first class, I started off the lecture … and I was shocked that I was moving ahead so quickly with my ‘power point’ slides, that I almost completed my 3 hour lecture in 1 hour. Damn! I was nervous … couldn’t help it! It was hilarious … oh well.. I had some substitute audio visual material.. and I put up a half an hour informative speech by “Steve Jobs” at Stanford. Its one of my favorite speeches… it motivates me every time I watch it. I cooled myself down while the video was playing for the next thirty minutes. And as soon as the video got over.. I had a small interactive session and gave a break! The break actually helped me as I planned and prepared myself. It also helped me organize my thoughts rather than rushing with the chapter. After that… there was no looking back. And now.. I believe that I have finally overcome the weakness of public speaking.

I got an evaluation of about 96% in the summers which is one of the highest at college. I would like to thank the BBA Coordinator at that point in time who kept the trust in me and gave me a further of two courses to teach in the fall semester 2009. I have taught about 3 classes by now which makes up to (26+23+28) 77 students in all. I tried be a different teacher altogether, tried to be more practical than bookish and kept more a friendly attitude. I don’t know how the students really felt… and if they learnt anything at all.

A lot of students were nice and understanding. Plus… they were serious about taking the course. Some were just trying to get off with an A grade because they thought I was a “thand” teacher. The rest had such a careless attitude… that my patience was being tested.. which finally ended up in me bursting with anger in the last class. The problem is.. that a lot of people don’t realize the issues the opposite person might have been going through.. and they just care about themselves only. A lot of students tried to act quite smart when they tried to trick me with various … ‘stupid questions’ to be honest, which of course made no sense. I don’t know where they get this much of over smartness… its going to effect them in the long run if they don’t correct it right now.

I plan to take a break with teaching for some time because I have other areas to concentrate on. But it was a great experience as I also went on to take some extra classes of Marketing Principles for a colleague in Iqra University. Apart from this I was honored to be called in as a guest speaker at various places. All in all .. it was great knowing a lot of students, and it was a pleasure teaching them.