Ever since 2008, there has been a big decline in yahoo.com as a portal or as a search engine or even as a news aggregator. I don't think yahoo will survive any longer as a major portal on the net. Even the concept of a portal is growing old with the new age of social media. Unless it reinvents itself it is slowly going down. The quality of the site went down, the top news is mainly hollywood gossip connected with mediocre value. Apparently the news editor/algorithm is highly entertainment oriented. Check out BBC for example, it has a good balance of news categories. The most popular photos feature for instance are years old and very dysfunctional. Yahoo will be around, but it lost its commanding position and slowly receding in its net footprint.
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06May
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09Feb
never take oneself too seriously
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04Feb
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/044428
That's a big feat. Solaris, SPARC, MySQL, Java are now part of Oracle. -
29Dec
Introducing the dreamie:
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29Dec
I am graduating soon and I started interviewing with the Big I banks for a Quant Strategist position. I had close to 8 phone interviews over the past 3 weeks all with Russian Theoretical physicists. Being a mere master’s student, you can imagine how intimidating it was. Anyways, I thought it would be fun to share some of the insanity I’ve seen:
One liners:
Question 1: How many digits does 2^71 has? How confident you are in your answer?
Question 2: How many primes are there less than 1000? Provide a confidence interval.
More involved games:
Question 3: A frog sits on an infinite line. It can jump in steps of 2 to the right and in steps of 1 to the left ( both with probability of 1/2). What is the probability that it returns its initial position.
Question 4: You have a standard deck of cards with 26 reds and 26 blacks placed on a table face down. You and a player take turns flipping the cards , one by one, if it’s red you win 1 dollar if black you loose 1 dollar. What is the optimal strategy to play this game? i.e When should you stop.
I have plently more if folks are interested.
Surprisingly , I managed to do well . I’ll find out in 2 weeks if I got the job
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03Dec
for some reason I couldn't find this TV specs anywhere on the net, so I thought I'd upload them myself. I bought it 1 week ago and I'm very happy with it.
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17Nov
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8364815.stm
"A spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the planning approval was "yet another step that shows and proves Israel is not ready for peace"."Arab 'leaders': Oh really! what can we do?!- Nothing, as usual! -
11Nov
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10Nov
I think this is worth a vote. "The movie 2012 shows the whole world collapsing – many monuments falling and rolling. As a Muslim, would you like to include the destruction of Islamic monuments (e.g. Kaba) in this movie?"
I'll ask Roba or Naseem to ask this [I don't support polling yet]
Emmerich: "Well, I wanted to do that [show the destruction of Kaba], I have to admit," the filmmaker told scifiwire.com. "But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said, 'I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie.' And he was right."
Emmerich went on: "We have to all, in the western world, think about this. You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have … a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it's just something which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out."
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28Oct
