Federer v/s Roddick

Came across this question recently.

Part 1:
Earlier, the probability of Federer winning against Roddick was > 4/5.
Now it is < 4/5.

Does there necessarily have to be a point when it was exactly 4/5, during the transition from > 4/5 to < 4/5?

( The probability was determined on the past record of the players against each other )

Part 2:
Does your answer change if, earlier it was < 4/5, and later it was > 4/5, and you are asked the question:
Does there necessarily have to be a point when it was exactly 4/5, during the transition from < 4/5 to > 4/5?

adda .. for fun ..

i propose that "adda" be made an exclusive "fun postings" site ..
no more serious stuff .. yen heltira .. enuff of work related, wall street economy etc..
lets get some quirky, off-the-beat, ridiculing and poking fun types stuff ..
life .. philosophy na swalpa avoid madona ..its everywhere .. lets make adda the escape place ..

back to hong kong ..
in hong kong .. there are two things which are very prevalent ..

"Managers" and good "calf muscles"..
everyone in hong kong is a manager / consultant .. u go to a restaurant .. u have a server manager, billing manager and i think in a salon they have hair stylist consultant.. thats the way it works here .. and i am a product manager as well :-)

coming to more serious issue .. calf muscles ..i dont know if it is genetic or absolute trained from childhood.. calf muscles rock in hong kong .. and it cannot be the "heels" effect .. since guys and girls both compete on good calf muscles in hong kong ..

Steinbrueck Says U.S. Will No Longer Be `Superpower' of Financial World German

hmmm .. I seriously hope so ..
but on the other hand this is a complete joke isnt it ...???

Even after the crisis things wont change.. here are some of the reasons

how many brouses around the world have you seen going against the Dow Jones trend??
By what %age does global commodities change in Asian/ European trading +- 2% ,
where the same in US trading can change like 10% + on a single day. why?? Asians dont like Gold/Crude/Rice/Wheat is it??

US still calls the shots and everyone follows. Thats been happening for a while and will happen for a long while. All these regional demand, powerhouses is a dumb concept. Japan, Europe, the BRICs whoever we combine together have no clue in terms of taking bets or assessing what price u need to pay for what .. we always look towards the fatherland/ uncle Sam for clues so that we can blame someone when things go wrong

Mr. Steinbrueck dint you see German banks losing billions in US housing market ?? what were you doing then buddy .. busy bailing out them?

I personally believe the hi-flying days of wallstreet are over .. though Paulson is trying very hard to not affect executive compensation, people will generally not pay high for investment banking services. But still US will set the pace of the broader industry (asset management, hedge funds, PE, VC blah blah blah) .. others are just followers .. mere followers who just dont have the guts to take bets , but have the guts to take on what the US bets and go under water coolly.. (esp the countries in the 2nd and 3rd positions like Japan and Europe .. compared to the likes of China/India etc)

Hmm my first post from my new company.

First impression has been good...Work is still to begin(which is gonna be C++ and Object Modelling and Design Patterns and all, which I don't have a good idea abt.).The cubicles are very close to each other and I am used to the majestic FAC-Z cubicles.

I can see the view of MG Road from my cubicle and I hear that my office will be shifted to Infantry Road. Meanwhile having an office in MGRoad is good because good access to eatables and anything! Tender coconuts, groundnuts buffet at a place called "Oye Amritsar!" ... Life goes on

There is a cab ( :-)!) and the timings are also good...

Tintin

I finished one round of going through all the Tintin comics after a long time. I have special memories of all the tintin comics. I remember the circumstance when I first got the each of the book and how good / bad it was.

What do I find so special about tintin comics ? At that time it was the style of cartoon, and the pleasant writing font which was used unlike the Marvel or DC comics. Even the Asterix style of cartooning is different. And it was the humor of Captain Haddock which had me glued.

Now as an adult reader, I liked the political references in the Blue Lotus, the amount of research which has gone into the work of Tintin and even now it is the style of cartooning (which is clean , neat and clear). I also found that some themes are recurring across various books written on Tintin.

My favorites in Tintin continue to be The Blue Lotus, The Calculus Affair, the Secret of the Unicorn, The Broken Ear, King Ottokar's Sceptre.

It seems Herege's favorite was Tintin in Tibet. It is too emotional for a Tintin comic and a little different because it was written when Herge was going through a personal turmoil. And my favorite character in Tintin is Tintin himself. Apart from Tintin I like Thomson and Thompson who can actually be differentiated by their moustaches!!! The humor is very french in nature.

Among the least liked ones :- The Lake of Sharks (no creative input by Herge),Castafiore Emerald(nothing happens), and thats it !

I heard that Spielberg's making a movie on Tintin. I hope does justice for fans like me!!

Blasts in Delhi ?

Blasts in Delhi ?

I heard that there are some blasts in Delhi ? Wtf ?

This is too much man ...

http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/sep/13delhi.htm

How many blasts in a year? Very disturbing ....

Seriously how do you prevent and whom do you check to stop all this nonsense ...

Hmmm

I moved out of Sasken yesterday. It was a wonderful company. From my point of view, more than the company, it was the team and the people. Team maketh an employee's professional life.

CorePCU is a lively team. Also an eventful one for me :-

a) I moved into our new house when I joined the team.
b) My sister's marriage.
c) My Paris trip.
d) My Ottawa trip.
e) My marriage.
f) My aptmt

Needless to say, I really enjoyed working here. Now I've stepped out of its umbrella, to venture into other things. I feel like a Columbus today, venturing into new waters, this rainy season.

Needed : Swalpa josh and Swalpa hosh.

Current Song : Eno ondthara

ie and ei ..

i hate those words which have both ei's and ie's in them.. i never get when to use "ie" and when to use "ei".. thanks to auto correct features which often helps me out..

my chemistry prof once advised that if a word in which the "ie" pair sounds "e" then the "i" would precede "e", and if it sounds "i" then "e" would precede "i" and immediately cautioned there were numerous exceptions to this rule..

some examples which follow these rules are field, believe, rein etc..

i had some exceptions in my mind .. but its buried in somewhere

Few movies you might want to Catch-up

If you are really looking to get rid of some boredom the following bollywood movies will certainly help you ..

Rock -On - For Farhan Akthar and Shankar-Eshan-Llyod amateurly sounding Great hindi rock.
Aamir - Mumbai Meri Jaan- A Wednesday , I suggest all three. Good work on terrorism in India from different angles . UTV has made a great contribution to the bollywood

If you are not into serious cinema right now then there is 'Singh is King' for you...

All these are available on Veoh.com.. thats my only source in Hong Kong. I try to get DVDs sometimes which are also pirated again and certainly I cannot wait for 3-4 years to catch a movie (avinash does not like me watching these pirated stuff, but I am channel restricted.. sorry).

After The Dark Knight I have not watched in Hollywood movie. Looking forward for Tropical Thunder.

India N-abled

thats the TOI headline today. Though there is lot of skepticism about the full-waiver stuff, this was a great achievement for Congress and India. Whatever the BJP/Left/BSP /Deve Gowda harp about the deal and that India had surrendered Nuclear-sovereignty I genuinely believe that apart from India other countries would want to have India continue its testing ability and be a nuclear powerhouse, apart from the likes of sweden, norway, austria, new zealand and switzerland .

the bigger threat to the region and the world are the likes of Pakistan, Iran, North Korea and China. There is a nuclear nexus here somehow and there is proliferation happening in this nexus allegedly in some instances like the China-Pak connection. Others like the Pak-Iran-NK was openly admitted by A.Q. Khan, though not proven explicitly.

Under such a nexus developing in the region the western world needs a counter balance. The US especially is interested in containing the growing presence of China in this region and its aggressiveness in non-nuclear activities like O&G exploration which is always included with an arms support, be it burma, middle east of africa. Even the european mights are threatened though there is russia which physically separates them from China, but not by a far distance. And if Pongyang claims to have missile reaching the US pacific states, its naive to assume china would not have.

So the US and its european allies really want an Asian heavyweight who can counter balance China and who else can that be apart from India, who also has a special relation with Russia. By enabling India, the western powers are sending a direct message to China. China obviously would and did tried to veto this deal and Mr. Bush himself had not interfered I am sure India would have lost the race.

So Mr. Yechuri and Jaitley mostly oppose for the sake of opposing, esp the BJP which itself would have done a similar deal if it were in power.

Certainly we are N-abled today.
Bravo India

Google chrome

I installed Google chrome for my windowsXP and I like it. It's cool. I think it is faster than firefox. It looks somewhat like the Opera Web browser I think.

Europe is the answer

I am not a technical expert on infrastructure, but looking at two geographies which have different transportation infrastructures, I perceived what could be better.. I might be completely wrong

There is a lot of talk about infrastructure in India and I always follow it up.
Looking at the developments taking across India looks like India likes to follow the US way of infrastructure, building massive road network across the country. This strategy basically sucks. I agree we do need roads, but we cannot afford to have a road network as vast as US/China or even 50% of it. We just do not have enough land for that.

While Roads work for a country as big as the US, like China, this would utterly fail for a country like India. To build world class roads you need land and land acquisition in India is not as easy as in China ( mass displacment for roads is common in China). the NICE road however nice it could be did run into a lot of trouble over acquiring land (most of it was politically motivated, but am sure the number of acres was really a huge number.)

By building roads we are directly affecting the most abundant working class - the farmers.
On the second hand we are encouraging people to buy Cars which could be second worst thing to happen for a country with subsidised petrol/diesel prices and imports nearly 80%+ of its crude oil.

What we currently need is better conditioned roads which will increase efficiency of vehicles and a wider roads (like the golden quadilateral). Building parallel highways like the BMIC is a waste of everything (though its very attractive).

India should look up to europe and build a world class railway infrastructure. Every city/town in India should be connected by railway networks. Being already the biggest railway network in the world and the ability to make a 30K crore surplus surely shows that there is a huge potential in this mode of tansportation. Every city should run a metro like Bombay.Railways consume less space, and can be more efficient for mass transportation. Building high class service trains would make it attractive for all class of people to travel by trains.

And Europeans have proven that they are smarter than the US in many instances (europe banned lead in gasoline nearly 50 years before US completely realized the harmful effects of lead, same is happening with the GHGs) and having a demography and geography similar to europe (western europe) we should act the european way and not the Calfornian way.

Chrome ..

Frankly, the browser business is a little outdated I feel and Google is entering very late into this.
But you never know whats in the store ( rather I do not know whats in the store, as I have not bothered to check the features, its left to my techie friends).

This shows Google has ample bench strength to work from Browsers to office documents and solar power and potentially wind mills.. so ppl dreaming of the coveted job beware.

May be Chrome should have been a Chinese/Japanese browser. Strategically this would have helped. (or atleast give it a wild shot). Mozilla is a good and much needed replacement for IE.
Chrome might end like Safari or even worse... but there is a cool factor (atleast in India and Brazil) to be associated with Google products and so Indians will for sure embrace the Chrome......