16 February 2005

Costly sevearance & Other issues

HP's ex boss clary is being paid a whopping 45mn$$ in severance.Now this should serve as an example to companies recruiting honchos for the top posts to be careful with the severance package.
She is soley credited with reducing all the ESOP's to worthless toilet paper.That is the common grouse against her by almost all the employees inside HP.
When the company's bread and butter buisness has been reduced to practically nothing is such a severance package necessary ?
Well that is corporate america for you folks.Milk em when the time is right !

I have always been maintaining that the courses at Indian Institue of Science are at best totally theoretic and put off many an intrested student from opting for it.To give an example consider the course which i myself took called performance modelling.Man that was real PITA.Totally arbit crap about random number generation and other useless stuff.Now i did manage to leave in the course feedback section saying that there is a total disconnect with the course goals and the way it was taken.I mean performance modelling should be able to give you an insight into how to model the performance of large scale systems when you are not able or not ready to build such systems.Now that is indeed theoretic but then it does give you a practical insight.
A project can be assigned where you try to put forth such a system and probably use petri nets or whatever to simulate.
Similar stuff exists in that ECE department too.You are made to belive that reading about protocols and other stuff is child's play and given some lenghty monolouges on poisson process and differential equations etc etc.Why is there not an attempt to mix both ?
Ok the point is not about that.
There was an intresting news item that aerospace students will be taken on aircraft rides and given demonstrations on how wingspan and altitude and other factors determine the speed and stability and other parameters of an aircraft in flight.This is in my view a very very important step in making the students feel the real essence of what they are doing in their textbooks.No point in solving some deep bat shit mathematics without really understanding as to why and where such things will be used.
IMHO college studies without telling u the practical applications is a total waste.Ok it need not tell u all the applications but atleast give you a hint.

One of my long thought about activity is to build a school where students are taught subjects by application to real life and not just bookish knowledge.CBSE stream in that sense is pretty ok folks.The calculus i learnt in high school had about 35% weightage for real life applications.

After my 30km run on sunday i went back to the running track for a small 8km run.luckily i did it today.i could feel my knees creaking and my ankles and thighs screaming.If i had done this on race day { feb 20th } then it would have been a total mess !

On a more intresting note i have been challenged to a 30km race.And to make things more intresting im totally unaware of my opponents skills and practise levels.In a total deviation from my methodical and practical self i have accepted on a whim or was it an utter confidence level that since im training for a marathon anyway i can win ? i dunno.It promises to be intresting though :-)
K.Shyam

Posted by Unknown at 10:18 AM

2 Comments

  1. Blogger musafir posted at Wednesday, February 16, 2005 at 11:08:00 AM GMT+5:30  
    Visited your blog for the first time. Good posts. As a runner (for more than 25 years) I could get a sense of your experience. I, too, wrote about Carly Fiorina but in a different vein. It was before the details of her severance package (golden parachute) became public. I felt that her critics, including members of the HP Board) were asleep at the wheel. They were fully supportive of her when the battle for acquisition of Compaq was in progress. They turned against her only when it didn't work out.
  2. Blogger Unknown posted at Wednesday, February 16, 2005 at 12:50:00 PM GMT+5:30  
    hey thanks !
    but i gather there were quite a lot of opposition to the merger within HP itself ! :-)

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