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shalinmangar | 11 years ago | on: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

Whatsapp is hugely popular in India where phone contracts are not popular and most people use pay-as-you-go prepaid mobile services. Very few, if any, of them come with unlimited messages. Unlimited messages are a US-only thing I guess.

shalinmangar | 14 years ago | on: Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97%

In case of Nexavar, another company is able to manufacture far more cheaply and that says something about Bayer. Either they are unable to manufacture cheaply or they are unwilling to price it cheaper.

Suppose that big pharma stops selling drugs in India. That wouldn't make much difference because the generic drug manufacturers would still make cheap copies of the drugs. The only downside would be that new drugs will take time to be introduced because of the time needed to reverse engineer the formulae and set up manufacturing capabilities.

shalinmangar | 14 years ago | on: We Need to Talk About Android

I must point out that your comment does not apply to a large number of markets. Consumers in India, for example, decide on a handset independent of which carrier's service they use.

Samsung's devices compare very favorably to similarly priced devices. iPhones are very expensive compared to Samsung's devices in India and in my observation (warning: anecdotal evidence), most iPhone owners that I know have sourced their devices from the US (usually via the used device markets) to get around the price problem. There's no wonder that Samsung continues to thrive and Apple continues to languish in the Indian market.

shalinmangar | 14 years ago | on: Who Rules America: An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%

>If that's the case, why has inflation been so low in the US in the last two years, when the Fed undertook the largest expansion of it's balance sheet in modern history? i.e. it has printed more money recently, than at any other time in it's mandate - but inflation AND inflation expectations are still low.

That is because all that inflation has been exported to other countries. There are economies who have bet their growth on exports and depend on a strong dollar.

shalinmangar | 14 years ago | on: Getting Bin Laden: What happened that night in Abbottabad

From the article: "They observed that residents of the compound burned their trash, instead of putting it out for collection, and concluded that the compound lacked a phone or an Internet connection."

How do you go from burning trash to lack of phone or internet?

shalinmangar | 15 years ago | on: The 'oh sh_t' moment that Nokia decided to abandon MeeGo

What I often wonder is why didn't Nokia decide to try its hand on both Android and Windows Phone 7? Samsung has managed to do this while keeping its in house platform intact. Experiment and see what finds uptake rather than bet a huge corporation on a single platform.

shalinmangar | 15 years ago | on: Chrome has transcended version numbers

Although it'd be nice to have diffs available for all earlier versions but it doesn't need to be mandatory. A simple way to get started would be, for example, to make the diffs available for the last version released by Ubuntu 11.04 as well as the last security update on top of 11.04 -- which I guess should take care of the majority. If people are running older versions of the packages, or if they haven't applied security updates regularly, they download the complete binary.

shalinmangar | 15 years ago | on: Why I get my entertainment via BitTorrent

"Well, it still has destroyed these industries."

No, the industries have destroyed themselves by letting piracy go out of hand when they could have done something about the root causes of piracy. Instead, they have focused their efforts on treating the symptoms and not the disease.

What can they do now? They can make it available, convenient and priced reasonably. Piracy may never go away but giving people an option between illegal and legal means of obtaining content can improve their chances of making money.

shalinmangar | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why can't I make as much as I make?

Per-employee earnings may make sense as an indicator of the health of a company but they do not mean much in this context because without the collective team, the earning per employee may be impossible to achieve.

shalinmangar | 15 years ago | on: Android

Do people really believe that Apple wants to dominate the mobile market? It seems wasteful to critique sales comparisons of iOS vs Android when Apple has never shown any signs of making iOS devices a monopoly.

shalinmangar | 15 years ago | on: Why Paying Bribes Should Be Legal

The article assumes that a functioning judicial and investigative system exists which can help you in a reasonable amount of time. If that were the case, bribery wouldn't have become so rampant in the first place.

How is one supposed to show evidence of wrongdoing? What keeps the government official from exercising his powers and punishing the reporter in the future?

shalinmangar | 15 years ago | on: The real reason people are mocking Color...

I don't think it has anything to do with the domain. Every time I see another post about Color, I become more and more convinced that the $41 million dollars were meant to trigger exactly this kind of frenzy. The usefulness of the application depends on a lot of people using it simultaneously and Color making it big without this kind of buzz was almost impossible.
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