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Hmm... does amnesty international regularly make "-1, troll" statements in order to further its causes? I know that PETA does. Certain environmental organizations also come to mind. Michael Crichton's "Environmentalism as religion" is highly recommended reading.

While I have nothing against your being a C fan (its certainly way simpler to learn than C++), IMHO one of the advantages of Gtk+/Gnome is the availability of bindings in a large number of languages (python, perl, C#, ruby, C++ etc). Efficiency is not crucial in desktop apps, and so using a higher level language can lead to big gains in programmer productivity. (I have personal experience with this. I wrote gretools in a week, and that included learning python along the way.)

This is not a religious argument; I'm not advocating that python is the one language you should use or anything like that. In fact, not having an "ideology" is one of python's major strengths.

If you're asking "why python", ESR has said it better than I ever could.

I'm yet another of those who experienced extremely small turnaround times for python programs. It took me a week, working part time (I estimate about 30 hours) totally, to release 1.0 of gretools, starting from scratch. I had not written a single line of python code before that, mind you.

Why python is great:

Its not a religion. It doesn't force its style of thinking on you. Functional programming, excellent string manipulation tools, classes, inheritance, exceptions, polymorphism, operating system integration, they're all available. This is python's biggest advantage. Whichever background you're coming from, you can very quickly become effective at python.

Incredibly compact code. This is largely a consequence of the previous point. Apart from that it is dynamically typed, and has lots of other cool features. Like doing away with braces for delimiting blocks. People who know nothing about the language flame it for using indentation, but I have never found it confusing, and it makes the code smaller far more readable.

A user-friendly programming language! You aren't going to believe this until you've actually programmed in python. Its got this amazing property that if you can express a thought in constant space mentally, then you can code it in a constant number of lines, most of the time in a single line. In other words, the abstractions of the programming language match the "natural" abstractions of programmers very closely. After just a couple of days I got so used to this that I began to "predict" language features intuitively. At one point I just knew there had to be a language construct for something I was trying to do, and found that it was the reduce function.

Simple syntax. Python manages to have all these features while retaining a very simple syntax, perhaps even simpler than C. This is a big plus, because it gets out of the way and Does What You Mean.

Convinced? Get started now!

It saddens me greatly that they failed to consider the Shakespeare Programming Language (/. story here ) worthy of inclusion in their performance tests. *sniff*

Granted, since SPL eventually becomes C, the C scores would apply, but still...

:-)

I've seen worse

Mirror

Don't put your email address online, period. Other solutions like filters only address part of the problem, because you still have to pay for the bandwidth and there's the problem of false positives. I wrote a little Javascript Turing email obfuscator, which prevents renders your email address invisible to bots, even those that can execute javascript.

An ounce of prevention...

E.F. Codd: In a relational database all data should be represented explicitly and in only one way, as values in tables.

You've just quoted the first of Codd's rules to define a relational database system. But it seems you're not aware of the others, in particular rule 3: there should be separate handling of null values, where the null value in a column is different from any of the normal values for that column's datatype.

In fact, Codd argued for two different kinds of null: one to mean 'unknown', as when entering a person into the database without knowing their date of birth, and one to mean 'not applicable', as when storing the engine size of a bicycle. One of the reasons he disliked SQL was because it combined these two into a single null value. SQL deviates from the relational model not because it supports some null values, but because it doesn't support enough of them.

BTW, please take Fabian Pascal's writings with a pinch of salt, at least until you have checked against other writings on relational theory and database management.

Parent was modded "interesting" ;^) Priceless. Absolutely priceless. In case that's no longer the case by the time your're reading this, I made a screenshot. Enjoy.

The Indian Institute of Technology declines a higher percentage of its applicants than US ivy league schools!

Does this really mean anything? I mean, for a country with a BILLION people that only have SEVEN Institutes of Technology, you would kinda of expect a lot of people to be declined.

• Does the typical "XML bloat" become an issue?

• And, is there much gained by using XML over some/any other scheme?

• Is it very sensitive to errors, like most XML applications? If one XML file/tag gets corrupted, is the whole windowing system fucked until someone goes in on the command-line to fix it?

• Overall, is it a good thing or a bad thing?

• -- world's largest democracy. (no link required)
• -- world's largest standing or deployed land force.
• -- world's largest employer is in India.
• -- Kerala, the state with over 99% literacy (one down, 28 to go :) )
  
  oh and i saved the best for last -- India as a country has 52% literacy.

There seems to be a lot of difference of opinion on this.

See here

Quote:


There are two conservative ways, and, third, a non-conservative way, to respond to EPR:

accede that nonlocal superluminal influences are possible. This violates Einstein locality ("state vector collapse should occur instantaneously at all point in configuration space") but does not violate signal locality ("no usable signal can be communicated faster than light's speed").
Another is that |Y> is not an intrinsic property of the quantum system, but an expression for the information content for some quantum observable. In the single state, there is mutual information between A and B, so the information content of B changes when we know about A.
A third way is to accept EPR at face value, and try to "complete" QM using local hidden variables. The impossibility of such a model was first shown by John Bell (1964, 1966) .


Like I said, I'm not really sure on this. But it does seem to me that information transmission could not violate SR.

If you'd like to discuss it more, let's keep it off the /. forum; you can email me here (remove the obvious) agroz@OBVIOUSLYspeNOT.midco.net

SB

Software from India is inherintly going to be better, not because programmers in India are any smarter than programmers anywhere else (in reality there are great programmers everywhere), but because in India, there is sufficient focus on technology these days, and because businesses are being started up by tech people from IIT rather than MBAs from Harvard, that they are going to do the software right, rather than what some PHB thinks he can sell.

I would argue that the entrant to any of the IIT's is TECHNICALLY much more qualified than 99% of the entrants I've seen in the US. To get into the IIT's, you need to clear what is known as the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE). The examination is conducted all over India. An estimated 250000 students take the exam yearly with about an estimated 2500 getting through to the 6 campuses of IIT's. The entrance exam is grilling. It encompasses three 3-hr exams in maths, physics and chemistry. The syllabus of these exams is roughly equivalent to that of a 3-year bachelor course in science (BSc). So its like you need to be about 3 years ahead of your grade to get through. With the increasing number of applicants, the exam has been made into a two stage exam - a three hr screening multiple choice exam followed by the aforementioned three 3-hr exams. You have to clear both!! Typically students start preparing for the JEE exams atleast 2 years before they give it. School work is neglected as the syllabus for the JEE is way more advanced than the normal school. The JEE is not a joke. It is one of the toughest exams to get through. Take this as an example - two senior year students came up witha polynomial time algorithm for Primality testing.

I would argue that the entrant to any of the IIT's is TECHNICALLY much more qualified than 99% of the entrants I've seen in the US. To get into the IIT's, you need to clear what is known as the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE). The examination is conducted all over India. An estimated 250000 students take the exam yearly with about an estimated 2500 getting through to the 6 campuses of IIT's. The entrance exam is grilling. It encompasses three 3-hr exams in maths, physics and chemistry. The syllabus of these exams is roughly equivalent to that of a 3-year bachelor course in science (BSc). So its like you need to be about 3 years ahead of your grade to get through. With the increasing number of applicants, the exam has been made into a two stage exam - a three hr screening multiple choice exam followed by the aforementioned three 3-hr exams. You have to clear both!! Typically students start preparing for the JEE exams atleast 2 years before they give it. School work is neglected as the syllabus for the JEE is way more advanced than the normal school. The JEE is not a joke. It is one of the toughest exams to get through. Take this as an example - two senior year students came up witha polynomial time algorithm for Primality testing.

You have a choice

You can send your kids to the same colleges that I was referring to. They have foreign national programs which are much cheaper than US universities. Will you really send them is another thing...

Here is one which will give you rough idea of fees Fee for Self-Financing Foreign National Students

Just keep in mind that the course structure is so tough in these colleges that barring the level of students at colleges like MIT, Georgia Tech etc, many local university level students might drop out in a year or two...
But if you have any kids, you can send them to these universities for low fees (compared to your local university) and I guarantee that once they get their college degree, they won't have to fear anything from H1B's or any others for that matter.

In the mid-80s, the American Govt. denied Indians access to the Cray (XMP 14 ?) and it resulted in a spurt of supercomputing activity. By mid-90s there were at least 3 Indian supercomputers developed independently.

1. NAL Flosolver
2. CDAC Param
3. Anupam

Though it is a matter of pride for most Indians to have supercomputers made indigenously, one should not loose sight of the following facts.

1. It takes a lot more to produce a micro-processor than to build a supercomputer
2. With the slightest hint of potential competition, the American Govt., pulls out all stops to ensure that its technological edge in "force multiplier technologies" is maintained, a la Microsoft. Apart from denying Indians the Crays, the American Govt. also arm-twisted the Russian space agency, Glavcosmos into curtailing the cryogenic engine technology transfer deal. This delayed the Indian space program by 5 years. (Indians have since successfully tested an indigenous cryogenic engine.)
3. Indian computers still have American chips in them. It is high time the Indians started building their version of the dragon chip.

In the mid-80s, the American Govt. denied Indians access to the Cray (XMP 14 ?) and it resulted in a spurt of supercomputing activity. By mid-90s there were at least 3 Indian supercomputers developed independently.

1. NAL Flosolver
2. CDAC Param
3. Anupam

Though it is a matter of pride for most Indians to have supercomputers made indigenously, one should not loose sight of the following facts.

1. It takes a lot more to produce a micro-processor than to build a supercomputer
2. With the slightest hint of potential competition, the American Govt., pulls out all stops to ensure that its technological edge in "force multiplier technologies" is maintained, a la Microsoft. Apart from denying Indians the Crays, the American Govt. also arm-twisted the Russian space agency, Glavcosmos into curtailing the cryogenic engine technology transfer deal. This delayed the Indian space program by 5 years. (Indians have since successfully tested an indigenous cryogenic engine.)
3. Indian computers still have American chips in them. It is high time the Indians started building their version of the dragon chip.

What's worse is that if you switch back to sawfish, all kinds of functionality (like logging out of an xession?!) breaks (thanks guys, real slick).

OK, no need to despair. You can surely get sawfish to run nice in Gnome2 on Red Hat 8.0. I got sawfish working smooth as silk (ok, not exactly silk, would combed cotton do?) and I've written an account of it here. Try gnome-session-save --kill for Gnome Logout.

HTH

Not only because (duh) India is the 2nd most populated country in the world, but they also can lay claim to easily one of the finest/most rigorous engineering and computer science schools in the world, if not the best. IIT grads almost invariably turn out to be big movers & shakers in the IT world, or scary-smart geniouses, and usually both. Thus, good allies to have in your camp. To the extent that their government is telling them to move towards Linux, thus weaning a whole new generation from MS dependence, that's fine news indeed.

Sure you are.

Really.

$ httptype www.hotmail.com
Microsoft-IIS/5.0


See the httptype home page

For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope.

Chapter 13

Weaselmancer

Linux: 386/16 with 1 MB RAM

The Linux boot sequence requires atleast 2MB of RAM because of the way it uncompresses itself. Somewhere I remember reading that it really needs atleast 4MB...

At my undergrad institution, a prestigious technical university, we had login names based on our student numbers, a number like n4026001 etc. A friend of mine wrote a simple script to finger all accounts in succession and then tried to log in with a password with minor variation of the individual's name. It wasn't too long before he had logged into more than 50 accts out of some 3000 or so accts.

Even more surprising was how many people would run untrusted binaries coming from friends. A person wrote a simple script which would give how compatible would you be with a person if you typed in your name and her (almost always her)name. The only problem was it did more than that, it would email a copy of you and you crush to the creator of the binary. Before long he had a huge database of who was after whom. Even more pathetic was people trying variations of their name or the girls name when the script said they were incomaptible.

BZZZZZT. Thanks for playing (scroll down)

http://www.me.iitb.ernet.in/yantriki/
IIT Bombay has a robotics festival called Yantriki.
They've had games like TUG-O-WAR in '94, moving on to SOCCER, BASKETBALL, BUNNY WARS, CARROMINES, SUMO WRESTLING and WATER POLO, since it's beginning in '94.

For more details and an alternative explanation, see the following.

W. Kundt, "The 1908 Tunguska catastrophe", Current Science 81: 399-407 (2001)

Gah! Show me who's built the gadget. Last I read up on this topic, the paper went on at great length about how it was not possible to exploit the phenomenon for purposes of communication. Now I have to go look for it because you have watched too much Star Trek.

Here, check out the math.

Here's the critical bit:

"An important first result in quantum information is "no-cloning" first proposed by Wooters and Zurek (1982) and Dieks (1982). It states that:
It is impossible to clone an arbitrary unknown quantum state."

[Proof follows]

"Interestingly, no-cloning rules out a mechanism for using entanglement to send superluminal classical signals. Suppose Alice will choose between performing a {|0>, |1>} basis or {|+>, |->} basis measurement. Bob can determine which she did instantaneously if he can produce multiple copies of his entangled twin particle."

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Spock. It doesn't work, it doesn't work, nyah nyah nyah!

Now, for him to have kept refining materials WHICH WERE HARD TO GET into 110lb of ultra-pure uranium or plutorium would have taken forever!

What he did was build a neutron source - which is not too hard, any alpha emitter and beryllium will do - and irradiated thorium and uranium. That will certainly give you a huge amount of all kinds of alpha, beta and gamma radiation. Actually neutron bombardment will turn just about anything radioactive. (But radioactive things don't glow! A popular misconception probably based on the Cerenkov radiation in swimming pool type reactors which emit a beautiful blue light.)

Thats why Foreign countries can't do it easily: because of lack of availability of materials.

The real reason, the simputer has been created is, the existing content on the web is not useful for an illiterate person. By producing low cost computers in local language,(in 2 languages at present) it gives an opportunity for content providers to target these groups with specialised content.
More links - Cnet article
Pc World article

BTW, the simputer comes with it's own license called the Simputer Public License. The Indian Institute of Science (IISC) and Encore, organisations behind the Simputer are not selling it & the news, is Manufacturers from other developing countries like venezuela, brazil, et al are keen on producing this Simputer.

...Marconi. Finally he was told to deliver a lecture on his invention in The Royal Institution, London on the 13th June, 1902. Now the time came for Marconi to answer to that most important question, "Who is the inventor of the coherer that uses mercury?" He was shrewd enough to find out some mean tactics to create even more confusion and to keep the works of Sir Bose unveiled. He told the august audience in Royal Institution that he designed a number of coherers and one of them used mercury, which was in no way coherent with his speech made in New York in front of AIEEE personnel where he had mentioned that he only invented one coherer. Gradually, he began to shift towards "mercury coherer" from "iron coherer", i.e., Bose's coherer, but never made any reference to Sir Bose. After 25 years of this incident Mr. Vivian, who was an assistant to Marconi, wrote the biography of Marconi where he clearly mentioned that it was nothing but the " mercury coherer" that Marconi used. ...

Bose or Marconi? questions:

Nearly 100 years after Guglielmo Marconi's first transatlantic wireless communication, it has come to light that the detector he had used to pick up the signal was invented by Professor Jagadish Chandra Bose. The discovery made by a group of scientists of the US-based IEEE proves what has been a century-old suspicion in the world scientific community: that the honour of being the pioneer in wireless communication should have gone to Bose and not Marconi. ...

And here is an interesting analysis why Bose wouldn't have patented...

J.C. BOSE: The Inventor Who Wouldn't Patent


and some more
analyses:

Bose's anti-patent position is explained in his authorised 1920 biography written by his close friend Patrick Geddes, "Simply stated, it is the position of the old rishis of India, of whom he is increasingly recognised by his countrymen as a renewed type, and whose best teaching was ever open to all willing to accept it." Bose carried on his shoulders the full weight of his country's defensiveness. He was the proof, because proof was needed, that Indians could do modern science. As Tagore wrote to him, Bose was God's instrument in the removal of India's shame. Bose did not want want to make hay for himself in the European sunshine.

and many more at google!

-Sas

we use turbos on some of our vacuum tools, and on our e-beam. the problem with turbos is that the older ones couldn't handle atmospheric pressure. they'd crash. the prinicple of a turbo spinning at that kind of speed is not to suck and push air like a normal fan, but to actually clobber air molecules and physically knock them down further through the fan. with all those tiny little fans moving at 1M rpm, my prediction is that it's all going to crash, spectacularly. imagine little tiny propellers, all flying off the chip assembly with amazing speed. shrapnel comes to mind. my advice, keep the speeds down to a reasonable level, and get some saftey glasses.

Enjoy.
-Hatta

The point is that IITB needs the funds. Traditionally education in India has been subsidized by the government even at the college level. But funds are drying up, and IIRC government funding at IITB has been frozen after 1995. There has been a steep hike in fees consequent to that, and my juniors are paying much more than I did. In this situation, it's only natural that they look towards industry to finance the costs of an engineering education.

Just my two bits.