India Plans A Supercomputing Grid

An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article at CNET, India is building a country-wide High Speed Network. Named the "I-Grid" (I is for 'Information' silly !), its a feat for the Indians who have been bogged down by U.S. sanctions in the recent past -- besides, with a country as big as theirs, its one helluva project!"

Comments

Re:India?

[swissmonkey]

Actually, at least 1/8 of the world cares about this place, that's much more than all the ignorant morons of your kind put together.

Go for it!

[bcilfone]

Hopefully they can pull it off... maybe then the US government will encourage its tech workers instead of threatening to throw them in jail in the name of a cartoon mouse.

I really hope this is for good....

[wholesomegrits]

And not for developing shitload of nukes to destroy Pakistan with. It sure sounds like the kind of thing perfect for nuclear simluations. Not that I'm fond of Pakistan's idea of leveling India with Nukes.

Braving the sanctions, C-DAC has built four versions of its Param series of machines, putting India in an elite club of supercomputing nations like the United States, Japan, Israel and China.

Oh wow, it's a who's who of nuclear powers. Considering that the US hasn't ruled out bombing the shit out of Afghanistan we're certianly in good company. The U.S. sanctions thing is bogus. They are close enough to Japan, France, Israel, &c to get all the shit they need.

Re:I really hope this is for good....

[Anonymous Coward]

First, India's really a second-world nation. The first/second/third world definitions were western/communist/other, but India's definitely not 3rd world (Uganda, Sudan, Afghanistan), and definitely not first world.

Second, India is less likely to use Nukes than Pakistan -- and U.S. citizens can thank the CIA for giving Pakistan nuke technology. Look up "Gary Powers" in your history books. His U-2 that was shot down over Russia began its flight in Pakistan. The U.S. has been in thick with Pakistan and less-than-honest deeds since. Pakistan was also a favored point for inserting people into the old U.S.S.R, and it touches China, making for more flight options to bases in Japan.

Back during the previous Bush presidency, India and Pakistan were in another heightened state of alert. Pakistan had fighter jets sitting on the tarmac, hot-seating pilots in 2-hour shifts, waiting for the word to sprint across the border and hit large cities like Delhi and Bombay. The previous President Bush, who understood the world far better than his offspring combined, probably deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for calming things down.

Third, Pakistan is the lawless nation here. Their previous female prime minister was forced out partly because of video tape taken by her secret service detail of her having sex with her own husband. (This is too absurd for me to make up, mind you.) Pakistan is currently controlled by a military dictatorship, which puts it into the same category as Pinochet, Hussein, Castro....

Fourth, a "poor" country deciding to spend a LOT of money on a private Internet backbone should scare the begeezus out of people. India is as more proximal to large population pockets than any other country. If you wanted to network Asia, Africa, and Europe, India is the place to do it.

Fifth, India was/is on the U.S. watch list because of grain sales back in the 1970's between Russia and India, and because of the U.S.'s need for a place to launch CIA spy plane flights (see Gary Powers reference above). The old "friend of my enemy is my enemy" simplistic notions of how the relationships between nations should work. India needed food, Russia was willing to sell it cheaper than the U.S., and so the simple rules of capitalism landed India on the watch list.

Sixth, there is great education in India. Who here among us has not had an Indian classmate? For seeing so many of them, remember that you are only seeing the ones that got accepted over here, and/or had the money to come over. There are many brains in India, well-educated, disciplined, and hungry for the opportunity to prove they are good, and to improve their lot in life. They lack only the chance, the opportunity....

Re:I really hope this is for good....

[joib]

Come to think of it, if they can allocate money for a nuke program, they can certainly afford to get appropriate number crunching equipment which is solely in the hands of the weapon designers, not shared by half the academics in the country. You know, nuclear weapons research is usually classified something like "top secret"... I doubt they'd let outsiders access their stuff solely for security reasons.

Re:I really hope this is for good....

[Lobachevsky]

according to the CIA factbook, per capita is $2,200/yr (2000est), and 35% below poverty(1994est); not $100/yr at 90%.

Re:I really hope this is for good....

[spasm]

" First, India's really a second-world nation. The first/second/third world definitions were western/communist/other, but India's definitely not 3rd world (Uganda, Sudan, Afghanistan), and definitely not first world."

Kinda ironic india invented the term 'third world' and applied it to themselves - the idea was the world was polarizing into the russian / american camps, & India saw that small, poor nations that cozied up to one or the other didn't do all that well, so decided to go down the route of 'independent neutrality'. Supposedly the rationale for this was all sorts of world-peace type reasons, but the (presumably hoped for & planned) outcome was the US and USSR outdid each other to see who could throw the most money & toys at the Indian Govt. Dig out an old copy of Janes from the 80s or earlier & have a look at which countries produced major chunks of hardware in the Indian military - a weirder mix of USA/USSR you won't find almost anywhere.

Can't think of too many other countries that did as well out of joining the 'third world' camp though, and it quickly became a catch-all term for places mostly thought of by westerners as stupefyingly poor.

Re:I really hope this is for good....

[nyteroot]

Actually, building a massive internet backbone in India is a really bad idea for two reasons:
1) India needs cheap, regular phone service first. I don't know if much has changed in five years, but last time I was there (not in a big city, mind you, but not exactly out in the boonies.. Udupi, Karnataka, near Mandgalore .. if that means anything to you) but local phone calls weren't cheap and you only made STD (long-distance) calls if you were an important businessman. And the sound quality wasnt good enough to support 9.6kbps.
2) India needs reliable elctricity! I know this one still holds true, I recently read something about the average electricity in India being 8 hours a day. I remember not being able to sleep cause the mill next to us would have to turn on its diesel generators every other night
Once India gets these acts together, then it should worry about getting a huge Internet network.. basics first, guys..

Re:I really hope this is for good....

[jweatherley]

There was a big drop in call charges in India in the new year. The phone lines support 56k modems - I was reading slashdot from Hyderabad this christmas. Indeed a year and a bit ago I would have had more luck getting an affordable DSL connection in an Indian city than the UK! Broadband has got better in the UK but it still sucks if you don't live in a large city.

As for power a UPS is essential for a computer over there but 8 hours a day is just not true - on average there seemed to be a cut every other day for half an hour max - not great but bearable.

A big problem with electricity in India is the amount of theft - bare wires from the junction box into someones house - nice!

Get the physical infrastructure sored out first

[gibler]

Shouldn't roads and irrigation be more important. Hospitals. Schools.

Re:Get the physical infrastructure sored out first

[Zibblsnrt]

Shouldn't roads and irrigation be more important. Hospitals. Schools.

Do so many people really believe that if a country isn't spending all their money on development, they might as well not be spending any?

...Come on, people, it's not like it's a one-or-the-other decision. It's possible to build roads and computers at the same time, leaps of black-and-white "logic" aside. :P

-PS

Where do they go for outsourcing?

[cmdr_beeftaco]

Where will they go for contractors when the project is 6 months behinds schedule and 50 million over budget? Will they farm out the programming to Pakistan? China? I need answer.

Re:Where do they go for outsourcing?

[Glorat]

It is interesting to note that here in the UK, the laws for immigration have changed significantly. Laws are getting tougher for assylum seekers but being relaxed for immigrants that would help the UK economy... and many of these are Indians because they are smart and well educated. Indeed, I have heard of many a project that have been outsourced to India because skilled labour is so much cheaper there. India have the skills and manpower to pull this off

Re:Where do they go for outsourcing?

[sharkey]

Perhaps they'll get Battle School grads to do the work in forced-labor camps. Probably only need some kind of a psycho who's willing to kill to keep 'em in line.

High voltage?

[cperciva]

C-DAC's computers, built on a sophisticated clustering of microprocessors, would use advanced software to securely network the machines, much like a high-voltage electricity grid.

Can anyone work out what they're trying to say here? Do high-voltage electricity grids use advanced security software? Perhaps they're saying that anyone who tries to tamper with the network will get shocked? Or...

Re:High voltage?

[talonyx]

They're saying that the computers will be all over the place connected with networks, just like how substations are connected with electrical cables.

I sure hope you failed English in high school.

Re:High voltage?

[kesuki]

Obviously the 'sophisticated clustering of CPUs' is generating a heat shield. So the effect must be a server room that causes anyone who attempts to tamper with the systems to collapse from heat stroke and/or suffer second degree burns. Or perhaps a more simple solution that the server nearest the door has a peltier device redistribting heat to the door knob so no one can enter the server room.
;-)

Heh

[EricKrout.com]

India's new i-Grid follows a long line of previously successfull Apple products, the i-Pod and the i-Mac being two of them.

When reached for comment, Apple's visionary Steve Jobs stated that his engineers "would worry about the technical difficulties" associated with such a large distributed system after they "dealt with the more important stuff first, like what fluorescent color to make the transparent wires and stuff".

monolinux.com :: GNUs For Nerds. Flawless Grammar.

Re:Heh

[darkov]

Yeah looks good but it too fucking expensive. When will Apple learn that it can't foist overpriced distributed computing networks onto unsuspecting countries. Someone should tell them they can get a much cheaper Grid by using PCs and Linux.

Also, I hear it only supports one button mice. Sigh.

Mammoth applications?

[Oink.NET]

Quoth CNet:

India's state-run agency for advanced computing plans to build a nationwide grid of supercomputers for mammoth applications.

Mammoth, as in wooly mammoth? I suppose they'll be excavating Cobol programmers to write the code for it...

Re:Mammoth applications?

[scoove]

grid of supercomputers for mammoth applications.

No, you must not have seen the network diagram. It's very explicit, as it has an elephant standing on the back of a turtle (and so on).

Check your Visio2000 India Symbols pack. It's all there.

*scoove*

Re:Mammoth applications?

[dillon_rinker]

Skeptic: But what does the turtle stand on?
True Believer: It's turtles all the way down!

Re:Mammoth applications?

[dillon_rinker]

THE TURTLE MOVES!

India the Next Superpower

[pyrrho]

There is no doubt in my mind that India is the next big superpower.

(1) Lots of unspoilt natural resources
(2) Smart People
(3) Most Important (A LOT OF PEOPLE)
(4) and it doesn't hurt they speak english allowing them to segue their way in.

My premise..? Numbers don't lie. A giant market is a giant period. This prediction does cover China too, their population makes them a sleeping giant. Except that China does not have an open society. India is struggling against years of exploitation and it's own caste system... but given the adoption of democracy there I can't imagine it won't arrise from these difficulties and when it does, it will have more resources than anyone will be able to (or want to) stop.

Re:India the Next Superpower

[scoove]

There is no doubt in my mind that India is the next big superpower.

Good arguments, but I'm not sold (as much as I'm impressed with India's efforts and potential).

Is there really any good evidence of the emergence of a superpower from a ethnically diverse and incompatible populace, absent significant suppression by the elite minority of the other groups?

China and South Africa are good examples of the potential for advancement under suppression.

I'm really more curious than serious on my argument - I'd have to believe there's a /.'er polysci major that knows of some good material on the topic.

Need some bedtime reading this weekend!

*scoove*

Re:India the Next Superpower

[ma_sivakumar]

My premise..? Numbers don't lie. A giant market is a giant period.

That is not strictly true. I am from India, and I have worked in China and in UK. Based on my experience, numbers are not everything. While I also see a lot of potential in the huge population of India and China, there are major hurdles to overcome.

1. Education:
   
   

   The education system in India is still the same system which aimed to churn out clerks to serve under the colonial British masters. The bright Indian professionals you meet in the western world are bright inspite of all the negatives of the education system

   
   
2. Personal Responsibility:
   
   

   As a direct result of the poor education system, you can see laws being flouted at all levels (right from the traffic system to awarding government contracts). When you have a big mass of people who are not following the rules, (unless watched over by the police,) most of the energy is drained in watching out rathern than performing

   
   
3. Corruption
   
   

   Again, following the above two, the system is corrupt through and through. NOTHING gets down without palms being greased and even after greasing, in many places nothing gets down EVER

   
   
   

   To mask their inefficiency, the political class resort to religeous fundamentalism, casteism and war mongering.
   
   

I also hope that we can wish away all these. But these are the sad realities. The silver lining is the functioning democracy and the remarkable shrewdness of the ordinary man in seeing through all this.

Thus, we are slowly inching towards progress, but as we say, sometimes you climb an inch and slip a foot, so it is tough

Whts the difference between Pakistan and a pancake

[indole]

From the article:
"Such a grid would share or combine diverse computer memories and software in parallel processes to aid environmental modeling, fast analysis of satellite images, advanced chip design and simulation of heavy-duty equipment like turbines."

I think it's interesting how when one nuclear agressive country imports Playstation 2's we freak the fuck out, but when another nuclear agressive country creates the worlds largest supercomputing grid we say, Bravo!

Ah well, such is life.

Colleges

[Telastyn]

From what I understand this will be a large project to interconnect India's largest technical colleges (Institutes of Technology, which are very prestegious and good) and have smallish (by US standards) supercomputers at each one. They would then resell the pooled computing resources as needed.

The American equivalent would be having a supercomputer at Stanford, MIT, UMich, CMU, GATech, and maybe 4 other places, connected via internet2 and ssh tunnels.

Re:Priorities

[scoove]

Umm, should the indians worry about feeding their own and eliminating bubonic plague as a major cause of death before they build stuff like this?

God do I hope that's a silly European and not a stupid American saying something like that. (It's probably a stupid American aspiring to be a silly European, in all likelyhood).

Actually, I think this is an exceptional move to help get people out of poverty (not that all people in India are in poverty - another rather myopic view). Besides the usual opportunities represented in such a move, technology tends to bring in a tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurship (read: a way for poor blokes to move up in the world).

Because of the rate of change with technology, rapid obsolescence, intellectual demands (brain vs brawn), the expansion of technology in any economy really helps young adults create new businesses which in turn feed more money into channels outside of the status quo.

I hope India explores liberal licensing of 2.4 and 5.8 GHz frequencies as well, ensuring this backbone has room to grow. India's telecom network has been terribly restricted, corrupt and ineffective in past years and a wireless broadband framework could serve as an excellent spur network to feed all this new commerce into the backbone.

eliminating bubonic plague

Er... we still have it in the US, buddy! It lives in prairie dogs (which have become recent animal preservationist favorites because they're so cute). Folks still come down with it from other rodent population that comes in contact with the prairie dogs (which are unaffected by the disease).

*scoove*

India : Some Facts

[matrix0040]

I guess the replies reflect a general ignorance about india and indians in general. India might have it's own problems with poverty and all but still countries in europe and US relied on indian brain power for their IT needs.

About supercomputing in India. CDAC had developed it's first supercomputer long back and has been making a lot of progress in this field. And before raising a nuclear alarm, India already has nuclear capability (and can launch a satellite into orbit (2+2 = ?) ) besides there are many other civilian applications on parallel computing .. ever heard of weather prediction (farming and fishing happen to be the largest industry in India and weather prediction is critical for these industries) Now i am not going to make a big list of all the applications of parallel computing but developing nuclear weapon is just one among the vast number of critical applications. Hell even the cows in india need the supercomputing power (they're the ones plowing the farms ;-)

I hope none of the fiber goes thru Kashmir

[LM741N]

Or they are going to have lots of network downtime.

Re:I hope none of the fiber goes thru Kashmir

[Quixote]

Why not? Last I checked, Kashmir was a part of India. The International Law recognizes the accession of Kashmir into India. Even the United Nations agreed that Kashmir would be a part of India (until the plebiscite is held). What it does not recognize is the occupation of a part of Kashmir by Pakistan.
The plebiscite has not been held because Pakistan continues to illegally occupy a third of the region. Once Pakistan withdraws, there should be no problems in holding a plebiscite.
Coming back to the topic at hand, I hope this network (or something similar) will spread to every nook and corner of the country, bringing high-speed access to the masses.

Another article on same report

[gupg]

Here is an article on the same subject in the Times of India: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp ?art_id=2867426

And what about tech support?

[Carmody]

When they have it all hooked up, when one of their citizens calls for tech support, to what country will their call be forwarded?

"How about India?"

"d00d! W3 R Indi4!"

The seamy side of Bollywood

[cryptochrome]

Sounds perfect for transfering large quantities of ripped Indian Porn... wonder if they're all musicals.

Re:Not Indians!

[inburito]

And people from where ever you come from are collectively called idiots..

Re:Just Imagine

[scorcherer]

I imagined a clustering article that didn't have the oh-so-cute Beowulf comments. It only contained +1nsightful and +1nteresting comments and not the usual digital landfill of /.. But you woke me up from that dream.

By the way, imagine a MOSIX cluster of these, now that would be something!

Re:"Weather predictions"

[matrix0040]

From Times of india

C-dac, based in the western city of Pune, plans to link the seven Indian institutes of technology (IITs), the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science and other academic institutions in the I-Grid, Arora said.

The IIT's and IISc and CDAC (as someone pointed out) are all open places. You can just walk into the place. No pass or clearance (for iit's i know for sure) needed.

I can tell you for sure that the terms of use of computational facilities at IIT's prohibit the use of computers for any nuclear or missile research. We don't do those kinds of work there. They're done in BARC and ISRO (though ISRO has joint projects with a few of iit's). But yes you can never draw a line between civilian and defence research. There are many applications of research. People will always find ways to use the civilain reseach for defence purpose but that doesn't mean one should not do research at all and go back to living in caves and hunting animals (ok a bit of exaggeration ;-))

Re:Priorities

[MagikSlinger]

Ah, the crypto-colonialist has crept out from under his rock.

1) India produces quite enough food for its population. It's poverty that's killing people.

2) Bubonic plague thrives in India because of the close proximity of people and animals over much of the country. Would you like them to start exterminating their biota to make you happy?If you are talking about antibiotics, then India needs a lot of cash it really doesn't have right now because they're still an economic backwater.

3) Since poverty is the greatest risk factor for death in India, maybe some industrial advancement would be in order. Not the kind that produces pollution and low wages, but maybe tertiary and quartenary industries, like say, computing science and engineering. Oops! They've been doing that and enjoying good economic growth and increased tax revenues to pay for things.

THUS to better serve the needs of their people through economic growth and transitioning away from a physical labor economy (where education isn't required), they need this kind of project. So please keep your neo-colonialist views to yourself. Do you imagine everyone outside of Europe and America as poor, stupid, starving darkies who need good white folk like you to put their priorities straight?

PUH-leeze! The White Man's Burden is SO over.

Or...

[Greyfox]

We'll all have to emigrate to India. That's OK. I like curry. I'll miss hamburgers though...

Re:Or...

[red_dragon]

In India, McDonald's serves lamb burgers.

Re:the down side...

[sharkey]

Ahhh. Perhaps they are adapting the Avian Carrier technology to Large Ruminants to provide lower altitude, higher throughput (camels can carry more than birds) service. Latency is still pretty bad, I'll bet.

Re:Priorities

[osgeek]

(not that all people in India are in poverty - another rather myopic view)

Sheesh... hardly. I lived in India for a few months working in Hyderabad, so I can tell you: That country is a complete hole. While there, I traveled from New Delhi to Bombay to Goa, and everywhere I went, it was the same: abject povery.

Hell, while there, we lived in a nice house in a decent neighborhood, but we still had a couple of grass shacks in the lot right next door to us. Garbage was everywhere, little kids were running around naked and hungry through the piles of garbage (often burning).

When you breathe in the air, you count yourself lucky if you only inhale a cloud of diesel fumes. More often than not, you have to breathe old piss and sewage fumes. Where does that come from? Well let me tell you, my friends -- when the average person living in an Indian city needs to relieve himself, he just whips it out and pisses on the side of the nearest building. Playing "Dodge the Piss Puddle" is no fun while you're walking down the sidewalk.

The reason why everything is so crappy can be summed up in one word: "corruption". Even most Indian friends that I know agree that it's a huge problem, although when they talk about it, it's always some government agency that they blame. Little do they realize that corruption pervades their entire society -- from the Prime Minister down to the little guy on the street. Everywhere you go, you have to be ready to pay bribes or grease someone's palm. You *always* ALWAYS have to count your change when you buy something, or you'll get ripped off. India's only hope to become the super power that they so desperately want to be is to undertake a massive cultural ethical shift. If Indians had the ethics of the Japanese, they'd be unstoppable as a world economic power... but they don't, so they won't ever be.

Spending that time in India was the greatest learning experience in my life. Every time I think about it (like now), I truly appreciate what we have in this country.

Re:Indians

[Anne_Nonymous]

AOL = Gerald Levin
LU = Particia Russo
PXCM = Acquired 9 months ago
GD = Nicholas Chabraja (a fat old white guy)
Lazard = Bruce Wasserstein
LIT = Acquired in 2001
Columbia = a pissant little firm with partners and no CEO

Etc, etc...

I don't mean to diminish the contributions of Indians to the world of business, but you obviously either have an agenda or are woefully misinformed.

Re:India the Next Superpower -wrong history

[NixterAg]

Buddy, you don't have a clue.

The reasons India won't become the next superpower have much less to do with the fact that they are religious than the fact that there are a billion people living in too small of an area lacking abundant natural resources.

The only reason you have this idiotic idea that Indians are more intelligent on the average is because those are the only ones the rest of the world is exposed to. It takes the cream of the crop to go to Universities throughout the world and to go run businesses.

An Indian friend of mine at Texas A&M University was once asked why all of the Indians he met were so smart. She replied something along the lines of "because we left all of the less intelligent Indians in India".

Please, don't be offended by this statement, because I truly mean no ill will. I am just relaying what my experience has been.

Re:Priorities

[MagikSlinger]

um, yes. look at history and the basic evolution of technology and answer your own question

That makes no sense as a rebuttal. I have looked at history and the basic evolution of technology, and that's where my original post came from. Technological progress has always lead to an increase in human welfare. Spending little to no resources on progress to feed everyone results in stagnation (cf. Pre-Colonial China).

Could you be more specific?

I guess you haven't played Civ III

[jonbrewer]

Shouldn't roads and irrigation be more important. Hospitals. Schools.

If you spend all your time building roads and irrigation without developing technology, you'll get clobbered. These things need to happen concurrently. Always set your Science spending to at least 40% and let the roads and irragation sort themselves out in good time. (hint, set the workers on auto)

RFC1149 is obsolete

[wackybrit]

Sorry, you can't get away with that nowadays.

RFC 2549 updates RFC 1149 with added Quality of Service.

h1-b

[_ph1ux_]

now we can saturate their tech market with h1-b visa workers from the US!!

Sanctions hurt mainly the US

[AndyChrist]

I knew a physics PhD student from India who said that when he was in the military there, anything they couldn't get from the US, they'd buy from Denmark, or make themselves. Example: he said that he himself had to design a mounting system for an infrared camera on a helicopter.

If anything, sanctions are probably good for India in the long term, as they encourage the development of local talent. (A lot of whom still want to leave India, so I guess it ends up being good for the US, too)

What "sanctions"?

[Grendel Drago]

From http://www.mac.doc.gov/sanctions/faq.htm:

The only sanctions remaining on India and Pakistan are restrictions on exports to Indian and Pakistani entities of nuclear or missile proliferation.

What sanctions are we talking about here?

--grendel drago

Why do you want a superpower?

[HiThere]

Superpowers are bad. They centralize control in a way that leads to autocratic control. Even if they start off with the best of intentions, it doesn't matter. This is basically a structural thing:
When you create a center of power, the people most interested in occupying it will be those who are addicted to power, who will do anything to get it. And they do. Some are subtle, some are crass. A few people try to get the center to accomplish some other goal, but they have less motivation to seek it then the crazy ones. So you frequently end up with a crazy person controlling everything. (You might look at recent civics and history.)

Of course, it is possible that you are only predicting, not desiring, and that I read you wrong (lack of vocal tone leads to such problems).

This is like the "Linux will conqueor the world" joke seriously. As a joke it was quite humorous. As a serious goal ... well, it's a better choice than Windows, but the goal is a bad one. The goal should be to develop Linux into an operating system that would satisfy the needs of everyone in a manner that appears to us to be superior to all of the alternatives. Not to insist that everyone agree with us. It does help, however, that the us is a diverse enough group to include almost all of the points of view. E.g., GUI lovers and command line lovers (and the moderates). Experimenters and conservatives, and the moderates. etc. And that nearly anyone who wants to can become a part of the us.

This brings us back to India. India is very important to us, because it contains a large number of computer users who can't afford MS prices. As Linux becomes "good enough" to satisfy their needs, and as copyright enforcement spreads, Linux will become more popular. And India is one of the places. Perhaps not a large fraction of the population is technically skilled (I'm certain that I have seen a biased sample!), but it contains a sufficiently large number. And they frequently use hardware that won't adequately support the recent versions of Windows. But on Linux they can get as far down as the command line, and scale up through BlackBox and TWM (etc.) to KDE and Gnome, depending on what their hardware will support. And they can generally all run the same programs (well, they can all run the same programs as the command line people, and most of them can run the same programs as the BlackBox people, and ...).

Now consider this "computing grid": This will necessarily mean improving the communicaitons systems. This should have benefits throughout the society (perhaps not maximal...but their allocation isn't our choice). Etc.

Re:-1: Second World

[PD]

Second world? You mean they are still aligned with the USSR? Even after the USSR is gone? Amazing!

The only terms that still have meaning are first world, and third world: the haves and the have nots.

Re:Priorities

[MagikSlinger]

It was indeed satire with a grain of truth. That is how Europeans viewed their relationship with their colonies. Although I've heard some scholars claim the phrase was already in use before the poem was written.

another nation overlooking common problems for tec

[Afrosheen]

Here we go again. Yet another nation ignoring it's problems with common poverty, mass starvation, etc. while turning its attention towards an expensive information infrastructure. Shouldn't you fix domestic problems before you strive for technology, or is it a means to an end, i.e. having this wonderful network will feed the starving and shelter the homeless?

Re:India?

[Afrosheen]

I'd say closer to 9/10ths.