Slashdot Mirror
Indian Companies Embracing Linux Faster Than Ever
cpatil writes "CNBC-TV 18 India has just announced that India's largest Insurance company, LIC(Life Insurance Corporation of India) sealed a deal with Red Hat to use its desktop and server software. LIC has roughly 160 Million customers, making it a non-trivial deal. Leslie D'Monte over at rediff also has a closer look at Linux deployment in India."
They are probably embracing Windows faster than ever too.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
contributing is something else, are these (m|b)illion dollar companies using Linux writing/contributing any code ?
It's called evolution and its something that non-dead languages should do to survive (it's a good thing).
Regards,
Steve
As an Indian, I am quite surprised that they went with an offering from Red Hat. Red Hat has long been known to support GNOME as their main desktop. However, KDE is the leader when it comes to supporting the popular Indic languages like Urdu, Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali.
I myself use the Tamil support of KDE, and have long found it superior to that of GNOME (even for recent releases). More of the core KDE applications have translations available, and most of are a higher quality than those of GNOME. That is not to say that GNOME is unable to support those languages; that is clearly not the case! The fact remains, however, that KDE is the better option at this time when it comes to displaying Indic scripts, and offering Indic translations.
Screw that, if another country is more efficient handling our crap jobs ( and let's face it, the programing jobs that are getting exported are the crap jobs ), then by all means let's let them.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I think its about time that, even though this piece was slightly biased, mainstream media began looking seriously at the behemouth that *nix has become. Its always been in data centers, and Linux is fitting in well there. The only reason that mainstream view of desktop software is so biased is simply because these people grew up knowing only Windows or Mac, and so that is, to them, how computers are supposed to be, and perform. When someone else comes along with something new, it is always compared to the existing system to see if it measures up.
... you know, like a "Ubuntu media edition for Dell computers" ... or something like that.
Now, I'm not saying that Linux is a perfect replacement for XP or OS X, but I remember the arguments about using F3 vs. F1 for the help key, and if you have ever seen Windows 3.0 or earlier, you'd know that there were plenty of people, myself included, that said meh, I'll keep using DR DOS thank you very much. The fact that Linux is the new kid on the block is all the more reason for MS and others to fear it. It *IS* changing everything.
It is about to the point that if a card or MB won't be supported by Linux, I can leave it setting on the shelf, and so can a lot of other people. The fact that there are examples of this, and WHOLE countries (apparently) leaving Windows for Linux means that the revolution is happening, slowly, but it is happening.
This story is not so exciting for those of us who have been waiting for it, expecting it, and are now ready to hear the daily updates in application development that surpases MS's capability to keep up. F/OSS is a better way to do thing, and I think (hope) that CLAMAV and others will show the Bill schills and others exactly what can be done to stop spam, virii, and malware. You know, something along the lines of "here, download the software.. its free.. and only 14.99/year for updates. Then someone fix the F/OSS mail clients to utilize global white and black lists etc. and some of the other ideas for stopping spam for only moderate yearly costs... say... hmmm 14.99/year maybe?
Look at what Vonage and Skype are doing to the telecomms business arena. That is pretty much the same sort of apple cart upsetting that's happening with *nix right now. I'd love to see a *nix distro that is first to be ready (out of the box) to be used to download television, movies, etc.
I'd just really like to see totally heated up competition in all media markets. iPod! your days are numbered. CD player? your days are numbered. Solid state memory is able to hold as much, in smaller spaces, and is more flexible. I'm just waiting for someone to create the hardware that will supercede CD's and DVD's altogether... leapfrog this whole BR-HD-DVD argument.
Anyway, the point is that this news, isn't really news to some of us, and it should not be shocking to anyone. Bring on more news like this is what I say... we can all use good news anyday.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
The state-owned LIC (Life Insurance Corporation) is a big customer and a major player in India and has a major share of the market (with a few smaller players). In the last few years though, private companies have been eating into the share of LICs market.
From here
"Though the total volume of LIC's business increased in the last fiscal year (2004-2005) compared to the previous one, its market share came down from 87.04 to 78.07%. The 14 private insurers increased their market share from about 13% to about 22% in a year's time. The figures for the first two months of the fiscal year 2005-06 also speak of the growing share of the private insurers. The share of LIC for this period has further come down to 75 percent, while the private players have grabbed over 24 percent."
So yeah this is a big deal (where the hell did you come up with "non-trivial"? - use of non-trivial because this is Indian stuff?) and this is offtopic, but rediff.com is a sucky site. Try control-clicking any of their links on their home-page (and say hello to popup central which beat Firefox).
They describe two different things. The use of 'non-trivial' is obviously in reference to the massive size of this deal. Nearly 20% of 1 billion people will be affected by this. We're talking about 20 cities with the population of New York, to put it in terms you may better understand.
The word 'important' would not suffice when describing the size of the deal. A deal between even just two participants (say Micro Soft and IBM) can end up being very 'important'.
So yes, this deal is 'important', but it is also well described as 'non-trivial', due to the extensive impact this will have on the people of India, and the open source community. This is an instance of very accurate and concise usage, contrary to your beliefs.
it's all about efficiency. I wouldn't characterize a job as "crap" or "notcrap". Germans create a lot of the world's best MRI machines, Japanese people create high quality ink and photocopying machines. Indians happen to create application software efficiently. These are not "crap" jobs, these are jobs that can be done elsewhere more efficiently. Do we see Indians creating skyscrapers, or becoming the world's best lawyers? No, that is something that Americans have the highest efficiency.
relax, don't get emotional, try to figure out what your value add is and work towards those jobs.
Based on the price, vendors classify servers as small (anywhere from Rs 40000 up to Rs 500,000), medium (from Rs 500,000 to Rs 1 crore) and large (over Rs 1 crore). They are identified as Intel (or X86 processor-based), Unix (or non-X86 processor-based) and Blade servers. Linux and Solaris are flavours of Unix. Windows and Intel form the loosely-termed "Wintel" brand.
Since when did running Unix decide your processor type for you? Last I checked, BSD ran on X86 without much issue. Last I checked, Linux wasn't a flavour of Unix.
This is what happens when English majors get hired on to do tech writing. It becomes tech guessing.
I think that "non-trivial" is fine if the context is that somebody might otherwise call the news "trivial". It addresses the perception that some random Indian company adopting Linux doesn't mean that much in the grand scheme of things. To say that this conversion to Linux is "important" would miss some connotations of this area of debate. I feel that "important" would imply that everyone would agree that it is important; the implication here is that the author is trying to convince people that this is important.
All IMHO of course.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Screw that, if another country is more efficient handling our crap jobs ... then by all means let's let them.
You can only employ that logic for so long until employment figures begin to drop. When you're at 30% unemployment you'll want those jobs back, only by then you'll have lost your competetive edge.
Read this as to why this is a big deal and non-trivial is a dumb term to use.
I'm starting to see a lot more of projects coming back to Silicon Valley from India. In fact, I just turned one down. The manager in charge sent off the embedded Linux project to India, they screwed it up (after 3 months, they STILL couldn't get a "hello world" program to work). Then he expected me to come in at the last minute and save his sorry ass.
Sorry, I can pick and choose what projects I want. I'll take the easier ones, where I'm assured of making a knowledgeable manager happy.
But anyway, the vast majority of projects and people over there are clueless. The truly good people tend to make it to the U.S. on at least a green card status. IMHO, this is more a result of the boom there than anything else; and is similar to what happened in the U.S. during the dot-com boom (when any idiot could call themselves a webmaster, and many did).
But what is better for Hindi and Urdu -- Vi or Emacs?
Sigh... but I guess a bit of flame war is a good change of pace in this dull story about Linux deployment in a traditional Windows markets.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
I have found Ubuntu to work best. I initially tried GNOME because that was the default desktop. It worked well, but my coworkers suggested I install and try KDE for a better experience. They were right. I did find the Tamil translations of KDE to be of a higher quality, and more widespread.
One problem I recall involved Galeon. It has decent support for Tamil, but for some of the configuration dialogs there was a mix of English and Tamil translations, and sometimes the Tamil translation would be missing outright! Now, I am thankful that I also understand English quite well, so I was able to switch over and finish the configuration that way.
Other core GNOME applications (like the Users & Groups utility, for instance) do not even have Tamil translations. It is unsuitable for purely Tamil-speaking users to deal with such translations!
I have not had any similar problems with KDE. The translations are always complete, and I think they are very well done. My many thanks to all who have provided such excellent work!
I say this is all seriousness, is it really better to have lots of indian companies make flops like the simputer or to have a few american companies make things like Tivo. I dont mean that they are mutually exclusive, but is quantity better than quality? when did that happen?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
India is much more efficient at programming (and many other tech jobs)... perhaps one reason is that they use Linux and don't have to deal with Windoze.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Citing the number of customers makes no sense. An insurance company doesn't equip each of its customers with a computer (and OS). What's much more relevant to Red Hat is the number of employees of the company that will be using their product. This number is probably in the tens of thousands, not hundreds of millions, assuming every employee gets a Linux desktop. (If it's just server machines, then the number of instances of the OS might be in the hundreds.)
No doubt the poster was motivated to wave a large number around, despite the lack of common sense.
> It's called evolution and its something that non-dead
> languages should do to survive (it's a good thing).
I'll remember to use that excuse too next time a slashdotter complains when someone in the media refers to breaking into a computer system and stealing data as "hacking".
Linux has gotten to the point where Microsoft's FUD can no longer hurt it. There are enough companies that have adopted Linux now that nothing that Microsoft says can cause clueful companies to ignore a Linux solution. Sure Microsoft will make or keep some sales due to FUD, but that no longer hurts Linux but perhaps the companies themselves.
The next battle may be with patents, but with IBM so involved with Linux, I seriously doubt Microsoft would go head to head with Linux for fear of stepping on IBM's toes. I actually wish there would be a big patent battle. If there was it would probably fizzle out with the result being some cross-patenting agreement, but there is a miniscule chance that companies and the government would realize the mess of patents if we had an apocalyptic patents battle.
god. i hope the trend doesnt continue, the winduze pirate cd makes association is talking of going on hunger strike if this continues.
*its a joke*
Oh, sorry, it was you. So when you posted that, you failed to explain even the tiniest hint about why "non-trivial" is a bad word. Just asserting that it's bad does not equal proving it.
Based on your logic (that non-trivial is stupid simply because important is a similar word), explain why we have "trivial" and "unimportant" and which of those two you declare to be obviously retarded.
While you're at it, go ahead and explain the pruning of these terms, too:
bootless, bush-league, diddly, dinky, dispensable, disposable, entry level, exiguous, expendable, extraneous, foolish, frivolous, immaterial, inappreciable, inconsequent, inconsequential, inconsiderable, ineffective, ineffectual, inessential, insignificant, insufficient, irrelative, irrelevant, lesser, lightweight, little, low-ranking, meager, meaningless, measly, Mickey Mouse, minim, minimal, minor, minor-league, minuscule, minute, needless, negligible, niggling, nonessential, nonserious, not germane, nothing, nugatory, otiose, paltry, peripheral, petty, picayune, piddling, pointless, profitless, puny, purportless, secondary, senseless, shallow, silly, slight, small, small potatoes, small-fry, small-time, superficial, superfluous, trifling, two bit, unnecessary, unneeded, unproductive, unprofitable, unprofound, unsubstantial, useless, vain, valueless, and worthless.
I did some research/interviews in India and I can assure you that Linux has a long way to go until it can get wide adoption for Desktop Computers (lets ignore servers for now).
- Almost everybody in India has a pirated version of Windows XP (which came with their computer, so its pretty much "free" for them)
- Very few people I interviewed actually do Windows Update (probably because of the whole XP-Key validation)
- Unless he/she is a software engineer, they would have never heard of Linux
- When asked about spyware, they didn't seem to care. Most Indians didn't seem to care about the performance factor. They also didn't seem to care about identity theft as much either (the culture is such that most people pay just about everything in cash since most vendors charge a "service charge" for using credit cards or even a check)
- Bill Gates is more of a hero in India than a devil (his charitable contributions are well known)
- Tying in Gujarati in Linux (KDE) takes time and pratice to learn (I assume the same with other Indian languages)
- Some "cablenet" ISPs in India require you to run Windows software in order to connect to the Internet. There is no support for Linux at this time.
Those are just a few problems that I can think of on top of my head. There are plenty more issues in Linux Desktop adoption in India.
Especially the Vietnamese.
The Stateless Linux project is an OS-wide initiative to ensure that Fedora computers can be set up as replaceable appliances, with no important local state.
For example, a system administrator can set up a network of hundreds of desktop client machines as clones of a master system, and be sure that all of them are kept synchronised whenever he or she updates the master system. We provide several technologies for doing this.
This is an obvious improvement over the situation now when a legion of MCSE services the networked MS Windows fat (in fact boated or obese) clients. By adopting this technology a large corporation can avoid the even greater bloat that will be enforced by the Vista upgrade.
It seems to me that there are three major approaches to the forthcoming corporate migrations to the Linux desktop by those corporations forward looking enough to want to avoid the cost and dislocations of the upcoming upgrades to Vista and who at the same time want to make cost savings and improve IT efficiency.
1. There is the Novell approach which is to replace the Windows fat client by a better more cost effective Linux fat client, i.e. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
2. There is the IBM approach which uses a Java Rich Client Platform (the Eclipse RCP) that is OS agnostic and which allows a smooth transition from Windows to Linux. This involves the Websphere based Workplace technology, the OOo based IBM productivity editors and new Hannover Notes client which runs natively on Linux.
3. Finally there is the RH stateless Linux approach outlined above.
Nice to decide that *someone else's job* is crappy and they *they* shouldn't mind losing it ... so long as it's not your job, right?
(I agree with you on the efficiency point though.)
So if I come home from work hungry like hell and embrace the whole fridge, does it make me embracing vegetarian diet faster than ever since I also ate tomatoes (beside the pork and chicken)?
As you can see, I'm kinda hungry.. but that's not the point.
This sounds more like one of those "Jobs that Americans won't do" arguments, that dosn't really exist. Every year the news has a another short disparaging report about how we are graduating less and less science, math, technology and engineering majors. And the reason always is that there aren't any jobs. Anerican companies need to realize that they get what they pay for, and once employment of american technology workers picks up technology education will too. We are at a very dangerous crossroads right now, one of the richest countries with a slipping education average. Other countries instead of trying to make what they can for themselves (just like americans did around the industrial revolution), are taking our slice of the pie. Stealing instead of making their own.
No, evolution is a mail client from Novell, which provides a semblance of support for Microsoft Exchange-based Linux clients.
Or did you mean something else?
"LIC will deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its 2,048 branches, 100 divisional offices, seven zonal offices, head office, subsidiary offices and overseas locations. The Linux deployment will provide LIC with a uniform, finely tuned operating system environment, along with security and integrity for its core application software. The implementation will also include utilisation of enterprise-layered solutions through Linux Servers for management, provisioning and monitoring of Red Hat Network."
As an Indian...I myself use the Tamil support of KDE, and have long found it superior to that of GNOME
Interesting the Gnome/KDE Flamewar has spread to India. Fanboyism is a fundemental human trait I guess. If you took 2 Linux machines to New Guinea and gave them to the natives you'd find them waring over Gnome and KDE within an hour. I personally think KDE sucks.
an ill wind that blows no good
LIC India was one of the largest users of Unix (SUN Solaris) systems prior to this announcement. They had trained Unix sysadmins and tape backup systems in 1998. Long before such an official announcement was made many of the client machines connecting to the servers were being switched to Linux even at regional offices. This time Redhat is migrating the servers too to Linux. So that in a sense is the corporate world beginning to embrace Linux.
Adding to this, Reliance Infocomm Ltd., one of the largest CDMA service providers does provide a rather clumsy, yet workable tool for dialing-up internet using their phones. They try to address a small but existent Linux Desktop market. There are OEM PCs that ship with TurboLinux desktops in India from many manufacturers.
However, the largets ATM chains, SBI - State Bank of India (now on a week long strike) and several other institutions continue to use flavors of legacy old systems including Microsoft Win32 platforms. Home users are most uncomfortable switching to Linux despite the arrival of Ubuntu/Kubuntu and other easily configurable alternatives. There is still much to be done. The transition is slow but definitely happening in the market, and that's the good news.
As for outsourcing blah, that's irrelevant to the article. Service firms adopt platforms that can put them in business with their clientele. That's business sense and they keep doing it.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
Guess Darl might sue LIC now :-)
6 0
http://www.sco.com/company/success/story.html?ID=
you have to cite BOTH numbers in order to make a guess at efficiency. But it still lacks surety, as there are other factors involved as well, such as how much they pay.
You obviously haven't seen any indian source code...
And of course rediff (the news service posting this article) uses Linux. Their free webmail system, Rediffmail.com, alone uses well over sixty Linux servers and has hundreds of terabytes spinning.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
India is much more efficient at programming (and many other tech jobs)... perhaps one reason is that they use Linux and don't have to deal with Windoze.
The reason people were all hot and bothered to farm out the development costs to India is the manpower cost much less. In the New Delhi area, a seasoned Java developer would make about $20 a day. If I can write up a spec in the US or UK and have someone implement it for pennies on the dollar (or sterling), that may we worth the bother of outsourcing it.
The irony is as the development shops demand a larger chunk of the pie, people outsourcing start to look elsewhere as the implementation stops being such a good deal. Even in India, some of the cities in the Southern portion of the country are the new 'Seattle'. So now we see the new 'cheap' shops springing up in other locations. Problem is, China and some of the Eastern European countries are pitching cheap labor as well.
It is not that India is smarter, more efficient, or better at 'grunt work' coding - they just have a much lower cost of living. When they ship the same code in the same time as someone who's cost of living is several orders of magnitude higher it figures the cost to the requestor should be less while the folks that make it should have better margins. I would not sell you my weekend for $200, but others in the world would jump on that.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
The problem with your statistics is that they're measuring very different things. Recall that GNOME and KDE are structured quite differently. KDE is a far tighter distribution system than GNOME.
Those statistics are for the very core of GNOME: GTK+, GLib, GDK, the GNOME desktop and taskbar, Metacity, and applications like gnome-terminal. It does not take into account GAIM, for instance, which is a separate project.
The stats for KDE, on the other hand, not only include the comparable base libraries and applications to that of GNOME, but also much software that for GNOME is completely separate. The data for KDE includes that for the Kopete instant messenging system, while the GNOME data does not include that for the equivalent in GAIM. The KDE data includes Konqueror, while the GNOME data does not include Galeon, Epiphany, Firefox, etc.
The amount translated for GNOME should be far more, just because the portion of software being measured is far less than that being measured by the KDE data. The numbers for GNOME start to decrease significantly once you start making the packages equal (by bringing in GAIM, Galeon, Nautilus, etc.)
Thank you, come again!
India is much more efficient at programming (and many other tech jobs)... perhaps one reason is that they use Linux and don't have to deal with Windoze.
It's pretty simple. India is in Asia. Computer programming requires intelligence. And Asians are the most intelligent.
It was the sort of moment thing you'd expect to read in Penthouse Forum. "I never believed this could happen to me, but I was at a club and I ran into Paris Hilton...." Normally, I wouldn't even be in a club; my Saturdays are invariably spent grabbing a slice of pizza in between WoW ninja looting sessions. Tonight, however, I'd finally gotten tired of my friends from work saying things like "we never see you" and "people are scared that you're studying chemistry and writing a manifesto." So, after letting my guild know that I wouldn't make the raid tonight, I'd let them drag me out to some dance place. Since I'm not nearly coordinated enough to dance, I spent most of the evening sitting around drinking. Three wine coolers finally took their toll, and I staggered off to the bathroom.
Feeling much relieved, I walked out the bathroom door, wondering if I could convince one of my coworkers to drive me back to my apartment. If we hurried, I might be able to make the raid after all. Absorbed in pleasant thoughts of ganking some n00bs, I walked right into someone's path. The impact sent me sprawling. Unsteadily, I rose to my feet, already mumbling an apology. I turned, and the words stuck in my throat; I knew that face! Those pouting lips and vacant blue eyes were a prominent feature in my JPEG collection. She was saying something, but my mind couldn't focus on the words. Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, "Oh my God, you're Paris Hilton!"
Things were kind of a blur after that. We ended up at my apartment, my arm around her waist as I fumbled with the lock. Inside, she set her purse down by the door and looked around. I cringed a bit, seeing my apartment as if through a stranger's eyes. There was a pyramid stack of empty mountain dew cans by my desk, a half-painted army of space marine miniatures covering the couch, and empty pizza boxes serving as a mute testimonial to my ineptitude at cooking. She didn't seem to notice; instead, she saw the cables leading from my desk to the plasma TV and said "wow, is that hooked up to the computer?" Her hands slid up and down the front of my X-box 360 t-shirt as she moaned "I love geeks... they're so hot." I couldn't believe my luck; a six-year-long dry spell was about to come to an end!
I found myself bragging about my setup, rattling off the system specs as she pressed herself against me. She seemed a bit surprised that I hadn't put it together myself, and was strangely silent as I told her about the great financing Dell had given me. The puzzled look turned into a frown when I mentioned the Pentium 4 processor; I found myself becoming defensive, explaining that it was a really innovative architecture while AMD was just a Pentium III retread. It was when I got to the OS that all hell broke loose. She stepped away, a look of total disbelief on her face, and shrieked "XP Media Center? You fucking nerd wannabe!" Grabbing her purse, she stormed out the door. In a rage, I followed her into the hallway, screaming "I downloaded your video!" at her retreating back. "At least Rick Solomon could set up Ubuntu," she snarled over her shoulder as she slammed the building door.
Alone in my apartment, I slumped over my keyboard, weeping bitter tears. Deleting her pictures brought me no consolation; someone had to suffer for the humiliation I had endured. Opening my trusty IE window, I headed off to MSN search to find the people who had brought this shame upon me. I clicked on a likely-looking link, Slashdot.org. Immediately, I knew I was in the right place; they proudly proclaimed themselves as an open-source advocacy site and one of the article headlines made the absurd claim that Windows systems had a higher TCO. They had obviously been ignoring the "Get The Facts" campaign. The comment threads were a target-rich environment: Linux zealots, Apple snobs, Clippy haters, and Firefox fanboys, all waiting to feel my wrath. My lips drew back in a primal snarl as I began crafting my first A.C. post.
From Hell's heart, Tux, I stab at thee!
Companies in India use FLOSS a lot. From my contacts, and experience with FLOSS in India in the past 1 1/2 years, this is the list that I have prepared:
http://shakthimaan.com/misc/database.html
David Axmark, the co-founder of the mysql project was here in India, recently, and recently gave a talk at IIT-M (http://www.chennailug.org/). He said that Indian companies are major consumers of free/open source software, but, don't produce/contribute back to the community.
Recently, there was the Debain Defconf meeting in Hyderabad, and about 1000 "developers" from India had participated, only 2 of them were Debian contributors.
Companies seldom market about FLOSS in India, where the "majority" of the masses read their news from newspapers, get updated from radio broadcasts and television broadcasts.
Educated != Anti-corporate.
Microsoft has some anti-competitive methods in place but this doesn't mean its software is inferior (overall). Mac systems are still years behind Windows in terms of overall compatibility (the recent change to Intel chips are a flat-out admission of defeat). Sure, it has some nice software, but you don't pull million/billion dollar deals if your boss has to ask the IT department why the company's Macs can't open a Microsoft Office file.
Linux hasn't even arrived at the starting gate. Third party developer support is virtually non-existant, second party developer support is COMPLETELY non-existant and first-party support is a flat-out joke. The few companies that do support Linux get bashed by the Linux community no matter what they do (Doom 3 and Quake 4 were both bashed because they weren't on par with Windows graphics, wth?) Hardware drivers are hit-or-miss, assuming Nvidia or ATI actually release them, theres nothing similar to Plug-and-Play, you MUST know a certain level of programming in order to self-maintain your system, etc etc etc...
This is an awesome product! It is a 146$ Linux computer (Thinix OS) from China
4 8706105599&q=municator
that does all the basic things most people need, like browsing (firefox),
emailing (thunderbird), instant messaging (gaim), skype, word processing (Red
Office), audio/video playback (mplayer), e-learning, all through a very user-
friendly very basic interface and is software upgradable. It has got 40GB, a
400mhz/800mhz Godson 2C processor (the chinese dragon chip cpu), 256mb ram, 4 usb2 ports, VGA-output, ps2
input, tv-output and weigths something like 400 grams. Their slogan is "Say
no to Wintel".
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-92034621
LIC offers insurance services in India, as government owned company. It has monopoly since ages, since private companies were not allowed to provide services in India.
One of the most important fact is LIC services are ineficient, very expensive and theft oriented. People in India are afraid of claiming anything, because no claims are settled by LIC.
LIC has loads of money to share.
I don't understand your link:
I think the word "non-trivial" draws attention to the story and invites even a sceptical reader to take closer look.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Except that, unfortunately for them, folks on the Indian subcontinent ("South Asians") are classified as Caucasian along with us laggardly Europeans; not the East Asian racial group referred to on the graph as "Asian" (later on in the article they clarify this by explicitly discussing East Asians versus other racial categories). Oh, well--we can't all be lucky enough to be born Mongolian!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
* * * * * *
I hate everybody equally and fairly without regard to race, religion or national origin.
http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/apr/08spec.htm
The UTI bank is glad they have linux running.
"Today, we are really happy with Linux that has delivered 99.99 per cent uptime so far," says Pritesh Thaker, AVP, IT, UTI Bank.
Sent from my desktop computer
Welcome to the world of Management, Public Relations, Sales etc... the world where you are not a customer... you are a consumer... a world where growth is a must... so the products are manufactured to last only as long as the warranty period...
Rolls Royce and Mercedes will not be considered a success if they were started today... they would be considered a disaster... that is the world we have created, do we really want it to be this way ?
--
I will be flamebaited for this but it is the truth !
If you cared to click the link you could have seen that for each language, you have both developer-libs and desktop percentages. For example:
...
Hindi: dev 99.84%, desktop 93.39%
Tamil: dev 73.38%, desktop 65.81%
Now clicking on 'desktop' for Tamil you have the details for each app. Indeed, GAIM is not in there because it's not an official GNOME app, but you do have Epiphany and Nautilus (the GNOME equivalents to Konqueror), or Ekiga (previously Gnome-Meeting), or Totem (movie player),
Of course the KDE stats don't take into account *all* apps written for KDE either...
When push comes to shove, like everybody else I worry about my wallet. This time it's not only about my wallet but also yours and everybody else's here, so think this through and try to keep your kneejerk reflex to a minimum: There are a zillion business opportunities where people could earn a minimum of $80 and more an hour if companies did not have the option of outsourcing to India etc or pulling in cheap, foreign workforces. The reason they have those H1B-visa's is of course to keep prices for IT from skyrocketing. I sell IT services, and I suppose you do too. Anything that keeps prices down is not welcome and if that means Ranjid from some village in India is helping to keep prices down then he's not welcome either. Nothing personal, Ranjid.
They can afford to do this - the Indians actually export chairs. No single person could bring about a shortage of chairs in India - even by throwing them day and night.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
Cheaply, yes. Efficiently, no.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What desktop will they use?
GNOME
KDE
Java Swing
something else
Does anyone know where the submitter got the 160m customer figure? It should also show how many employees they have. Since LIC isn't an IT firm, the employees use the IT product, not their customers.
AC's modded -6. I don't see you, I don't mod you, anything you say is lost. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
YOU SUCK!!!!!! Tell you what you are, you're nothing but a fucking racist NAZI PIGGGGGG!!!!!!!! I am SO SICK of PEOPLE LIKE YOU for who every excuse is good enough to WAIL WAH! WAH! WAH! They're taking our american jobs away! WAH! WAH! WAH! The jews! it's the jews who are all behind this!! WAIL WAIL WAH WAH FUCK YOU ASSHOLE! You will just have to live with it you piece of shit. Fuck you, NAZI TRASH!
Good points. What's worrying me lately is that, while Linux is doing a fine job catching up to (and in many cases surpassing) the established OSes, the law hasn't really caught up to Linux.
For example, Ubuntu is pretty much how I'd want it by with the default installation, but it can't play certain proprietary media formats and some other things by default -- the wiki explains this. I know some of this is related to gray-area software that's free as in beer, but not as in speech, but there's a significant part of the computer world that's really restricted by patents and copyright issues. I also expect that, in the interest of diplomacy, more countries are going to start prioritizing intellectual property claims over FOSS. Is it politically shrewd to let Linux get tangled up in ridiculous legal issues? Obviously it's better for the public to have a free, flexible, secure OS available, but -- that hasn't necessarily stopped politicians in the past.
Now, if the media picked up that idea and ran with it, you'd think that would satisfy every reporter's innermost desire to do the world a favor and help the little guy. Clear some FUD off the table, get people interested in what our new trans-Pacific overlords are up to. Events like this are happening all the time, so mass media has every reason to spread the word.
Elx - http://www.elxlinux.com/ - Indian Linux Distro
Then, according to your definition, freedom never exists. There's always some reason (be it evil marketing strategy, economic pressures, patriotism & xenophobia against foreign producers, ecological specs of the considered device, childproof safety of a toy, or even presonnal taste in design and color) that restricts the choice to the specific item you finally pick up...
The freedom about which I'm speaking is that the choice isn't restricted by the strategy of a *sinlge company* who got a strong desktop share by doing lock-in marketing. Most of the time, a westerner company choose to keep microsoft and avoid switching to something else, because they're damn used to windows and affraid to switch to something new and to have to retrain their staff. New companies in emergent countries are *not* tied by such addiction to microsoft's products, both windows and linux are equally new to them and both need the same effort for deploying and learning.
Linux uptake in western companies is slow because these companies are locked-in. Linux uptake isn't that slow in new markets, because those companies aren't locked-in. This is a proof that the "lock-in" marketing of microsoft is the only reason why companies keep using their shit, and that Linux is a mature and valid solution for companies, whatever folks at microsoft say with their "Get the Facts" FUD.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]