A bit offtopic... Such export controls may not work. I remember times when there were very strict controls (by USA) for export (to India) of any kind of components that can be used for building high performance computing equipment. During that period several indegenous projects sprung up for building supercomputers (I remember at least three different projects). At some point these were so successful that there was news about exporting these to eastern European and some other countries,... (these used to cost a fraction of those US Cray supercomputers...)
This won't work (most likely) in practice... There are examples...
I come from a tiny state located at the south-western part of India. Compared to the rest of India, people of this state are highly educated (very high literacy, very high
Physical Quality of Life Index,...) Due to all these we have better minimum wages, laws related to prevention exploitation of workers, other industrial laws,... somewaht strictly enforced (compared to the other neighboring states in India). The overall result of this is/was in general to move most of the industries located in our state out to other neighboring states where industries can find workers who are ready to accept much lesser wages, work under dangerous/less than acceptable conditions,...
Due to all these the unemployment rate is very high + A major
portion of the income of the state comes from people who work outside the state and outside India like me... Oh something more - since we don't have much manufacturing industries most of the things we consume are not manufactured/produced in there (is this familiar ?Go to your fav. supermarket in US...) It is really sad to find industries being moved out of USA... Often reminds me of something at home:-(
I remember something similar happenining with Cable TV programmes/Movie tapes from India. It initially started with a narrow annoying strip of ads (much like the stock quotes one finds in some Cable TV channels) and later began to cover more and more of the screen area. During the peak some programmmes had around 1/2 to 1/3rd of the screen space covered by various types of annoying ads (much like the web banner ads ). Finally everyone had enough of all this - Indian courts stepped in... to restore the balance:-)
GM had full size mockups (early prototype ?) of the "Autonomy" concept platform during the last "Detroit Auto Show". They had some interesting features like "designer tops" - ie. the same base can be changed to a drive to office car from a sports car just by changing the top portion (which contains the passenger compartment) - much like the way people create custom looks for wristwatches / cellphones / laptops(Dell ?)by changing a faceplate with a different design - perhaps much more advanced...
I often find it surprising (amusing ?) to find references to God in various "things" related to the US government... May be there is no real separation of religion and state in US ?
Compare this with my country (India). Even though religion and everything related to that plays a major part in Indian politics and society (much much more compared to US) one will not find any such references there... Infact it will be a sure recipe for disaster if references like this are introduced in such a diverse/complex culture (compared to US) like India...
I have it running. Works great for me for the files that I tried sofar... No problems (both embedded and standalone players).... Probably the gretest help are the "excel, word2000, powepoint" viewers support (staroffice/open office, abiword,... sometimes fail on some docs...:-( Wonder why people keep on sending docs in these formats...). Printing documents also work great from these - transparently through my Debain/Linux printing system...
Hmmm... SO what is new ? Every government does this. Though almost all of them deny involving in such activities - even when questioned with hard evidence...
See stories and works by Tsiolkovsky - considered to be the "Father of Rocketry and Astronautics" He has also written several early science fiction stories. Worth reading - beautiful... These stories contain a lot of stuff related to rocketry/astronautics which are fact now...
...India... Were a lot of such restrictions are there (like restrictions on reasonably accurate local maps etc.). Most of these rules are carry over from the period when British ruled India (BTW British left India in 1947). But inspite of the rules those who really need, get them anyway... I guess:-)
I have met guys who work on development of Cryogenic rocket engines for space applications. One of the componets used in these is Hydrogen. From whatever I have heard, handling Hydrogen in any form is a VERY tricky thing, since leakages can easily cause major explosions...
End of 80's (?) and early 90's I used to go through an excelent set of tutorials and lessons (feely available) on PC games programming. A lot of examples, algorithms, code,... It is still availabe on the net at PC-GPE site . What we need is probably a set of Linux tutorials following the same philosophy...
The real issue in Nuclear power is the true cost of nuclear power. The pro-nuclear power lobby usually hide the hidden costs associated with waste processing, plant life, etc There are plenty of excellent books and reports availabe on this.
Regarding nuclear material sent up with the help of rockets. Already these are widely used as power sources in Spy Satellites and deep space probes. Plenty of information is available.
Then there are the UN/international guidelines.
That is sad, because a lot of exciting things are happening in HAM Radio now a days... Like the sudden spurt of "new digial modes" that use the computer soundcard and the computer itself to do most of the digital signal processing (no external hardware for signal processing) - like PSK31, Feld-Hell,... Software defined radios, like the DSP-10 software defined 2m multimode transceiver... The new Phase 3D satellite AO-40,...
I met a lot of old times (who were inactive for a long time like you...) recently on the air on the modes like PSK31 (which looks like a reliable modern version of RTTY...), they were all really enthusiastic about the new developments... Perhaps people got a bit fedup with the "code/no-code" debates:-) (I am a CW guy myself...)
Perhaps it is time for you to check back:-) Welcome back !!
Quality of Internet access in India is generallay very bad. This is mainly due to poor (mostly government controlled) telecom infrastructure. Generally it takes moths/years (I am not kidding, this is true) to get a telephone connection. Once you get the connection the quality of service is generally very poor. One has to pay for local calls (telephone calls within the local area) also. This means that for Internet connection one has to pay the ISP (for internet access) as well as the telecom company (telephone connection charge based on time duration). To make matters worse the available bandwidth is generally far less than the demand - in some of the places one will be lucky if can get connected to the dialup service. Even if one is able to ge connected somehow the service will be often so slow that is bad to unusable...
These "Internet Cafe"s have better connectivity like a high speed leases line, cable internet connection etc. So sometimes people prefer these compared to the poor dialup service. In addition to this I won't be surprised if people see good business oppertunity in Internet porn sites in a city like *mba* which already has a well established "sex industry" (also not legal in India).
Recently some companies have started introducing Cable internet connection for domestic users... I hope that things will improve...
These are available even now. I bought a bunch of these shapped in the form of CPU cooling units around 6 months back from a "Hamfest" in Ohio (around $2.5 I think). The guy who sold these was complaining that he could not sell many, but were selling like hot cakes sometime back !!
You are wrong here, because almost all the research these drug companies do is based on fundamental research already available publicly, goverment funded research (money which comes from persons like you and me)... There are some extreme cases where drug companes are made direct (massive) profits from results of government funded research. There are numerous studies on this area.
Already most of the research journals require one to send an electronic copy (LaTeX, TeX, etc.), sometimes in "Camera Ready Form" (PS etc.). It is not clear how "errors" will be introduced by making them available online. Of course the amount of money flow to the publising companies will reduce.
Publishing research papers online will be specially great for research community in countries other than US, UK (from where a larhe number of research journals are bublished) etc., I remember getting a lot of journals months after their publication date, in India. Some were really hard to locate...
India has already done/doing some limited scale commercial launches (for low-earth, polar,... satellites) using their previous genration launch vehicles (like PSLV) for clients from countries like Germany, Korea... So one can expect thing to happen (commercial launches using GSLV) soon (much earlier than 5 years...).
Cheaply and Reliably ?
ISRO has launched a series of rockets which can carry satellites to different types of orbits (low-earth, polar,...) RELIABLY. Success of the present launch is a result of third attempt (first one failed due to some problem with strap-on booster separation, second was aborted last month when the onboard saftysystems shutdown the launch just before liftoff on launchpad). If one goes through the history of launches of all the previous generation launch vehicles of India, it can bee seen that the test to routine launch of different generations of rockets were achieved with minimum number of launches. This is partly because of relatively limited funds available to the Indian space agency (as comapared to ESA, NASA, Russian,...). Only uncertainty as far as this version of the GSLV is the last stage rocket used (a cryogenic rocket engine from Russia). In fact the present launch was delayed several years because these were not delivered in time by Russia, possibly due to pressure from USA. But I am sure that it is only a matter of time before they replace this with their own version. As far as the cheapness part is concerned, probably noone except China will be able to beat them.
As someone who has worked in a University/Institute environment,in regular industry and IT/software jobs I can agree fith most of this comment. It is impossible/difficult to replace the insight and experience one gains working in an open intellectually stimulating environment with someone to guide you. At least at the initial stages this cannot be replaced by just reading some book. How many Institutes/Universities provide such environment is a debatable question... The kind of work that is done 99.9% of the time in IT/software jobs will be considered as trivial and routine in most of the universities with such an open environment... It is a pity that regular university/research jobs are much less attractive in terms of money...
Various organizations in India are already involved in projects for building supercomputing machines. I know at about least 3-4 publicly known projects. A lot of them are already in use (mucch before Beowoulf...) Ckeck out the following links.
http://www.webspawner.com/users/SUPERCOMPUT/
http://www.cdacindia.com/
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/india/facility/hyder abad-drc-other.htm
I don't think Debian as such prevents one from using latest Kernels. The system as a whole mostly doesn't care if you use a newer Kernel or a standard one which comes with the release. I do agree that Deselect package management system is a bit confusing for the fist time users. Use apt-get instead...
I remember during the Debian pre-release days, Debian people putting a lot of effort, trying to arrive at a common standard for packages with RedHat/RPM at that time. It didn't work at that time when DEB and RPM standards were just being put together... (Due to hesitations from RH side ?). Will it work now ? (Even though anyone can see that DEB based package management is far superior to the other scheme...)
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A bit offtopic ... ... (these used to cost a fraction of those US Cray supercomputers ...)
Such export controls may not work. I remember times when there were very strict controls (by USA) for export (to India) of any kind of components that can be used for building high performance computing equipment. During that period several indegenous projects sprung up for building supercomputers (I remember at least three different projects). At some point these were so successful that there was news about exporting these to eastern European and some other countries,
This won't work (most likely) in practice ... There are examples ...
...) Due to all these we have better minimum wages, laws related to prevention exploitation of workers, other industrial laws, ... somewaht strictly enforced (compared to the other neighboring states in India). The overall result of this is/was in general to move most of the industries located in our state out to other neighboring states where industries can find workers who are ready to accept much lesser wages, work under dangerous/less than acceptable conditions, ...
... Oh something more - since we don't have much manufacturing industries most of the things we consume are not manufactured/produced in there (is this familiar ?Go to your fav. supermarket in US ...) It is really sad to find industries being moved out of USA ... Often reminds me of something at home :-(
I come from a tiny state located at the south-western part of India. Compared to the rest of India, people of this state are highly educated (very high literacy, very high Physical Quality of Life Index,
Due to all these the unemployment rate is very high + A major portion of the income of the state comes from people who work outside the state and outside India like me
I remember something similar happenining with Cable TV programmes/Movie tapes from India. It initially started with a narrow annoying strip of ads (much like the stock quotes one finds in some Cable TV channels) and later began to cover more and more of the screen area. During the peak some programmmes had around 1/2 to 1/3rd of the screen space covered by various types of annoying ads (much like the web banner ads ). Finally everyone had enough of all this - Indian courts stepped in ... to restore the balance :-)
GM had full size mockups (early prototype ?) of the "Autonomy" concept platform during the last "Detroit Auto Show". They had some interesting features like "designer tops" - ie. the same base can be changed to a drive to office car from a sports car just by changing the top portion (which contains the passenger compartment) - much like the way people create custom looks for wristwatches / cellphones / laptops(Dell ?)by changing a faceplate with a different design - perhaps much more advanced ...
I often find it surprising (amusing ?) to find references to God in various "things" related to the US government ... May be there is no real separation of religion and state in US ?
... Infact it will be a sure recipe for disaster if references like this are introduced in such a diverse/complex culture (compared to US) like India ...
Compare this with my country (India). Even though religion and everything related to that plays a major part in Indian politics and society (much much more compared to US) one will not find any such references there
I wonder what will happen to the phrase "as dead as Dodo" when ultimately a Dodo is cloned !
yes let's be serious ... There is no way to prove that an entirely unknown set of entities from an unknown (almost ...) will be harmless ...
I have it running. Works great for me for the files that I tried sofar ... No problems (both embedded and standalone players).... Probably the gretest help are the "excel, word2000, powepoint" viewers support (staroffice/open office, abiword, ... sometimes fail on some docs ... :-( Wonder why people keep on sending docs in these formats...). Printing documents also work great from these - transparently through my Debain/Linux printing system ...
Hmmm ... SO what is new ? Every government does this. Though almost all of them deny involving in such activities - even when questioned with hard evidence ...
See stories and works by Tsiolkovsky - considered to be the "Father of Rocketry and Astronautics" He has also written several early science fiction stories. Worth reading - beautiful ... These stories contain a lot of stuff related to rocketry/astronautics which are fact now ...
...India ... Were a lot of such restrictions are there (like restrictions on reasonably accurate local maps etc.). Most of these rules are carry over from the period when British ruled India (BTW British left India in 1947). But inspite of the rules those who really need, get them anyway... I guess :-)
I have met guys who work on development of Cryogenic rocket engines for space applications. One of the componets used in these is Hydrogen. From whatever I have heard, handling Hydrogen in any form is a VERY tricky thing, since leakages can easily cause major explosions...
End of 80's (?) and early 90's I used to go through an excelent set of tutorials and lessons (feely available) on PC games programming. A lot of examples, algorithms, code, ... It is still availabe on the net at PC-GPE site . What we need is probably a set of Linux tutorials following the same philosophy ...
Regarding nuclear material sent up with the help of rockets. Already these are widely used as power sources in Spy Satellites and deep space probes. Plenty of information is available. Then there are the UN/international guidelines.
I met a lot of old times (who were inactive for a long time like you ...) recently on the air on the modes like PSK31 (which looks like a reliable modern version of RTTY ...), they were all really enthusiastic about the new developments ... Perhaps people got a bit fedup with the "code/no-code" debates :-) (I am a CW guy myself ...)
Perhaps it is time for you to check back :-) Welcome back !!
These "Internet Cafe"s have better connectivity like a high speed leases line, cable internet connection etc. So sometimes people prefer these compared to the poor dialup service. In addition to this I won't be surprised if people see good business oppertunity in Internet porn sites in a city like *mba* which already has a well established "sex industry" (also not legal in India).
Recently some companies have started introducing Cable internet connection for domestic users ... I hope that things will improve ...
These are available even now. I bought a bunch of these shapped in the form of CPU cooling units around 6 months back from a "Hamfest" in Ohio (around $2.5 I think). The guy who sold these was complaining that he could not sell many, but were selling like hot cakes sometime back !!
You are wrong here, because almost all the research these drug companies do is based on fundamental research already available publicly, goverment funded research (money which comes from persons like you and me) ... There are some extreme cases where drug companes are made direct (massive) profits from results of government funded research. There are numerous studies on this area.
Publishing research papers online will be specially great for research community in countries other than US, UK (from where a larhe number of research journals are bublished) etc., I remember getting a lot of journals months after their publication date, in India. Some were really hard to locate ...
India has already done/doing some limited scale commercial launches (for low-earth, polar, ... satellites) using their previous genration launch vehicles (like PSLV) for clients from countries like Germany, Korea ... So one can expect thing to happen (commercial launches using GSLV) soon (much earlier than 5 years ...).
Cheaply and Reliably ? ISRO has launched a series of rockets which can carry satellites to different types of orbits (low-earth, polar, ...) RELIABLY. Success of the present launch is a result of third attempt (first one failed due to some problem with strap-on booster separation, second was aborted last month when the onboard saftysystems shutdown the launch just before liftoff on launchpad). If one goes through the history of launches of all the previous generation launch vehicles of India, it can bee seen that the test to routine launch of different generations of rockets were achieved with minimum number of launches. This is partly because of relatively limited funds available to the Indian space agency (as comapared to ESA, NASA, Russian, ...). Only uncertainty as far as this version of the GSLV is the last stage rocket used (a cryogenic rocket engine from Russia). In fact the present launch was delayed several years because these were not delivered in time by Russia, possibly due to pressure from USA. But I am sure that it is only a matter of time before they replace this with their own version. As far as the cheapness part is concerned, probably noone except China will be able to beat them.
As someone who has worked in a University/Institute environment,in regular industry and IT/software jobs I can agree fith most of this comment. It is impossible/difficult to replace the insight and experience one gains working in an open intellectually stimulating environment with someone to guide you. At least at the initial stages this cannot be replaced by just reading some book. How many Institutes/Universities provide such environment is a debatable question ... The kind of work that is done 99.9% of the time in IT/software jobs will be considered as trivial and routine in most of the universities with such an open environment ... It is a pity that regular university/research jobs are much less attractive in terms of money ...
Various organizations in India are already involved in projects for building supercomputing machines. I know at about least 3-4 publicly known projects. A lot of them are already in use (mucch before Beowoulf ...) Ckeck out the following links.
http://www.webspawner.com/users/SUPERCOMPUT/
http://www.cdacindia.com/
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/india/facility/hyder abad-drc-other.htm
I don't think Debian as such prevents one from using latest Kernels. The system as a whole mostly doesn't care if you use a newer Kernel or a standard one which comes with the release. I do agree that Deselect package management system is a bit confusing for the fist time users. Use apt-get instead ...
I remember during the Debian pre-release days, Debian people putting a lot of effort, trying to arrive at a common standard for packages with RedHat/RPM at that time. It didn't work at that time when DEB and RPM standards were just being put together ... (Due to hesitations from RH side ?). Will it work now ? (Even though anyone can see that DEB based package management is far superior to the other scheme ...)