Doesn't big bang theory basically say "magic" for that first instant though?
It is "magic" in the same sense that this is magic: Lim_{x -> \infty} {1/x} = 0
The first instance is a limiting case, in that we can only postulate it by coming arbitrarily close to that first instant.
I do subscribe to the NYT and personally I feel, I do get a value out of the subscription. YMMV.
Their Sunday and Friday editions are enough to justify the price I pay to them, and I have found that they always keep me informed about the changes in their policies along with their justification.
Frankly speaking my customer experience with them has been rather satisfactory and quite a refreshing change from various different websites that take my data and impose arbitrary "shove it in your face, accept our brand-new-redesign-that-we-will-impose-on-you-anyway" attitude.
The Times is amazing to just chill with a cup of coffee in the sunlight lazing on a Sunday morning. The articles usually are thought-provoking with an elevated conversation level that is intellectual, simple, and complete -- a very satisfying experience after the cacophony of @juvenile LOL tweets, facebook "me-too" posts, and brain-dead txt msgs. Just for that, I am glad to be a paying customer and the reason why in spite of being only a poor student, I do subscribe to NYT and make sure to donate to NPR.
<quote><p>People can (and do) write incomprehensible code in any language; that's not something specific to C++. My point was that the fault usually lies with the developer (trying to being too clever for his own good) and not the language.</p></quote>
Yup. C++ is in my opinion, an excellent language, although with age and legacy there are signs of clear kludges worked in.
I have noticed that incompetent; or egoists are the ones who end up writing incomprehensible code which scars a generation of maintainers. C++'s folly lies in the fact that it makes it way too easy to do this. However, within given guidelines and a programmer that may be a superstar but understands the value of writing clearly (that is the sign of a star programmer anyways -- they know their stuff but don't have to flaunt it, and when they do it is explained why and what!) --- there are very few things out there that rival the power C++ gives you.
Besides, I hate to be the party pooper --- but I do not believe statements like "Good programmer == How much they hate their primary language" are a good yardstick.
I think a Good programmer has to have at the very least 3 characteristics: 1. Knowledge --- knows the tools, knows the problem, and knows if the best tool is being used to solve the problem. 2. Knows weaknesses and strengths of his preferred language, and is not biased towards its suitability when faced with a problem in face of alternatives. 3. Finally, understands that tricks are for exceptional circumstances and have to be explained. Straight-forward code supplanted by properly named entities usually make for a self documenting code. Is not comment averse, but is not a comment junkie either (the ones who have to explain i=8// Assigns 8 to i are the biggest pain in the butt and time wasters)
Actually you don't think insurance companies have thought about that?
These days it is not the lack of data that is the reason, but ironically it is an overwhelming abundance of it that is the roadblock. Arranging this data; condensing it; and compacting it into a meaningful relationship takes a lot of work and skills. You not only have to establish such a relationship, but also tie it to the profitability of your company. The company executives needs to have a reliable source (does excessive alcohol buying ALWAYS lead to the rise in the person's medical risk?); hedge against unwanted correlations (it may turn out that excessive alcohol buyers may not IN A LARGE MAJORITY of cases be the consumers!); and also consider the risk of alienating their base (admittedly a small factor, but executives love to look like they DO care for their customers).
Oh the data is there, utilizing it into a consistently repeatable profit margin with minimal risk is the main aim, and it meanders through the questions of data acquisition (the insurance company will have to form a deal with your grocery/pharmacy store and through your medical provider to get your medical data); data storage (how will this data be received, what format, how can we reconcile their format with ours); data structure (how should we store information about the consumer - divide them into profiles, or store it individually?); data analysis (what is the relationship with your medical history... etc...); and finally data interpretation (What does it all mean?) --- then the soft skills come into play... how do we roll this out, etc...etc.
From a single person's standpoint, the possibility is frightening; but the single person forgets that all the analysis done for him/her has to be repeated for thousands and millions of people -- this scaling is not always linear and requires keen knowledge of computing and math.
In short -- this is already happening and will happen to even more persuasive level in future.
English will remain for foreseeable future THE dominant language on the web for the following reasons:
Flexibility: Even though countries vouch for it, it is perhaps one of the few languages that is truly international. It has freely absorbed from various cultures, and languages, making itself a little less alien to its speakers, yet establishing a common bond.
Evolving: English has continued to evolve. Slowly but surely, antiquated usage has been replaced by modern verbiage. It is in part due to its flexibility that the language continues to adapt to the situation of its speakers, thus elevating it from antiquity.
Literature: One of the strongest arguments in favor of English dominance is the sheer amount of literature, which has exponentially grown in modern times. As more literature gets published and is widely distributed, the language asserts its relevance and increases its dominance.
Scientific Adoption: Modern Science and mathematics has all but adopted English conventions. Although other languages have been dominant in the past - no other language saw the growth of Science/Math as English has. As more body of knowledge is built and relies on precise terms -- English will continue to dominate heavily.
If you strictly adhere to RAII in C++ then things are fairly ok, but I honestly think that in this case C++ is too C-ish and not object oriented enough.
It is so fashionable to berate C++ and reduce it to a glamorous bloated superset. I take exception to your statement, because I usually think people who say this have never been familiar with C++ and its standard libraries.
C++ has a lot of features that make it far more object oriented than C even when you follow paradigms like RAII -- especially relevant to this thread of discussion is that did you know that you can override new and delete operators in C++ and mitigate a lot of problems being discussed here?
Personally a lot of issues arise with strictly imperative/procedural thinking in programming, because it is not exactly amenable to solving all the problems - resource management, freeing up memory pointers, responsibility delegation are just a few issues that are overly complex with imperative paradigms.
Functional programming excels at a lot of issues here -- passing generalized functions to algorithms really solves a lot of issues. And C++ addresses it more effectively than C.
However, C++ does a clumsy job of it and the constructs are so numerous with sideeffects that warrant spending considerable time looking them up. But the fact is that they are there -- which places the language apart from C.
I think India needs to understand that for a service like RIM's if the people purchasing it can't trust it to carry their own private thoughts/conversations, then people won't pay for the service anyway...matter of privacy vs big brother government... I can respect that India has issues with terrorist acts and is in a geo-political volatile area... there are thousands of other ways to send the same information securely, including but not limited to free internet email systems, to even setting up their own private email server...dozens of free dynamic dns systems available.
I agree with what you say. Coming from India, let me add the following perspectives:
What you say is absolutely correct, however the Indian bureaucracy is legendary for its arrogant and corrupt ways. In fact, the closing statement of the article "... business is done here differently." should provide an invaluable insight. This is why most outsiders scratch their heads about how India functions. Above all, following protocols is a big thing in India. You have to navigate things in a very particular way -- grease and please everyone along the way and in a very rigid protocol. Follow that, and the merit of your case actually plays a very small role in getting you the meat. Ignore it, and even if you are the most qualified by a wide margin, you will be left outside.
Finally, the actual issue of the case is left far behind -- the bureaucracy will convert this into a nationalist patriotic jingoism (for example: RIM is being arrogant towards India.. blah...blah... discrimination...), once this happens (it already has to a certain extent) -- the conservative people will take the stage with rhetoric. Logic, reasoning, and sane questioning will be thrown out of the window.
It is sad, but unless the intellectuals in India start demanding more share of limelight and direct the discussion for its merit, I can only see a couple of options for RIM -- bend to the will and follow the sick protocol OR butt out and be made a public enemy in the eyes of the populace.
I face the same issues too. Immensely large datasets, that change and no proper way of tracking them through the file system.
Trust me, when I say this -- it will be worth your while to spend some time thinking about your requirements and do some quick coding to get an infrastructure in place.
It was said here before (I guess just a couple of posts above), but this is right on mark -- You have got to separate out your data and meta-data. Text files are immensely convenient and to be honest, that is also where I prefer to store my actual data. But statistics about my data I store in a quick relational database. My meta-data db consists of fixed columns that have all the statistics for my data sets that I usually need. For example: Date/Time, Number of Columns, Number of Rows, Row Description, Column Description, Algorithm Description, Parameters, Special Notes, File Name of Data, etc.
Row Description, Column Description, and Algo Description point to separate helper tables.
I also agree with many people here that relational databases can be an overkill for a manageable database, but if you generate a lot of datasets, the break-even point is reached almost immediately. Besides, text files even though extremely convenient for a quick grab and feed into a software are simply horrid when it comes to trending across many datasets.
Now depending upon your skill set, setting up this database could be a day's job or it can take you weeks. If you are computationally inclined though -- go for the relational database to store the meta-data, keep your main data in text files.
If you are not, there are excellent software out there that give you a nice interface to a relational database.
Nevertheless, my main point is, whatever route you choose, it will help you to separate out your actual data, and stuff about that data (meta-data).
Well, no. They're developing resources that were handed to them by us.
Oh please! Enough with the melodrama. Technological exchange is something that benefits all human kind.
The number system (from Arabs, and hey the concept of Zero is from India) you are using, to your expressways (modeled after Germany's Autobahns), to relaxation activities like yoga (from India again!) and to most other things were developed by people around the world.
. Not us. We lost money, jobs, and competitive advantage.
America is currently just passing through an economic downturn; which will be followed by an upturn -- this is not something that happened due to your "technological give-away". Oh by the way, the reason for your down turn is your own housing market. Let me reiterate though - America has NOT lost any competitive advantage. I see it every day in universities here in America -- innovative research being done, technological breakthroughs accomplished. You are simply moving on, developing new things for your own benefit, for Americans benefit and ultimately for humankind's benefit. Look into any research publication to see what I mean.
The times are simply changing, the paradigms of work that YOU are familiar with are shifting and morphing into something different. You just seem to be another person who isn't comfortable with change; but change happens.
It's as though India and China won a war, and took a couple of $trillion out of us in the process. But it wasn't a war. It was more like treason, since our CEOs gave us up rather than fighting for us.
To show you the fallacy in your logic - Let us assume that India and China didn't do this development and are frozen in time. Here is what will happen:
While your world and the rest of world goes ahead, these people would be stuck without modern amenities -- disparities will increase. And do you know what happens when this disparity reaches a tipping point? People revolt and become extremists.
In your la..la world of developed US and Europe, your companies producing products will reach a saturation point. I mean, that everyone in developed world will have all they need and they all can buy just so many quantities of consumables. Companies will see their profits reach a flat line, especially if their products are non-perishable. The result, you will have spectacular market crash which will never recover, since the number of consumers does not changes significantly!
Now here is what developing India and China do for you:
With development comes enlightenment -- they know that if they work hard there is a WAY OUT of their pathetic life situation.
American companies get a HUGE customer base where they can almost indefinitely expand as the population develops. This is currently going on. These people become American goods consumers. The profit comes to American companies.
So you are looking at a partial picture -- You see the jobs going out, but you don't see the money that comes back by these people, the money generated by American companies.
So stop crying and may be look to reinvent yourself. Because I know for a fact, that this country - USA - still rewards people for their hard work and skill. The system may be a bit unfair, but it still works. Anyone willing to put in the work and sweat still succeeds here. And just for this reason alone, this country will always come out on top.
True. But how do you eliminate hunger and poverty?
The middle-class in India thinks it is by education. Which happens to be largely correct. Poverty and hunger are not isolated problems individually, they are usually the result of:
Extreme crunch on resources and intense competition. (Remember this is the second most populous nation on this earth and smaller in size than USA)
Social factors (Yes, untouchability; caste system, which are still a big problem in rural India)
How would you then eliminate those? By providing opportunities; by opening up avenues; by making people aware that the world has a lot of other things which they can explore to realize, recognize their own talents, and empower themselves. So these kind of computer/technology distribution helps. Maybe not directly, but surely in a forceful way.
Hey, I would say that if India does manage to get it out of the marketing hype, this should be mass-produced, (maybe talents from here in USA can make it even more better by applying current advances) and sold universally to every country where people struggle.
You know that is a topic that is currently being fiercely debated in the civil society of India.
Just like here in America, you have people who do not want government to be involved at all and then there are those who support government takeover.
However, since the Indian economy has largely been a pseudo-capitalist economy and largely socialist until the early 1990s, the government gets away by doing this without any rigorous study of whether it should be doing it or handing it to private enterprise..
I suppose as capitalism strengthens over time, and people realize that entrepreneurship is in their best interest, you will find this debate getting intense. Especially since the country is already a democracy, and as people become assured of their basic necessities, they start questioning the opportunities afforded to them.
Rightly said!
This is simply an example of countries trying to develop themselves and their resources. It may be shitty compared to what is available in the developed world, but its a start -- we have all paid through our noses for costly micro-processing power that sometimes are pathetically underutilized doing tasks such as browsing and occasional document composition.
Though I am aware that the original article is sorely lacking details, and it seems more a marketing hype, but even if they manage to do take off with this, it will be marvelous and a little help to millions who at this point cannot even hope to achieve a life with basic necessities, leave alone sitting comfortably ordering a powerful computer.
This is not for Americans, nor should it be expected that the hardware would be any comparable to what is considered minimal in America, but its a start; an attempt to introduce a bit of technology so people who would otherwise have no chance to even aim for a middle-class life are empowered.
However, lets put the main topic aside for a moment and allow me to express the blatant racism being practiced on this forum on every such topic related to India:
They stole our jobs.. those a$$holes: It is the companies in US that willingly outsource. These people are simply trying to eke out a living in what their circumstances allow. To call them names and wish evil upon them is simply not right. You have a problem with outsourcing - protest to your own companies. Granted some of these people on the other end of the line can be classified as inept - but don't forget that English is not their first language! It is your company's fault for allowing such a level of customer service, not of the guys providing them!
Those simpletons, they can only follow an EXACT procedure: Americans do not realize how much of their mannerisms that they take for granted, is not something that is common in the rest of the world. It is not their fault. Do these Indian employees need to make effort to understand American connotations more? Certainly. But do Americans need to put in more effort to make their language more universal especially when dealing with international personnel? Again the answer is yes.
Ha Ha... They have no original thinking, solve their problems in poor English: Every country has various strata of people residing within it. Can I fairly say that an Average American is a red-neck with a beat-up old pickup and homes with weeds around it speaking with a twang refusing to understand math and all? No. I definitely cannot. In a country of 305 Million in America, it is difficult to find one personality profile that fits all Americans. Now scale this problem to 1.4 BILLION people - is it fair to characterize a whole country like that? Absolutely not. India has 26 official languages -- can you imagine the cultural barriers that are already in place?? Just like any other country, India has some brilliant people, some not so brilliant and a whole lot anywhere in the middle.
If India has such a huge population and so intelligent why isn't it a power in the world?: Simple answer to this POPULATION. India is also much smaller in land mass than America. With 1.4 BILLION people -- the struggle for resources is intense. People literally have to fight intensely to even eke out a decent standard of living, let alone living lavishly.. This is something Americans have a huge problem understanding since they never have had such a tremendous pressure on their resources. But when basic standards have to be fought intensely for because there are just so many other people in the race for it -- very little energy is spent on luxuries of life. This will probably even help you understand why your Indian colleagues in US sometimes live like paupers but otherwise earn handsomely. But please just stop and think how you would feel if you are an average academic performer, the best jobs have been strictly been snagged by so many people better than you and you are in race with million other people for one lousy job that is equivalent to burger-flipping in America? Will you still be able to achieve all that you do today?? DOES IT NOT FEEL LUCKY TO BE AMERICAN NOW, even if you are down in dumps?
Why not so many Nobel prizes from India, with such intelligentsia?: This is because -- the extreme lack of resources forces many people with talent to flee to a place where life is a bit easy. Where they can freely think about solving problems like P=NP, having assured that their basic needs and even many luxuries are easily met. That country happens to be America today. In fact, America should want such talent to stay in America. These people tend to be the great thinkers of our times, and their contribution usually far exceeds the cost of opportunities America provides to them. The founder of Sun Microsystems - Indian in origin. Most top Microsoft engineers - Indian in origin. Man
...Outsourcing has hurt this country a lot more than it has helped....
Aren't you the same type of person who shouts over the top about the virtues of capitalism? When the same capitalism turns back on you, suddenly its inconvenient!
The other day I discovered that a piece of software I had been delivered stored financial transaction amounts in floats. I dare to advance that no CS graduate who didn't get his degree from a diploma mill would commit such a sin. But here the self-taught developer looked at me as if I was nitpicking.
Exactly right. And then you have the self-taught developer complaining to others about how you were hand-waving and talking about mantissas, radix, truncation, rounding errors and other esoteric stuff that he never has to deal with and how you needlessly complicate his life over trivial matters.
To be honest, I even had a high-school developer completely convinced that I was merely exercising my arrogance as a graduate student, and if it is working - it is correct. It wasn't a big issue when I was mentioning that his solution was O(2^n), whereas there are more optimal strategies for the same problem. In his opinion, it was pretty neat.
...I'd use lots and lots of gotos, which would seem like bad programming to you (because you've been told that goto=bad), but I would have written it as an automata, which is FAR faster than your stuff (and for huge database programs, this is again the difference between "fast enough" and "to slow")....
Rightly put.
Programmers who haven't ever delved in to real CS tend to think -- "If this is it, why bother with college?" -- they forget that the field is extremely vast and a lot of it is packed with profound insights into the nature of logic itself. It is this part of CS that enables someone with a substantial investment in a CS degree, enable an acuity to use the correct tool for the job.
As someone famously said -- "Computers are only as important to Computer Science as the telescope is to astronomy."
"Math is the new Sanskrit, the new Latin." He believes we overestimate the value of math as a tool to assess a student's ability.
I am appalled by reading this.
This may be true to Mr. Vembu's business, but to make sweeping generalizations based off a personal experience with no statistical significance nor weight-age taken into account is exactly the kind of logical fallacy that you become aware of in a rigorous graduate program.
I speak Tamil, and I also have taken a couple of years of Sanskrit in high-school, but just because I can read Sanskrit does not mean I can fully comprehend the context and connotations of Sanskrit in scriptures.
Except that 80% of laptops sold over $1000 are Apple and most high end computers tend to be Macs. It's more entrenched than Linux on the desktop that's for sure.
Very True.
I am a big Linux fan and personally use it everywhere, even on my macbook - however, to be honest, I am still appalled at non-resolution of issues that were glaring in the nineties and are still a gaping hole.
A Linux user is painted as not giving a rat's ass to anything as fancy as X with beautiful ornately decorated windows -- which is true to a large extent, but I guess a large set of core developers forgot that X is what a casual computer user sees.
I am not denying that there are some really extensive Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Mint etc.) geared towards user experience - the fact is that all these distributions are trying to provide an environment similar to Windows. Graphical Linux has always tried to emulate either Windows/Mac OS, as if they are the standard in user friendliness.
Any other graphical environment in Linux does not make it friendly for the user.
My gripe is that Linux has not invented a standard of user friendliness for itself, that is unique to it. A casual user sees an emulation of Windows/Mac OS and feels as if he/she is settling for second best -- I mean why not go for Windows or OS X itself!
The advanced user doesn't even care about that!
The result? X is still a very unwieldy system when things don't go right. If things are perfect, the autodetection system works well, but do something delta out of ordinary and X literally regurgitates all its mess, and you can spend days trying to fix something as simple as monitors of different sizes, or different makes, or on different graphic cards.
And let us not even talk about enabling 3D acceleration for your graphics card if it is not Nvidia.
Oh, then there's Java configuration (Want Sun Java, some distros make it extremely difficult to switch!), Flash idiocy (another reason to hate flash), and finally..
don't even forget actually customizing KDE/Gnome so that everything at the very least looks properly, scales properly. Mac OS X does a fantastic job of all of that. Linux can actually use quite a few tips from OS X.
Amen to that! Personally Auctex in Emacs is just about the best that LaTeX gets. I have tried LyX but it hides too many details to my tastes.
auctex and Emacs make for a powerful environment and the ideal mixture of WYSIWIG and advanced fine-tuning.
Slashdot Mirror
That's like saying man up and go see the new production of Glitter Boys on Broadway and then go get a pedicure.
That's like saying man up and go see a Justin Bieber concert while prancing around in a field of flowers dressed in all pink.
Oh... here come the gay jokes... seriously... grow up?
Jest? Sure, but whats with the perpetuation of a stereotype against gay people?
Oh BTW, plenty of men go see a production of Justin Bieber/Glitter Boys, prance, and get a pedicure... ain't nothing less manly about them!
Doesn't big bang theory basically say "magic" for that first instant though?
It is "magic" in the same sense that this is magic: Lim_{x -> \infty} {1/x} = 0
The first instance is a limiting case, in that we can only postulate it by coming arbitrarily close to that first instant.
I do subscribe to the NYT and personally I feel, I do get a value out of the subscription. YMMV.
Their Sunday and Friday editions are enough to justify the price I pay to them, and I have found that they always keep me informed about the changes in their policies along with their justification.
Frankly speaking my customer experience with them has been rather satisfactory and quite a refreshing change from various different websites that take my data and impose arbitrary "shove it in your face, accept our brand-new-redesign-that-we-will-impose-on-you-anyway" attitude.
The Times is amazing to just chill with a cup of coffee in the sunlight lazing on a Sunday morning. The articles usually are thought-provoking with an elevated conversation level that is intellectual, simple, and complete -- a very satisfying experience after the cacophony of @juvenile LOL tweets, facebook "me-too" posts, and brain-dead txt msgs. Just for that, I am glad to be a paying customer and the reason why in spite of being only a poor student, I do subscribe to NYT and make sure to donate to NPR.
I think your pun detector is a little rusty.
True that! I think by the time I wrote that, the irony of the matter was completely lost on me!
...unleashes the linguists with such ferrousity.
And of course spellings... try ferocity.
<quote><p>People can (and do) write incomprehensible code in any language; that's not something specific to C++. My point was that the fault usually lies with the developer (trying to being too clever for his own good) and not the language.</p></quote>
// Assigns 8 to i are the biggest pain in the butt and time wasters)
Yup. C++ is in my opinion, an excellent language, although with age and legacy there are signs of clear kludges worked in.
I have noticed that incompetent; or egoists are the ones who end up writing incomprehensible code which scars a generation of maintainers. C++'s folly lies in the fact that it makes it way too easy to do this.
However, within given guidelines and a programmer that may be a superstar but understands the value of writing clearly (that is the sign of a star programmer anyways -- they know their stuff but don't have to flaunt it, and when they do it is explained why and what!) --- there are very few things out there that rival the power C++ gives you.
Besides, I hate to be the party pooper --- but I do not believe statements like "Good programmer == How much they hate their primary language" are a good yardstick.
I think a Good programmer has to have at the very least 3 characteristics:
1. Knowledge --- knows the tools, knows the problem, and knows if the best tool is being used to solve the problem.
2. Knows weaknesses and strengths of his preferred language, and is not biased towards its suitability when faced with a problem in face of alternatives.
3. Finally, understands that tricks are for exceptional circumstances and have to be explained. Straight-forward code supplanted by properly named entities usually make for a self documenting code. Is not comment averse, but is not a comment junkie either (the ones who have to explain i=8
Actually you don't think insurance companies have thought about that?
These days it is not the lack of data that is the reason, but ironically it is an overwhelming abundance of it that is the roadblock.
Arranging this data; condensing it; and compacting it into a meaningful relationship takes a lot of work and skills. You not only have to establish such a relationship, but also tie it to the profitability of your company.
The company executives needs to have a reliable source (does excessive alcohol buying ALWAYS lead to the rise in the person's medical risk?); hedge against unwanted correlations (it may turn out that excessive alcohol buyers may not IN A LARGE MAJORITY of cases be the consumers!); and also consider the risk of alienating their base (admittedly a small factor, but executives love to look like they DO care for their customers).
Oh the data is there, utilizing it into a consistently repeatable profit margin with minimal risk is the main aim, and it meanders through the questions of data acquisition (the insurance company will have to form a deal with your grocery/pharmacy store and through your medical provider to get your medical data); data storage (how will this data be received, what format, how can we reconcile their format with ours); data structure (how should we store information about the consumer - divide them into profiles, or store it individually?); data analysis (what is the relationship with your medical history... etc...); and finally data interpretation (What does it all mean?) --- then the soft skills come into play... how do we roll this out, etc...etc.
From a single person's standpoint, the possibility is frightening; but the single person forgets that all the analysis done for him/her has to be repeated for thousands and millions of people -- this scaling is not always linear and requires keen knowledge of computing and math.
In short -- this is already happening and will happen to even more persuasive level in future.
If you strictly adhere to RAII in C++ then things are fairly ok, but I honestly think that in this case C++ is too C-ish and not object oriented enough.
It is so fashionable to berate C++ and reduce it to a glamorous bloated superset. I take exception to your statement, because I usually think people who say this have never been familiar with C++ and its standard libraries.
C++ has a lot of features that make it far more object oriented than C even when you follow paradigms like RAII -- especially relevant to this thread of discussion is that did you know that you can override new and delete operators in C++ and mitigate a lot of problems being discussed here?
Personally a lot of issues arise with strictly imperative/procedural thinking in programming, because it is not exactly amenable to solving all the problems - resource management, freeing up memory pointers, responsibility delegation are just a few issues that are overly complex with imperative paradigms.
Functional programming excels at a lot of issues here -- passing generalized functions to algorithms really solves a lot of issues. And C++ addresses it more effectively than C.
However, C++ does a clumsy job of it and the constructs are so numerous with sideeffects that warrant spending considerable time looking them up. But the fact is that they are there -- which places the language apart from C.
I think India needs to understand that for a service like RIM's if the people purchasing it can't trust it to carry their own private thoughts/conversations, then people won't pay for the service anyway...matter of privacy vs big brother government... I can respect that India has issues with terrorist acts and is in a geo-political volatile area... there are thousands of other ways to send the same information securely, including but not limited to free internet email systems, to even setting up their own private email server...dozens of free dynamic dns systems available.
I agree with what you say. Coming from India, let me add the following perspectives:
It is sad, but unless the intellectuals in India start demanding more share of limelight and direct the discussion for its merit, I can only see a couple of options for RIM -- bend to the will and follow the sick protocol OR butt out and be made a public enemy in the eyes of the populace.
I face the same issues too. Immensely large datasets, that change and no proper way of tracking them through the file system. Trust me, when I say this -- it will be worth your while to spend some time thinking about your requirements and do some quick coding to get an infrastructure in place.
It was said here before (I guess just a couple of posts above), but this is right on mark -- You have got to separate out your data and meta-data. Text files are immensely convenient and to be honest, that is also where I prefer to store my actual data. But statistics about my data I store in a quick relational database. My meta-data db consists of fixed columns that have all the statistics for my data sets that I usually need. For example: Date/Time, Number of Columns, Number of Rows, Row Description, Column Description, Algorithm Description, Parameters, Special Notes, File Name of Data, etc.
Row Description, Column Description, and Algo Description point to separate helper tables.
I also agree with many people here that relational databases can be an overkill for a manageable database, but if you generate a lot of datasets, the break-even point is reached almost immediately. Besides, text files even though extremely convenient for a quick grab and feed into a software are simply horrid when it comes to trending across many datasets.
Now depending upon your skill set, setting up this database could be a day's job or it can take you weeks. If you are computationally inclined though -- go for the relational database to store the meta-data, keep your main data in text files.
If you are not, there are excellent software out there that give you a nice interface to a relational database.
Nevertheless, my main point is, whatever route you choose, it will help you to separate out your actual data, and stuff about that data (meta-data).
Well, no. They're developing resources that were handed to them by us.
Oh please! Enough with the melodrama. Technological exchange is something that benefits all human kind. The number system (from Arabs, and hey the concept of Zero is from India) you are using, to your expressways (modeled after Germany's Autobahns), to relaxation activities like yoga (from India again!) and to most other things were developed by people around the world.
. Not us. We lost money, jobs, and competitive advantage.
America is currently just passing through an economic downturn; which will be followed by an upturn -- this is not something that happened due to your "technological give-away". Oh by the way, the reason for your down turn is your own housing market.
Let me reiterate though - America has NOT lost any competitive advantage. I see it every day in universities here in America -- innovative research being done, technological breakthroughs accomplished. You are simply moving on, developing new things for your own benefit, for Americans benefit and ultimately for humankind's benefit. Look into any research publication to see what I mean.
The times are simply changing, the paradigms of work that YOU are familiar with are shifting and morphing into something different. You just seem to be another person who isn't comfortable with change; but change happens.
It's as though India and China won a war, and took a couple of $trillion out of us in the process. But it wasn't a war. It was more like treason, since our CEOs gave us up rather than fighting for us.
To show you the fallacy in your logic - Let us assume that India and China didn't do this development and are frozen in time. Here is what will happen:
Now here is what developing India and China do for you:
So you are looking at a partial picture -- You see the jobs going out, but you don't see the money that comes back by these people, the money generated by American companies.
So stop crying and may be look to reinvent yourself. Because I know for a fact, that this country - USA - still rewards people for their hard work and skill. The system may be a bit unfair, but it still works. Anyone willing to put in the work and sweat still succeeds here. And just for this reason alone, this country will always come out on top.
The middle-class in India thinks it is by education. Which happens to be largely correct. Poverty and hunger are not isolated problems individually, they are usually the result of:
How would you then eliminate those? By providing opportunities; by opening up avenues; by making people aware that the world has a lot of other things which they can explore to realize, recognize their own talents, and empower themselves. So these kind of computer/technology distribution helps. Maybe not directly, but surely in a forceful way.
Hey, I would say that if India does manage to get it out of the marketing hype, this should be mass-produced, (maybe talents from here in USA can make it even more better by applying current advances) and sold universally to every country where people struggle.
You know that is a topic that is currently being fiercely debated in the civil society of India.
Just like here in America, you have people who do not want government to be involved at all and then there are those who support government takeover.
However, since the Indian economy has largely been a pseudo-capitalist economy and largely socialist until the early 1990s, the government gets away by doing this without any rigorous study of whether it should be doing it or handing it to private enterprise..
I suppose as capitalism strengthens over time, and people realize that entrepreneurship is in their best interest, you will find this debate getting intense. Especially since the country is already a democracy, and as people become assured of their basic necessities, they start questioning the opportunities afforded to them.
Rightly said!
This is simply an example of countries trying to develop themselves and their resources. It may be shitty compared to what is available in the developed world, but its a start -- we have all paid through our noses for costly micro-processing power that sometimes are pathetically underutilized doing tasks such as browsing and occasional document composition.
Though I am aware that the original article is sorely lacking details, and it seems more a marketing hype, but even if they manage to do take off with this, it will be marvelous and a little help to millions who at this point cannot even hope to achieve a life with basic necessities, leave alone sitting comfortably ordering a powerful computer.
This is not for Americans, nor should it be expected that the hardware would be any comparable to what is considered minimal in America, but its a start; an attempt to introduce a bit of technology so people who would otherwise have no chance to even aim for a middle-class life are empowered.
Good thing I plan to relay this post to your faculty members and students.
Please do. I stand by my views and I am responsible enough to endorse them.
Would you like me to give you their contact info? You won't have to spend your time hunting for it then.
Get the fuck out of America and stop sapping our education system you fucking supremacist traitor.
No, sir. That I am not. I am perplexed as to what caused you to be so angry? For just bringing up sane logical points?
Can we keep this civil please?
... False Signature / Personal Info Posting
Wow, that is low.
Just like any other country, India has some brilliant people, some not so brilliant and a whole lot anywhere in the middle.
...Outsourcing has hurt this country a lot more than it has helped....
Aren't you the same type of person who shouts over the top about the virtues of capitalism? When the same capitalism turns back on you, suddenly its inconvenient!
The other day I discovered that a piece of software I had been delivered stored financial transaction amounts in floats. I dare to advance that no CS graduate who didn't get his degree from a diploma mill would commit such a sin. But here the self-taught developer looked at me as if I was nitpicking.
Exactly right. And then you have the self-taught developer complaining to others about how you were hand-waving and talking about mantissas, radix, truncation, rounding errors and other esoteric stuff that he never has to deal with and how you needlessly complicate his life over trivial matters. To be honest, I even had a high-school developer completely convinced that I was merely exercising my arrogance as a graduate student, and if it is working - it is correct. It wasn't a big issue when I was mentioning that his solution was O(2^n), whereas there are more optimal strategies for the same problem. In his opinion, it was pretty neat.
...I'd use lots and lots of gotos, which would seem like bad programming to you (because you've been told that goto=bad), but I would have written it as an automata, which is FAR faster than your stuff (and for huge database programs, this is again the difference between "fast enough" and "to slow")....
Rightly put.
Programmers who haven't ever delved in to real CS tend to think -- "If this is it, why bother with college?" -- they forget that the field is extremely vast and a lot of it is packed with profound insights into the nature of logic itself. It is this part of CS that enables someone with a substantial investment in a CS degree, enable an acuity to use the correct tool for the job.
As someone famously said -- "Computers are only as important to Computer Science as the telescope is to astronomy."
Can a moderator please mod the parent up?
Do you put Orkut or Google Buzz in your "works" category?
Actually yes. Orkut is the facebook of South east Asia. And it is just as popular as Facebook, in India, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc...
"Math is the new Sanskrit, the new Latin." He believes we overestimate the value of math as a tool to assess a student's ability.
I am appalled by reading this.
This may be true to Mr. Vembu's business, but to make sweeping generalizations based off a personal experience with no statistical significance nor weight-age taken into account is exactly the kind of logical fallacy that you become aware of in a rigorous graduate program.
I speak Tamil, and I also have taken a couple of years of Sanskrit in high-school, but just because I can read Sanskrit does not mean I can fully comprehend the context and connotations of Sanskrit in scriptures.
Except that 80% of laptops sold over $1000 are Apple and most high end computers tend to be Macs. It's more entrenched than Linux on the desktop that's for sure.
Very True.
I am a big Linux fan and personally use it everywhere, even on my macbook - however, to be honest, I am still appalled at non-resolution of issues that were glaring in the nineties and are still a gaping hole.
A Linux user is painted as not giving a rat's ass to anything as fancy as X with beautiful ornately decorated windows -- which is true to a large extent, but I guess a large set of core developers forgot that X is what a casual computer user sees.
I am not denying that there are some really extensive Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Mint etc.) geared towards user experience - the fact is that all these distributions are trying to provide an environment similar to Windows. Graphical Linux has always tried to emulate either Windows/Mac OS, as if they are the standard in user friendliness.
Any other graphical environment in Linux does not make it friendly for the user.
My gripe is that Linux has not invented a standard of user friendliness for itself, that is unique to it. A casual user sees an emulation of Windows/Mac OS and feels as if he/she is settling for second best -- I mean why not go for Windows or OS X itself!
The advanced user doesn't even care about that!
The result? X is still a very unwieldy system when things don't go right. If things are perfect, the autodetection system works well, but do something delta out of ordinary and X literally regurgitates all its mess, and you can spend days trying to fix something as simple as monitors of different sizes, or different makes, or on different graphic cards.
And let us not even talk about enabling 3D acceleration for your graphics card if it is not Nvidia.
Oh, then there's Java configuration (Want Sun Java, some distros make it extremely difficult to switch!), Flash idiocy (another reason to hate flash), and finally..
don't even forget actually customizing KDE/Gnome so that everything at the very least looks properly, scales properly. Mac OS X does a fantastic job of all of that. Linux can actually use quite a few tips from OS X.
I highly recommend it.
Amen to that! Personally Auctex in Emacs is just about the best that LaTeX gets. I have tried LyX but it hides too many details to my tastes.
auctex and Emacs make for a powerful environment and the ideal mixture of WYSIWIG and advanced fine-tuning.
True that, I hadn't thought of that.
Lets just outlaw being single for heterosexual people. (Why heterosexual? Hey, homosexual people aren't allowed marriage, duh??!)
You divorce, you have to immediately re-marry.