The US preaches free markets to the rest of the world, yet the IT programmers there seem to think they are entitled to a monopoly on jobs. I thought free market capitalism was about open market and prices based on demand-supply. Why are IT workers so threatened by this? Is it insecurity about their skills or ability to compete?
Considering the way China and India are growing, many of the brightest graduates that are turned out from state-subsidized universities are better employed at home. There was a time in the last 2-3 decades where a highly qualified engineer from these countries had no choice but to emigrate to the states to have a career. This is increasingly no longer necessary. Making it harder for people to move to the US will have the beneficial effect of halting the brain drain in these countries and keeping the brightest minds home.
This is not true, or at least wildly inaccurate. The main Indian Government-owned ISP, BSNL, has not blocked any of these websites. Many of the private ISP's haven't either. There is one private ISP -- Reliance Infocomm -- which is owned by the Reliance ADA Group, which happens to also have considerable interests in content generation (they produce bollywood movies, and also are major financial backers to Spielberg's Dreamworks SKG). They are known to block torrent/video sharing sites during prominent movie releases.
The reason I posted this bit of news, is the rather unconventional crowd-sourcing/collaboration approach to science, coupled with the idea of involving non-specialists in his attempt. Would like more informed opinions on this approach to doing science. Even if he fails at the attempt, would, say, a person with an engineering background participating in such a workshop stand to gain anything? Is this a ponzi scheme or good science with a dash of showmanship thrown in?
I worked for a while in India, and am now in the US finishing my Masters in CS. Here are my two cents. Computer Science education in the US is still leagues ahead of any other country in the world. The IITs and IISc in India are good institutions but still do not have significant research programs that compare with any of the top universities in the US. I suppose the story is similar across the world. Given the option, everyone in the world would like to be educated here in the US:-) -- if you are being given this on a platter, why let go of the opportunity??? I applaud your intentions of exploring the world -- I do believe that Americans should be more outward looking and understand the world around them better. Also many of the new business opportunities will likely arise out of South Asia and China in the next few decades. However from a technical perspective, US is still the place to be as far as CS is concerned. You would be much better off getting the best training that the US has to offer, and then going out into the wider world -- your skills will be much appreciated, and you can make a more substantial contribution to the world. I am much impressed by the scientific culture that American universities inculcate in their students, and I do believe the world would be a better place if that culture were propagated more aggressively.
Or rather, perceive, I should say, is that Haneef (an Indian citizen) was a relative/roommate of some of the terrorists who carried out the failed UK bombings last year. The Howard government and the Australian political establishment tried to get some mileage out of a showcase terrorist case by putting him on trial and feeding disinformation to the media. Luckily, Haneef seemed to have a good lawyer, and the Indian government, Indian media and Australian media seemed to be wise to the manipulation the Aussie government was upto.
Recently, I came to the US as a grad student, and was shocked that the US has no running water in their toilets. They actually use pieces of paper!!! Thats soo lame, not to mention yucky!!! ughhh...
Last year, the Indian government banned a few websites (mostly fundamentalist hindu/muslim sites), and at about the same time I read about onion routing and the EFF's Tor software. I tried using it, and although it was obviously slightly slower than normal web access, it worked just fine -- and no:), I am not a fundamentalist, I was just curious about anonymizing technology:). I used to live in Thailand, did some of my schooling there, and I know there is a large expatriate population there who might wish to access Youtube for legitimate reasons. They should try out Tor -- here's an overview:
Cellphones were never subsidised by the government. The Indian government never bought a mllion "10$" cellphones so that they could distribute them to poor villagers in remote ares of India. However, through the mechanisms of a free market economy, this has become a reality in India today, and the government hasn't had to spend a dime in getting this done. It has actually generated huge revenue in the process.
There was a time when the government subsidised electronic communication in India. That was when it took months for anyone to get a landline connection.
Indians should learn from this -- there is no need for the government to spend millions on scams like the OLPC, when computers are going to make their way into Indian classrooms sooner or later.
OLPC seems irrelevant for an economy that's set to become the world's third largest by 2020. Now if MIT were paying the Indian government for access to Indian schools, that would be a different matter entirely.
In India, there are basically two kinds of schools -- the high tuition, exclusive schools run by Christian Convents or rich, privately funded educational institutions, and the 'municipal' schools run by the government. Most children that go to the former category of schools come from middle class/upper class families and already have access to computers at home. Presumably, the OLPC program is for the second type of schools, which mostly children who live close to or below the poverty line attend. Most of these schools will have teachers who have never used computers, and who are likely to resent any drastic technological change such as computers in the classroom. So, along with an OLPC program, the government would have to run a massive teacher-education program to teach the use of these computers in the classroom -- not to mention overhauling the coursework so that it makes effective use of these machines. In addition, the government would have to put in place infrastructure to service and repair these laptops at affordable prices throughout India. All of this to be done in a country of more than a billion people speaking hundreds of known languages and dialects. When you think of these factors, those laptops are going to cost way more than the 100$ MIT claims. I could go on and on about the fallacies of this scheme, but clearly, it would be crazy for India to adopt it at this point in time. The government has wisely rubbished OLPC. India cannot progress from slates and chalks to laptop computers in one stroke. It has to progress at an organic rate and accept technology in education gradually, ensuring the teachers are comfortable with it before it gets to the children.
IDEs are a great tool, but they can often obscure the details that one should know too. For instance, I know a lot of people who use Visual Studio who would be lost if they ever had to use make files or script-based configuration/build tools.
I myself learnt to program on an Apple ][e with BASIC, and later graduated to using M$ QBASIC on DOS 6.0. The former, of course, didn't have an IDE, but still ended up teaching me a lot about modularity and thoroughness, whereas QBASIC taught me how powerful an IDE can be, provided you have one.
If you can figure out a way to have a different set of exercises, one which targets IDE-based projects, and another which teaches survival skills using the command line to use the interactive shell for the language you will teach, or to use tools that the language distribution provides, that would be great.
I mean I would have loved to have been taught that way:).
Age of Empires!!! The mac version doesn't allow me to play network games with windows machines, which is sad, really. Well, MSOffice of course, and Visual Studio for windows development:). I haven't found a good open-source MS Project alternative either. Apart from that, Mac software is invariably more innovative and better than equivalent alternatives on Windows. There are many websites out there that use ActiveX, and some that haven't been tested for compatiblity with Safari or Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape.
These are the only reasons I would ever use windows, really.
"Slow" is a subjective assessment. Without any benchmarks to back that up, this discussion is moot. However, in general, I think Windows, as a GUI-based system, is more efficient at resource usage than Linux+X+Any equivalient Window Manager (KDE/Gnome).
I've been working for small software consulting companies in Pune, India, since I graduated about 5 years ago. If you want to pick an offshore company to outsource your development, make sure you clarify the following points: 1.) Management experience -- are their enough guru's in the company who can mentor the team that works for you? Do they have experience working on International projects or with different cultures? Does a process exist to pass their experience onto the other employees? 2.) Talent -- You might have to work with inexperienced engineers, but do they have strong fundamentals, and can they learn. 3.) Infrastructure -- How willing is the management to put up the necessary infrastructure (servers, servers rooms with the right air conditioning, power backup, IP telephones etc. etc.) 4.) Hiring pipeline -- Does the company have a good pool of potential employees wanting to work there? Do they have a good liaison with local universities? 5.) Relevance of skill set -- Does the company match your profile? Is their collective skill set relevant to what you want?
You might want to check out the company I work for right now, I think they do pretty well on all these counts.
I think anyone would prefer to buy an appliance that did one thing really well, over an appliance which purports to do a bunch of things, but does not provide the best user experience for all of them.
The iPod clickwheel interface is also very minimalist and simple and appeals to peope who are not power users or people who work a lot with computers. This broadens their appeal.
Here's another guy looking to pile on to this poor self-involved guy disconnected from reality.
Going to work is all about two things: 1.) Creating things that make money for the company. 2.) Socially enmeshing yourself in the company so that you get your hands on a sizeable portion of the revenue -- preferably more than the share you deserve.
From his post, it seems to me the guy hasn't thought about 1, and has no clue about 2.
Now I believe (1) to be the reason I started programming as a teenager. The joy of seeing a program work is a big kick, but there is no kick like creating something that is useful to other people, and that puts the bread on your table too. It sounds easy, but a lot of crap gets created in the world, and it only takes great engineering to make something that is of value to humanity.
In the real world, my experience has told me that (1) is often optional:-). (2) is often necessary and sufficient, unless the executive management of the company is a bunch of 'equi-potential' individuals with a belief in the value of professionalism.
A lot of good companies go bad because they are victims of their own success. They start out with a bunch of techno-geeks at the helm of affairs, and the "do work, get rewarded" policy applies. As they become successful, people gravitate to these places for a share of the pot of honey. Then you have cliques and factions, and things start to go downhill from there.
The surest sign that you have to get out of the company is not that you don't have an office, or that your manager doesn't kiss you full on the mouth every morning (with tongue).
It really depends on your priorities -- If you're the creative type who takes pride in your work, leave only when you're not learning anything new, and when you're only twiddling your thumbs at the office everyday. If you want money, leave when you don't have any route to the honey-pot.
Usually, the nature of life dictates that the one also implies the other:-).
I've been working for a few years now, so here's my take on documents I found useful and that I really like to borrow stylistic elements from.
- The problem should be stated first, clearly. This usually helps someone reading the document to think roughly of their own solution first -- the rest of the document only confirms their hunch (if they're competent enough, i.e.).
- Avoid presenting low-level details as long as possible, proceed top-to-bottom in the hierarchy of abstractions in the system you are designing.
- Define all special terms and jargon in a separate section after the introduction.
- Use the right diagrams -- this is a tough one. Finding the right graphical representation to concisely yet lucidly describe something is the toughest problem I've had.
As a CS graduate I often wish I had better match teachers/better focus on math subjects back when I was an undergraduate. Those who disagree need only browse through Khuth's TAoCP and Hennessy/Patterson's book on Quantitative analysis of computer systems. Its a powerful tool which opens new vistas, and never goes to waste
Any performance advantages SCSI drives have over ATA/IDE must surely only come from the way these protocols have been defined, at the command-set and interconnect layers.
SCSI provides a richer set of asynchronous operations, and has a more robust design for its shared bus.
ATA still relies on 2 channels, each shared by 2 disks, but each ATA spec improves on the one before it in terms of command-set, borrowing ideas from SCSI.
SCSI disks also tend to be more high-end, have larger track buffers on the average, which gives better data throughput. Of course all this goodnesss comes at a $$price.
I don't think either of them would really come off better in a latency measurement, because internally, they would use the same disk technology (assuming both disks under comparison have the same mechanical and low-level electronic characteristics).
Although I would love to know if this is actually the case...
It has to be memento...A plot that twists your sense of time and space and warps your mind...And to top it all off, a killer climax. Somehow, not a lot of people I know share my enthusiasm for this movie...maybe slashdotters would disagree
One thing they've done differently is the memory. Its flash+RAM based, instead of being ROM+RAM-based. That should effectively provide more space (if they write all persistent data to flash when the unit is shut down), and better battery utilisation. This is a cool device, and a couple of my friends have the original 5500. One of them, who does testing for EMC, used to mount his test volumes over NFS, and start off his test scripts over telnet, all over the 802.11, while he sat in boring meetings. Not as much software out there, compared to the palmOS platform, though.
Slashdot Mirror
The US preaches free markets to the rest of the world, yet the IT programmers there seem to think they are entitled to a monopoly on jobs.
I thought free market capitalism was about open market and prices based on demand-supply.
Why are IT workers so threatened by this? Is it insecurity about their skills or ability to compete?
Considering the way China and India are growing, many of the brightest graduates that are turned out from state-subsidized universities are better employed at home.
There was a time in the last 2-3 decades where a highly qualified engineer from these countries had no choice but to emigrate to the states to have a career. This is increasingly no longer necessary. Making it harder for people to move to the US will have the beneficial effect of halting the brain drain in these countries and keeping the brightest minds home.
This is not true, or at least wildly inaccurate. The main Indian Government-owned ISP, BSNL, has not blocked any of these websites. Many of the private ISP's haven't either. There is one private ISP -- Reliance Infocomm -- which is owned by the Reliance ADA Group, which happens to also have considerable interests in content generation (they produce bollywood movies, and also are major financial backers to Spielberg's Dreamworks SKG). They are known to block torrent/video sharing sites during prominent movie releases.
The reason I posted this bit of news, is the rather unconventional crowd-sourcing/collaboration approach to science, coupled with the idea of involving non-specialists in his attempt. Would like more informed opinions on this approach to doing science. Even if he fails at the attempt, would, say, a person with an engineering background participating in such a workshop stand to gain anything?
Is this a ponzi scheme or good science with a dash of showmanship thrown in?
I worked for a while in India, and am now in the US finishing my Masters in CS. Here are my two cents. :-) -- if you are being given this on a platter, why let go of the opportunity???
Computer Science education in the US is still leagues ahead of any other country in the world. The IITs and IISc in India are good institutions but still do not have significant research programs that compare with any of the top universities in the US. I suppose the story is similar across the world. Given the option, everyone in the world would like to be educated here in the US
I applaud your intentions of exploring the world -- I do believe that Americans should be more outward looking and understand the world around them better. Also many of the new business opportunities will likely arise out of South Asia and China in the next few decades.
However from a technical perspective, US is still the place to be as far as CS is concerned.
You would be much better off getting the best training that the US has to offer, and then going out into the wider world -- your skills will be much appreciated, and you can make a more substantial contribution to the world.
I am much impressed by the scientific culture that American universities inculcate in their students, and I do believe the world would be a better place if that culture were propagated more aggressively.
A friend interning at Amazon says it was a DDoS attack, and it happened right when they were having an all-hands meeting.
Or rather, perceive, I should say, is that Haneef (an Indian citizen) was a relative/roommate of some of the terrorists
who carried out the failed UK bombings last year.
The Howard government and the Australian political establishment tried to get some mileage out of
a showcase terrorist case by putting him on trial and feeding disinformation to the media.
Luckily, Haneef seemed to have a good lawyer, and the Indian government, Indian media and Australian
media seemed to be wise to the manipulation the Aussie government was upto.
Recently, I came to the US as a grad student, and was shocked that the US has no running water in their toilets.
They actually use pieces of paper!!!
Thats soo lame, not to mention yucky!!! ughhh...
Last year, the Indian government banned a few websites (mostly fundamentalist hindu/muslim sites), and at about the same time I read about onion routing and the EFF's Tor software. :), I am not a fundamentalist, I was just curious about anonymizing technology :).
I tried using it, and although it was obviously slightly slower than normal web access, it worked just fine -- and no
I used to live in Thailand, did some of my schooling there, and I know there is a large expatriate population there who might wish to access Youtube for legitimate reasons. They should try out Tor -- here's an overview:
http://tor.eff.org/overview.html.en
Cellphones were never subsidised by the government. The Indian government never bought a mllion "10$" cellphones so that they could distribute them to poor villagers in remote ares of India.
However, through the mechanisms of a free market economy, this has become a reality in India today, and the government hasn't had to spend a dime in getting this done. It has actually generated huge revenue in the process.
There was a time when the government subsidised electronic communication in India. That was when it took months for anyone to get a landline connection.
Indians should learn from this -- there is no need for the government to spend millions on scams like the OLPC, when computers are going to make their way into Indian classrooms sooner or later.
OLPC seems irrelevant for an economy that's set to become the world's third largest by 2020. Now if MIT were paying the Indian government for access to Indian schools, that would be a different matter entirely.
In India, there are basically two kinds of schools -- the high tuition, exclusive schools run by Christian Convents or rich, privately funded educational institutions, and the 'municipal' schools run by the government.
Most children that go to the former category of schools come from middle class/upper class families and already have access to computers at home.
Presumably, the OLPC program is for the second type of schools, which mostly children who live close to or below the poverty line attend. Most of these schools will have teachers who have never used computers, and who are likely to resent any drastic technological change such as computers in the classroom.
So, along with an OLPC program, the government would have to run a massive teacher-education program to teach the use of these computers in the classroom -- not to mention overhauling the coursework so that it makes effective use of these machines.
In addition, the government would have to put in place infrastructure to service and repair these laptops at affordable prices throughout India.
All of this to be done in a country of more than a billion people speaking hundreds of known languages and dialects.
When you think of these factors, those laptops are going to cost way more than the 100$ MIT claims.
I could go on and on about the fallacies of this scheme, but clearly, it would be crazy for India to adopt it at this point in time.
The government has wisely rubbished OLPC. India cannot progress from slates and chalks to laptop computers in one stroke. It has to progress at an organic rate and accept technology in education gradually, ensuring the teachers are comfortable with it before it gets to the children.
IDEs are a great tool, but they can often obscure the details that one should know too. For instance, I know a lot of people who use Visual Studio who would be lost if they ever had to use make files or script-based configuration/build tools.
:).
I myself learnt to program on an Apple ][e with BASIC, and later graduated to using M$ QBASIC on DOS 6.0. The former, of course, didn't have an IDE, but still ended up teaching me a lot about modularity and thoroughness, whereas QBASIC taught me how powerful an IDE can be, provided you have one.
If you can figure out a way to have a different set of exercises, one which targets IDE-based projects, and another which teaches survival skills using the command line to use the interactive shell for the language you will teach, or to use tools that the language distribution provides, that would be great.
I mean I would have loved to have been taught that way
It is...
http://earth.google.com/images/macscreenshot.jpg
Age of Empires!!! The mac version doesn't allow me to play network games with windows machines, which is sad, really. :). I haven't found a good open-source MS Project alternative either.
Well, MSOffice of course, and Visual Studio for windows development
Apart from that, Mac software is invariably more innovative and better than equivalent alternatives on Windows.
There are many websites out there that use ActiveX, and some that haven't been tested for compatiblity with Safari or Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape.
These are the only reasons I would ever use windows, really.
"Slow" is a subjective assessment. Without any benchmarks to back that up, this discussion is moot.
However, in general, I think Windows, as a GUI-based system, is more efficient at resource usage than Linux+X+Any equivalient Window Manager (KDE/Gnome).
I've been working for small software consulting companies in Pune, India, since I graduated about 5 years ago.
If you want to pick an offshore company to outsource your development, make sure you clarify the following points:
1.) Management experience -- are their enough guru's in the company who can mentor the team that works for you? Do they have experience working on International projects or with different cultures? Does a process exist to pass their experience onto the other employees?
2.) Talent -- You might have to work with inexperienced engineers, but do they have strong fundamentals, and can they learn.
3.) Infrastructure -- How willing is the management to put up the necessary infrastructure (servers, servers rooms with the right air conditioning, power backup, IP telephones etc. etc.)
4.) Hiring pipeline -- Does the company have a good pool of potential employees wanting to work there? Do they have a good liaison with local universities?
5.) Relevance of skill set -- Does the company match your profile? Is their collective skill set relevant to what you want?
You might want to check out the company I work for right now, I think they do pretty well on all these counts.
http://www.gs-lab.com/
I think anyone would prefer to buy an appliance that did one thing really well, over an appliance which purports to do a bunch of things, but does not provide the best user experience for all of them.
The iPod clickwheel interface is also very minimalist and simple and appeals to peope who are not power users or people who work a lot with computers. This broadens their appeal.
Here's another guy looking to pile on to this poor self-involved guy disconnected from reality.
:-). (2) is often necessary and sufficient, unless the executive management of the company is a bunch of 'equi-potential' individuals with a belief in the value of professionalism.
:-).
Going to work is all about two things:
1.) Creating things that make money for the company.
2.) Socially enmeshing yourself in the company so that you get your hands on a sizeable portion of the revenue -- preferably more than the share you deserve.
From his post, it seems to me the guy hasn't thought about 1, and has no clue about 2.
Now I believe (1) to be the reason I started programming as a teenager. The joy of seeing a program work is a big kick, but there is no kick like creating something that is useful to other people, and that puts the bread on your table too. It sounds easy, but a lot of crap gets created in the world, and it only takes great engineering to make something that is of value to humanity.
In the real world, my experience has told me that (1) is often optional
A lot of good companies go bad because they are victims of their own success. They start out with a bunch of techno-geeks at the helm of affairs, and the "do work, get rewarded" policy applies. As they become successful, people gravitate to these places for a share of the pot of honey. Then you have cliques and factions, and things start to go downhill from there.
The surest sign that you have to get out of the company is not that you don't have an office, or that your manager doesn't kiss you full on the mouth every morning (with tongue).
It really depends on your priorities -- If you're the creative type who takes pride in your work, leave only when you're not learning anything new, and when you're only twiddling your thumbs at the office everyday. If you want money, leave when you don't have any route to the honey-pot.
Usually, the nature of life dictates that the one also implies the other
I've been working for a few years now, so here's my take on documents I found useful and that I really like to borrow stylistic elements from.
- The problem should be stated first, clearly. This usually helps someone reading the document to think roughly of their own solution first -- the rest of the document only confirms their hunch (if they're competent enough, i.e.).
- Avoid presenting low-level details as long as possible, proceed top-to-bottom in the hierarchy of abstractions in the system you are designing.
- Define all special terms and jargon in a separate section after the introduction.
- Use the right diagrams -- this is a tough one. Finding the right graphical representation to concisely yet lucidly describe something is the toughest problem I've had.
As a CS graduate I often wish I had better match
teachers/better focus on math subjects back when I was an undergraduate.
Those who disagree need only browse through Khuth's TAoCP and Hennessy/Patterson's book on Quantitative analysis of computer systems.
Its a powerful tool which opens new vistas, and never goes to waste
Any performance advantages SCSI drives have over ATA/IDE must surely only come from the way these protocols have been defined, at the command-set and interconnect layers.
SCSI provides a richer set of asynchronous operations, and has a more robust design for its shared bus.
ATA still relies on 2 channels, each shared by 2 disks, but each ATA spec improves on the one before it in terms of command-set, borrowing ideas from SCSI.
SCSI disks also tend to be more high-end, have larger track buffers on the average, which gives better data throughput. Of course all this goodnesss comes at a $$price.
I don't think either of them would really come off better in a latency measurement, because internally, they would use the same disk technology (assuming both disks under comparison have the same mechanical and low-level electronic characteristics).
Although I would love to know if this is actually the case...
One cool thing I liked about the Zaurus was that the 'graffiti' mode also provided word completion, something which Palm's overlooked.
It has to be memento...A plot that twists your sense of time and space and warps your mind...And to top it all off, a killer climax.
Somehow, not a lot of people I know share my enthusiasm for this movie...maybe slashdotters would disagree
Well a couple i know of are Hathaway and Siti Cable.
One thing they've done differently is the memory.
Its flash+RAM based, instead of being ROM+RAM-based.
That should effectively provide more space (if they write all persistent data to flash when the unit is shut down), and better battery utilisation.
This is a cool device, and a couple of my friends have the original 5500. One of them, who does testing for EMC, used to mount his test volumes over NFS, and start off his test scripts over telnet, all over the 802.11, while he sat in boring meetings.
Not as much software out there, compared to the palmOS platform, though.