Unless you are trying to be another Jim Corbett, you are unlikely to come across even a monkey,forget an elephant or a tiger (???) if you are applying for an executive's job in any of the metro's or urban areas. Of course, cows are there, but nowadays found only in gully areas or residential areas. FYI, I am living in Bangalore for the present and I have contacts with a number of "foreigners", both within my organisation or those visiting it and have yet to find someone who finds the problems you mentioned a reason to leave their jobs here. The person heading the Organisation sharing our office premises has been in Bangalore for around 20+ years and is originally from UK and he not only is v.comfortable, but has mastered the local language quite well. And yes, I am yet to see a sparrow near my house/place of work and come across a cow, only when i take a walk near my house. And economic liberalisation has meant, most upper & middle class attitudes & lifestyles, around the world are more or less the same (ie., good education, a good house in a nice surrounding, good social life, having good spending power,etc.,)
I am not saying, there won't be any problems in relocation, but rather that some of them may be due to stereotypes you have developed(in your case, seeing a wild tiger) and some could be ignored (seeing cows all around), if your job is challenging or satisfactory enough and you could manage to have a decent lifestyle.
more tech details about the simputer
on
State Of The Simputer
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Not long ago, the guys from encore gave a talk at our local lug on the simputer and from what i could gleam, they now seem to be moving towards customizing the simputer for special sectors like Manufacturing cos., etc., instead of relying too much on it's original purpose to fund themselves. You can find slides from the talks here.
I'd prefer to use free software to write my articles, like LaTeX or OpenOffice and then distribute PDFs or host HTML files for people to look over.
Have you looked at Plone. Pretty powerful & easy to setup & use & yeah, under a gpl compatible license. Using CMFOO, an addon, you can write in open office & once you save the document it will show up on the website. Pretty cool.
While the president of India does not have much political power, his opinions atleast among the politicians do make an impact. The current president, Abdul Kalam, by virtue of his being a scientist & a former scientific adviser to the Prime Minister does carry a lot of weight. And one more thing to remember is, having the President of India advocate open source software carries a lot of weight and is a great reference for people(including yours truly) who are pushing for OSS/FS in the Indian Govt., against a sceptic & unwilling to change beaurocracy.
Slightly OT, will these incidents combined with countries favouring OSS/FS over s/w developed by American Cos.,(mostly, i a may be wrong) lead to the US adopting OSS/FS more widely & more rapidly.
The specs are open, but the implementation is patented. ie., you can create a opentype font and release it under any license even GPL and adobe won't do anything, but the patent is on the method. Again, IANAL, but one of my friends, who is a lawyer is researching this stuff, since we use OTF'S a lot and i will try to put his research online.
I disagree it is reinventing the wheel, but rather it prevents reinventing the wheel, since now OTF'S are being developed for each toolkit, like gtk uses pango, while the qt guys are developing their own. Having such a important feature at the X-server level is good.
While the politics that is happening in the XFree86 team is somewhat disgusting, I am extremely happy that STST is integrated into the XFree86 core.
Here's why:
STSF has OpenType Font Support, which is accepted as a standard for rendering indic and other complex asian texts(arabic, urdu, etc) by the developer community. By having OTF support at the X-server level instead of the toolkit level(like pango for gtk), almost all GUI's if internationalized would render in all Asian Languages. This is a great step forward for spreading linux into asian countries, but it's unfortunate this politics has to happen. BTW, some of the STSF development was done here in Sun's Bangalore centre.
Anyway, some related links:
More about Opentype fonts:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thr ead_id=1856380&forum_id=12019
Building OTF
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/int ro.htm
Unicode FAQ about Indic: http://www.unicode.org/faq/indic.html
Links about fonts, otf,xserver,etc:
http://indlinux.org/links.php
The indic_computing mailing list - expect to see a lot of heat generated because of this announcement:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?for um_id=2967
On Ian Gillan's website, Kalpana Chawla's husband Jean-Pierre Harrison has written an interesting piece abt the CDs she carried aboard the STS-107 mission.
As a tribute to Columbia & the crew, I am dedicatingn them the
Space Truckin Song.
Rakesh Sharma was the first Indian in Space. He flew aboard the Russian rocket Soyuz T-11 on an Indo-Russian space programme. Kalpana was the first Indian female and first Indian-American in space.
Here is a better collection of stories than the rediff one on kalpana chawla. Incidentally, chawla was the most experienced of the crew, this being her 2nd trip & she is is the 2nd Indian in space after Rakesh sharma did it with the Russians in 1984.
BTW, this is just in:
Columbia crew remains found
Some people from Microsoft gave a talk on Shared Source Implementation of.NET in Linux Bangalore 2002, a conference abt linux related technologies held in bangalore. You need to appreciate their balls. The presentation is in star office format.
I want to write the scenario on Linux (maybe with a set of Latex commands or SGML?). Good.But why bother with typing latex commands, when you have Lyx.
Lyx, according to lyx.org, is a
"LyX produces high quality, professional output..using LaTeX.. in the background..No knowledge of LaTeX is necessary to use LyX, although it will give a user more power. "
Lyx comes with templates for movie & broadway scripts & is a powerful WYSIWYM editor that lets you concentrate on writing rather than formatting. It also has an in-built & easy to use
versioning system and you can output to ps/pdf/html/ascii/dvi & misc other formats right from the menu. Read this for more info on what lyx is.
The reason this post is more abt lyx rather than writing scripts is, it is not a specialised software but never the less it is highly versatile & has some great features to aid you in script-writing.
..that separates the haves(college-educated) and have-not's(drop-outs) are 'risk'. Most of the educated people are generally averse to risk, in the sense that they whatever subject they learn, be it management or engineering they are taught to manage risk. While I am not saying that educated people don't take risks, but people who haven't gone to college maybe less prone to over analysis and take the plunge in following their vision.Ok, I am being overtly simplistic and may be generalisations, but it's not entirely false. Let's look at the facts:
From a forbes article:
The vast majority of the 234 U.S. billionaires whose education level is tracked by Forbes magazine through 1999 finished college; 100 have some form of advanced degree, but 41--that's 18%--never got their college diplomas and two never even finished high school.
The world's richest man(i don't have to stress here:-) ) is a dropout, India's richest men: Dhirubhai Ambani(Reliance founder), Azim Premji(Wipro) are all great examples.
One IIMB professor told me that 10 of the
richest people are dropouts or have basic education & the 11th(i believe ballmer) works for the 1st(bill). I haven't verified it though, so take it with a pinch of salt.
The point I am trying to make is not that education doesn't help you or isn't necessary, but rather bookish/college education is not the be all or end all in making a person a great individual or entrepreneur or leader.
Which brings up questions for Open Source developers: What's involved in translating programs? Is there a process that can be followed to make the inevitable easier? Is there a group providing guidelines for this already? -- Do you work in program translation? Step up and do tell."
Yes to all. Translating OS s/w is no big deal & doesn't require any programming skills. Kde & Gnome have great documentation, resources all neatly organised. So, I will let them do the talking:
Translation howto for kannada - This is a howto I wrote yesterday for people wanting to translate their language into kannada(an indian language spoken in karnataka). But the concept applies to all indian languages & other languages too to a certain extent.
[OK, I confess some self interest is involved here:-)]
Actually, kannada support came first on windows XP thanks to the karnataka govt support & since MS & Adobe developed opentype fonts(must for complexity of indian languages), but thanks to the Pango team, we hope to have support before MS does. And many state govts in India are also pressurising MS to bring Win XP in their languages and already bengali,hindi & tamil(kde is fully translated into tamil.) are in the works. But, we hope to set it right, soon.
Very true. But you need to remember, that the US has a special fondness for Pakistan becuase of it's assistance in the cold war days & hence most Us govts, and to a certain extent the clinton regime used to treat India & Pakistan even handedly. Fortunately, the Bush govt., has released this folly and treats India like it should be, although discreetly.
To be ontopic, CDAC, despite being a govt organisation has a great marketing wing & it's Indian language s/w is still on the top. And the clever thing is it is being merged with another organisation NCST, which is more into opensource stuff, while CDAC retains it's commercial ways of doing things. But that's how things should work, in this market economy, post protection days.
WTO/WIPO has a provision for countries to patent their products/processes, which are unique to a particular region. If a country fails to patent such a thing(french champagne, medicianal properties of turmeric acc to ayurvedi system, multaani mitti, etc.,). We screwed up only in patenting Basmati Rice, but we are now better prepared to handle unchecked capitalism of the 'texas' variety.;-)
To be on-topic:
Multani-Mitti is a safe, cool(literally) & great way to get rid of those pesky pimples.
Heres one such treatment.
Very true. For one, you can't dedicate all resources to one problem & then move to the next. That's practically impossible. Secondly, the major factor that propelled India's success in the software arena was it's liberalisation programme. In a layman's words, the govt stopped screwing the business & hence encouraged the mild, talented & generally wary-of-the-bureaucracy middle-class men & women to become entrepreneurs.
But however, their counterparts in the villages continued to getting screwed for as simple a thing as obtaining records of their own land, which they used to get after bribing the village head, upwards of 1000 Rs. & wait upto 1 year. Recently, bhoomi, a project of the karnataka govt., was introduced, which basically is a s/w which gives out the land records of a famer within 3 hrs & costs Rs.10.
Cancelling a debt will hurt the recipient in the long run: He will get used to getting help for free and develop an addiction. Not to forget foreign aid has contributed in propping up dictators & bad ecnonomic policies.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen. Firefox should also support Presentation Mode, a very cool & useful feature that only Opera supports.
In konqueror, there is a nice button to clear the current URL. On mozilla & firefox, install the diggler extension, which provides the same function.
I am not saying, there won't be any problems in relocation, but rather that some of them may be due to stereotypes you have developed(in your case, seeing a wild tiger) and some could be ignored (seeing cows all around), if your job is challenging or satisfactory enough and you could manage to have a decent lifestyle.
Some links:
Myths about Indian Business women
Outside execs who have succeeded in India
Not long ago, the guys from encore gave a talk at our local lug on the simputer and from what i could gleam, they now seem to be moving towards customizing the simputer for special sectors like Manufacturing cos., etc., instead of relying too much on it's original purpose to fund themselves. You can find slides from the talks here.
Debian Sid users can get the latest kde debs from the cvs here.
I'd prefer to use free software to write my articles, like LaTeX or OpenOffice and then distribute PDFs or host HTML files for people to look over. Have you looked at Plone. Pretty powerful & easy to setup & use & yeah, under a gpl compatible license. Using CMFOO, an addon, you can write in open office & once you save the document it will show up on the website. Pretty cool.
While the president of India does not have much political power, his opinions atleast among the politicians do make an impact. The current president, Abdul Kalam, by virtue of his being a scientist & a former scientific adviser to the Prime Minister does carry a lot of weight. And one more thing to remember is, having the President of India advocate open source software carries a lot of weight and is a great reference for people(including yours truly) who are pushing for OSS/FS in the Indian Govt., against a sceptic & unwilling to change beaurocracy. Slightly OT, will these incidents combined with countries favouring OSS/FS over s/w developed by American Cos.,(mostly, i a may be wrong) lead to the US adopting OSS/FS more widely & more rapidly.
I disagree it is reinventing the wheel, but rather it prevents reinventing the wheel, since now OTF'S are being developed for each toolkit, like gtk uses pango, while the qt guys are developing their own. Having such a important feature at the X-server level is good.
Please refer to my previous post on why OTF'S are so important.
Here's why:
STSF has OpenType Font Support, which is accepted as a standard for rendering indic and other complex asian texts(arabic, urdu, etc) by the developer community. By having OTF support at the X-server level instead of the toolkit level(like pango for gtk), almost all GUI's if internationalized would render in all Asian Languages. This is a great step forward for spreading linux into asian countries, but it's unfortunate this politics has to happen. BTW, some of the STSF development was done here in Sun's Bangalore centre.
Anyway, some related links:
More about Opentype fonts:r ead_id=1856380&forum_id=12019
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?th
Building OTFt ro.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/in
Unicode FAQ about Indic:
http://www.unicode.org/faq/indic.html
Links about fonts, otf,xserver,etc:
http://indlinux.org/links.php
The indic_computing mailing list - expect to see a lot of heat generated because of this announcement:r um_id=2967
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?fo
As a tribute to Columbia & the crew, I am dedicatingn them the Space Truckin Song.
The times of India has more details about her background.
Here is a better collection of stories than the rediff one on kalpana chawla. Incidentally, chawla was the most experienced of the crew, this being her 2nd trip & she is is the 2nd Indian in space after Rakesh sharma did it with the Russians in 1984.
BTW, this is just in: Columbia crew remains found
Some people from Microsoft gave a talk on Shared Source Implementation of .NET in Linux Bangalore 2002, a conference abt linux related technologies held in bangalore. You need to appreciate their balls. The presentation is in star office format.
The promotion guide in one nice page. BTW, the default desktop is pretty clean.
Good.But why bother with typing latex commands, when you have Lyx.
Lyx, according to lyx.org, is a
Lyx comes with templates for movie & broadway scripts & is a powerful WYSIWYM editor that lets you concentrate on writing rather than formatting. It also has an in-built & easy to use versioning system and you can output to ps/pdf/html/ascii/dvi & misc other formats right from the menu. Read this for more info on what lyx is.
The reason this post is more abt lyx rather than writing scripts is, it is not a specialised software but never the less it is highly versatile & has some great features to aid you in script-writing.
Let's look at the facts:
From a forbes article: The vast majority of the 234 U.S. billionaires whose education level is tracked by Forbes magazine through 1999 finished college; 100 have some form of advanced degree, but 41--that's 18%--never got their college diplomas and two never even finished high school.
The world's richest man(i don't have to stress here
The point I am trying to make is not that education doesn't help you or isn't necessary, but rather bookish/college education is not the be all or end all in making a person a great individual or entrepreneur or leader.
The GNOME Translation Project
KDE i18n project
Translation howto for kannada - This is a howto I wrote yesterday for people wanting to translate their language into kannada(an indian language spoken in karnataka). But the concept applies to all indian languages & other languages too to a certain extent. [OK, I confess some self interest is involved here :-)]
Actually, kannada support came first on windows XP thanks to the karnataka govt support & since MS & Adobe developed opentype fonts(must for complexity of indian languages), but thanks to the Pango team, we hope to have support before MS does. And many state govts in India are also pressurising MS to bring Win XP in their languages and already bengali,hindi & tamil(kde is fully translated into tamil.) are in the works. But, we hope to set it right, soon.
To be ontopic, CDAC, despite being a govt organisation has a great marketing wing & it's Indian language s/w is still on the top. And the clever thing is it is being merged with another organisation NCST, which is more into opensource stuff, while CDAC retains it's commercial ways of doing things. But that's how things should work, in this market economy, post protection days.
To be on-topic: Multani-Mitti is a safe, cool(literally) & great way to get rid of those pesky pimples. Heres one such treatment.
"Hello Mr. Gates, I'll be your server today!" That's cool. You can find the picture here.
It seems others are noticing elen feiss's popularity with the geek crowd.
A good guide to completely disable or uninstall the Flash player/plugin, with lots of links to such s/w's besides other ad-blockers for both windows & linux.
a commercial product - flashswitch
Google also returns a lot of results.
But however, their counterparts in the villages continued to getting screwed for as simple a thing as obtaining records of their own land, which they used to get after bribing the village head, upwards of 1000 Rs. & wait upto 1 year. Recently, bhoomi, a project of the karnataka govt., was introduced, which basically is a s/w which gives out the land records of a famer within 3 hrs & costs Rs.10.
Cancelling a debt will hurt the recipient in the long run: He will get used to getting help for free and develop an addiction.
Not to forget foreign aid has contributed in propping up dictators & bad ecnonomic policies.
The problem is solved.