I am from India and I have worked with American companies in the past, though not in an outsourcing kind of situation. While I understand
+ the anger (I would be too if jobs from here were shifted to Timbaktu for example) + and I understand the under-the-table tactics of Indian outsourcing companies operating in India,
I would like to add my 0.02$ to the debate. First, I have never seen expert jobs being outsourced. Most of the companies I know of, talk about outsourcing un-important parts, something that is not critical to business. Expert jobs are not outsourced, product management is not outsourced, sales jobs are not outsourced. Fact is, If you are working for one of these companies in India, you have a clear sense that you are no-where near decision centers. So important things are still in US, even for technology companies. The very fact that the management is ready to go to a lower bidder underlines the fact that the pieces are not important. The counterparts I knew and respected for skill are still employed and much in demand.
Second, all such debated necessarily assume that people who instead of US folks finally get to do these jobs are morons. That is a naive assumption. Maybe these jobs were actually low skill jobs to begin with or lot of people in US were living under a false assumption that they were "doing technology". I know enough morons working in US offices who should have been fired a long ago. The only advantage these people had that they were born in a good place and nothing else. It would be nice if someone could present an alternate version of this story as well. If nothing then just to balance the debate a little bit.
If you want fewer bugs, then Ubuntu LTS is really the way to go. Those LTS releases are expected to be relatively stable for 5 years.
I am not sure that 12.04 LTS is that rock stable. I installed 12.04 on rackspace (using their image) and mysql refused to start because of some AppArmor bug. If you search launchpad you can get that bug. Now mysql is a big and fairly known package and lot of people would be using it on server. Now I understand the rationale of "it will be fixed soon", "someone already has the hack" and "you fix it, you did not pay for it". However just imagine how surprised you would be it it were an LTS release. I do not think Debian stable would have given someone such a jolt.
I started off with RedHat (5.2) days and stuck with it for a long time. I guess part of the reason was that my work also required working on Linux machines and office was using RedHat and later CentOs. I stopped using Linux for a while and then I wanted to try it again on a laptop, a 2004 model iBook.
I think I tried Ubuntu because I had heard it could support my wireless driver without doing any compilation chores on my part. The first Ubuntu CD I got was in probably 2007 (Ubuntu 7) and then I stuck with Ubuntu till 2011. It was more like a side affair. However since last year my work machine has again been a Linux machine. I was happy with Ubuntu but I wanted to try Debian just for curiosity's sake. No big reasons or plans.
I guess after using things daily and getting back in groove I was no longer in need of "polish" and "out-of-box". I tried Debian Testing with Gnome3/XFCE and then moved to crunch-bang12. Partly it was my search to make my desktop my way since I spend almost all my time on Linux now. I do not think I will try anything new sooner. I like the feel of an icon less desktop and arbitrary control. My desktop, my way.
... PHP under Apache (And really what serious professional would use anything else?)...
My personal default setup for any medium-sized website is nowadays nginx (load balancer) => varnish => nginx (static content) => php-fpm
second that. which serious professional is still with Apache + mod_php? excuse me please! The serious professional world (at least the people who can decide their destiny) has already moved to NGINX
I agree with the part that X lets you display what is happening on remote machine to your local terminal (virtualization) part. Just sending the bitmaps/buffers back and forth is very primitive (VNC) and does not perform well. And yes, people short circuiting that part just to say that yeah! everything is running on this box only miss that part. on the other hand, X is old and crumbling around and I am not sure about the audio/video etc support for modern devices and hardware. Maybe an X done for today;s world is the answer.
The poster has changed [Every time you log in to any service that uses a plain HTTP connection that's essentially what you're doing.] to >>Every time you log in to Twitter, Facebook or any other service that uses a plain HTTP connection and that is not accurate. The Facebook login page uses https.
At work I have a wyse xenith thin client on my desk that I use with Xen Desktop 5 VDI. I use Xen desktop to launch VM templates that contain my development tools like perforce and visual studio. I really do not feel any difference between using my laptop or the thin client when I am on my desk. The only advantage I can see for the laptop is portability.
I have not read or seen this book so maybe I am not good enough to comment on the *content* of this book. However I am really troubled by these sort of books from O'reilly of late. They look less like books and more like reference cards or compendiums.
First observation : I dont know what is slashdot now-a-days! is it some kind of call-center-bashing forum ? Most of the people are anyway posting off-topic, so let me add to the dirt.
1) first fact about Business - It is blind/impartial to nationality, cast,creed,gender and rants. Business goes where it sees fit. It does not matter whether it operates in America/India/Timbaktu. it sees and seeks profit. And in a sense business is visionary. who would have thought about moving to india 10 yrs back ? Face it, people making those decisions are smarter and rich !! too.
2) Most of the people "ranting" about "stupid" call-center jobs today are the kind of people who were in such jobs, lost it to better competition and are now just jealous, thinking w/o head. If you are so smart, i am sure outsourcing of a low-end call-center job should not hurt you. people on slashdot just create funny signatures, use words like troll, mods and think they have become geek , with some kind of halo around theit head.
3) Do not comment on kashmir issue w/o knowing about it. It is very easy to open your mouth and say whatever you like. It is not for nothing that a proxy war has been going on for almost 20 yrs now, so many people dead. People are not playing games here. its an involved and complex issue.
4) This is a sensitive issue and saying create an independent kashmir may not be the solution. it is not that indians and pakistanis hate each other or anything like that. But how can you concede some part of a country just because some morons with slashdot login think like that.
5) I think americans get too much w/o doing anything. They should move around the world to actually realize that fact. with your kind of talent, If you were born in india, probably you would not even finish high school.
6) Militants want to target software companies because they symbolize the "new and confident" face of india.
7) when indian economy was opened up in 1992, there were talks that soon all the indian would be w/o jobs and then there were re-assurance talks that in an open economy the best always wins! The fact that it has happened the other way round just goes on to show who is better!
when you start learning, you got to ask this Question,"How do I Install x on Y", nothing funny or be-littling there. The reason you see so many such questions is simply because so many people are trying it out. Do you know everything ? answer is NO.
And if you know how to install linux on PC today (even RH 5.2 would get you some credit) you are not earning any extra credit for it. You are not a hacker if you can do this and similarly alice/bob is not a no-hacker if they can not do it.
Wow! if this is implemented, this is simply wow!! Though promise of a really Fast pipe and ultra-blazig speeds are still not fulfilled, i can vouch for the temendous improvements in net connection speed/options that has happened in India,especially bangalore. I remember the times when I had to connect to my web server (verio) using modem/phone Lines, data actually used to come in trickles and any "work" was done during night only. The only good side effect was that you developed buddha-like patience. Now people are providing broadband over Cable wires/CDMA network/anything. Mobile network providers are into GPRS and now its actually possible to plug your mobile in LapTop and go net surfing.
I think half the slashdot crowd now-a-days speaks just for the heck for speaking and even goes on the extent of comparing Oracle against MySQL. Face it, while you may like open-source/BSD/MySQL/PostGreSQL they are no match for Oracle Database server. (lets keep iLearning etc. out of it) 1) Stored Proc support in MySQL is only now added No triggers, foreign_key support (?) , and what is there with all this InnoDB/ISAM for transactional support ? All this lack of features is really a pain in ass if you have worked with Oracle. 2) Dont crap about oracle setup, because anyway only a DBA is supposed to install it. And if you are installing it on your Laptop you are not mission critical anyway. 3) PostGreSQL window installer is still beta(face it). 4) PostGreSQL/mySQL is no business competition to oracle. (even the idea is laughable) ask any Oracle sales guy.
My God, if postGreSQL is so good vis-a-vis oracle why is Red Hat patching their kernel to run Oracle on Enterprise servers?
yes, for slapping together 4 web pages MySQL is ok, but if i have "Money" i would anyday buy Oracle.
yah, be a zealot , that is ok, but accept realities also.
its not a question of whether people would like to write enterprise applications in java. most of the consulation industry atleast is already doing that.
I am sure language per se can not be such a deciding factor when designing enterprise applications and the fact that it runs on VM or the fact that users of app would have to purchase Big IRON machines to run it. No, there are never the deciding factors!
Java is certainly not suitable for certain kind of applications but so is any other language. and this false 'macho' sense that i am doing it on metal in 'C/C++' is well false, thats all. [ there would be thousands of instances of brain-damaged C++ code written by brain-damaged programmers!]
Its not that just writing it in C/C++ makes you a more capable programmer! Java is much more cleaner. Things that suck most are primarily in libraries.
And, anyway, extending the logic, why not write everything in assembly ? or make your own ADDER from NAND gates ? or do you know how the electrons tunnel through to make a transistor work ?
well, i am writing this long mail because i have just come from a long tour of north india at the peak of summer through heat , dust and dehydration. First to the nationalists, the most often quoted line is ' Since india is such a big country, you can not ignore even the small percentages which is in big and small cities and which is largely responsible for the big outgrowth of cybercafes/internet centers with charges like 20 bucks ( 50 cents) for 1 hr surfing. people in places like engineering , medical colleges and uiversities etc etc. And if you look at this number obviously we have a very large crowd ( let;s say switzerland/ australia ?)
However, the fact remains that a very big portion of this very big country housing very many people is plain ignorant of internet and don;t give a damn. They are fighting for basic infrastructure , power/roads/water. Have you been to villages ? real small cities ? Idea of having a simputer is not bad, but it can only be seen as a logical progession of infrastructure facilities. In my view Computer/Communication can also be thought of as some component of 'infrastructure' and as such it is not needed for existence of this score of millions of people, their urgent priorities are elsewhere. As such the 'concept of a simputer' is fine, but it is something an indian farmer can do without.
While for news clippings and TV coverage this makes a great story, (Farmers trading with help of technology in xyz Area of India) fact remains that No Body needs it at that level where satisfying basic requirements for living itself is a huge task.
probably i would like to own a simputer for my 'needs' but not the farmer in himalayan hinterland who had to fetch water from 5 kms. probably put lots of games on it and distribute it to village kids , that is the only possible use i see in villages.
however if you don;t have a > 256 MB RAM machine, don;t try to run tomcat etc automatically when forte starts. I believe default configuration of forte is hugely bloated. a better option would be to use netbeans (netbeans.org) that is much slimmer or turn off those modules from loading that you are not using in forte.
Slashdot Mirror
I am from India and I have worked with American companies in the past, though not in an outsourcing kind of situation. While I understand
+ the anger (I would be too if jobs from here were shifted to Timbaktu for example)
+ and I understand the under-the-table tactics of Indian outsourcing companies operating in India,
I would like to add my 0.02$ to the debate. First, I have never seen expert jobs being outsourced. Most of the companies I know of, talk about outsourcing un-important parts, something that is not critical to business. Expert jobs are not outsourced, product management is not outsourced, sales jobs are not outsourced. Fact is, If you are working for one of these companies in India, you have a clear sense that you are no-where near decision centers. So important things are still in US, even for technology companies. The very fact that the management is ready to go to a lower bidder underlines the fact that the pieces are not important. The counterparts I knew and respected for skill are still employed and much in demand.
Second, all such debated necessarily assume that people who instead of US folks finally get to do these jobs are morons. That is a naive assumption. Maybe these jobs were actually low skill jobs to begin with or lot of people in US were living under a false assumption that they were "doing technology". I know enough morons working in US offices who should have been fired a long ago. The only advantage these people had that they were born in a good place and nothing else. It would be nice if someone could present an alternate version of this story as well. If nothing then just to balance the debate a little bit.
If you want fewer bugs, then Ubuntu LTS is really the way to go. Those LTS releases are expected to be relatively stable for 5 years.
I am not sure that 12.04 LTS is that rock stable. I installed 12.04 on rackspace (using their image) and mysql refused to start because of some AppArmor bug. If you search launchpad you can get that bug. Now mysql is a big and fairly known package and lot of people would be using it on server. Now I understand the rationale of "it will be fixed soon", "someone already has the hack" and "you fix it, you did not pay for it". However just imagine how surprised you would be it it were an LTS release. I do not think Debian stable would have given someone such a jolt.
I started off with RedHat (5.2) days and stuck with it for a long time. I guess part of the reason was that my work also required working on Linux machines and office was using RedHat and later CentOs. I stopped using Linux for a while and then I wanted to try it again on a laptop, a 2004 model iBook.
I think I tried Ubuntu because I had heard it could support my wireless driver without doing any compilation chores on my part. The first Ubuntu CD I got was in probably 2007 (Ubuntu 7) and then I stuck with Ubuntu till 2011. It was more like a side affair. However since last year my work machine has again been a Linux machine. I was happy with Ubuntu but I wanted to try Debian just for curiosity's sake. No big reasons or plans.
I guess after using things daily and getting back in groove I was no longer in need of "polish" and "out-of-box". I tried Debian Testing with Gnome3/XFCE and then moved to crunch-bang12. Partly it was my search to make my desktop my way since I spend almost all my time on Linux now. I do not think I will try anything new sooner. I like the feel of an icon less desktop and arbitrary control. My desktop, my way.
To summarize RedHat -> Ubuntu -> Debian
My personal default setup for any medium-sized website is nowadays nginx (load balancer) => varnish => nginx (static content) => php-fpm
second that. which serious professional is still with Apache + mod_php? excuse me please! The serious professional world (at least the people who can decide their destiny) has already moved to NGINX
I agree with the part that X lets you display what is happening on remote machine to your local terminal (virtualization) part. Just sending the bitmaps/buffers back and forth is very primitive (VNC) and does not perform well. And yes, people short circuiting that part just to say that yeah! everything is running on this box only miss that part. on the other hand, X is old and crumbling around and I am not sure about the audio/video etc support for modern devices and hardware. Maybe an X done for today;s world is the answer.
The poster has changed
[Every time you log in to any service that uses a plain HTTP connection that's essentially what you're doing.] to
>>Every time you log in to Twitter, Facebook or any other service that uses a plain HTTP connection and that is not accurate. The Facebook login page uses https.
At work I have a wyse xenith thin client on my desk that I use with Xen Desktop 5 VDI. I use Xen desktop to launch VM templates that contain my development tools like perforce and visual studio. I really do not feel any difference between using my laptop or the thin client when I am on my desk. The only advantage I can see for the laptop is portability.
I have not read or seen this book so maybe I am not good enough to comment on the *content* of this book. However I am really troubled by these sort of books from O'reilly of late. They look less like books and more like reference cards or compendiums.
First observation : I dont know what is slashdot now-a-days! is it some kind of call-center-bashing forum ? Most of the people are anyway posting off-topic, so let me add to the dirt.
1)
first fact about Business - It is blind/impartial to nationality, cast,creed,gender and rants. Business goes where it sees fit. It does not matter whether it operates in America/India/Timbaktu. it sees and seeks profit. And in a sense business is visionary. who would have thought about moving to india 10 yrs back ? Face it, people making those decisions are smarter and rich !! too.
2) Most of the people "ranting" about "stupid" call-center jobs today are the kind of people who were in such jobs, lost it to better competition and are now just jealous, thinking w/o head. If you are so smart, i am sure outsourcing of a low-end call-center job should not hurt you. people on slashdot just create funny signatures, use words like troll, mods and think they have become geek , with some kind of halo around theit head.
3) Do not comment on kashmir issue w/o knowing about it. It is very easy to open your mouth and say whatever you like. It is not for nothing that a proxy war has been going on for almost 20 yrs now, so many people dead. People are not playing games here. its an involved and complex issue.
4)
This is a sensitive issue and saying create an independent kashmir may not be the solution. it is not that indians and pakistanis hate each other or anything like that. But how can you concede some part of a country just because some morons with slashdot login think like that.
5) I think americans get too much w/o doing anything. They should move around the world to actually realize that fact. with your kind of talent, If you were born in india, probably you would not even finish high school.
6) Militants want to target software companies because they symbolize the "new and confident" face of india.
7) when indian economy was opened up in 1992, there were talks that soon all the indian would be w/o jobs and then there were re-assurance talks that in an open economy the best always wins! The fact that it has happened the other way round just goes on to show who is better!
I am ready for more mud-slinging
when you start learning, you got to ask this Question ,"How do I Install x on Y", nothing funny or be-littling there. The reason you see so many such questions is simply because so many people are trying it out. Do you know everything ? answer is NO.
And if you know how to install linux on PC today (even RH 5.2 would get you some credit) you are not earning any extra credit for it. You are not a hacker if you can do this and similarly alice/bob is not a no-hacker if they can not do it.
Wow! if this is implemented, this is simply wow!! Though promise of a really Fast pipe and ultra-blazig speeds are still not fulfilled, i can vouch for the temendous improvements in net connection speed/options that has happened in India,especially bangalore.
I remember the times when I had to connect to my web server (verio) using modem/phone Lines, data actually used to come in trickles and any "work" was done during night only. The only good side effect was that you developed buddha-like patience.
Now people are providing broadband over Cable wires/CDMA network/anything. Mobile network providers are into GPRS and now its actually possible to plug your mobile in LapTop and go net surfing.
I think half the slashdot crowd now-a-days speaks just for the heck for speaking and even goes on the extent of comparing Oracle against MySQL.
Face it, while you may like open-source/BSD/MySQL/PostGreSQL they are no match for Oracle Database server. (lets keep iLearning etc. out of it)
1) Stored Proc support in MySQL is only now added No triggers, foreign_key support (?) , and what is there with all this InnoDB/ISAM for transactional support ? All this lack of features is really a pain in ass if you have worked with Oracle.
2) Dont crap about oracle setup, because anyway only a DBA is supposed to install it. And if you are installing it on your Laptop you are not mission critical anyway.
3) PostGreSQL window installer is still beta(face it).
4) PostGreSQL/mySQL is no business competition to oracle. (even the idea is laughable) ask any Oracle sales guy.
My God, if postGreSQL is so good vis-a-vis oracle why is Red Hat patching their kernel to run Oracle on Enterprise servers?
yes, for slapping together 4 web pages MySQL is ok, but if i have "Money" i would anyday buy Oracle.
yah, be a zealot , that is ok, but accept realities also.
its not a question of whether people would like to write enterprise applications in java. most of the consulation industry atleast is already doing that.
I am sure language per se can not be such a deciding factor when designing enterprise applications and the fact that it runs on VM or the fact that users of app would have to purchase Big IRON machines to run it. No, there are never the deciding factors!
Java is certainly not suitable for certain kind of applications but so is any other language. and this false 'macho' sense that i am doing it on metal in 'C/C++' is well false, thats all. [ there would be thousands of instances of brain-damaged C++ code written by brain-damaged programmers!]
Its not that just writing it in C/C++ makes you a more capable programmer! Java is much more cleaner. Things that suck most are primarily in libraries.
And, anyway, extending the logic, why not write everything in assembly ? or make your own ADDER from NAND gates ? or do you know how the electrons tunnel through to make a transistor work ?
well sure thing yahoo got the place's name in south india all wrong! The village is KodaiKanal and its near to chennai (Madras).
I don;t know if i can now believe Yahoo with spelling of places any longer!
well, i am writing this long mail because i have just come from a long tour of north india at the peak of summer through heat , dust and dehydration. First to the nationalists, the most often quoted line is ' Since india is such a big country, you can not ignore even the small percentages which is in big and small cities and which is largely responsible for the big outgrowth of cybercafes/internet centers with charges like 20 bucks ( 50 cents) for 1 hr surfing. people in places like engineering , medical colleges and uiversities etc etc. And if you look at this number obviously we have a very large crowd ( let;s say switzerland/ australia ?)
However, the fact remains that a very big portion of this very big country housing very many people is plain ignorant of internet and don;t give a damn. They are fighting for basic infrastructure , power/roads/water. Have you been to villages ? real small cities ? Idea of having a simputer is not bad, but it can only be seen as a logical progession of infrastructure facilities. In my view Computer/Communication can also be thought of as some component of 'infrastructure' and as such it is not needed for existence of this score of millions of people, their urgent priorities are elsewhere. As such the 'concept of a simputer' is fine, but it is something an indian farmer can do without.
While for news clippings and TV coverage this makes a great story, (Farmers trading with help of technology in xyz Area of India) fact remains that No Body needs it at that level where satisfying basic requirements for living itself is a huge task.
probably i would like to own a simputer for my 'needs' but not the farmer in himalayan hinterland who had to fetch water from 5 kms. probably put lots of games on it and distribute it to village kids , that is the only possible use i see in villages.
however if you don;t have a > 256 MB RAM machine, don;t try to run tomcat etc automatically when forte starts. I believe default configuration of forte is hugely bloated. a better option would be to use netbeans (netbeans.org) that is much slimmer or turn off those modules from loading that you are not using in forte.
Try Ken Arnold and James Gosling's
the Java programming Language
Addison-wesley: ISBN: 81-7808-148-2
Real Nice Book