India has a prototype wireless phone system in the Kuppam Wireless Telephone System... I don't know if it's open source or not... (from what I see, politics drives towards expensive solutions). Has all the stuff WiFi for 3.2 lakh people, VoIP phones , the works... from HP
Isn't this the Bush admininstration in a nutshell? If you disagree with us, you are un-American, disloyal, unpatriotic.
I'm tired of linking the following quote : People don't want War by Herman Goering . That in a few sentences covers what you have said... and raises serious questions about the war on terrorism . The similarities are shocking.
So, the next time you see a pervert, go up and shake his hand, and tell him "Thank you for your contribution to society".
Just be sure to wash your hand afterward.
Do you realize that all the practical innovations that have taken off on the internet had something or the other to do with pr0n ?. Think about pay-per-month websites, streaming video, P2P (look at gnutella statistics).
Do it for the children is so abused like the
"Those who don't are traitors" flavour of patriotism (I know I linked a swastika, but you have to admit the striking similarity). !. If children are seeing pr0n on the internet , why are the parents blaming the internet for this and NOT THE CHILDREN OR THEMSELVES ?. Take some responsibility for your own children at least, not strike down some ISP (if I read it right, TFA means "screw the small ISP" more than "protect the children").
> It's amazing that the myth of Java being slow is so persistant
Before you mod me down as a Troll , I work on a virtual machine as a hobby.
The problems with Java being slow have little to do with the "execution of code" part. The part that takes a hit are the Garbage Collector and the Class Loader. The latter causes a HUGE hit in the start up. The former is responsible for those strange Swing freezes I've been seeing when I switch into a Java app.
Unicode also brings its own set of junk , for example "Hello World" in dotgnu's JIT does 7302 hastable inserts, 6000+ StringBuffer operations to initialize the Unicode encoder/decoder. And that is the standard way of decoding unicode (mono uses the same code).
Lastly , C/C++ commonly uses a lot of fields while Java brings in get/set methods for these. A method calls for a get or set is a LOT more expensive than a pointer read . Design has a lot to do with why Java is slow.
The enterprise apps where Java is popular are essentially backend applications which run for long periods of time (so have all the classes looked up and loaded) with a HUGE heap (256 MB or more) where occasional GC freeze won't destroy the entire experience (as it is often JSP/Web based interfaces).
Java *is* fast, if you don't count the slow parts.
Kerala has a lot of things that don't add up. It consumes more than it produces. It's main product is educated young professionals (doctors and engineers) who send money back home from the Persian Gulf, US , Europe and other states of India. It's a successful business model . But India is a LOT different from Kerala:)
The India I see is not the middle class Kerala where everyone wears full sleeves and wants a white collar job.
Oh, yeah... I'm a Keralite too.. and most of slashdot have yet to see India as something other than "You took our jobs away" . I wonder why you don't see that unlike half the eastern world, we are NOT FIGHTING you ?.
Remember India's President is a
Nuclear Physicist who has worked on Guided Missiles... he probably knows what he's doing with nukes and rockets around:)
Also remember all those nice things which came out the space program ?. Like pacemakers or kevlar ? . See now India has to develop SuperComputers big enough to compute the path to moon... Like the Space Race of the 60's , this too is a war fought in peaceful result-oriented fashion than a traditional military escalation. But India's still sending a clear message - We have the technology.
> "So they drop the bomb on us, and 50 million people die. Big deal, we're still a billion people. So we drop the bomb om them, and kill 50 million people and win the war."
Is that so shocking ?. That's just the point. In the Cold War, the US of A and USSR were in an even uglier deadlock -
Mutually Assured Destruction. Here at least India has a No First Use agreement .
Also there's the relgion angle.. Ever heard about Moksha ?. Think about a terrorist who believes in COMING BACK after death.
As as an Indian , I reply ....
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
>> The American worker, on average, works longer hours than any other country - including Japan.
I work 14-13 hours days - this is actually the time I spend in office. I work on saturdays (like today) and sunday afternoons as well.
> Really, 10 days of vacation is a bad thing for the US economy...
Last year I got 5 days of vacation time .
I work here... now you know why outsourcing works ?.
* Managers overcommit * employees work their a$$es off * ??? (random bugs, bad documentation) * Profit !!!
Sadly my office is airconditioned with free coffee , while at home on a hot day is totally different... (oh, and I DON'T HAVE A LIFE).
On the other side of the world ... opposites ?
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
I graduated last year in August from a very good college in South India... I've got permanent (or what goes for permanent in Software) work right now.The four years that I studied saw the entire indian software industry go WAAAAY up in '99-2000 and then come down crashing in 2001-2002 and stabilized in 2003 (almost).
We had no qualified teachers... yes, we had 3 people who had Masters from IITs - but the rest was pure JUNK. Anyone and everyone who knew to use a mouse got a job in IT . The choice of faculty jobs was left to a very small minority of "I can't get no job in IT" graduates. I mean, who'd quit a job that would pay 5-6 times that of a college teacher ?.
We (As in students) were pissed... I was in the top 50 students in my state and I still couldn't get a teacher who understood datastructures properly ?. It's very frustrating when the people teaching you have just passed out a year or two ahead of you and still have no idea what they are teaching. We were even more angry at the system when the dotcoms crashed in 2001 - we were going out into the big bad world very very unprepared . Anyway, some of us did learn a bit on our own.... but we could have done a lot better with teachers who knew things better than us (rather than teaching off a textbook).
In my opinion, if you people have to dig yourself out of this position - get good teachers , people who know programming as an art, build a second line of good programmers instead of letting it die out because there's no future in IT assumptions.
You hit the nail on the head
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
Welfare State != Socialism....
Socialism != "Down with the rich"
There are places in the world where socialist economies are bringing into being a Middle Class world. As the percentage of very poor (desperate) and very rich (lazy) reduces the economy seems to stabilize. Especially the crime rates are seen to fall...
Unfortunately "Get Rich Quick" is the modern version of "laissez-faire" Capitalism... sad.. very sad. Reminds of the Douglas Adams's Aorist Rods...
-- Seen on National Highway 1 to New Delhi "When you go home, tell them we gave our today, for your tomorrows . -- Indian Army"
> As for rsync, Arch has its own built-in mirroring support, which is arguably much better
Does it run over SSH ?. Does it support Solaris 2.9 ?. (two important requirements for me).
Lastly you know how hard it is to convince people to use Open Source in a commercial environment - ok, perl and apache wasn't that hard... but cvs was purely an economical decision from the management.
I like the fact that finally CVS is not the only one around... Parts have started to use Subversion recently (cvs lacks merge indications in the revision history).
The Guide is more of a comedy satire set in a space ship , partly in the past , partly in the future with most timeframes being "Now".
Oh, it's a fantasy with a LOT of science backing it up too (like the infinite improbability drive or earth being created by mice and margatheans).
I wish I had read this book a lot earlier in my life. It should be made reading material for undergraduates (though this might cause them to hate it by association).
Dune is fantasy, Star Wars is Sci Fi, The Guide is a comedy:)
> That's like saying that if you forget to lock your door, then it's all right for people to steal your stuff. In reality, it's still just as illegal.
But you still lose out on your insurance... being "Stupid" has its own costs.
More people have to know that browsing with IE is the equivalent of buying a bicycle lock for your house. Of course, it will stop any decent guy from entering the house , but the first thief with a pair of pliers will go in:)
Hmm.. I wonder how "Security through Obscurity" works for Microsoft... they are the most COMMON boxes and it just makes the job easier.
I've seen illiterate carpenters do calculations on stress , strain and tensile strength in their head which would take me a couple of hours and a nice calculator to solve.
Mathematics is a pure science as we define "1 + 1 = 2" and say it is so. Modern physics is reaching the limits of naturally observable phenomena and are resorting to backward calculations from theories to prove things . (ok, prove "E=MC2"... the theory came before nuclear bombs and fission). Right now - Physics is Mathematics , but one which tries to predict rather than explain what natural phenomena happens in an atom smasher. Maybe we'll finally know the mind of God (as Stephen Hawking is fond of saying).
But, yeah - Law is convoluted and keeps getting convoluted with each new loophole being plugged. It's come a long way from an eye for an eye
"Before January" in weasel terms is between Christmas and New Year:)
So you have 12 reverse-days of christmas playing and sucking at 10 games a day while the beta testers wh00p your a$$ on the ones they've played for a couple of weeks more...
> Then, they will claim that they are acting on behalf of the copyright holder of the work.
There's a loop hole there - the copyright holder of the work in mention. And we all know they are not going to say "Valgrind - Memory debugger" or "Twisted Python".
The only way to get people moving against DMCA is to enforce it very rigorously.
> Nonsense. GCC has way too many extremely useful "idiosyncracies" to abandon. If you don't know what they are, then you aren't paying attention.
Very true, Try compiling Linux with ICC and we'll compare:).. I have a program which runs 30% faster on GCC due to just one reason - Computed GOTO. Computed GOTO is sooo much faster than a switch loop for most performance intensive switches . You could use function pointers to achieve something similar, but method call overhead outweighs switch loop costs (where it would be inlined anyway).
> Better that other compiler makers mimic GCC's behavior. Better still is for the standards groups to adopt GCC as the reference standard for C and C++ compilers.
GCC rocks... (sdcc's good too.. but it's a niche compiler).
The good thing is that it's all very well
documented. and of course you can refer the source (but not copy directly).
> Portland relies on hydro power rather than dirty power
Hydro power is sometimes more disruptive than nuclear power - you never hear nuclear power causing an earthquake do you ? .
> Why don't the regions of the US that rely heavily on coal or nucler power have the same impitus for cleaner alternatives ?.
Solar panels, Wind power and tidal power plants need a few natural resources which aren't easily transportable. (or think about solar panels in a hailstorm ?).
The best use of solar panels I've ever seen was for AirConditioning... if the sun's not out, the air's cool anyway and if it is solar power kicks in . Don't know if it'll work for a bigger scale , unless we have spray on solar panels for those BIG tinted windows.
From the little EE knowledge I have (I'm a CS Major , but the girls were mostly in EE, so..) , I don't think rolling back the meter's a possible option. Power grids supply voltage at high voltages and use transformers to step it down to reduce transmission losses. Sending current the wrong way doesn't seem to be a valid option to be noticeable (yeah, maybe a bewoulf cluster of these might *snicker*) .
What is more likely is to have a neighbourhood power distribution inside your local transformer loop and feed the it from your production via the same plug. That too might confuse the shock protection circuit breakers which apparently measure current levels between the two wires to make sure no equipment is earthing the power. Also the power man's in for a shock when he finds that there are 200 power sources he has to disconnect to pull a new line off the main cable . Technical difficulties in implementing this are too high , or we'd already be generating our own electricity. (btw, my desk lamp is powered by a solar panel and a rechargeable battery and that's only because my city scheduled a half-hour power cut daily).
Feed the power grid back is a pipe dream at least in the Indian power situation. But oregon might be different after all.... If you need me I'll be in my backyward feeding the power grid with my cold fusion powered giant hamster wheel.
> Gee, if I modify gpl code and then redistribute it under gpl and the accompanying source, I'm going to get sued for copyright infringement?
Yes you can , as long as you don't hold the copyright. Copyright law precedes GPL here.
But to violate GPL , the code you modified is distributed in binary form to a customer who doesn't recieve a written promise of source. GPL violator is then the distributor and not the author or the copyright holder.
I modify lots of FOSS tools (lxr and bugzilla) for work... as long as it's internal, nobody needs to get a copy.
Lastly GPL is based on Copyright , if Copyright law is rendered NULL and VOID , GPL falls too . But , if GPL is NULLified , Copyright still protects the code.
GPL's a clever little license . (RMS's a pretty good lawyer too..)
Of course, RTFA seems to be a slightly more SCOX situation:)
Slashdot Mirror
India has a prototype wireless phone system in the Kuppam Wireless Telephone System... I don't know if it's open source or not ... (from what I see, politics drives towards expensive solutions). Has all the stuff WiFi for 3.2 lakh people, VoIP phones , the works ... from HP
Isn't this the Bush admininstration in a nutshell? If you disagree with us, you are un-American, disloyal, unpatriotic.
I'm tired of linking the following quote : People don't want War by Herman Goering . That in a few sentences covers what you have saidI hate JNI .. .NET's design is a little better - But I stick to good old GPL'd Portable.net for my .NET needs :)
So, the next time you see a pervert, go up and shake his hand, and tell him "Thank you for your contribution to society".
Just be sure to wash your hand afterward.
Do you realize that all the practical innovations that have taken off on the internet had something or the other to do with pr0n ?. Think about pay-per-month websites, streaming video, P2P (look at gnutella statistics).
Do it for the children is so abused like the "Those who don't are traitors" flavour of patriotism (I know I linked a swastika, but you have to admit the striking similarity). !. If children are seeing pr0n on the internet , why are the parents blaming the internet for this and NOT THE CHILDREN OR THEMSELVES ?. Take some responsibility for your own children at least, not strike down some ISP (if I read it right, TFA means "screw the small ISP" more than "protect the children").
> It's amazing that the myth of Java being slow is so persistant
Before you mod me down as a Troll , I work on a virtual machine as a hobby.
The problems with Java being slow have little to do with the "execution of code" part. The part that takes a hit are the Garbage Collector and the Class Loader. The latter causes a HUGE hit in the start up. The former is responsible for those strange Swing freezes I've been seeing when I switch into a Java app.
Unicode also brings its own set of junk , for example "Hello World" in dotgnu's JIT does 7302 hastable inserts, 6000+ StringBuffer operations to initialize the Unicode encoder/decoder. And that is the standard way of decoding unicode (mono uses the same code).
Lastly , C/C++ commonly uses a lot of fields while Java brings in get/set methods for these. A method calls for a get or set is a LOT more expensive than a pointer read . Design has a lot to do with why Java is slow.
The enterprise apps where Java is popular are essentially backend applications which run for long periods of time (so have all the classes looked up and loaded) with a HUGE heap (256 MB or more) where occasional GC freeze won't destroy the entire experience (as it is often JSP/Web based interfaces).
Java *is* fast, if you don't count the slow parts.
The India I see is not the middle class Kerala where everyone wears full sleeves and wants a white collar job.
Oh, yeahI wonder why you don't see that unlike half the eastern world, we are NOT FIGHTING you ?.
Also remember all those nice things which came out the space program ?. Like pacemakers or kevlar ? . See now India has to develop SuperComputers big enough to compute the path to moon ... Like the Space Race of the 60's , this too is a war fought in peaceful result-oriented fashion than a traditional military escalation. But India's still sending a clear message - We have the technology.
Is that so shocking ?. That's just the point. In the Cold War, the US of A and USSR were in an even uglier deadlock - Mutually Assured Destruction. Here at least India has a No First Use agreement .
Also there's the relgion angle .. Ever heard about Moksha ?. Think about a terrorist who believes in COMING BACK after death.
I work 14-13 hours days - this is actually the time I spend in office. I work on saturdays (like today) and sunday afternoons as well.
> Really, 10 days of vacation is a bad thing for the US economy...Last year I got 5 days of vacation time .
I work here ... now you know why outsourcing works ?.
Sadly my office is airconditioned with free coffee , while at home on a hot day is totally different... (oh, and I DON'T HAVE A LIFE).
We had no qualified teachers ... yes, we had 3 people who had Masters from IITs - but the rest was pure JUNK. Anyone and everyone who knew to use a mouse got a job in IT . The choice of faculty jobs was left to a very small minority of "I can't get no job in IT" graduates. I mean, who'd quit a job that would pay 5-6 times that of a college teacher ?.
We (As in students) were pissed ... I was in the top 50 students in my state and I still couldn't get a teacher who understood datastructures properly ?. It's very frustrating when the people teaching you have just passed out a year or two ahead of you and still have no idea what they are teaching. We were even more angry at the system when the dotcoms crashed in 2001 - we were going out into the big bad world very very unprepared . Anyway, some of us did learn a bit on our own .... but we could have done a lot better with teachers who knew things better than us (rather than teaching off a textbook).
In my opinion, if you people have to dig yourself out of this position - get good teachers , people who know programming as an art, build a second line of good programmers instead of letting it die out because there's no future in IT assumptions.
Welfare State != Socialism....
...
... sad .. very sad. Reminds of the Douglas Adams's Aorist Rods ...
,
Socialism != "Down with the rich"
There are places in the world where socialist economies are bringing into being a Middle Class world. As the percentage of very poor (desperate) and very rich (lazy) reduces the economy seems to stabilize. Especially the crime rates are seen to fall
Unfortunately "Get Rich Quick" is the modern version of "laissez-faire" Capitalism
--
Seen on National Highway 1 to New Delhi
"When you go home, tell them we gave our today
for your tomorrows . -- Indian Army"
> As for rsync, Arch has its own built-in mirroring support, which is arguably much better
... but cvs was purely an economical decision from the management.
... Parts have started to use Subversion recently (cvs lacks merge indications in the revision history).
Does it run over SSH ?. Does it support Solaris 2.9 ?. (two important requirements for me).
Lastly you know how hard it is to convince people to use Open Source in a commercial environment - ok, perl and apache wasn't that hard
I like the fact that finally CVS is not the only one around
The Guide is more of a comedy satire set in a space ship , partly in the past , partly in the future with most timeframes being "Now".
:)
Oh, it's a fantasy with a LOT of science backing it up too (like the infinite improbability drive or earth being created by mice and margatheans).
I wish I had read this book a lot earlier in my life. It should be made reading material for undergraduates (though this might cause them to hate it by association).
Dune is fantasy, Star Wars is Sci Fi, The Guide is a comedy
I'm still using CVS and there are two things that makes CVS very interesting for me .
*) Rsync Mirroring
*) Symlinks in CVS
rsync over ssh and lots of clunky symlinks is what I have in my CVS . I don't know how I'll ever port this into SVN or ARCH.
> That's like saying that if you forget to lock your door, then it's all right for people to steal your stuff. In reality, it's still just as illegal.
... being "Stupid" has its own costs .
:)
... they are the most COMMON boxes and it just makes the job easier.
But you still lose out on your insurance
More people have to know that browsing with IE is the equivalent of buying a bicycle lock for your house. Of course, it will stop any decent guy from entering the house , but the first thief with a pair of pliers will go in
Hmm.. I wonder how "Security through Obscurity" works for Microsoft
Mathematics is a pure science as we define "1 + 1 = 2" and say it is so. Modern physics is reaching the limits of naturally observable phenomena and are resorting to backward calculations from theories to prove things . (ok, prove "E=MC2" ... the theory came before nuclear bombs and fission). Right now - Physics is Mathematics , but one which tries to predict rather than explain what natural phenomena happens in an atom smasher. Maybe we'll finally know the mind of God (as Stephen Hawking is fond of saying).
But, yeah - Law is convoluted and keeps getting convoluted with each new loophole being plugged. It's come a long way from an eye for an eyeSome people lock their rotary diallers , so that the phone function only for incoming (some lock their phones when they leave office)...
.. but it takes a bit of practice and works only for the Strowger (IIRC) pulse exchanges.
... (and we liked it !).
The clicker is a nice way to deal with this
We had an analog exchange till '99 , but it used to drop my dialup every 3 minutes
"Before January" in weasel terms is between Christmas and New Year :)
...
So you have 12 reverse-days of christmas playing and sucking at 10 games a day while the beta testers wh00p your a$$ on the ones they've played for a couple of weeks more
> Then, they will claim that they are acting on behalf of the copyright holder of the work.
.
There's a loop hole there - the copyright holder of the work in mention. And we all know they are not going to say "Valgrind - Memory debugger" or "Twisted Python"
The only way to get people moving against DMCA is to enforce it very rigorously.
Very true, Try compiling Linux with ICC and we'll compare :) .. I have a program which runs 30% faster on GCC due to just one reason - Computed GOTO. Computed GOTO is sooo much faster than a switch loop for most performance intensive switches . You could use function pointers to achieve something similar, but method call overhead outweighs switch loop costs (where it would be inlined anyway).
> Better that other compiler makers mimic GCC's behavior. Better still is for the standards groups to adopt GCC as the reference standard for C and C++ compilers.
GCC rocks ... (sdcc's good too.. but it's a niche compiler).
The good thing is that it's all very well documented. and of course you can refer the source (but not copy directly).Took 8 minutes to code, and 4 to run :)
Lameness filter won't let me post it - view it here
Hydro power is sometimes more disruptive than nuclear power - you never hear nuclear power causing an earthquake do you ? .
> Why don't the regions of the US that rely heavily on coal or nucler power have the same impitus for cleaner alternatives ?.
Solar panels, Wind power and tidal power plants need a few natural resources which aren't easily transportable. (or think about solar panels in a hailstorm ?).
The best use of solar panels I've ever seen was for AirConditioning ... if the sun's not out, the air's cool anyway and if it is solar power kicks in . Don't know if it'll work for a bigger scale , unless we have spray on solar panels for those BIG tinted windows.
What is more likely is to have a neighbourhood power distribution inside your local transformer loop and feed the it from your production via the same plug. That too might confuse the shock protection circuit breakers which apparently measure current levels between the two wires to make sure no equipment is earthing the power. Also the power man's in for a shock when he finds that there are 200 power sources he has to disconnect to pull a new line off the main cable . Technical difficulties in implementing this are too high , or we'd already be generating our own electricity. (btw, my desk lamp is powered by a solar panel and a rechargeable battery and that's only because my city scheduled a half-hour power cut daily).
Feed the power grid back is a pipe dream at least in the Indian power situation. But oregon might be different after all .... If you need me I'll be in my backyward feeding the power grid with my cold fusion powered giant hamster wheel.
> Gee, if I modify gpl code and then redistribute it under gpl and the accompanying source, I'm going to get sued for copyright infringement?
.
... as long as it's internal, nobody needs to get a copy .
:)
Yes you can , as long as you don't hold the copyright. Copyright law precedes GPL here.
But to violate GPL , the code you modified is distributed in binary form to a customer who doesn't recieve a written promise of source. GPL violator is then the distributor and not the author or the copyright holder
I modify lots of FOSS tools (lxr and bugzilla) for work
Lastly GPL is based on Copyright , if Copyright law is rendered NULL and VOID , GPL falls too . But , if GPL is NULLified , Copyright still protects the code.
GPL's a clever little license . (RMS's a pretty good lawyer too..)
Of course, RTFA seems to be a slightly more SCOX situation
Imagine a guy sleeping on the keyboard , with his chin firmly on the space key and right hand on the numpad ENTER key :)
....
Oh, if I stand on my chair I can see at least 7 guys down the aisle like this
Back to topic, so how about using the keyboard with a nose ?