Take a hollow toothbrush. Fill it with toothpaste. Then take a hollow shaving razor. Fill it with shaving foam. Now glue the toothbrush to the razor. For kicks, lets also glue a fork, a knife and a spoon to this appartus.
Now I claim you can brush your teeth, shave, eat your breakfast, butter your bread, drink your soup - all with this one appartus.
So then why do we have a separate toothbrush, razor, spooon, fork etc ? Is it because we want to ensure the employment of spoonmakers worldwide ?
Without CP, MBS, CDOs honestly there is no way you can run a modern industrial economy. You can glue them up into one savings account, but it would be as unwieldy as your toothbrush-cum-razor-cum-fork.
I built most of this financial gobbledegook in a previous life...
Why didn't the senior from the Vellore Institute of Technology who supposedly designed this $10 laptop take his design to a VC ? Upwards of a few billion dollars is looking to park its ass in India. Any VC would fund this project in a heartbeat if the design is sound. Same with the IISc designers. Why are they so scared of the markets ? Instead, both parties approach the Government of India, definitely the most corrupt+inefficient entity on the entire planet, and hand over their super-secretive design to the Human Resources Ministry ?!! The mind boggles. Here's what will happen - the HRD ministry will make crazy hyped promises, go showboating, end up spending a few crore taxpayer rupeees ( few mil taxpayer dollars ) to prove that a laptop can't be built for $10. By then, a decade would have passed, and China would indeed be building and selling $10 laptops at the local Walmart.
I don't know about plumbing & the construction business, but Doctors are out.
Medical tourism is booming in India. You can buy a return ticket to Delhi from NYC, get your artificial hips, knees, bypass surgery or whatever else done in a day, no hassles over any insurance, and be back in a week after checking out the Taj Mahal. It'll still cost you less than what you'd end up paying here in the US, after you factor in the time & money chasing your insurance company.
They have state of the art equipment in cosmetic surgery, hair replacement, laser hair removal in Bombay, all available at a fraction of what you'd pay out here in the US.
I was actually treated by one of the doctors who work in these facilities - he was an orthopaedic who got his postgrad training at the Harvard Medical School and then returned to India after his J1 visa waiver expired. Fixed my broken ankle and gave me shots, all for a grand total of 400 rupees. That's like nine dollars! I wouldn't dream of getting access to a Harvard trained medic in the US for $9. But that's India for you.
Cent one: Ability != Desire. Understanding this incredibly simple precept took me 31 years. I can only wish whoever's reading this, and gets it, is younger than that. Just because I had the ability to write code & get paid six figures by wall street doesn't mean I was interested in writing code. However, at the time, I thought it did. Monetizable abilities don't become desires even if you rationalize them to be so.
Cent two: Don't shortchange your ancestors. Why did my dad struggle so hard to put me through school instead of abandonding me as an orphan in a dumpster ( not an uncommon occurence among the poor in India those days )...why did his parents....and their parents....and so on all the way to some early man who fought off a dinosaur with some primitive handtools...in point of fact, why do we strive so hard to raise our kids ? So they can coast through life ? Methinks its cause we want them to take great risks and do what they love, instead of conforming to the pressures of society. So lets not shortchange our parents' struggles by taking the safest bet...lets take some big risks and see what happens. Doing what you love is the biggest risk, but its the only one worth taking.
Even if you accept the dubious claim that there are jobs available for project managers & security experts, the typical career arc start at the bottom as a lowly programmer & work your way up to these lofty positions. When you outsource the lowly programmer jobs to India, where are the sec experts & proj managers supposed to come from ? No university instantly graduates a security expert - you learn on the job & submit papers get peer reviewed & work your way up. If you outsource the training ramp, you can't expect to get to the top.
When I asked NYU economist Prof Easterly about this, he dismissed it as classic fallacy - "nobody works his way to a Professor by first serving at kindergarten, then middle school, then high school, then college, then univ..."
Well ok, but you don't get tenure straighaway either - you start as a freshly minted PhD, become a post-doctorate asspc, then asst Prof, then associate Prof, then tenured Prof.
No US firm can do a rip at less than a dollar per CD and remain financially sustainable in the long run. Recently I spoke with a bunch of folks interested in doing this out of India ( ie. outsourcing CD-ripping)
Pros: 1. CD to mp3 at 5 cents per CD. ( Most US firms charge around $1 per CD) 2. Audio Casette to mp3 at 10 cents per tape. ( Most US firms charge upwards of $5 per tape)
Cons: Shipping. This isn't Java code you can "ship over the wire". Packaging CDs + courier costs + potential damages + Customs duties at port of entry bring the costs back to a dollar per CD:(
btw, the Audio Cassette to mp3 market is much more lucrative within India, & for Indian immigrants abroad( roughly 2 million Indian immigrants in USA, 1.5 mil in UK ). An average Bollywood movie has 6 songs. About 800-900 films released per year, mostly music available in audio tapes only. Old Bollywood films ( 1980s & earlier ) are exclusively on audiotape. That means the average Indian household has 100s of audiotapes lying around. The mp3 market in India is exploding, mp3 players available dirt-cheap Last I counted, I have 375+ audio cassettes waiting to be converted to mp3, & I'm not even a hardcore Bollywood fan!
"Over the past 5 years, bandwidth to the home has grown from 300k for broadband to 5mbs, and in some cases even 10mbs. But that bandwidth is not dedicated per user. That bandwidth is shared. The number of users sharing that bandwidth has increased even faster than the size of the pipe. Thats not going to change...the amount of bandwidth required to transmit an HDTV show vs the amount of bandwidth required to transmit a DVD quality show is about 8mbs to 1mbs...For broadcast it takes 2 to 3mbs to transmit a standard definition show, and 10mbs to transmit an HDTV, non sports program at quality that is equal to what is available from over the air HDTV broadcasters like CBS and NBC.
Which leads to point. Bandwidth to the home is not expanding as fast as the bandwidth required to transmit content.
What makes a program worthless in High Definition ? If it was shot or mastered on tape. Shows from the 1980s, 1990s, and even some shows today, are shot using standard definition tape. Why is it worthless ? Because standard definition video doesnt have enough resolution to look good in high definition. To up convert it to HD would be like upconverting music from mono to 5.1 Surround Sound. You can fake it and improve it a little, but when compared to music captured in Surround Sound or even stereo, its obviously inferior.
If you go through the schedules of many cable networks, some are made up completely or substantially of shows shot or mastered on tape. The networks that are full of music videos from the past 20 years. Networks with comedies from the 1980s and 90s. Science Fiction created for syndicated TV (Most primetime scifi was shot on Film and then HD). THere is nothing their owners or licensors can do to make them look good in HD. I dont think they will even try. "
My experiments with portability
on
Write Portable Code
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I had to take a mandatory graduate level course CS 533 Developing portable software, taught by Dr. Mooney, who was known around school as "that portability guy".
The class went thru umpteen strategies to write portable code & culminated in a portability project, where you wrote a "Quiz Program" in C, that ran on Solaris, Windows & the Mac with minimum code changes. All code changes had to be confided to the stdio.h & other header libraries. I see these days he has added Java to the mix.
My own experience has been that it has very limited utility in real-life ie. corporate IT. All the jobs I held since I graduated did not require an ounce of thinking portable. They were all about writing proprietary code to be run off the web, and for some 10 years, Java was the only option until C# came along. So I practised portability by default, since that was the nature of my employment in the industry. But I can see how this might be useful for somebody doing systems level programming (assuming there are still such jobs in the IT industry in the US, of course...)
Please study the list for atleast 10 full minutes ( assuming pop culture hasn't numbed your attention span:) and its clear movies haven't grown complex, not by a long shot.
Take the top 10 in that list. Other than LOTR & maybe starwars, the rest are straightforward good-vs-evil narratives.
Ok, take the top 25. You have memento & usual suspects...both are an example more of puzzle/trickery than true complexity.
Take the top 50...you now add Matrix & Eternal Sunshine...two examples of, forgive me, pretentious complexity as opposed to being genuinely complex.
On to the top 100...
I'd wager that truly complex films won't do well on the box office. Simpler motifs are more compelling. Why ? Because narratives mirror human life. Human life is primarily about 1.ambition 2.rejection 3.acceptance 4.mortality
You can play combinatorics with above 4 plotpoints to get finite set of 3-acts & those would translate to premises. You then construct characters to advocate said premises, such characters would then lead to conflict,lo & behold...drama! Ingredients have always been the same Pemise->Character->Conflict. For a forceful primer on why this is so, study Lajos Egri, for example.
Film has a roughly 106 year old history at this point. We're still dealing with the same stock naratives, and a 106 years later, unless the species have evolved to some higher ethereal plane, we'll deal with the same narratives.
Ofcourse Joe becomes Neo to keep up with pop culture...thats as far as complexity goes.
What has changed is the phenomenal growth of meta. 50 years ago, you forgot about the outside world & watch a flick & walk out mesmerized by the characters & the narrative. Now, nobody cares about the characters as much as which star is playing the character, whom he's sleeping with, whats the size of his paycheck, where's the film's blog, what did the director say on Jon Stewart's show, hey did you see the trailer on Charlie Rose, did you hear that joke on Jay Leno, Larry King,...so much meta-info.
Gimme the first & last name of the character played by Tom Cruise in Speilberg's WOTW ? Who cares ? It was a Tom Cruise flick, made for the studio average of $120+ million, probably made twice as much on the box, had cool cgi,...more complex ? Certainly not. Good guy Cruise saves planet from bad guy Martians...so whats new ?
Mr. Gates writes "We have a research lab in Cambridge, we have one now in China, one in India and that is where the top problems in computer science are going to be solved."
Here's the research lab in India - working on technology implementations, certainly not top CS problems.
Here are the 10 innovations that will blow you away - coming out of Beijing. Again, some very sound implementations, but not exactly top 10 CS problems.
But yes, Cambridge is looking at some of the top 10 CS problems. However, MS is no Bell Labs when it comes to taking on research problems. They end up successfully monetizing tech solutions, but that is quite different from pioneering fundamental breakthroughs like inventing a transistor or laser.
Sciences are not the American Idol. There has been a million dollar reward for ages now, to crack the P-NP problem, among others. You see hordes of math & CS grads working on it ? Nah. There's no easy attack.
Professor Richard Hamming was fond of saying that you can get money beyond your dreams if you solve any one of the 3 hardest problems in physics - timetravel, antigravity, or teleportation.
Do you see Physics majors attacking these problems tooth & nail ? As Hammings explains, there's just no known attack.
Americans aren't warming up to the sciences simply because they have a choice. Students get to decide what they want to study. They look at the difficulty levels of the subject, the job market, ask their peers & parents, look at career prospects & evaluate their "sexiness", and decide to major in English & Communication & Marketing instead. In India, where I come from, you simply didn't have a choice, (well, not until you were 18 anyway, by which time it was too late for most of us). You were asked to digest megadoses of math & science in high school. Hell, I remember working on some "preliminary math" problems when I did my Masters in CompSci in the US. The problems were ones I had previously encountered when I was in my early teens, in my high school! But the Professor said American undergrads needed that sort of thing!!
You guys have a choice, so you study literature & photography & journalism & whatnot in your high school. In India, the only choices are math, more math & much more math. So I can comfortably handle a second order differential equation. But to this day I have not studied Shakespear ( spelling ? ), Rosseu, Homer ( not simpson, the pgilosopher chap), Keats, Byron or any other literary figures. I just know the names cause we crammed them for various "general knowledge" quizzes!
Education systems are broken all over the world. In places like India & China, we get a one-sided hard-core math-sci curricula with no literature. In the US/UK, you guys get liberal arts with less math/science than what Bill Gates wants to hire.
Prizes are not the answer (Nor is a $100 laptpop for developing nations). I don't know what is.
I had an opportunity to interview Dan Gillmor this year on camera. He was genuinely concerned about where Outsourcing was headed, especially what happens to the US economy if all tech jobs migrate from the Valley to India. He placed the whole situation in a proper historical perspective, a comparison with NAFTA & how it was different this time around, a rundown of the actual numbers of people who were laid off, the impact on the valley, mountains of idle cash sitting on Sand Hill Road, and so much more...I came away with a feeling I had spoken to someone who felt quite strongly about where this country was headed, not your average journo who cooks up a spin so he can pay his bills.
Here's his picture he's 5th from the bottom.
The #1 reason why most of us are tired is the nature of work. Corporate IT is the most soul-sucking stultifying chore I've encountered in my entire life. I just couldn't bring myself to wake up until 9am, and then I would rush to work, a tiring commute, be tired all day & then go back to sleep, tired again. It was just so boringly repititive & mindnumbing. And its not one company or one set of colleagues - I've switched jobs several times & inevitably it ends up the same.
Finally I had the courage to save up some cash, quit IT for good, and "find myself". Introspection is so hard less than 1% of the planet indulges in it. It can reveal so many unpleasant truths about you. Like the fact that no matter how skilled I was, I was never going to fit in as a corporate whore anywhere.
When I finally took the plunge & did what I really wanted to do all along, there was no going back. Since then I've been so upbeat, so frighteningly happy, its scary. I've never worked so hard as in the past few months. It is both physically & mentally gruelling, but I never felt tired.
All you got to do is grow some balls, figure out what you really want to do, & then go do it. And yes, the nest egg is important.
This is such an awe-inspiring effort. Logging 200 hours of footage over 3 years...I can imagine the amount of dedication, effort, logistics & scheduling that went into making this possible.
Hats off to you!
I'm into my 4th month of filmmaking right now. Logged 20+ hours so far, a dozen interviews under my belt, lots of travel, caffeine, sleepless nights...and I've barely begun. By the time I hope to be finished, I hope to have about 50 hours of footage. Just sifting thru all that, deciding which segment will make the cut & which won't...gigantic effort. I can't even imagine what you're going thru, narrowing down 200 hours into 3 DVDs. I wish you luck & lots & lots of patience.
There was this one documentary I watched recently - "Begging Naked" - that tracked this prostitute thru 7 yeas of her life. 7 years!!! In those 90 minutes of footage, you can practically see the person aging in front of you. The prostitute goes from being a young sexy hooker making pots of money in a Manhattan apartment to an old haggard woman living under a tree in Central Park out of a cardboard box. The person who made this film started filming in her 20s & is now in her 30s & the film still hasn't gotten a theatrical release. And she keeps plugging away. That's motivation for you!
The current outsourcing scenario is nothing compared to what will happen in the next 5 years.
At a recent outsourcing panel, the CEO of one of the top-10 outsourcing outfits asked & answered the question "Where do you see yourselves in 5 years".
The outsourcing timeline can be classified into 4 tiers -
Tier 1 - Staffing - bring Indian pgmmers on H1Bs & L1s into US to staff IT departments
Tier 2 - Codefactory - Indian pgmmers in India write code spec'd out by American pgmmers.
Tier 3 - The current outsourcing wave
Tier 4 - The future - No IT department in the USA. All IT needs serviced by Indian outsourcing firms.
So you see, they are already preparing for Tier 4. All IT jobs, including R&D, design & architecture will eventually go to the IT depts in India & other low cost structure countries.
How to compete ?
Well, don't! Don't fight the tide. Do something else. IT has been commoditized. Find another field and get into that. If you must do IT, simply go where the jobs are - to India, Philippines, Russia, elsewhere.
The economics of the situation are so compelling, it makes no fiscal sense for US companies to keep IT jobs in the US.
"immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy"
What she really means is that she'd rather get the attention she seeks, than be ignored for being staid & boring like plain old PBS.
Tom Stoppard said it best - most conflicts are NOT about rights vs wrongs....most conflicts are about rights vs rights.
There are different truths. Its "truthful" to say that messing with stem cells amounts to playing God. Its also "truthful" to assert that stem cells may hold the promise to cure for diseases that don't have any right now.
Its "truthful" to say abortion kills. Its also "truthful" to assert a mother's rights over her foetus.
Nietzche asserted that perspectivism was more dear to him than absolutism ( the notion that there are certain absolute truths). Perspectivism asks of the philosopher to adopt "changing truths" as a manifesto, rather than search for "the truth", since there isn't really any such objective truth - it depends on the observer, his circumstances, his senses & powers of observation ( just as an ant or a bee with widely differing sense of sight & smell would see the world very differently than a human, similarly a black man would see certain truths differently than a white man, certain notions are truthful to catholics but not muslims, & so on... )
Those who argue for "objective truth & accuracy" bestow much more power to man than he really has. Most events are a result of chance, synchronicity , chaos and non-determinism...to look for truth in them is simply futile.
Ofcourse an attempt at truth is better than reporting plain falsehoods, but that doesn't mean such an attempt is the real truth, because there is no real truth, only perspectives.
Well, capitalism ( not competition ) is intrinsically designed to drive prices down, simply because of economies of scale ( ie. costs less per widget when a million widgets are made as opposed to when a hundred are made )
Competition can drive prices up or down -eg. In his classic book, Professor & psychologist Robert Cialdini talks about one common tactic to get customers to buy your product - RAISE prices!
Customers have this mistaken perception that price equals value, so higher price translates in their mind to valuable, lower prices to inferior/cheap goods ( this actually goes waaaay back, to Karl Marx's Labor Theory of Value )
The masses might actually buy a $5 song in the mistaken assumption that it is somehow more valuable than a song for $0.99.
From your site - "I try and run/bike/workout for at least 30 to 45 minutes a day"
I began just like you did and made rapid progress, but then plateaued. Here's what works for me now -
a.Skip every other day. The muscles need atleast 24 hours to repair. By working them every day, you are overtaxing them. You will plateau, it is a certainity - ask any fitness specialist or your doctor.
b. When you do run/bike/workout, up the intensity and/or duration. Rather than 30 minutes, shoot for 1 hour, then 2.
c. Best to invest in an elliptical.Since your feet don't touch the ground on an elliptical, you don't bust your knees. At the same time you build rock-hard legs. Plus, you get to vary the intensity on an elliptical by changing the resistance & the incline - very effective.
d. Audio books are a great way to learn something while chugging away on an elliptical. I have loaded up on about 50 hours of philosophy - Locke, Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Marx, and yes, the usual suspects - Socrates, Plato & Aristotle. As geeks, we are constantly upgrading "tech skills" ( Perl, Java, C++, C# etc. ) while neglecting "life-skills". A sound foundation in philosophy comes in handy like nothing else. Even if you don't care for the subject, you learn things like argumentation, dialectic, persuasion theories, burden of rejoinder...essential skills for making your point when you talk to anybody.
Best elliptical scores so far, at different levels -
At the outsourcing panel yesterday, there were concerns expressed, by one of the panelists Ray Vickery( Asst. Secretary of Commerce, Trade Development in the Clinton Administration) that you will see much more of this in the future ie. American MNCs (Multi-national companies) will end up owning a big, big chunk of the Indian infrastructure.
Its a sea change from the 80s when IBM was kicked out of India during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's administration.
To really look beyond the short-term glitter and understand what this might lead up to, you must watch Life & Debt, which chronicles the Jamaican tragedy. Once Jamaica agreed to freetrade & opened up its trade zones, in a short span of few months, its entire native diary industry & banana trade was totally destroyed ( Milkpowder was dumped at dirt-cheap prices, and MNCs like Dole undercut the banana trade by bringing in bananas from Mexico ).
There are a lot of pluses to free trade, but unless developing nations like India wield their bargaining power carefully, they will sell out to corporations & lose their autonomy.
But a lot of Indians in the panel felt the American ownership of Indian firms was a good thing, and it could erase some of the anti-outsourcing sentiment prevailing here in the US. Towards the end, the panel discussion got particularly heated up with sharply polarized arguments from both sides. A host of people agreed to talk to us about the "sale of India", as one of them put it.No easy answers to be found on this one.
Lion's Gate (LGF ) owns a majority stake in CinemaNow, the closest competition. LGF stock has been all over the place in the past few months due to Video-On-Demand deals with major studios.
Unlike LGF, which grew from strength to strength after acquiring Artisan Films, is based in Hollywood, and has exclusive rights to several hundred movies as well as ties with the major players in the entertainment business, Netflix is more a rental mall for DVDs.
otoh, Netflix's CEO has been predicting his entry into the VOD market for the past few years, and they did trails with sample footage for most DVDs.
Competition's always beneficial to the consumer.
At my first startup, one of my first multipeople multiyear Java projects was a mainframe screen scraper ( TN3270 using AWT - example ). I was fresh out of college & totally unaware that mainframes still ruled the planet. Those two years & the huge revenues it brought led the startup to be acquired and made a lot of people really rich ( minus moi, ofcourse:(
Lots of money to be made in desktop-mainframe connectivity.
Even if this product fails to catch on in the airline industry, they can always turn to the rapidly growing market of "Porn Blockers", "Family Internet Filters" & "Parental Controls" - One of the existing problems is to detect & filter porn images accurately. The current naive algorithms simply sample image for huge swaths of pink & then discard the image. So an innocent pink puppy is as likely to be filtered as a naughty Hooter girl's pink hooters. "Shape-searching" can augment the algorithm by factoring the spherical shape of the breast into the search.
Heatmaps have been around in the trading space for a while now. Every brokerage firm & most trading mags have heatmaps which show where the market is headed visually, exactly the way this "newsmap" works.
eg.
Nasdaq heatmap
Sure 1GB Gmail beats 4MB Yahoomail or 2MB hotmail, but I still can't store a single DVDs worth of data ( 1 DVD = 4.7GB ).
I predict future email providers are simply going to offer 1 DVD worth of space. Have a giant DVD-burner on the other end & pop in one DVD-RW per user, you have a good thing going...
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=finite+abelian+group#
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=differentiation+rules
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=power+series
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=differential+geometry
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=slashdot
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=pornstars
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=c+compiler
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=probability+distribution
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=cancer
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=spielberg+films
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=Gross+domestic+product+countries
Take a hollow toothbrush. Fill it with toothpaste. Then take a hollow shaving razor. Fill it with shaving foam. Now glue the toothbrush to the razor. For kicks, lets also glue a fork, a knife and a spoon to this appartus.
Now I claim you can brush your teeth, shave, eat your breakfast, butter your bread, drink your soup - all with this one appartus.
So then why do we have a separate toothbrush, razor, spooon, fork etc ? Is it because we want to ensure the employment of spoonmakers worldwide ?
Without CP, MBS, CDOs honestly there is no way you can run a modern industrial economy. You can glue them up into one savings account, but it would be as unwieldy as your toothbrush-cum-razor-cum-fork.
I built most of this financial gobbledegook in a previous life...
Why didn't the senior from the Vellore Institute of Technology who supposedly designed this $10 laptop take his design to a VC ? Upwards of a few billion dollars is looking to park its ass in India. Any VC would fund this project in a heartbeat if the design is sound. Same with the IISc designers. Why are they so scared of the markets ? Instead, both parties approach the Government of India, definitely the most corrupt+inefficient entity on the entire planet, and hand over their super-secretive design to the Human Resources Ministry ?!! The mind boggles. Here's what will happen - the HRD ministry will make crazy hyped promises, go showboating, end up spending a few crore taxpayer rupeees ( few mil taxpayer dollars ) to prove that a laptop can't be built for $10. By then, a decade would have passed, and China would indeed be building and selling $10 laptops at the local Walmart.
I don't know about plumbing & the construction business, but Doctors are out.
Medical tourism is booming in India. You can buy a return ticket to Delhi from NYC, get your artificial hips, knees, bypass surgery or whatever else done in a day, no hassles over any insurance, and be back in a week after checking out the Taj Mahal. It'll still cost you less than what you'd end up paying here in the US, after you factor in the time & money chasing your insurance company.
They have state of the art equipment in cosmetic surgery, hair replacement, laser hair removal in Bombay, all available at a fraction of what you'd pay out here in the US.
I was actually treated by one of the doctors who work in these facilities - he was an orthopaedic who got his postgrad training at the Harvard Medical School and then returned to India after his J1 visa waiver expired. Fixed my broken ankle and gave me shots, all for a grand total of 400 rupees. That's like nine dollars! I wouldn't dream of getting access to a Harvard trained medic in the US for $9. But that's India for you.
Cent one: Ability != Desire.
Understanding this incredibly simple precept took me 31 years. I can only wish whoever's reading this, and gets it, is younger than that. Just because I had the ability to write code & get paid six figures by wall street doesn't mean I was interested in writing code. However, at the time, I thought it did. Monetizable abilities don't become desires even if you rationalize them to be so.
Cent two: Don't shortchange your ancestors.
Why did my dad struggle so hard to put me through school instead of abandonding me as an orphan in a dumpster ( not an uncommon occurence among the poor in India those days )...why did his parents....and their parents....and so on all the way to some early man who fought off a dinosaur with some primitive handtools...in point of fact, why do we strive so hard to raise our kids ? So they can coast through life ? Methinks its cause we want them to take great risks and do what they love, instead of conforming to the pressures of society. So lets not shortchange our parents' struggles by taking the safest bet...lets take some big risks and see what happens. Doing what you love is the biggest risk, but its the only one worth taking.
Even if you accept the dubious claim that there are jobs available for project managers & security experts, the typical career arc start at the bottom as a lowly programmer & work your way up to these lofty positions.
When you outsource the lowly programmer jobs to India, where are the sec experts & proj managers supposed to come from ? No university instantly graduates a security expert - you learn on the job & submit papers get peer reviewed & work your way up. If you outsource the training ramp, you can't expect to get to the top.
When I asked NYU economist Prof Easterly about this, he dismissed it as classic fallacy - "nobody works his way to a Professor by first serving at kindergarten, then middle school, then high school, then college, then univ..."
Well ok, but you don't get tenure straighaway either - you start as a freshly minted PhD, become a post-doctorate asspc, then asst Prof, then associate Prof, then tenured Prof.
There is always a training ground.
No US firm can do a rip at less than a dollar per CD and remain financially sustainable in the long run.
:(
Recently I spoke with a bunch of folks interested in doing this out of India ( ie. outsourcing CD-ripping)
Pros:
1. CD to mp3 at 5 cents per CD. ( Most US firms charge around $1 per CD)
2. Audio Casette to mp3 at 10 cents per tape. ( Most US firms charge upwards of $5 per tape)
Tascam makes a decent cassette->CD converter
Cons:
Shipping. This isn't Java code you can "ship over the wire". Packaging CDs + courier costs + potential damages + Customs duties at port of entry bring the costs back to a dollar per CD
btw, the Audio Cassette to mp3 market is much more lucrative within India, & for Indian immigrants abroad( roughly 2 million Indian immigrants in USA, 1.5 mil in UK ). An average Bollywood movie has 6 songs. About 800-900 films released per year, mostly music available in audio tapes only. Old Bollywood films ( 1980s & earlier ) are exclusively on audiotape. That means the average Indian household has 100s of audiotapes lying around. The mp3 market in India is exploding, mp3 players available dirt-cheap
Last I counted, I have 375+ audio cassettes waiting to be converted to mp3, & I'm not even a hardcore Bollywood fan!
FRom Mark Cuban ( Owner HDNet ) blog:
"Over the past 5 years, bandwidth to the home has grown from 300k for broadband to 5mbs, and in some cases even 10mbs. But that bandwidth is not dedicated per user. That bandwidth is shared. The number of users sharing that bandwidth has increased even faster than the size of the pipe. Thats not going to change...the amount of bandwidth required to transmit an HDTV show vs the amount of bandwidth required to transmit a DVD quality show is about 8mbs to 1mbs...For broadcast it takes 2 to 3mbs to transmit a standard definition show, and 10mbs to transmit an HDTV, non sports program at quality that is equal to what is available from over the air HDTV broadcasters like CBS and NBC.
Which leads to point. Bandwidth to the home is not expanding as fast as the bandwidth required to transmit content.
What makes a program worthless in High Definition ? If it was shot or mastered on tape. Shows from the 1980s, 1990s, and even some shows today, are shot using standard definition tape. Why is it worthless ? Because standard definition video doesnt have enough resolution to look good in high definition. To up convert it to HD would be like upconverting music from mono to 5.1 Surround Sound. You can fake it and improve it a little, but when compared to music captured in Surround Sound or even stereo, its obviously inferior.
If you go through the schedules of many cable networks, some are made up completely or substantially of shows shot or mastered on tape. The networks that are full of music videos from the past 20 years. Networks with comedies from the 1980s and 90s. Science Fiction created for syndicated TV (Most primetime scifi was shot on Film and then HD). THere is nothing their owners or licensors can do to make them look good in HD. I dont think they will even try. "
Rest here
I had to take a mandatory graduate level course CS 533 Developing portable software, taught by Dr. Mooney, who was known around school as "that portability guy".
The class went thru umpteen strategies to write portable code & culminated in a portability project, where you wrote a "Quiz Program" in C, that ran on Solaris, Windows & the Mac with minimum code changes.
All code changes had to be confided to the stdio.h & other header libraries. I see these days he has added Java to the mix.
My own experience has been that it has very limited utility in real-life ie. corporate IT. All the jobs I held since I graduated did not require an ounce of thinking portable. They were all about writing proprietary code to be run off the web, and for some 10 years, Java was the only option until C# came along. So I practised portability by default, since that was the nature of my employment in the industry. But I can see how this might be useful for somebody doing systems level programming (assuming there are still such jobs in the IT industry in the US, of course...)
Mandatory reference
...more complex ? Certainly not. Good guy Cruise saves planet from bad guy Martians...so whats new ?
Please study the list for atleast 10 full minutes ( assuming pop culture hasn't numbed your attention span:) and its clear movies haven't grown complex, not by a long shot.
Take the top 10 in that list. Other than LOTR & maybe starwars, the rest are straightforward good-vs-evil narratives.
Ok, take the top 25. You have memento & usual suspects...both are an example more of puzzle/trickery than true complexity.
Take the top 50...you now add Matrix & Eternal Sunshine...two examples of, forgive me, pretentious complexity as opposed to being genuinely complex.
On to the top 100...
I'd wager that truly complex films won't do well on the box office.
Simpler motifs are more compelling.
Why ?
Because narratives mirror human life.
Human life is primarily about
1.ambition
2.rejection
3.acceptance
4.mortality
You can play combinatorics with above 4 plotpoints to get finite set of 3-acts & those would translate to premises. You then construct characters to advocate said premises, such characters would then lead to conflict,lo & behold...drama!
Ingredients have always been the same Pemise->Character->Conflict.
For a forceful primer on why this is so, study Lajos Egri, for example.
Film has a roughly 106 year old history at this point. We're still dealing with the same stock naratives, and a 106 years later, unless the species have evolved to some higher ethereal plane, we'll deal with the same narratives.
Ofcourse Joe becomes Neo to keep up with pop culture...thats as far as complexity goes.
What has changed is the phenomenal growth of meta.
50 years ago, you forgot about the outside world & watch a flick & walk out mesmerized by the characters & the narrative. Now, nobody cares about the characters as much as which star is playing the character, whom he's sleeping with, whats the size of his paycheck, where's the film's blog, what did the director say on Jon Stewart's show, hey did you see the trailer on Charlie Rose, did you hear that joke on Jay Leno, Larry King,...so much meta-info.
Gimme the first & last name of the character played by Tom Cruise in Speilberg's WOTW ?
Who cares ? It was a Tom Cruise flick, made for the studio average of $120+ million, probably made twice as much on the box, had cool cgi,
Mr. Gates writes "We have a research lab in Cambridge, we have one now in China, one in India and that is where the top problems in computer science are going to be solved."
Really ?
Here's some of the top problems in CS.
Here's the research lab in India - working on technology implementations, certainly not top CS problems.
Here are the 10 innovations that will blow you away - coming out of Beijing. Again, some very sound implementations, but not exactly top 10 CS problems.
But yes, Cambridge is looking at some of the top 10 CS problems. However, MS is no Bell Labs when it comes to taking on research problems. They end up successfully monetizing tech solutions, but that is quite different from pioneering fundamental breakthroughs like inventing a transistor or laser.
Professor Richard Hamming was fond of saying that you can get money beyond your dreams if you solve any one of the 3 hardest problems in physics - timetravel, antigravity, or teleportation. Do you see Physics majors attacking these problems tooth & nail ? As Hammings explains, there's just no known attack.
Americans aren't warming up to the sciences simply because they have a choice. Students get to decide what they want to study. They look at the difficulty levels of the subject, the job market, ask their peers & parents, look at career prospects & evaluate their "sexiness", and decide to major in English & Communication & Marketing instead. In India, where I come from, you simply didn't have a choice, (well, not until you were 18 anyway, by which time it was too late for most of us). You were asked to digest megadoses of math & science in high school. Hell, I remember working on some "preliminary math" problems when I did my Masters in CompSci in the US. The problems were ones I had previously encountered when I was in my early teens, in my high school! But the Professor said American undergrads needed that sort of thing!!
You guys have a choice, so you study literature & photography & journalism & whatnot in your high school. In India, the only choices are math, more math & much more math. So I can comfortably handle a second order differential equation. But to this day I have not studied Shakespear ( spelling ? ), Rosseu, Homer ( not simpson, the pgilosopher chap), Keats, Byron or any other literary figures. I just know the names cause we crammed them for various "general knowledge" quizzes!
Education systems are broken all over the world. In places like India & China, we get a one-sided hard-core math-sci curricula with no literature. In the US/UK, you guys get liberal arts with less math/science than what Bill Gates wants to hire.
Prizes are not the answer (Nor is a $100 laptpop for developing nations). I don't know what is.
I had an opportunity to interview Dan Gillmor this year on camera. He was genuinely concerned about where Outsourcing was headed, especially what happens to the US economy if all tech jobs migrate from the Valley to India. He placed the whole situation in a proper historical perspective, a comparison with NAFTA & how it was different this time around, a rundown of the actual numbers of people who were laid off, the impact on the valley, mountains of idle cash sitting on Sand Hill Road, and so much more...I came away with a feeling I had spoken to someone who felt quite strongly about where this country was headed, not your average journo who cooks up a spin so he can pay his bills. Here's his picture he's 5th from the bottom.
The #1 reason why most of us are tired is the nature of work. Corporate IT is the most soul-sucking stultifying chore I've encountered in my entire life. I just couldn't bring myself to wake up until 9am, and then I would rush to work, a tiring commute, be tired all day & then go back to sleep, tired again. It was just so boringly repititive & mindnumbing. And its not one company or one set of colleagues - I've switched jobs several times & inevitably it ends up the same.
Finally I had the courage to save up some cash, quit IT for good, and "find myself". Introspection is so hard less than 1% of the planet indulges in it. It can reveal so many unpleasant truths about you. Like the fact that no matter how skilled I was, I was never going to fit in as a corporate whore anywhere.
When I finally took the plunge & did what I really wanted to do all along, there was no going back. Since then I've been so upbeat, so frighteningly happy, its scary. I've never worked so hard as in the past few months. It is both physically & mentally gruelling, but I never felt tired.
All you got to do is grow some balls, figure out what you really want to do, & then go do it. And yes, the nest egg is important.
This is such an awe-inspiring effort. Logging 200 hours of footage over 3 years...I can imagine the amount of dedication, effort, logistics & scheduling that went into making this possible.
Hats off to you!
I'm into my 4th month of filmmaking right now. Logged 20+ hours so far, a dozen interviews under my belt, lots of travel, caffeine, sleepless nights...and I've barely begun. By the time I hope to be finished, I hope to have about 50 hours of footage. Just sifting thru all that, deciding which segment will make the cut & which won't...gigantic effort. I can't even imagine what you're going thru, narrowing down 200 hours into 3 DVDs. I wish you luck & lots & lots of patience.
There was this one documentary I watched recently - "Begging Naked" - that tracked this prostitute thru 7 yeas of her life. 7 years!!! In those 90 minutes of footage, you can practically see the person aging in front of you. The prostitute goes from being a young sexy hooker making pots of money in a Manhattan apartment to an old haggard woman living under a tree in Central Park out of a cardboard box. The person who made this film started filming in her 20s & is now in her 30s & the film still hasn't gotten a theatrical release. And she keeps plugging away. That's motivation for you!
Project Outsourced - the film
At a recent outsourcing panel, the CEO of one of the top-10 outsourcing outfits asked & answered the question "Where do you see yourselves in 5 years".
The outsourcing timeline can be classified into 4 tiers -
Tier 1 - Staffing - bring Indian pgmmers on H1Bs & L1s into US to staff IT departments
Tier 2 - Codefactory - Indian pgmmers in India write code spec'd out by American pgmmers.
Tier 3 - The current outsourcing wave
Tier 4 - The future - No IT department in the USA. All IT needs serviced by Indian outsourcing firms.
So you see, they are already preparing for Tier 4. All IT jobs, including R&D, design & architecture will eventually go to the IT depts in India & other low cost structure countries.
How to compete ?
Well, don't! Don't fight the tide. Do something else. IT has been commoditized. Find another field and get into that. If you must do IT, simply go where the jobs are - to India, Philippines, Russia, elsewhere.
The economics of the situation are so compelling, it makes no fiscal sense for US companies to keep IT jobs in the US.
Sounds scary, but that is what we were told.
Project Outsourced - the film
What she really means is that she'd rather get the attention she seeks, than be ignored for being staid & boring like plain old PBS.
Tom Stoppard said it best - most conflicts are NOT about rights vs wrongs....most conflicts are about rights vs rights.
There are different truths. Its "truthful" to say that messing with stem cells amounts to playing God. Its also "truthful" to assert that stem cells may hold the promise to cure for diseases that don't have any right now.
Its "truthful" to say abortion kills. Its also "truthful" to assert a mother's rights over her foetus.
Nietzche asserted that perspectivism was more dear to him than absolutism ( the notion that there are certain absolute truths). Perspectivism asks of the philosopher to adopt "changing truths" as a manifesto, rather than search for "the truth", since there isn't really any such objective truth - it depends on the observer, his circumstances, his senses & powers of observation ( just as an ant or a bee with widely differing sense of sight & smell would see the world very differently than a human, similarly a black man would see certain truths differently than a white man, certain notions are truthful to catholics but not muslims, & so on... )
Those who argue for "objective truth & accuracy" bestow much more power to man than he really has. Most events are a result of chance, synchronicity , chaos and non-determinism...to look for truth in them is simply futile.
Ofcourse an attempt at truth is better than reporting plain falsehoods, but that doesn't mean such an attempt is the real truth, because there is no real truth, only perspectives.
Well, capitalism ( not competition ) is intrinsically designed to drive prices down, simply because of economies of scale ( ie. costs less per widget when a million widgets are made as opposed to when a hundred are made )
Competition can drive prices up or down -eg. In his classic book, Professor & psychologist Robert Cialdini talks about one common tactic to get customers to buy your product - RAISE prices!
Customers have this mistaken perception that price equals value, so higher price translates in their mind to valuable, lower prices to inferior/cheap goods ( this actually goes waaaay back, to Karl Marx's Labor Theory of Value )
The masses might actually buy a $5 song in the mistaken assumption that it is somehow more valuable than a song for $0.99.
I began just like you did and made rapid progress, but then plateaued. Here's what works for me now -
a.Skip every other day. The muscles need atleast 24 hours to repair. By working them every day, you are overtaxing them. You will plateau, it is a certainity - ask any fitness specialist or your doctor.
b. When you do run/bike/workout, up the intensity and/or duration. Rather than 30 minutes, shoot for 1 hour, then 2.
c. Best to invest in an elliptical .Since your feet don't touch the ground on an elliptical, you don't bust your knees. At the same time you build rock-hard legs. Plus, you get to vary the intensity on an elliptical by changing the resistance & the incline - very effective.
d. Audio books are a great way to learn something while chugging away on an elliptical. I have loaded up on about 50 hours of philosophy - Locke, Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Marx, and yes, the usual suspects - Socrates, Plato & Aristotle. As geeks, we are constantly upgrading "tech skills" ( Perl, Java, C++, C# etc. ) while neglecting "life-skills". A sound foundation in philosophy comes in handy like nothing else. Even if you don't care for the subject, you learn things like argumentation, dialectic, persuasion theories, burden of rejoinder...essential skills for making your point when you talk to anybody.
Best elliptical scores so far, at different levels -
3 hours, 19 miles, 2400 calories
1 hour, 7 miles, 950 calories
0.5 hour, 450 calories
Good luck, and watch that caffeine !
They can outsource me, but can they outrun me?:)
Its a sea change from the 80s when IBM was kicked out of India during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's administration.
To really look beyond the short-term glitter and understand what this might lead up to, you must watch Life & Debt, which chronicles the Jamaican tragedy. Once Jamaica agreed to freetrade & opened up its trade zones, in a short span of few months, its entire native diary industry & banana trade was totally destroyed ( Milkpowder was dumped at dirt-cheap prices, and MNCs like Dole undercut the banana trade by bringing in bananas from Mexico ). There are a lot of pluses to free trade, but unless developing nations like India wield their bargaining power carefully, they will sell out to corporations & lose their autonomy.
But a lot of Indians in the panel felt the American ownership of Indian firms was a good thing, and it could erase some of the anti-outsourcing sentiment prevailing here in the US. Towards the end, the panel discussion got particularly heated up with sharply polarized arguments from both sides. A host of people agreed to talk to us about the "sale of India", as one of them put it.No easy answers to be found on this one.
Lion's Gate (LGF ) owns a majority stake in CinemaNow, the closest competition. LGF stock has been all over the place in the past few months due to Video-On-Demand deals with major studios. Unlike LGF, which grew from strength to strength after acquiring Artisan Films, is based in Hollywood, and has exclusive rights to several hundred movies as well as ties with the major players in the entertainment business, Netflix is more a rental mall for DVDs.
otoh, Netflix's CEO has been predicting his entry into the VOD market for the past few years, and they did trails with sample footage for most DVDs.
Competition's always beneficial to the consumer.
At my first startup, one of my first multipeople multiyear Java projects was a mainframe screen scraper ( TN3270 using AWT - example ). I was fresh out of college & totally unaware that mainframes still ruled the planet. Those two years & the huge revenues it brought led the startup to be acquired and made a lot of people really rich ( minus moi, ofcourse :(
Lots of money to be made in desktop-mainframe connectivity.
Even if this product fails to catch on in the airline industry, they can always turn to the rapidly growing market of "Porn Blockers", "Family Internet Filters" & "Parental Controls" - One of the existing problems is to detect & filter porn images accurately. The current naive algorithms simply sample image for huge swaths of pink & then discard the image. So an innocent pink puppy is as likely to be filtered as a naughty Hooter girl's pink hooters. "Shape-searching" can augment the algorithm by factoring the spherical shape of the breast into the search.
Another area that could benefit from it is Google Zeitgeist
Sure 1GB Gmail beats 4MB Yahoomail or 2MB hotmail, but I still can't store a single DVDs worth of data ( 1 DVD = 4.7GB ).
I predict future email providers are simply going to offer 1 DVD worth of space. Have a giant DVD-burner on the other end & pop in one DVD-RW per user, you have a good thing going...