Oh, absolutely, and I believe this manifests itself in a subtly different way. Time was when there was at least one article a day on Slashdot on how to hack (in the traditional, SICP-isque sense of the term) things; you know, people doing really cool hacks with Wi-fi antennae, Lego bricks, case-mods and what not. Now all the hack-articles we get to read about are on how change defective MacBook batteries. Or, as a poster so gratitiously wrote, fashion advice for RMS.
While I'm not a diehard OSS fanatic by any means, (closer to MS professionally than to OSS), I think your broad point is extremely valid: OSS/Software Libre is less about political ideologies, and more about actual tinkering around with technology. Extremely saddening that the community here is increasingly losing sight of this basic truth.
Seeing as it is that you've worked on design elements, and on one of the more popular mobile browsers out there, what do you think are the challenges and pitfalls in designing webpages for mobiles? As a followup, where do you see the mobile application market headed, and how effective is it for web-designers to spend time on mobile browsers and not on, say, cross-(regular) browser compatibility?
And finally, since no one else has said this, Howcome you're here!:-)
Nope. The link only says that 10% of global road-deaths are in India; it makes no claim whatsoever on whether the deaths are car-related or not. Most of the urban vehicular traffic in India is from motorbikes.
Re:You can't get to China from here...
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Earth Sandwich
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On the other hand, I'm now struck by the notion that I'll emerge at the ruins at Machu Pichu if I take up digging as a serious hobby. (I'm in South East Asia). Then again, perhaps not as fantastic as it sounds if the Nazca lines turn out to be ancient markings for a planet-size kebab.
And a partially aborted rant..... what the bloody hell is people's obsession, with being in touch with the entire world 24/7? What the hell is wrong with NOT being wired for an hour or two?
I went to an improv comedy performance a few weeks back that worked like this: the audience was supposed to have forwarded curious SMS's they got to an on-stage mobile. The cast members would then perform a five minute skit based on that forwarded message.
All fine, and an extremely creative setting, but with one snag: the theater, in its wisdom, had asked the mobile company to remove cellphone towers from the vicinity of the theater. Or something to that effect; I'm not really conversant with communication technologies, but most (but not all) of the audience was left with no cell reception inside the theater. With the result that most of our messages got sent half an hour after the performance ended, when we were back in cell-towered civilization.
The lesson here is simple: art (and hence, society) will find a way to use technology, as long as technology doesn't try and solve the human condition.
Incidentally the anyone with the slightest degree of familiarity with Indian English will recognize the syntax
Oh, absolutely.:-) Been chuckling to myself as I browsed through the thread; if you're Indian, Ind-glish usage is one of the first things you notice in an otherwise ethnic-free text.
I don't know if my experience here in Singapore is any measure, but I've been told by peers that I could easily get a salary that is 20% more than what I'm earning if I shift companies, something that my company (to which, truth be told, I don't quite have too much loyalty for, but that's a different story) says it can't promise as yet.
Apparently, there are a lot of companies, mostly financial ones, moving in and are trying to establish a base here for the Asia-Pacific region, so there's a lot of sudden demand for technology-architects and such.
Then again, Flickr has been bought over by Yahoo and there are many users (such as myself) who are paid subscribers, so yup, while, say, YouTube's long term viability is under a question mark, Flickr definitely seems to be there for the long-haul.
Nothing to take away from your website, though,:-), just saying things aren't as black-and-white as you point out even in the Web2.0 world.
The truth is though, many of the female developers I know about tend to be just as shy as your average male coder.
Indeed, and that's what most (male) geeks miss when they ask if and where female geeks exist. They exist in similar cubicles as Ye Average Male Geek, just that they're invisible to the opposite sex. Just as Ye Average Male Geek is.
Of course, I say this with a uniquely Asian, and hence non-North-American, perspective (and remember, we have Affirmative Action for women in engineering; 33% seats reserved in some engineering colleges in India), but yeah, as an overall point, geek-itude inherently is not gender-based.
The answer is three-fold: first, there's that traditional nerd skepticism which is, of course, healthy and all that. The second reason is that this crowd doesn't usually "get" social innovations; as you saw in this thread, most here don't seem to be able to differentiate between "running 20+ firefox extensions together", and "one single product that does 20+ things". I'm not saying that Flock is a good product per se, haven't tried it as yet, but the point here is to highlight the difference, and to point out that tech-oriented folks don't usually understand that there's a difference.
The third and most important reason is demographics:- the Slashdot crowd has grown up from being starry-eyed sophomores, to dyed-in-the-wool late-20's folks with a couple of years of industry experience. Most of the old idealism has been replaced with hard-to-crack tech orthodoxy.
Bottomline: it's not just Web 2.0, you'll notice the same level of whining for any new gizmo/gadget/etc.
Market economics tells us why this might have happened. It tells us absolutely nothing as to whether it is acceptable for these conditions to persist.
I'm sure some Cambodians will take up the slack, which'd be better than sex slavery at any rate. Better fucked in the wallet than in the 12-year-old vagina by sweaty German tourists, don't you think?
I'm sorry, but not only is this a logical fallacy, it is also grotesquely insulting to Cambodians in general. While child prostitution is a real danger to many young girls in South and South East Asia, to present that as the only other employment alternative there is mindbogglingly condescending to the thousands of fine, upstanding folk in that country. You should be ashamed to have made such a statement.
In practice, there's no way a senior official can personally meet each and every citizen and discuss his or her concerns with them.
In India and even in a (an allegedly) 'controlled democracy' such as Singapore, Members of Legislative Assembly/Parliament have weekly meet-the-people sessions where regular folk can meet their representatives to discuss issues of their concern. The reason they do this is not just to ensure voter loyalty, but more importantly, to give a certain human touch to an essentially face-less bureaucracy.
Frankly, I'm of the opinion that meeting their constituents on a regular basis is part of any representative's job description, and find it ludicrous that anyone thinks it isn't.
(Which, of course, is not to say that the French PM should have met RMS; goes without saying that there's a PR stunt involved here).
Then again, there are people who have hijacked planes by brandishing sharply-cut carrots.:-) (This was in 1993, if I'm not wrong, one of those short-haul flights either from, or to, Varanasi).
That said, I'd just have to say this: after much thought, I've mostly come to the concluson that airline security in general is all about the appearance of doing something, and nothing about actual security because precious little can actually be done. For two years, I had a pocket Swiss knife that I always carried with me wherever I went. It so happened that I was able to pass this through seven airports (three international airports in India) in two continents without anyone asking anything. I finally got "caught" in this South East Asian hub, but even those guys there didn't really exonerate themselves; it was the fourth time I was passing through the airport!
Actually, her real point wasn't that she is against these individual lawsuits; she specifically says that she was part of the decision-making process, and that there were good points on "both" sides of the issue, but that the suits didn't start after she left. Whether that's weasel-words or not is something we can talk about, but nope, she isn't saying suing is a bad idea, but that they didn't sue while she was in charge. And that point about the iPod in the blurb... well, it's a non-issue completely; all she says is that she may, or may not, discuss it in detail in the future.
So yeah, really didn't read it as if she was distancing herself too much from RIAA; she's just invoking a plausible-deniability clause of sorts on those individual lawsuits.
The same thing happened to me over 10 years ago, when my job flew south to Texas. At the time, a few conversations with the Texan's replacing my group revealed that they made about 1/3 of the money in Texas compared to what we made in the Bay Area.
Exactly. Sorry if I sound disappointed in the general reaction here, but seems to me that the whining isn't that jobs are being replaced per se, but that the replacement is Indian. I'm not a free-market ideologue by any means, and for sure, I think it's important for countries to decide for themselves whether they want to interact with the rest of the world or not, but let's face facts here: this is pure fear of someone from a different community doing your job. The word for such a sentiment isn't "isolationist", or anti-free-trade, but another interesting term starting with X.
Personally, I'm waiting for the time when US firms start shipping off management positions to India.
As an ethnic group, I'm told that Indians (of all nationalities; important to remember that there are people of Indian descent in every continent) are the fastest growing bunch in INSEAD.
In fact, while on the topic of remniscising about the "old" Slashdot, let me also lament the total and complete disappearance of links to cool hacks/pet-projects done by regular folk in their spare time. Now all the Toys stories we seem to get are about, well, toys that you can buy, as opposed to those people have built (or could build). With the result that Slashdot discussions in general seem to have atrophied from being informed, to something of a worldwide whinefest on technology.
I suppose I should end this with a "FACT: Slashdot is dying" message or something.
Although, it must be mentioned, we were more heavily on the Allied side; the (British) Indian National Army, with its East India Company heritage, was pretty much a mercenary force at large. Most of the war in the Asian theater was fought by Indian soldiers; the World War 2 memorial at Kranji, Singapore, lists more Indian names than that of any other nationality.
So yup, we've been in this outsourcing business for quite some time now, and in "industries" you wouldn't have imagined of.:-)
Same story all across Asia.:-) I've been shown an internal document that I shouldn't have read, but my company, a prominent IT consulting firm in Singapore, expects that up to 75% of its staff will leave the company in two years or less.
I believe you're making two points here: first, that the job market in India is fairly mono-cultural, and secondly, that most Indian developers' skillsets are tied in to a single technology.
As far as the first point is concerned, I'd disagree. A close friend of mine is a project leader in a certain company that develops its core product for Symbian phones. He says he had to search for three-odd months in the region (South East Asia, btw), before finally falling back on the mother-ship, and "importing" some developer there. Bottomline: the job market is still fairly diverse; if anything, I think it's more J2EE-heavy, than.net-focussed. But you're right about Objective-C/Mac OS X in particular; I doubt that there's any Apple penetration in Indian universites. MS, otoh, is heavily into their student.net groups and that Imagine Cup thing.
I would, however, totally agree when you say that most folks' CS skills are tied into a single technology. To be fair though, that's exactly what the market wants; Indian IT is all about meeting client requirements ('code-monkeying' as some of you folks so endearingly call it), and less about innovating products, mostly for the fact that there's no local market for IT at all. Consider, for instance, the Indian flavour of Google News; this might not be immediately obvious to a non-Indian, but consider this:- we have the world's largest number of languages and the world's largest number of newspapers published. There are close to 2,500 newspapers published every day in my hometown. And yet, consider the number of news sources featured there; China, for all its allegedly reprehensive Great Firewall, has more news-sources in Google News (zh-CN).
This, as usual, can be explained by India's Great Big Divide; we might have the world's largest IT workforce or whatever, but there is simply no local market for IT! Most Indian geeks in urban India don't really realise this, surrounded as they are in Wi-Fi enabled malls, and mobile-phone-carrying teenagers, but our technology penetration levels are waaay off, even compared to other Asian countries. You begin to think: for a country that wants to be a knowledge society, this is a great place to start.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm not a diehard OSS fanatic by any means, (closer to MS professionally than to OSS), I think your broad point is extremely valid: OSS/Software Libre is less about political ideologies, and more about actual tinkering around with technology. Extremely saddening that the community here is increasingly losing sight of this basic truth.
The bit about being positive, though, was gold. *kow-tows*
And finally, since no one else has said this, Howcome you're here! :-)
Nope. The link only says that 10% of global road-deaths are in India; it makes no claim whatsoever on whether the deaths are car-related or not. Most of the urban vehicular traffic in India is from motorbikes.
On the other hand, I'm now struck by the notion that I'll emerge at the ruins at Machu Pichu if I take up digging as a serious hobby. (I'm in South East Asia). Then again, perhaps not as fantastic as it sounds if the Nazca lines turn out to be ancient markings for a planet-size kebab.
All fine, and an extremely creative setting, but with one snag: the theater, in its wisdom, had asked the mobile company to remove cellphone towers from the vicinity of the theater. Or something to that effect; I'm not really conversant with communication technologies, but most (but not all) of the audience was left with no cell reception inside the theater. With the result that most of our messages got sent half an hour after the performance ended, when we were back in cell-towered civilization.
The lesson here is simple: art (and hence, society) will find a way to use technology, as long as technology doesn't try and solve the human condition.
Apparently, there are a lot of companies, mostly financial ones, moving in and are trying to establish a base here for the Asia-Pacific region, so there's a lot of sudden demand for technology-architects and such.
Nothing to take away from your website, though, :-), just saying things aren't as black-and-white as you point out even in the Web2.0 world.
Of course, I say this with a uniquely Asian, and hence non-North-American, perspective (and remember, we have Affirmative Action for women in engineering; 33% seats reserved in some engineering colleges in India), but yeah, as an overall point, geek-itude inherently is not gender-based.
Now WHY did /. screwup my para tags?! Something's not quite right in the new CSS it seems, hmmm.
The third and most important reason is demographics:- the Slashdot crowd has grown up from being starry-eyed sophomores, to dyed-in-the-wool late-20's folks with a couple of years of industry experience. Most of the old idealism has been replaced with hard-to-crack tech orthodoxy.
Bottomline: it's not just Web 2.0, you'll notice the same level of whining for any new gizmo/gadget/etc.
The new Google Groups is in beta, and has been for the last two years. The old Google Groups was never in beta.
Frankly, I'm of the opinion that meeting their constituents on a regular basis is part of any representative's job description, and find it ludicrous that anyone thinks it isn't.
(Which, of course, is not to say that the French PM should have met RMS; goes without saying that there's a PR stunt involved here).
That said, I'd just have to say this: after much thought, I've mostly come to the concluson that airline security in general is all about the appearance of doing something, and nothing about actual security because precious little can actually be done. For two years, I had a pocket Swiss knife that I always carried with me wherever I went. It so happened that I was able to pass this through seven airports (three international airports in India) in two continents without anyone asking anything. I finally got "caught" in this South East Asian hub, but even those guys there didn't really exonerate themselves; it was the fourth time I was passing through the airport!
So yeah, really didn't read it as if she was distancing herself too much from RIAA; she's just invoking a plausible-deniability clause of sorts on those individual lawsuits.
Exactly. Sorry if I sound disappointed in the general reaction here, but seems to me that the whining isn't that jobs are being replaced per se, but that the replacement is Indian. I'm not a free-market ideologue by any means, and for sure, I think it's important for countries to decide for themselves whether they want to interact with the rest of the world or not, but let's face facts here: this is pure fear of someone from a different community doing your job. The word for such a sentiment isn't "isolationist", or anti-free-trade, but another interesting term starting with X.
As an ethnic group, I'm told that Indians (of all nationalities; important to remember that there are people of Indian descent in every continent) are the fastest growing bunch in INSEAD.In fact, while on the topic of remniscising about the "old" Slashdot, let me also lament the total and complete disappearance of links to cool hacks/pet-projects done by regular folk in their spare time. Now all the Toys stories we seem to get are about, well, toys that you can buy, as opposed to those people have built (or could build). With the result that Slashdot discussions in general seem to have atrophied from being informed, to something of a worldwide whinefest on technology.
I suppose I should end this with a "FACT: Slashdot is dying" message or something.
Not to sound like a Google fanboi, but seems that they're now re-thinking.
Devi Station? Are we at the end of Kali Yug already?
Although, it must be mentioned, we were more heavily on the Allied side; the (British) Indian National Army, with its East India Company heritage, was pretty much a mercenary force at large. Most of the war in the Asian theater was fought by Indian soldiers; the World War 2 memorial at Kranji, Singapore, lists more Indian names than that of any other nationality.
So yup, we've been in this outsourcing business for quite some time now, and in "industries" you wouldn't have imagined of. :-)
Same story all across Asia. :-) I've been shown an internal document that I shouldn't have read, but my company, a prominent IT consulting firm in Singapore, expects that up to 75% of its staff will leave the company in two years or less.
As far as the first point is concerned, I'd disagree. A close friend of mine is a project leader in a certain company that develops its core product for Symbian phones. He says he had to search for three-odd months in the region (South East Asia, btw), before finally falling back on the mother-ship, and "importing" some developer there. Bottomline: the job market is still fairly diverse; if anything, I think it's more J2EE-heavy, than .net-focussed. But you're right about Objective-C/Mac OS X in particular; I doubt that there's any Apple penetration in Indian universites. MS, otoh, is heavily into their student .net groups and that Imagine Cup thing.
I would, however, totally agree when you say that most folks' CS skills are tied into a single technology. To be fair though, that's exactly what the market wants; Indian IT is all about meeting client requirements ('code-monkeying' as some of you folks so endearingly call it), and less about innovating products, mostly for the fact that there's no local market for IT at all. Consider, for instance, the Indian flavour of Google News; this might not be immediately obvious to a non-Indian, but consider this:- we have the world's largest number of languages and the world's largest number of newspapers published. There are close to 2,500 newspapers published every day in my hometown. And yet, consider the number of news sources featured there; China, for all its allegedly reprehensive Great Firewall, has more news-sources in Google News (zh-CN).
This, as usual, can be explained by India's Great Big Divide; we might have the world's largest IT workforce or whatever, but there is simply no local market for IT! Most Indian geeks in urban India don't really realise this, surrounded as they are in Wi-Fi enabled malls, and mobile-phone-carrying teenagers, but our technology penetration levels are waaay off, even compared to other Asian countries. You begin to think: for a country that wants to be a knowledge society, this is a great place to start.
Strike me interested. Will be tuning in to your JE's now.