I'm presuming you come from a biological background, but allow me to say this:- evolutionary programming is more about using evolution as a metaphor rather than modelling evolution per se. This I gathered after endless conversations with my (gastroenterologist) dad and (plant pathologist) mom on my research work in my final year of college.
Most computer scientists loosely use the term "evolutionary programming" to talk about algos that have inherently unpredictable ("emergent") results rather than modelling actual evolutionary processes observed in nature, although that's also a fair part of it all. (Incidentally, I also believe the "Science" topic assigned to this story is wrong for this reason.)
The meta-algo is evolutionary programming in that the algo fianlly "developed" by the meta-algo is apparently result that isn't immediately apparent, indeed, one that perhaps unpredictable by humans.
As the grandparent said, things might be different in rural India. I hear that there are still some villages where people must dial long-distance to connect, so maybe that skews things a bit.
Actually, no; at least in AP, and in the North East, there is no city/town from where you'll have to dial long-distance to get net access. All calls by modems to their special dial-in number are charged as local calls.
This was in place since 1999 itself, when I had my last intra-India backpacking trip (and cared about sending email while on a backpacking trip).:-)
Boo booo, you Kannadigas are only five years late to the game! We in AP have had this for quite sometime now; it's called CARDS (I think), and it brought down the processing time from one week to five minutes for my new house, back in 2001 itself.:-)
I don't know if you were being sarcastic when you said this, but so are 4200's. You can get an equivalent model from Dell for US$200 or so less.
Re:Oh Please! The land where police protect crimin
on
India's Digital Village
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Okay, so I'm a closet Rail geek, but technically, Ind Rail is the world's largest rail network under a single management. This is quite different from being the "world's largest (country-wide) rail network", which still is, as a matter of fact, Russia's. Incidentally, IR is also the world's largest employer (has some 2 million or so employees, many of them college teachers, doctors and so on), as also moves the largest number of people per day anywhere in the world, so yup, we're talking of a really massive enterprise here.
Btw, you really don't want to write off IR that easily. They are doing some cool stuff out there; an IR subsidiary has, for instance, developed a fascinating new mass transit solution for India's crowded urban landscapes. They also have a fairly active mailing list, and often respond to polite queries.
New technologies will not suit the currupt and they are the one's who usually have the power to decide what stays and what doesn't.
Resistance to change from vested interests is part and parcel of the political game in just about every country; India is no exception to the rule. That said, progress will happen; we'll definitely take longer than, say, China or Korea, but we'll get there pretty soon. In the process, we'll probably develop technology to cater to uniquely Indian needs perhaps, but make no mistake:- we will get there, no matter how corrupt some political netas ('leaders' in Hindi) are.
Also, the bulk of people are against technology and change, as seen in the last elections.
An electorate that (electronically) votes the incumbent government(s) out is afraid of... technology and change? Interesting logic you've got out there.
Simputer as a country-wide measure to improve QoL?
Whoa there, have you ever seen the Simputer website? Here's a summary:- except for cute Indic marketing, there's in fact zero value that an Amida adds over, say, a Dell Axim, EVEN in terms of pricing.
I can probably see why you want to "defend" India against trolls (personally, growing immune to the crap these days), but let's use the *right* weapons here shall we?:-)
Interesting, they seem to be trying to develop an open source community around their product. Some very interesting ideas:- an open firmware, an XML db for the Synchronisation Manager, and oh, they seem to be using.net code in their apps. Hmmmm.
I completely emphathise on two counts. Clients are morons, and would never pass up the oppurtunity to put the blame on you. Which is why I've learnt to document all communication/requests with the client in a fail-safe place. That way, you keep your a** covered when things do go wrong.
And yup, shifting media when the channels of communication breaks down in one is always a good idea. Not only can you appeal to people at a different level, you can also take a little time off, reflect on the situation and then decide where you want to stand.
The problem here is simple, really. Telugu, like other Indic languages, requires some complex rendering. Essentially, unlike European scripts, you need to get both character and glyph information out; that is to say, the glyph (letters, guNintaalu, or conjunct-vowels, vottulu, or conjunct-consonants) change shapes when placed next to other letters/conjunct consonants.
Now, the way it's been done through the 90's was to define a font (like Shree 940 etc) on the basis of the roman script; that is, instead of displaying an 'A' for character code 65, you display a Telugu character. Which definitely "works" for, say, a lone DTP professional sitting somewhere in Tarbund, but in terms of information interchange, it's hell; you'd not only have to transfer documents but also fonts. Which leads to a lot of chaos; as you'd expect, normal users wouldn't like to dabble with all this fonts nonsense. So sites like Eenadu, Andhra Jyothy and so on usually "embed" the Telugu font using some weird ActiveX-ish function, thereby closing the door for users of alternate browsers like us.
Now, the realllly long term solution to this mess is for the webmasters to move over to a Unicode representation. The added advantage for them would be that their pages would finally be Google-searchable in Telugu itself (thereby resulting in more hits). That, unfortunately, would need loads of PR, communication, expertise and more importantly, motivation from their side. Not to mention the fact that, except Win XP, no Windows version is Unicode-Telugu-compatible.
In the absence of all that, one option I've just been thinking of is to write a script that mimics IE, gets the respective pages, encodes them into, say, PDF (while maintaining all the respective links). Now, I really haven't explored this option from a technical point of view, but I could fiddle around with some scripting over the week, and perhaps, I could come up with something.
Actually, I'd say the Gmail public beta is one of the most successful viral marketing attempts I've seen in recent history. I mean, think about it:- had Google announced Gmail through a teeny weeny link on, say, labs.google.com, I'd probably have not bothered about it. OTOH, now that there's such a big hype factor about owning a Gmail account, I'm all ga-ga over it, virtually blackmailing a (Slashdot) friend into sending me an invite.:-)
Always remember; Gmail isn't just about the space, it's also about the UI as well. It definitely isn't easy for either Hotmail or Yahoo or any other webmail to compete against it easily.
Re:Not going to accept or send email to/from Gmail
on
Gmail in the News
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· Score: 1
I dont know about you folks out there, but Gmail seems to have hit us here like a tsunami. Within three days, more than 60% of the contacts in my MSN Messenger list have Gmail accounts, and all of them, without exception, have converted them to their primary email accounts.
Fact is, despite all concerns, Gmail *is* becoming wildly popular. Things are going at such a rate here that if anyone is deluded enough to not accept any email from a Gmail account, he's basically banishing himself from email in general.
Unfortunately, no one can be told why GMail is better. You'll have to see it for yourself.:-)
Seriously, mroe than the gig of inbox space they offer, I think it's the UI that beats the shit out of even Opera IMAP (and trust me, I'm a heavy M2 user on my other email account); imagine M2-like view abilities with the ability to google through your email. Disappointing though, that GMail is still not Opera-compatible; this, currently, is the only reason I'm still on IE.
2.5 US cents per SMS for me out here in Singapore.
And that rate kicks in only after some 200-300 SMS's only, which is about 10 times the amount I'd send in a month, so basically, I've never paid for an SMS ever.:-)
The main point about India Shining is rather simple; it's all about saying "we can catch up with the First World [if we do x]", not say, "we are the First World". No ego trips intended, not with you Pakis or Nepalis or B'deshis or anyone; wonder why you think otherwise.
Now, the reason why it failed is, I believe, a failure of the media and the messengers more than that of the message; the mass media, for one, has discernably turned out to be less mass than what the political managers thought. Also, most voters (and I'm one of them, incidentally) never made the connection between 'prosperity' and the 'incumbent government'; quite clearly, economic policy has now mostly become a matter of non-debate in political circles these days (implementation is a different matter altogether) so there was no real reason to vote for the incumbent anyway.
But all the same, I don't see why anyone should object if we Indians pat ourselves on our backs; things have certainly improved in prosperity terms for all sections of Indian society over the past 15 years.
While I share your scepticism regarding the India Shining propaganda, I must however point out here that CB Naidu didn't lose because he focussed on IT; he lost because he got his political equation wrong.
Remember folks, elections are just that:- elections. They are NOT vox populi, they are NOT referenda on governance (or even economic prosperity). If they were, Laloo (or the Left in West Bengal, to answer the point about economic prosperity; look up the article for comparitive stats on that) wouldn't be elected every freaking time.
Well, in net terms, India still churns out more Arts grads than science/engin grads; in fact, policymakers here often point to places like Ireland and keep telling us how we need to actually increase the percentage of tech grads. (60% of all fresh Irish grads are apparently sci/tech types, compared to the 25 - 30% that we have currently).
The reason why tech grads have more visibility (and hype) than arts grads is because the number of good engineering schools is more than the number of good Arts schools. So you tend to see more successful Indian techies than successful Indian lib arts types. Moreover, the job market for the past 10 years or so is uniquely tailored to techies, so Arts grads are definitely going to lose out.
Creativity... the response we got here was entirely different. Not to beat my own drum, but we had a Harvard prof visit us once to observe how classes are conducted over here. We were later told that he was very impressed by the quality of discussion in our class and by how the system generally puts a high value on verbal skills.
My take on it:- it takes a lot of people to be India.:-)
'Thakur' is a caste name, a feudal caste of landowners in northern India. In places such as Bihar, trouble between old money castes such as this and the (so-called) lower castes often lead to rioting and massacres; the outlawed "private army", the Ranbir Sena, is often seen as a ragtag band of armed Thakurs and Bhumihars desperate to cling to political and societal power that was once theirs.
I probably over evil-ised Thakurs:-), which certainly wasn't my intention, I have a lot of Thakur friends, but just to clarify that it certainly is not fake. OTOH, Rabindranath's surname is, indeed, an Anglicised version of the Indic 'Thakur'. Ironic that you should believe it's the opposite.
Actually, the impression I got was that it was only "liberal" governments such as MP's and Kerala's (for some reason, we seem to have concentrated our OSS firepower in Mallu-land) that was mouthing niceties at OSS; ap.gov.in certainly was more pro-MS than OSS, at least under Chandrababu Naidu was at the helm.
Don't get me wrong, I think the (I)IIT's and all research institutes are deeply into OSS, but governmental organisations (NIC, ERNET, ICAR, CMC etc).... mmay be not.
Slashdot Mirror
Already here. :-)
Most computer scientists loosely use the term "evolutionary programming" to talk about algos that have inherently unpredictable ("emergent") results rather than modelling actual evolutionary processes observed in nature, although that's also a fair part of it all. (Incidentally, I also believe the "Science" topic assigned to this story is wrong for this reason.)
The meta-algo is evolutionary programming in that the algo fianlly "developed" by the meta-algo is apparently result that isn't immediately apparent, indeed, one that perhaps unpredictable by humans.
This was in place since 1999 itself, when I had my last intra-India backpacking trip (and cared about sending email while on a backpacking trip). :-)
Boo booo, you Kannadigas are only five years late to the game! We in AP have had this for quite sometime now; it's called CARDS (I think), and it brought down the processing time from one week to five minutes for my new house, back in 2001 itself. :-)
Btw, you really don't want to write off IR that easily. They are doing some cool stuff out there; an IR subsidiary has, for instance, developed a fascinating new mass transit solution for India's crowded urban landscapes. They also have a fairly active mailing list, and often respond to polite queries.
Whoa there, have you ever seen the Simputer website? Here's a summary:- except for cute Indic marketing, there's in fact zero value that an Amida adds over, say, a Dell Axim, EVEN in terms of pricing.
I can probably see why you want to "defend" India against trolls (personally, growing immune to the crap these days), but let's use the *right* weapons here shall we? :-)
Interesting, they seem to be trying to develop an open source community around their product. Some very interesting ideas:- an open firmware, an XML db for the Synchronisation Manager, and oh, they seem to be using .net code in their apps. Hmmmm.
And yup, shifting media when the channels of communication breaks down in one is always a good idea. Not only can you appeal to people at a different level, you can also take a little time off, reflect on the situation and then decide where you want to stand.
The problem here is simple, really. Telugu, like other Indic languages, requires some complex rendering. Essentially, unlike European scripts, you need to get both character and glyph information out; that is to say, the glyph (letters, guNintaalu, or conjunct-vowels, vottulu, or conjunct-consonants) change shapes when placed next to other letters/conjunct consonants.
Now, the way it's been done through the 90's was to define a font (like Shree 940 etc) on the basis of the roman script; that is, instead of displaying an 'A' for character code 65, you display a Telugu character. Which definitely "works" for, say, a lone DTP professional sitting somewhere in Tarbund, but in terms of information interchange, it's hell; you'd not only have to transfer documents but also fonts. Which leads to a lot of chaos; as you'd expect, normal users wouldn't like to dabble with all this fonts nonsense. So sites like Eenadu, Andhra Jyothy and so on usually "embed" the Telugu font using some weird ActiveX-ish function, thereby closing the door for users of alternate browsers like us.
Now, the realllly long term solution to this mess is for the webmasters to move over to a Unicode representation. The added advantage for them would be that their pages would finally be Google-searchable in Telugu itself (thereby resulting in more hits). That, unfortunately, would need loads of PR, communication, expertise and more importantly, motivation from their side. Not to mention the fact that, except Win XP, no Windows version is Unicode-Telugu-compatible.
In the absence of all that, one option I've just been thinking of is to write a script that mimics IE, gets the respective pages, encodes them into, say, PDF (while maintaining all the respective links). Now, I really haven't explored this option from a technical point of view, but I could fiddle around with some scripting over the week, and perhaps, I could come up with something.
Always remember; Gmail isn't just about the space, it's also about the UI as well. It definitely isn't easy for either Hotmail or Yahoo or any other webmail to compete against it easily.
Looks like you've just hit SCFWE (Slashdot certified funny writing engineer) certification instead! ;-)
Ah, but I was reading comments here suggesting that GMail wasnt Firefox compatible either! :-) Or is it?
clickey.
Fact is, despite all concerns, Gmail *is* becoming wildly popular. Things are going at such a rate here that if anyone is deluded enough to not accept any email from a Gmail account, he's basically banishing himself from email in general.
Seriously, mroe than the gig of inbox space they offer, I think it's the UI that beats the shit out of even Opera IMAP (and trust me, I'm a heavy M2 user on my other email account); imagine M2-like view abilities with the ability to google through your email. Disappointing though, that GMail is still not Opera-compatible; this, currently, is the only reason I'm still on IE.
And that rate kicks in only after some 200-300 SMS's only, which is about 10 times the amount I'd send in a month, so basically, I've never paid for an SMS ever. :-)
(Always thought the only places you could find Tech Gults were Sunnyvale and Hyderabad...)
Now, the reason why it failed is, I believe, a failure of the media and the messengers more than that of the message; the mass media, for one, has discernably turned out to be less mass than what the political managers thought. Also, most voters (and I'm one of them, incidentally) never made the connection between 'prosperity' and the 'incumbent government'; quite clearly, economic policy has now mostly become a matter of non-debate in political circles these days (implementation is a different matter altogether) so there was no real reason to vote for the incumbent anyway.
But all the same, I don't see why anyone should object if we Indians pat ourselves on our backs; things have certainly improved in prosperity terms for all sections of Indian society over the past 15 years.
Remember folks, elections are just that:- elections. They are NOT vox populi, they are NOT referenda on governance (or even economic prosperity). If they were, Laloo (or the Left in West Bengal, to answer the point about economic prosperity; look up the article for comparitive stats on that) wouldn't be elected every freaking time.
The reason why tech grads have more visibility (and hype) than arts grads is because the number of good engineering schools is more than the number of good Arts schools. So you tend to see more successful Indian techies than successful Indian lib arts types. Moreover, the job market for the past 10 years or so is uniquely tailored to techies, so Arts grads are definitely going to lose out.
Creativity... the response we got here was entirely different. Not to beat my own drum, but we had a Harvard prof visit us once to observe how classes are conducted over here. We were later told that he was very impressed by the quality of discussion in our class and by how the system generally puts a high value on verbal skills.
My take on it:- it takes a lot of people to be India. :-)
I probably over evil-ised Thakurs :-), which certainly wasn't my intention, I have a lot of Thakur friends, but just to clarify that it certainly is not fake. OTOH, Rabindranath's surname is, indeed, an Anglicised version of the Indic 'Thakur'. Ironic that you should believe it's the opposite.
Don't get me wrong, I think the (I)IIT's and all research institutes are deeply into OSS, but governmental organisations (NIC, ERNET, ICAR, CMC etc).... mmay be not.