If it's the Indian postal system you are talking about, well, let's just say people have some very good ideas for it.
You see, the postal system in rural India is more than a communication system, it is also effectively a village's bank as well; you can open a National Small Savings account in any of the 30,000 or so post offices across the country.
So add convinience marts, a centralised utilities payment counter, a rail/bus/air ticketing counter, an Internet browsing kiosk and perhaps a Western Union branch at each of these 30,000 locations, and we're talking rural renewal at a massive scale.
As in, still won't increase literacy rates or healthcare parameters (which is one reason why India is doing so badly in the UNDP scales) or improve the deteriorating crime situation, but would make life a helluva lot simpler for the rural populace.
No, no, you got it all wrong:- it is the *United States* that is leading the world in army outsourcing. Consider US Army operations in Phillipines, Taiwan and S Korea for preference.
The Indian Army, otoh, has had just one not-so-wow experience in Sri Lanka in the late 80's.
India's myriad little kingdoms of the past few centuries did little to create a unified language. China is well prepared for an actual great technological leap forward. India has it's work cut out for it.
You seem to be hinting that India isn't ready for an "actual" great technological leap forward because we don't speak a common tongue. I disagree; where there is complexity, there is creativity. It is pretty trivial for end-users to transliterate between scripts using the Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange (ISCII); a certain M- key combo, I believe, for emacs fans:-).
And indeed, it is a creative solution that has found uses outside Indian borders as well; Thai, for instance, uses ISCII as a base for its character encoding. So does Sinhalese, Myanmarese and just about most of the South, and South East Asian scripts out here.
Nope, our past and culture have never held us back from innovation or technological discovery.
granted, India has more languages and dialects, but it's important to keep in mind that naming the distinction is mostly arbitrary. Two people can consider themselves to speak the same language, but the differences in their language can be greater than those that for identity or historical reasons call their language a different name.
But that wasn't the OP's point; he was merely saying it would be much more difficult, technically speaking, than it is for Chinese, to take search engines to all Indians, whether they speak English or not.
Second, most educated people in India also know English. Granted, most people in India cannot afford to be educated, but neither can they afford computers and internet to do web searches either.
Which, still, isnt reason enough for Google, or any other search engine, not to be in Indian languages. I, for one, would like to, say, look up the Ram Charita Manas, as easily as I can look up, say, Shakespeare. (As in, you can *get* the Ram Charita Manas, but you can't *search* through it.)
I speak five (Indian) languages, and have always wondered at Google's ability at searching Unicode characters across all languages (and, of course, their commitment to serving their UI in manyIndianlanguages).
The difficulty, therefore, is not in terms of *languages* per se, but in terms of encoding; 99% of the stuff out there in my mother tongue, Telugu, uses non-Unicode rendering with proprietary fonts (often dynamic, so the display gets screwed up in browsers other than IE). Not to mention the fact that many websites, instead, prefer to use JPG images to display content; that way, they wouldn't have to do any tech support for n00b users irritated by the badly corrupted display on their browsers.
Then again, I'm talking about the ten or so Indian scripts which are covered by Unicode. Other scripts such as Meitei, for instance, obviously need to wait even more (but hopefully can get to the net faster considering the current experience).:-)
The general units in cases such as this, young padawan, is Libraries of Congress. Now, run back to the article, and re-calculate how many Libraries of Congress equates 45 hours of HDTV broadcast.
Can't give you *specific* advice on courses per se, but you'd generically want to look at courses that teach you classical design theory (in a media-agnostic sense), as opposed to merely courses that teach you *web-designing*. Won't turn you into a creative genius overnight, but knowledge of proper design principles (such as the "Gestalt Principle" or understanding which colours match etc) always helps.
This has come about because the telephone companies can bribe the Govt, and Govt also does not want VoIP coz it will mean lost revenue to state own telecom mammoth BSNL which has more than 100 Million Subscibers.
Popular misconception, but no longer true, and not even accurate, even considering the earlier situation. VoIP has been legal in India from April 2003 onwards; thank a certain Mr Arun Shourie for that.
In any case, the telephone companies (by which I presume you meant the private telecom co's such as Tata Indicom or Reliance) couldn't have bribed the government, simply because the international phone line segment simply wasn't open in the past; Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (which, I might point out, literally means, 'Overseas Communication Corporation Limited') still had a monopoly over that segment even after cellular services and metro landline services were privatised years back in 1996. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, BSNL, (or the even bigger, MTNL) has always been limited to intra-national telecom services.
In either case, VSNL has been privatised, and the government is mostly out of the system except for a fair bit of chaos it left in its wake, mostly to do with the manner in which the licences have been given to particular telecom circles (for instance, Mohali and Chandigarh are two seperate telecom 'circles', despite being a single topographically unified metropolitan area) and technologies (WLL versus mobiles), but there's always the quasi-judicial Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to look into that.
India most definitely has a corruption problem, but unfortunately, that's not the case here. The reason why things haven't changed until 2003 has mostly been an ancient evil known since Newton, an evil habit known as 'inertia'.
Although he did not say specifically how many DVDs BigStar ordered from Urban Fetch, company sources say they ordered close to $5,000 worth of DVDs before Urban Fetch established a limit of one DVD per order yesterday. "We were glomming for a few days," says Friedensohn. "Now we might switch to ice cream, which they also seem to sell below wholesale. Or maybe their VC can just send us the cash directly."
Does the economic boom of Bangalore have an influence on the average living standard of the typical citizen of Karnataka?
Let's take this 'boom' into perspective first. There's massive hype:- while I wouldn't exactly call it 'lying', the Indian IT companies have been certainly misleading when they talk about their success. There have been layoffs even as late as 2002, and what's more, all the big IT companies have changed their salary structures:- close to 30% of a software engineer's salary is now variable, depending on boom-and-bust cycles. Net result: profit statements are no longer an accurate measure of how the industry has been doing as a whole.
The most damning thing however, at least as far as I'm concerned, is that the fact that outsourcing per se has not been the shining star in whatever percentage growth we've had, either in GDP terms or in forex terms. Remittances by Indian workers internationally, and other star sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, agriculture, automobiles and telecom, are more to blame. Look up any article on the outsourcing 'boom'; all of them uniformly talk about what will happen in 2007.
Is the indian middle class a closed economic system or does a member of the indian middle class spend a large percentage of her money on stuff which is produced by the lower classes?
I don't know if I read your question correctly, but I'm assuming you want to differentiate between things made by, say, corporations (whether Indian or MNC), and by the lower classes generically. It's an interesting distinction must say, especially given the fact that the farming community in India is, after all, the world's largest private enterprise and has, mostly, avoided corporatisation.
In a sense, I suppose you could argue that other sectors are also like that; for all its impressive record, the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, is mostly a motley group of itsy-bitsy factories spread all over the landscape. The same for the diary industry (which is another of those success stories), and as Roblimo will probably post on newsforge, it's also true for the outsourcing sector. (Trying to differentiate between 'outsourcing' and 'product'-based companies)
Is there a major difference between the communist and the noncommunist indian states in this respect?
Yup, major.:-) Note, however, that only Kerala has had this sort of success; the other Communist-active states, West Bengal and Tripura, haven't had as much success in raising QoL metrics as Kerala has.
[The irony of course is that gokulpod, despite being from Kerala, doesn't seem to know much about this.;-) ]
One simple way:- cluster all amazon pages into a single thread, instead of spreading them all over your results page. Like some of the newer generation search tools do.
The answer is that the so-called caste 'system' isn't quite as systemic as it sounds. More like a hotch-potch of traditions, mindsets, communities and dialects spread across India's villages that continues to rear its ugly head in places where it shouldn't be.
A bit like, say, someone from Northern Ireland not getting a job in Limerick because of his accent (took the example from Angela's Ashes)
If you *really* want to go all Indian, you MUST try toddy (kallu, naaTu saaraa) tapped and brewed straight from the palm trees. One of the most potent juices around. The downside, though, is that you have to careful of the source; there *have* been deaths coz of illicit liquor.
Seriously though, Kingfisher is a great Indian beer, and no, Cobra isn't truly Indian [not available in India, although the CEO of the company is from my alma mater B-) ] and no, Kingfisher UK is apparently not the same as Kingfisher India.
Personally, I prefer this brand of flavoured water known as Tiger Beer from across our pond. Not that I *recommend* it though; just that I'm more used to it than other brands.;-)
No longer do you need to transport 50 kg of film reels in canisters.Instead, the movie will be stored in a high-capacity disc drive about double the size of a cigarette pack which will be couriered to the hall where the film can be downloaded to the server. Also, it'll be a digitally encrypted signal with an access password. This, to keep the pirates at bay. While a conventional print costs Rs 60,000-80,000, digital images come at only about 10 per cent of the expense, at Rs 3,000-8,000 for a disc.
The weight of the stuff they're carrying obviously matters here.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention, a chaotic [pun intended ;-)] slashdot poster.
You see, the postal system in rural India is more than a communication system, it is also effectively a village's bank as well; you can open a National Small Savings account in any of the 30,000 or so post offices across the country.
So add convinience marts, a centralised utilities payment counter, a rail/bus/air ticketing counter, an Internet browsing kiosk and perhaps a Western Union branch at each of these 30,000 locations, and we're talking rural renewal at a massive scale.
As in, still won't increase literacy rates or healthcare parameters (which is one reason why India is doing so badly in the UNDP scales) or improve the deteriorating crime situation, but would make life a helluva lot simpler for the rural populace.
Why not? Such a user community initiative was wildly successful for another closed source app Google
The Indian Army, otoh, has had just one not-so-wow experience in Sri Lanka in the late 80's.
Heh, true; as an MS salesguy friend of mine here insists, the broad agreements are during dinner, but the details are during golf.
And indeed, it is a creative solution that has found uses outside Indian borders as well; Thai, for instance, uses ISCII as a base for its character encoding. So does Sinhalese, Myanmarese and just about most of the South, and South East Asian scripts out here.
Nope, our past and culture have never held us back from innovation or technological discovery.
But that wasn't the OP's point; he was merely saying it would be much more difficult, technically speaking, than it is for Chinese, to take search engines to all Indians, whether they speak English or not.
Which, still, isnt reason enough for Google, or any other search engine, not to be in Indian languages. I, for one, would like to, say, look up the Ram Charita Manas, as easily as I can look up, say, Shakespeare. (As in, you can *get* the Ram Charita Manas, but you can't *search* through it.)I speak five (Indian) languages, and have always wondered at Google's ability at searching Unicode characters across all languages (and, of course, their commitment to serving their UI in many Indian languages).
The difficulty, therefore, is not in terms of *languages* per se, but in terms of encoding; 99% of the stuff out there in my mother tongue, Telugu, uses non-Unicode rendering with proprietary fonts (often dynamic, so the display gets screwed up in browsers other than IE). Not to mention the fact that many websites, instead, prefer to use JPG images to display content; that way, they wouldn't have to do any tech support for n00b users irritated by the badly corrupted display on their browsers.
Then again, I'm talking about the ten or so Indian scripts which are covered by Unicode. Other scripts such as Meitei, for instance, obviously need to wait even more (but hopefully can get to the net faster considering the current experience). :-)
The general units in cases such as this, young padawan, is Libraries of Congress. Now, run back to the article, and re-calculate how many Libraries of Congress equates 45 hours of HDTV broadcast.
Can't give you *specific* advice on courses per se, but you'd generically want to look at courses that teach you classical design theory (in a media-agnostic sense), as opposed to merely courses that teach you *web-designing*. Won't turn you into a creative genius overnight, but knowledge of proper design principles (such as the "Gestalt Principle" or understanding which colours match etc) always helps.
Two words:- Opera sessions.
In any case, the telephone companies (by which I presume you meant the private telecom co's such as Tata Indicom or Reliance) couldn't have bribed the government, simply because the international phone line segment simply wasn't open in the past; Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (which, I might point out, literally means, 'Overseas Communication Corporation Limited') still had a monopoly over that segment even after cellular services and metro landline services were privatised years back in 1996. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, BSNL, (or the even bigger, MTNL) has always been limited to intra-national telecom services.
In either case, VSNL has been privatised, and the government is mostly out of the system except for a fair bit of chaos it left in its wake, mostly to do with the manner in which the licences have been given to particular telecom circles (for instance, Mohali and Chandigarh are two seperate telecom 'circles', despite being a single topographically unified metropolitan area) and technologies (WLL versus mobiles), but there's always the quasi-judicial Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to look into that.
India most definitely has a corruption problem, but unfortunately, that's not the case here. The reason why things haven't changed until 2003 has mostly been an ancient evil known since Newton, an evil habit known as 'inertia'.
The most damning thing however, at least as far as I'm concerned, is that the fact that outsourcing per se has not been the shining star in whatever percentage growth we've had, either in GDP terms or in forex terms. Remittances by Indian workers internationally, and other star sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, agriculture, automobiles and telecom, are more to blame. Look up any article on the outsourcing 'boom'; all of them uniformly talk about what will happen in 2007.
I don't know if I read your question correctly, but I'm assuming you want to differentiate between things made by, say, corporations (whether Indian or MNC), and by the lower classes generically. It's an interesting distinction must say, especially given the fact that the farming community in India is, after all, the world's largest private enterprise and has, mostly, avoided corporatisation.In a sense, I suppose you could argue that other sectors are also like that; for all its impressive record, the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, is mostly a motley group of itsy-bitsy factories spread all over the landscape. The same for the diary industry (which is another of those success stories), and as Roblimo will probably post on newsforge, it's also true for the outsourcing sector. (Trying to differentiate between 'outsourcing' and 'product'-based companies)
Things are, however, changing.
Yup, major.[The irony of course is that gokulpod, despite being from Kerala, doesn't seem to know much about this.;-) ]
One simple way:- cluster all amazon pages into a single thread, instead of spreading them all over your results page. Like some of the newer generation search tools do.
I think it's time for a -1, post-modernist humour meta-moderation option. :-)
Caste was ALWAYS about family clans. It's comparable to the clan associations that turn-of-century Chinese had.
A bit like, say, someone from Northern Ireland not getting a job in Limerick because of his accent (took the example from Angela's Ashes)
Seriously though, Kingfisher is a great Indian beer, and no, Cobra isn't truly Indian [not available in India, although the CEO of the company is from my alma mater B-) ] and no, Kingfisher UK is apparently not the same as Kingfisher India.
Personally, I prefer this brand of flavoured water known as Tiger Beer from across our pond. Not that I *recommend* it though; just that I'm more used to it than other brands. ;-)
You will, once I get my home computer working. :-) [Can't code on company time, sorry]
So sayeth someone posting on a popular website called http://SLASHDOT.org :-)
I cant? :)
Quite clearly, he should learn from Microsoft and never make sweeping generalisations about his /. behaviour.