Both of you are wrong. The different statistics are measured seperately, but the numbers you hear on TV *do* take into account underemployment and those who have given up looking.
Its a laptop LCD from an Inspiron 8200. The panels themselves are rather cheap --- $200 to $250. Its a shame manufacturers do not make desktop monitors with these LCDs!
Eh. I've got a 15" LCD that does 1600x1200. I wouldn't trade it for *any* CRT (that includes those very nice 21" Sony ones). A good high res LCD is just *so* much easier on the eyes. LCDs may be more expensive than desks, but vision correction surgery is more expensive than either...
The title of this article is a crime to the English language. The way it's worded, it implies that the childrens' data was outsourced. I assume that simoniker contorted the sentence because he or she wanted to get "outsourced" into the start of the title.
Simoniker: Please tell me that English is not your primary language!
Ugh. Your average American code monkey can be bribed just as easily as an Indian code monkey. Terrorist organizations have a lot of cash, and people everywhere are cheaply bought.
The OP asked the question why there was such a disproportionate number of Indians in CS schools. The reason is that Indian culture makes them more inclined to go into CS. Consider your statement: "real geeks don't care much about popularity anyhow." Consider that out of the average population, 10% of people are "real geeks" who are willing to fight the social stigma and go into CS. Indians attach no such stigma to CS. Thus, > 10% of Indians will be willing to go into CS. Ergo, you have more Indians (many more, since the percentage is actually >> 10%) in CS relative to their share of the US population.
Your post is a perfect example of what people are doing wrong.
First, ignore the facts for a moment and pretend that outsourcing really is destroying the US middle class. How do you suppose we can keep executives from doing this? Of course, we can make protectionist laws to stop outsourcing. However, its protectionist laws of this sort that keeep citizens from buying foreign drugs!
You should be calling for an end to protectionist drug laws, not for the instatement of new protectionist laws!
BTW> In any capitalist system, the rich will be getting richer faster than the middle class gets richer. Its an example of exponential growth, not linear growth. Protectionist laws keep the gap from growing larger not by addressing the inequity, but by limiting growth! If you believe that the gap between the rich and the middle-class should be smaller, don't vote for protectionism, but vote for increased taxes to support increased social services (healthcare, education), which increases equality without sacrificing growth.
Cost benefit ratio. They might not be as good at their jobs, but if they are cheap enough, it doesn't matter.
We've been seeing this in the United States for decades, by the way. The quality of service has plummeted across the board. This is just a continuation of that trend. The sad fact is that people are willing to put up with crappy service if they can pay $10 less for something.
I don't live in India, but I've got some understanding of the Indian school system. From what I can tell, its very much a British-style system. That means a whole lot of very rigerous study in mathematics and science. Not a huge percentage of people get to go to the best schools, but numerically, that makes for a lot of people with a good education.
PS> As someone who has endured the US education system from kindergarten, I have to say it sucks. In K-12, students learn nothing useful. The just learn about Native Americans over and over. "Guess and check" is taught a a legitimate way of solving math problems! There are some islands of good teaching (certain GT schools, some private schools, for example) but their success lies in the fact that their teachers essentially ignore the standard cirriculum. For example, my brother's math teacher uses a geometry book from the 1980s, because he believes that math books since then have just been pretty picture books. A couple of times a week, he assigns two or three extremely difficult problems that take hours to complete. And that style, though rigerous, certainly gets results! Things get much better in the excellent US University system (if you go to a good school, that is) but often freshman year of college is just spent trying to undo the brain-damage inflicted by the K-12 system.
Its a cultural thing. Indian culture glorifies engineering and math study. American popular culture actively discourages it. It makes perfect sense, thus, that there would be a higher percentage of Indians in engineering and CS.
What legal protections? White collar workers generally do not get the kind of protections blue collar workers do. Salaried workers, for example, who work tens of hours of overtime per week without seeing an extra cent.
Also note that American white collar workers have the longest work weeks and shortest vacations of pretty much any country in the world.
As for medical and dental benefits, those are factored into the compensation, and are not a hidden cost.
Bush made a funny comment yesterday on his interview with "Meet the Press." When asked, basically, why people around the world hate him, he said something along the lines of, "well, they hated Ronald Reagan too." I think that statement meant two completely different things to me and him. For hardline Republicans, the reaction was probably something like: "Yes, they spoke ill of our prophet and savior Reagan in the past, just like they speak ill of his progeny Bush now. Infidels!" For everyone else, it was probably like: "Duh, he was a loser too!"
We're the ones who made it work when everyone else failed. ---------- The people who *invented* free-market capitalism, the British, seem to be doing just fine with it.
Our economy is by far the most liberal of the industrialized countries. ----------- In one way, yes, in other ways, no. We are pretty liberal, but we still have far too many protectionist policies in place. Take, for example, the recent attempt by GWB to put a tarrif on steel imports. It was withdrawn, but there are lots of other ones like it that have not been.
They aren't elected officials, they don't even have to pretend to care what the people think. ---------- They don't have to. By its very nature, the Constitution trumps the will of the people. And the courts are (rightly) deciding that anti-gay marriage laws are unconstitutional.
The problem with your "national culture" argument is if that a nation's citizens cared about their national culture, they'd stop importing American culture. Unless you take away their freedom to spend their money how and where they want, there is nothing you can do about the passing of your national culture. I agree that American culture is a crappy thing to decide to want to import, but I have to say that the people should be free to import what they choose to.
There would not be an opeating system per-se, just a bunch of large libraries that provided services such as disk I/O, drivers, hardware management, etc. That and interrupt handlers, I guess. Its very similar to the idea of an exokernel, except there would be no kernel, just the library OS.
If you get rid of protection, however, you would have to implement some form of code-signing to ensure that only safe code got executed directly, and unsafe code (C/C++ programs, for example) were executed in a virtual machine.
As far as high level languages go, VB, Java, C# are pretty crappy ones. VB is high level, but doesn't use that to give the programmer power, but rather to baby him and restrict him. Java and C# are really mid-level. All of them have relatively crappy implementations. For example, the entire distinction between primitives and objects in Java is unnecessary. We've had the technology to make "objects all the way down" languages very fast for quite awhile now. Hell, Java's predecessor, Self, pioneered many of these techniques!
In any case, your logic is flawed. Just because its possible to write a slow high-level language (VB) doesn't mean that there aren't lots of fast high-level languages (Scheme, Common Lisp, Dylan, Ocaml, Clean, etc).
There was an interesting study done comparing the performance and productivity of C++ vs Lisp vs Java programmers. Results are here.
One very interesting thing they found was that while the best C++ programs were faster, the average Lisp program was faster. Programmer experience could not account for this, since the C++ programmers were much more experienced than the Lisp ones.
In retrospect, its easy to see why. When you write clean, straight-forward code like you would in a production environment, its much easier for the compiler to optimize high-level code than low-level code. Compilers for languages like Lisp/Scheme/Haskell/etc do all sorts of optimizations that existing C/C++/Java compilers either don't do (forgotten technology) or can't do (pointers cause lots of problems).
My point is that programming at a higher level, in general, allows the compiler to do more optimization than programming at a lower level. Given infinite time, an asm programmer will always be able to crank out faster code than a C++ programmer, who will always be able to crank out faster code than a Lisp programmer. However, in the real world, it may very well be the case that giving the optimizer more meat to work on will result in a program that is ultimately faster over all.
If we actually adhered to the mantra "cycles are cheap, people are expensive" we'd be using fast, compiled, *safe* languages. There are a number of languages (notably CL and Dylan) that can get within 80-90% of the performance of C assuming equally well-written code. That remaining 20% would easily be made up by getting rid of all the crap (memory protection, process domains, enormous complexity in the virtual memory manager, a kernel/userspace boundry) that is completely unnecessary given a safe language.
There was an interesting study done comparing the performance and productivity of C++ vs Lisp vs Java programmers. Results are here.
One very interesting thing they found was that while the best C++ programs were faster, the average Lisp program was faster*. Programmer experience could not account for this.
In retrospect, its easy to see why. When you write clean, straight-forward code like you would in a production environment, its much easier for the compiler to optimize high-level code than low-level code. Compilers for languages like Lisp/Scheme/Haskell/etc do all sorts of optimizations that existing C/C++/Java compilers either don't do (forgotten technology) or can't do (pointers cause lots of problems).
My point is that programming at a higher level, in general, allows the compiler to do more optimization than programming at a lower level. Given infinite time, an asm programmer will always be able to crank out faster code than a C++ programmer, who will always be able to crank out faster code than a Lisp programmer. However, in the real world, it may very well be the case that giving the optimizer more meat to work on will result in a program that is ultimately faster over all.
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Both of you are wrong. The different statistics are measured seperately, but the numbers you hear on TV *do* take into account underemployment and those who have given up looking.
Its a laptop LCD from an Inspiron 8200. The panels themselves are rather cheap --- $200 to $250. Its a shame manufacturers do not make desktop monitors with these LCDs!
I'm a CLI-whore, and I love my LCD. Its tiny (15") but high-res (1600x1200). With virtual desktops and a dozen Konsole windows open (vim :) I'm happy.
Eh. I've got a 15" LCD that does 1600x1200. I wouldn't trade it for *any* CRT (that includes those very nice 21" Sony ones). A good high res LCD is just *so* much easier on the eyes. LCDs may be more expensive than desks, but vision correction surgery is more expensive than either...
The title of this article is a crime to the English language. The way it's worded, it implies that the childrens' data was outsourced. I assume that simoniker contorted the sentence because he or she wanted to get "outsourced" into the start of the title.
Simoniker: Please tell me that English is not your primary language!
Flamebait? Eh? That's just shitty moderation!
Ugh. Your average American code monkey can be bribed just as easily as an Indian code monkey. Terrorist organizations have a lot of cash, and people everywhere are cheaply bought.
Yeah, that's pretty common too... Luckily, my parents let me run rampant, so it was cool.
The OP asked the question why there was such a disproportionate number of Indians in CS schools. The reason is that Indian culture makes them more inclined to go into CS. Consider your statement: "real geeks don't care much about popularity anyhow." Consider that out of the average population, 10% of people are "real geeks" who are willing to fight the social stigma and go into CS. Indians attach no such stigma to CS. Thus, > 10% of Indians will be willing to go into CS. Ergo, you have more Indians (many more, since the percentage is actually >> 10%) in CS relative to their share of the US population.
Your post is a perfect example of what people are doing wrong.
First, ignore the facts for a moment and pretend that outsourcing really is destroying the US middle class. How do you suppose we can keep executives from doing this? Of course, we can make protectionist laws to stop outsourcing. However, its protectionist laws of this sort that keeep citizens from buying foreign drugs!
You should be calling for an end to protectionist drug laws, not for the instatement of new protectionist laws!
BTW> In any capitalist system, the rich will be getting richer faster than the middle class gets richer. Its an example of exponential growth, not linear growth. Protectionist laws keep the gap from growing larger not by addressing the inequity, but by limiting growth! If you believe that the gap between the rich and the middle-class should be smaller, don't vote for protectionism, but vote for increased taxes to support increased social services (healthcare, education), which increases equality without sacrificing growth.
Cost benefit ratio. They might not be as good at their jobs, but if they are cheap enough, it doesn't matter.
We've been seeing this in the United States for decades, by the way. The quality of service has plummeted across the board. This is just a continuation of that trend. The sad fact is that people are willing to put up with crappy service if they can pay $10 less for something.
In India, every mom wants their child to be a doctor or an engineer.
:)
Not a stereotype: I've got a Bangladeshi mom
I don't live in India, but I've got some understanding of the Indian school system. From what I can tell, its very much a British-style system. That means a whole lot of very rigerous study in mathematics and science. Not a huge percentage of people get to go to the best schools, but numerically, that makes for a lot of people with a good education.
PS> As someone who has endured the US education system from kindergarten, I have to say it sucks. In K-12, students learn nothing useful. The just learn about Native Americans over and over. "Guess and check" is taught a a legitimate way of solving math problems! There are some islands of good teaching (certain GT schools, some private schools, for example) but their success lies in the fact that their teachers essentially ignore the standard cirriculum. For example, my brother's math teacher uses a geometry book from the 1980s, because he believes that math books since then have just been pretty picture books. A couple of times a week, he assigns two or three extremely difficult problems that take hours to complete. And that style, though rigerous, certainly gets results! Things get much better in the excellent US University system (if you go to a good school, that is) but often freshman year of college is just spent trying to undo the brain-damage inflicted by the K-12 system.
Well, economics does say that minimum wages create unemployment, and voila, here it is :)
Its a cultural thing. Indian culture glorifies engineering and math study. American popular culture actively discourages it. It makes perfect sense, thus, that there would be a higher percentage of Indians in engineering and CS.
What legal protections? White collar workers generally do not get the kind of protections blue collar workers do. Salaried workers, for example, who work tens of hours of overtime per week without seeing an extra cent.
Also note that American white collar workers have the longest work weeks and shortest vacations of pretty much any country in the world.
As for medical and dental benefits, those are factored into the compensation, and are not a hidden cost.
Bush made a funny comment yesterday on his interview with "Meet the Press." When asked, basically, why people around the world hate him, he said something along the lines of, "well, they hated Ronald Reagan too." I think that statement meant two completely different things to me and him. For hardline Republicans, the reaction was probably something like: "Yes, they spoke ill of our prophet and savior Reagan in the past, just like they speak ill of his progeny Bush now. Infidels!" For everyone else, it was probably like: "Duh, he was a loser too!"
We're the ones who made it work when everyone else failed.
----------
The people who *invented* free-market capitalism, the British, seem to be doing just fine with it.
Our economy is by far the most liberal of the industrialized countries.
-----------
In one way, yes, in other ways, no. We are pretty liberal, but we still have far too many protectionist policies in place. Take, for example, the recent attempt by GWB to put a tarrif on steel imports. It was withdrawn, but there are lots of other ones like it that have not been.
They aren't elected officials, they don't even have to pretend to care what the people think.
----------
They don't have to. By its very nature, the Constitution trumps the will of the people. And the courts are (rightly) deciding that anti-gay marriage laws are unconstitutional.
The problem with your "national culture" argument is if that a nation's citizens cared about their national culture, they'd stop importing American culture. Unless you take away their freedom to spend their money how and where they want, there is nothing you can do about the passing of your national culture. I agree that American culture is a crappy thing to decide to want to import, but I have to say that the people should be free to import what they choose to.
There would not be an opeating system per-se, just a bunch of large libraries that provided services such as disk I/O, drivers, hardware management, etc. That and interrupt handlers, I guess. Its very similar to the idea of an exokernel, except there would be no kernel, just the library OS.
If you get rid of protection, however, you would have to implement some form of code-signing to ensure that only safe code got executed directly, and unsafe code (C/C++ programs, for example) were executed in a virtual machine.
As far as high level languages go, VB, Java, C# are pretty crappy ones. VB is high level, but doesn't use that to give the programmer power, but rather to baby him and restrict him. Java and C# are really mid-level. All of them have relatively crappy implementations. For example, the entire distinction between primitives and objects in Java is unnecessary. We've had the technology to make "objects all the way down" languages very fast for quite awhile now. Hell, Java's predecessor, Self, pioneered many of these techniques!
In any case, your logic is flawed. Just because its possible to write a slow high-level language (VB) doesn't mean that there aren't lots of fast high-level languages (Scheme, Common Lisp, Dylan, Ocaml, Clean, etc).
A computer scientist, the term used by the article author, is not necessarily a programmer.
There was an interesting study done comparing the performance and productivity of C++ vs Lisp vs Java programmers. Results are here.
One very interesting thing they found was that while the best C++ programs were faster, the average Lisp program was faster. Programmer experience could not account for this, since the C++ programmers were much more experienced than the Lisp ones.
In retrospect, its easy to see why. When you write clean, straight-forward code like you would in a production environment, its much easier for the compiler to optimize high-level code than low-level code. Compilers for languages like Lisp/Scheme/Haskell/etc do all sorts of optimizations that existing C/C++/Java compilers either don't do (forgotten technology) or can't do (pointers cause lots of problems).
My point is that programming at a higher level, in general, allows the compiler to do more optimization than programming at a lower level. Given infinite time, an asm programmer will always be able to crank out faster code than a C++ programmer, who will always be able to crank out faster code than a Lisp programmer. However, in the real world, it may very well be the case that giving the optimizer more meat to work on will result in a program that is ultimately faster over all.
If we actually adhered to the mantra "cycles are cheap, people are expensive" we'd be using fast, compiled, *safe* languages. There are a number of languages (notably CL and Dylan) that can get within 80-90% of the performance of C assuming equally well-written code. That remaining 20% would easily be made up by getting rid of all the crap (memory protection, process domains, enormous complexity in the virtual memory manager, a kernel/userspace boundry) that is completely unnecessary given a safe language.
There was an interesting study done comparing the performance and productivity of C++ vs Lisp vs Java programmers. Results are here.
One very interesting thing they found was that while the best C++ programs were faster, the average Lisp program was faster*. Programmer experience could not account for this.
In retrospect, its easy to see why. When you write clean, straight-forward code like you would in a production environment, its much easier for the compiler to optimize high-level code than low-level code. Compilers for languages like Lisp/Scheme/Haskell/etc do all sorts of optimizations that existing C/C++/Java compilers either don't do (forgotten technology) or can't do (pointers cause lots of problems).
My point is that programming at a higher level, in general, allows the compiler to do more optimization than programming at a lower level. Given infinite time, an asm programmer will always be able to crank out faster code than a C++ programmer, who will always be able to crank out faster code than a Lisp programmer. However, in the real world, it may very well be the case that giving the optimizer more meat to work on will result in a program that is ultimately faster over all.