Everybody talks about MySQL 5.0 as if it's just a upgrade to MySQL 4.1. Isn't it a completely different database? Previously known as MaxDB and before that as SAP DB.
"This is one of the things that makes files hosted on a single server w/ MD5 hashes "verifying" them a little silly...if you can alter the file, you can alter the.md5 file as well."
Actually, it's not silly at all. Granted it doesn't provide any security, but when you download a big file it does help you verify that you got the full contents without any errors.
Today's employment section in Bangalore "Times of India" calls for software developers with experience in Symbian/Series 60/Linux developers. Read what you want into this development:-).
I've never used Palm V. Personally I've found Treo 90 to be the best form factor for a PDA. I've upgraded to a Treo 600 now but still miss my old Treo 90. I don't need a Camera. I wish Palm would a release a Treo 650 variant without a camera.
While this is a great move by HP, I doubt they're doing this out of pure goodness of their heart. Linux on Laptops in India is not something new. It's a highly competitive market. Most branded PCs/Laptops lose out to the "Assembled" ones which come preloaded with Windows and Office at "no cost". In order to compete companies have to remove the cost of Microsoft baggage - hence Linux. For example take a look at this Acer Laptop.
Sometime back Cisco allowed ssh access for employees by using user created keys. That's now disabled. I don't remember if it was disabled after this incident or before.
Just mmap() way beyond the possible size of the result and ftruncate just before writing to that memory. You can optimize by doing fewer ftruncates than the actual writes by some good guesses. I can't see how writing to the memory and then ftruncating the file works on BSD. There needs to be some backing store for the memory that you write.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the biggest advantage of Opera - the memory footprint; not the download size, though that's small too but the run time memory usage. On Linux try running FireFox and Opera for a while and you'll notice that Firefox uses up a lot more memory.
> Their direct dial is quite expensive (although > not unusual for VOIP - it's still *far* > cheaper to use a cheap analogue dialup for > overseas calls than VOIP).
How does that work to call an arbitrary number in Europe? I live in India and my wife is currently traveling. Calls to Europe cost a minimum of Rs. 9.60 per min (nearly 20 US cents) compared to using Skype for 2 US cents (plus ISP and phone costs which works out to less than 1 US cent a min). Skype is the cheapest option I've found so far. If there is a cheaper standards based option then I am all ears;-).
Well until cheap standards based options come, Skype is sure to be ahead. For example compare the costs to call a phone in Netherlands (my wife is currently there) using SkypeOut vs (say) Sipphone (www.sipphone.org). Approx 2 cents vs 5 cents a minute.
It definitely is much worse than other mail clients in my experience. 200MB+ to manage two IMAP accounts? I have now switched back to Kmail even though feature wise I like Thunderbird better. But kmail stays below a (relatively) reasonable 60MB.
Alioth (http://alioth.debian.org/), the Debian free software development site based on sourceforge code does give the option of subversion repositories. Currently you need subversion version 0.33, but I am sure they'll upgrade to 1.0 pretty soon.
I am not aware of any such distributed whiteboard projects being done (I am happy with IRC:-). However, I forgot to mention about one outsourcing benefit for open source. Novell developers in India work on Mono, GNOME and OpenOffice. Obviously, they get paid for working on them but "cheaper" Indian developers contributing to open source software can only be a good thing:-). I am jealous:-).
Mostly localization projects. See IndLinux for an example. Considering that there are more than 14 widely spoken Indian languages, obviously there are many more independent efforts out there for each language out there.
There are no well known software projects that are truly "Indian" like Linux or spamassasin. Indian developers are involved in many of these projects of course including kernel hacking, GNOME, KDE etc - for example, I am a Debian developer - but I am sorry to say that I cannot pick a high-profile (non localization related) open source project and say that yeah, this is an "Indian" project.
By the way, don't think of India as "non-english" speaking. All Indian programmers are by necessity english speaking. Considering that programmers from all over India come and work in a single office it's not practical for us to be speaking in our native languages at office. We get good english education from primary school and that's our primary medium of communication at work; and the only medium of communication for anything technical.
Internet Connection - pretty good at work. I think my company has a 2Mbps link - not T1, but quite nice for me (considering that when I started my career 64kbps was luxury:-). At home, still mostly dial up. Cable and DSL have limited availibility, expensive and not really broadband in the US sense. I think DSL/Cable gives you only about 128kbps - I don't have it yet, so I can't say for sure
Electricity - used to bad, but a lot, lot improved. We hardly have blackouts now, but happens once in a while. Offices have power backup, so we go about without noticing anything. Blackouts used to be about one or two hours power shutdown every day.In homes, many folks opt for power backup - but like I said blackouts are rarer these days, so it's not a big deal any more.
Water - is bad. Really bad in many cities. Per capita water consumption was always much less than US (less than a fourth if I remember correctly) but even that is in trouble in recent times. Most people use a "borewell" (i.e tapping underground water) to augment municipal supply. That has depleted ground water levels and caused even more problems. This is the biggest worry in most cities of India.
Living space when compared to office size - pretty good. My apartment is twice as big as some of one bedroom condos my friends rent in the US.
Yes, the pattern you are talking about is already happening. It costs about 150-200$ to rent a comfortable two bedroom house in a nice area here in Bangalore. The cost of a two bedroom apartment is about $40000 to $60000, inching towards $80000 already. A two bedroom house will be costlier but obviously everything depends on the location; suburbs are cheaper.
While this appears cheap in US terms, these costs are astronomical in Indian terms. I have personally given up the idea of buying a house even though, I can probably afford it right now. I can't make sense of the real estate prices in Bangalore now.
So yes, five years down the line, it may not be a whole lot cheaper hiring developers in Bangalore. But India is a big country; there are smaller cities which are much cheaper than Bangalore, so it will probably take much longer (say ten years) for costs to be comparable to US levels. This is obviously my personal opinion, nothing scientific about it:-).
$1000 per month is a pretty good salary in India (even in Bangalore:-) right now. The current "official" inflation rate is about 5% in India. In actual terms, it's probably higher - may be 7 or 8%. You do your calculations for 2009:-). I see rapidly rising real estate prices as a temporary phenomenon; it's bound to crash. It's happened before, and I bet it's going to happen again.
Answers from an Indian software developer in Bangalore. My first job was with an Indian company as a programmer. It was a "typical" Indian company in "software services". Most of our "clients" were in the US but the business unit I was in was developing software for Indian scientific and defense establishments. Since then I have worked for subsidiaries of US companies for most of my (8 year) career because I prefer to work on "products" than "projects". I don't know whether you consider that "outsourcing". For me, it's just a well paying job for something I love to do.
About your questions, no, you can't form an union if your wage is above a certain level (the level is fairly low). Obviously there are labor laws in India too, some or fairly strict; for example it's not that easy to lay off employees in India:-). Work week is the standard 5 days, 40 hours but like in the US, hours don't count and you work your ass off some times (before a release for e.g.) and get to goof off some times. Working conditions is also pretty much like in the US - air conditioned, cubicle hell:-). Benefits are comparable, vacation, medical, dental, profit sharing (I guess you mean bonuses), stock options all yes.
For a developer with my experience (Post Graduate with 8 years), I am probably being paid one fourth of what I could reasonably get if I was working in the US. My stock options are also probably about one fourth of what I might have got if I was in USA, same case for bonuses. However, this is a pretty nice salary in India, I probably earn five to ten times what I would earn in Government Service for example.
So, no it's not a level playing field. Cost of living is simply cheaper in India. Many of my friends are in the US on H1-B visas and earning four times my salary. For most programmer's in India, that's the dream. To be honest, I some times wonder if I made the right decision to stay back in India.
I never thought of outsourcing as an issue before. When everything was booming, US wanted more and more workers and nobody had a reason to complain. Now with the slowdown, cost cutting etc I guess, I can understand the concerns of an American about outsouring but frankly I think it's a fact of life. It's worrying Americans today and it'll probably worry Indians tomorrow.
But for today, hiring has picked up a lot in India, more companies are setting up shop here, fresh graduates are getting job offers easier - a sea change from one year back. Yes, times are good in India, but I wonder for how long.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like it's kind of both. It's a merger of old MySQL with SAPDB
h tml
http://www.linuxpipeline.com/betawatch/mysql_bw.j
Everybody talks about MySQL 5.0 as if it's just a upgrade to MySQL 4.1. Isn't it a completely different database? Previously known as MaxDB and before that as SAP DB.
"This is one of the things that makes files hosted on a single server w/ MD5 hashes "verifying" them a little silly...if you can alter the file, you can alter the .md5 file as well."
Actually, it's not silly at all. Granted it doesn't provide any security, but when you download a big file it does help you verify that you got the full contents without any errors.
It's not so far fetched. You don't need Linux. There is Python for Series 60 already available.
Today's employment section in Bangalore "Times of India" calls for software developers with experience in Symbian/Series 60/Linux developers. Read what you want into this development :-).
I've never used Palm V. Personally I've found Treo 90 to be the best form factor for a PDA. I've upgraded to a Treo 600 now but still miss my old Treo 90. I don't need a Camera. I wish Palm would a release a Treo 650 variant without a camera.
We pay a 10.2% service tax on broadband as well as Cell Phone and Land Line bills.
Ganesan
While this is a great move by HP, I doubt they're doing this out of pure goodness of their heart. Linux on Laptops in India is not something new. It's a highly competitive market. Most branded PCs/Laptops lose out to the "Assembled" ones which come preloaded with Windows and Office at "no cost". In order to compete companies have to remove the cost of Microsoft baggage - hence Linux. For example take a look at this Acer Laptop.
I felt the same way. Where's the review exactly? It read more like a personal blog entry than a "review" of a new OS release.
Sometime back Cisco allowed ssh access for employees by using user created keys. That's now disabled. I don't remember if it was disabled after this incident or before.
"This is what I do: open, ftruncate up to 2Gb, write, unmap, ftruncate down to the actual size, close. This is very convenient."
You can do this on Linux too, I do it all the time. Am I missing something?
Just mmap() way beyond the possible size of the result and ftruncate just before writing to that memory. You can optimize by doing fewer ftruncates than the actual writes by some good guesses. I can't see how writing to the memory and then ftruncating the file works on BSD. There needs to be some backing store for the memory that you write.
Did they "fix" MySQL or did they rename the database they acquired from SAP.
Same story here. I am a debian developer too and I haven't yet voted for exactly the same reasons. I need more time to consider the candidates.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the biggest advantage of Opera - the memory footprint; not the download size, though that's small too but the run time memory usage. On Linux try running FireFox and Opera for a while and you'll notice that Firefox uses up a lot more memory.
> Their direct dial is quite expensive (although
;-).
> not unusual for VOIP - it's still *far*
> cheaper to use a cheap analogue dialup for
> overseas calls than VOIP).
How does that work to call an arbitrary number in Europe? I live in India and my wife is currently traveling. Calls to Europe cost a minimum of Rs. 9.60 per min (nearly 20 US cents) compared to using Skype for 2 US cents (plus ISP and phone costs which works out to less than 1 US cent a min). Skype is the cheapest option I've found so far. If there is a cheaper standards based option then I am all ears
Well until cheap standards based options come, Skype is sure to be ahead. For example compare the costs to call a phone in Netherlands (my wife is currently there) using SkypeOut vs (say) Sipphone (www.sipphone.org). Approx 2 cents vs 5 cents a minute.
It definitely is much worse than other mail clients in my experience. 200MB+ to manage two IMAP accounts? I have now switched back to Kmail even though feature wise I like Thunderbird better. But kmail stays below a (relatively) reasonable 60MB.
This not a Linux distro on a compact flash card. This is a full Linux based computer in the form factor of a compact flash card.
Alioth (http://alioth.debian.org/), the Debian free software development site based on sourceforge code does give the option of subversion repositories. Currently you need subversion version 0.33, but I am sure they'll upgrade to 1.0 pretty soon.
I am not aware of any such distributed whiteboard projects being done (I am happy with IRC :-). However, I forgot to mention about one outsourcing benefit for open source. Novell developers in India work on Mono, GNOME and OpenOffice. Obviously, they get paid for working on them but "cheaper" Indian developers contributing to open source software can only be a good thing :-). I am jealous :-).
There are no well known software projects that are truly "Indian" like Linux or spamassasin. Indian developers are involved in many of these projects of course including kernel hacking, GNOME, KDE etc - for example, I am a Debian developer - but I am sorry to say that I cannot pick a high-profile (non localization related) open source project and say that yeah, this is an "Indian" project.
By the way, don't think of India as "non-english" speaking. All Indian programmers are by necessity english speaking. Considering that programmers from all over India come and work in a single office it's not practical for us to be speaking in our native languages at office. We get good english education from primary school and that's our primary medium of communication at work; and the only medium of communication for anything technical.
Electricity - used to bad, but a lot, lot improved. We hardly have blackouts now, but happens once in a while. Offices have power backup, so we go about without noticing anything. Blackouts used to be about one or two hours power shutdown every day.In homes, many folks opt for power backup - but like I said blackouts are rarer these days, so it's not a big deal any more.
Water - is bad. Really bad in many cities. Per capita water consumption was always much less than US (less than a fourth if I remember correctly) but even that is in trouble in recent times. Most people use a "borewell" (i.e tapping underground water) to augment municipal supply. That has depleted ground water levels and caused even more problems. This is the biggest worry in most cities of India.
Living space when compared to office size - pretty good. My apartment is twice as big as some of one bedroom condos my friends rent in the US.
While this appears cheap in US terms, these costs are astronomical in Indian terms. I have personally given up the idea of buying a house even though, I can probably afford it right now. I can't make sense of the real estate prices in Bangalore now.
So yes, five years down the line, it may not be a whole lot cheaper hiring developers in Bangalore. But India is a big country; there are smaller cities which are much cheaper than Bangalore, so it will probably take much longer (say ten years) for costs to be comparable to US levels. This is obviously my personal opinion, nothing scientific about it
$1000 per month is a pretty good salary in India (even in Bangalore
About your questions, no, you can't form an union if your wage is above a certain level (the level is fairly low). Obviously there are labor laws in India too, some or fairly strict; for example it's not that easy to lay off employees in India
Work week is the standard 5 days, 40 hours but like in the US, hours don't count and you work your ass off some times (before a release for e.g.) and get to goof off some times. Working conditions is also pretty much like in the US - air conditioned, cubicle hell
For a developer with my experience (Post Graduate with 8 years), I am probably being paid one fourth of what I could reasonably get if I was working in the US. My stock options are also probably about one fourth of what I might have got if I was in USA, same case for bonuses. However, this is a pretty nice salary in India, I probably earn five to ten times what I would earn in Government Service for example.
So, no it's not a level playing field. Cost of living is simply cheaper in India. Many of my friends are in the US on H1-B visas and earning four times my salary. For most programmer's in India, that's the dream. To be honest, I some times wonder if I made the right decision to stay back in India.
I never thought of outsourcing as an issue before. When everything was booming, US wanted more and more workers and nobody had a reason to complain. Now with the slowdown, cost cutting etc I guess, I can understand the concerns of an American about outsouring but frankly I think it's a fact of life. It's worrying Americans today and it'll probably worry Indians tomorrow.
But for today, hiring has picked up a lot in India, more companies are setting up shop here, fresh graduates are getting job offers easier - a sea change from one year back. Yes, times are good in India, but I wonder for how long.