The US educational system has its problems = primarily in that it tries to dumb down education a lot - this is particularly evident if you compare the standards of education against those available in parts of Asia like Japan, India etc..where the syllabus, on the average, has a much higher degree of difficulty.
However, the US educational system has one killer advantage over many of the Asian systems in that it allows high achievers to advance very quickly..for instance, a particulary bright student can skip grades and finish school much quicker than the rest of the class.
As far as I know, this doesn't happen in places like India where no matter how good you are, you advance at the same rate as the rest of the class.. skipping grades is very rare... and also schools and colleges strictly enforce age restrictions.. For instance, you cannot join the undergraduate programme in the Indian Institute of Technology if you are older than 18/19 (I forget the exact age) or less than 17.
Also, in Asia, scholarships are much harder to get.. unlike in the US where the bright kids will get these scholarships and advance into highly rated colleges... and the US colleges are definitely some of the world's best.
So yes, the US educational system has its problems but the situation is not as bleak as people would have us believe.. a bit more emphasis on increasing the depth of each course of study will definitely help cure some of its ills. Also, there must be a greater emphasis on teaching about the rest of the world as well - my experience has taught me that many Americans have very little knowledge of anything outside their own state or nation.
Information is not the key in many developing nations. Most governments already have ALL the information they need to start doing something about helping the people, but that rarely happens because the political will to help is not there.
Make no mistake about this - putting a computer in the hand of a peasant won't drammatically improve his state as much as setting up a system for irrigation, procuring farm products etc.
Most of these so called steps to "bridge" the gap, are really misdirected. There is something to be said about developing infrastructure and frameworks for development and much less to be said (in favour of) giving toys to the poor.
Re:India: The land where police protect criminals
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India's Digital Village
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The last elections were not a mandate against technology and change, but rather a mandate against the insensitive, block-headed policies of the previous government.. a government which couldn't see past its own rhetoric and coined the phrase "India Shining" which was an insult to the vast majority of Indians whose living standards had not improved but instead had worsened.
It is fine and dandy to talk about IT, fancy cars, fancy electronics but when your talk also indicates an attitude of utter disregard for people who were committing suicides due to poverty caused primarily because of governmental negligence, then we have the classic scenario where an old phrase fits - the case of an insult upon injury.
The people of India, for once, decided not to tolerate that.
Seems like a good idea to me. We will need a comprehensive API covering pretty much everything from:
OS and environment management (starting/stopping services, setting up environment variables, starting and stopping devices, configuring devices etc)
Database management (ADO.NET type functionality)
File system management (file access,compression, decompression, disk management such as partitioning, defrags, backups, event notifications on file changes)
GUI management (creating new windows, pluggable components, clipboard management)
Configuration management (registry type functionality)
Web applications (ASP.NET style functionality)
Imaging functions
Directory services functions
Security and cryptography functions
etc...
Personally, I think QT/KDE is an excellent framework and Gnome/GTK is coming along very well too..But neither of them provide quite the same breadth of API as is needed. By that I mean that I cannot write an app which utilizes pretty much all the functionality of a Linux system and use no additional library other than either QT/KDE or Gnome/GTK.
Also, both these libraries support scripting languages using additional libraries such as PyQT.. neither of them provide quite the same functionality as is found on Windows - on windows, I can access pretty much any registered component using a simple "CreateObject" or a "CreateOleObject" function call. Granted there are many security implications associated with this, but again like I said earlier, I am sure there is a secure way of implementing even this.
I am not sure about Cocoa, GnuStep/OpenStep and I don't have much hands on experience with any of these and so I really cannot comment.
However, I have been thinking of working on just such a comprehensive framework. Extending Gnome libraries is an idea that I am toying with. Other ideas are welcome. Anyone wants to join?
Comparing XUL with.NET is like comparing apples to house boats. XUL does not come close to matching the depth and breadth of.NET in terms of API, speed etc.
And speaking of Mono - Mono is not really an answer to.NET for Linux either because no matter what Miguel and the rest of the Mono team might believe, the possibility that Microsoft can put a stop to Mono development does exist - either by a legal process (read patents, injunction, cease & desist....) or simply by making changes to the.NET framework.
And even if MS didn't stop development on Mono, who uses Mono anyway? Would any development team use Mono for developing a commercial.NET app? or would a company support Mono as a framework for their.NET app? both these scenarios are highly unlikely. There is very little incentive to use Mono either for development or for deployment.
But having said that, a framework similar to Mono but which is not encumbered by an obvious and irrefutable link to any specific MS technology is absolutely needed for Linux.
We do not have a framework which runs on Linux which brings with the many advantages of.NET (but without an obvious link to.NET) such as a well design API, a garbage collection system, the common language runtime and running as a native app. No, Java doesn't count. And neither does QT because QT requires an expensive developer license when the application being developed is a commercial one.
I can understand that Trolltech has to charge for QT, but this is drastically limiting its adoption. In the case of.NET, MS's decision to make the framework itself free but charging just for the developer tools has helped its adoption. It might have been better if Trolltech had developed a development environement which they were selling instead of charging for using the QT framework itself.
Linux desperately needs a technology like QT to ship standard with most distributions and this coupled with an excellent configuration storage and management facility will definitely put an end to the dependency hell that is now a part of Linux.
Once such a framework is in place, the app installation tools like rpm, yast, apt-get etc could get much more advanced and include facilities similar to installshield, wise etc, which make use of scriptable interfaces to configure and manage the OS environment.
Now, before I am flamed for saying - "scriptable interfaces" with the expected comments abouts vbscript, macros and viruses, there is really no reason why a scriptable interface cannot be safely and securely implemented. Just because MS screwed up its implementation does not mean that such a system cannot be implemented well.
The scriptable interfaces on Windows (accessible via COM) allow for the creation of advanced applications such installers much more intuitively without having to go and mess around with application configuration files which may be spread around the system in different directories.
For XUL to be really useful, I think there should be a provision for the XUL app to be loaded from a server.. say, if I hit http://www.mysite.com/store, it should be able to load the shopping site xul onto my browser without requiring any client-side installation.
As far as I know (I could be wrong) I don't think this currently works in Mozilla. At the moment, all XUL apps need to be registered in the chrome (put into this folder?) before it can be used - so a client-side installation is mandatory.
Therefore there is no compelling reason to develop an app in XUL when wxwindows, qt, gtk etc serve the same purpose better (performance is definitely better than xul and qt/gtk/wxwindows are all cross-plaform to varying levels)
Mozilla can already load apps directly into a browser and do some pretty nifty things with it, so adding this ability to load apps across the network would greatly increase its usefulness.
Integrate SVG and SVG based UI widgets and we really could have a killer platform.
I know this message won't be popular around here - but to go beyond the simple installers which basically uncompress files from the source tar ball/rpm over to a directory on disk, Linux will need to evolve the concept of a registry of some sort.
Not to say that it should be like the one that is currently used in Windows; in Windows the registry is one large file (and a backup) which is prone to corruption - but I guess Linux could use a configuration storage system which utilizes a database of some sort which stores the configuration system across multiple files which are all managed using a single application. The individual configuration files should be text and not binary so that it can be edited using a simple text editor if needed.
For those who think that a registry is error prone and therefore useless - Have you tried to setup a complex application which needs a database engine, multiple transactioned COM components, set roles and rights for various users etc on Windows?
Doing these things is quite easy on Windows because of all the "objects" that are accessible on windows - for instance, to connect all the said tasks - setting up the users and their access rights, setting up the database engine (or detecting an existing one and using it) can all be done by accessing the various objects such as the IIS Administration objects, the MSDE Management objects, the Active Directory objects etc..
Windows also allows for the OS to be upgraded easily via an executable.
All this is possible because of the registry which stores the object references (COM registry).
Ok, you might argue that this makes Windows insecure and buggy.
That is true, but with some effort, I believe it is still possible to develop a secure, powerful OS with administration objects (perhaps utilizing a registry mechanism without the registry corruption problems of Windows) which will still be secure.
Linux does not currently lend itself to being easily configured programmatically - the administrator will still need to fiddle around with a lot of configuration files to get something complex setup. If this is addressed, it could go a long way towards easy automated complex installs which goes beyond just copying files from the source destination to a directory on disk.
SVG - or more specifically, the Adobe Plugin for SVG, has some interesting features that makes the use of SVG even more interesting..
The Adobe SVG provides the user a getURL() (or similar named) method which allows the browser to read information from the server or any other arbitary url on the web without any form submits of page refreshes.
This is useful, for instance, to have a stock exchange ticker which continuosly reads data from a stock exchange server and renders a graph of the values on the screen - without requiring the browser to refresh.
Another interesting aspect of SVG is that it can be compressed using gzip and so a fairly complex svg image could still be in a very small file. The data that is passed into the SVG could also be compressed.
I read a lot of comments here about how people in the Philipines and India get 1/10th of what an American coder earns.. and therefore an assertion is made by some on this thread that it isn't immoral if more and more work flows towards these poorer nations until the wages reach comparable levels..
The replies to these posts also follow a similar pattern - I refer to this as "Counter Argument 1" - This argument follows the chain of thought that the cost of living in the US is so much higher and therefore it isn't immoral if an American coder gets so much more than someone who does the same job in Philipines or India.
Personally, I find Counter Argument 1 to be bogus. Because the truth is this - the cost of maintaining the same standard of living is about the same anywhere in the world.
A car of comparable quality sells for pretty much the same price anywhere in the world. All the stuff that you take for granted - Washing machines, dish washers, electronic goods, cellphones. Most things of comparable quality are more expensive in the developing world than in the US.
For a comparison, please take a look at the Ford India website and see the prices of the cars - Compare the car prices to those of Ford cars sold in the US - make sure that the features are the same.. You will notice that the American pricing is actually cheaper. You can visit other Indian shopping sites on the net - compare prices.. you will see that the products are actually cheaper in the US.. but I concede that certain things are cheaper in the third world - food being one.
But on average, the cost of living is about the same anywhere in the world - it is just that the standards of living are lower in the developing world than in the first world - also the purchasing power of a person in the third world is much less than a tenth of an American..An Indian or Philipino can afford far less than Americans/Europeans and therefore makes do with much less. Most people cannot afford a washing machine - leave alone a car.
What most Americans consider as essential necessities are luxuries most people from the developing world can never afford.
One other point while I am at it -In my experience I have noticed that when a person from the developed world works in a team with a person from the third world in the same geographical location, the wage disparity continues to exist. That is, the American/European will be paid far higher than the Indian/Philipino on the same project while staying in the same country. That is, the wage disparity continues to exist even when the cost of living is the same..
This is particularly true in the Middle East where Americans/Europeans get paid much higher than their Asian counterparts.
Also, while I am at it - consider the scenario where an American company recruits you to be posted onsite at a Russian oil company for completing a software project - would you be willing to take a Russian salary?
Or are you saying - no, but the American was forced to move away from the "comforts" of the US to a place which is far less "comfortable" and therefore needs to be additionally compensated for this "sacrifice"?
Well, then let me give you the second scenario - what if you were posted in a country like Portugal which is pretty much on par with the US as far as "comforts" go? Would you be prepared to accept a Portuguese salary which will be lower than an American one?
Even big companies like Ford, Caterpillar etc pay their American workers far higher than the local workers...
So these arguments against outsourcing don't really stand - but having said that, I do believe that the US government has a responsibility to ensure that US citizens have adequate employment - and if the American government decides to limit outsourcing to ensure this, thats perfectly understandable.. but saying things like - Americans deserve to be paid 10 times higher than Indians or Philipinos because the cost of living is higher in the US is very insulting as it implies that Americans deserve a higher standard of living than the rest of the world - and also statements like these are not based on fact.
I read a lot of comments here about how people in the Philipines and India get 1/10th of what an American coder earns.. and therefore an assertion is made by some on this thread that it isn't immoral if more and more work flows towards these poorer nations until the wages reach comparable levels..
The replies to these posts also follow a similar pattern - I refer to this as "Counter Argument 1" - This argument follows the chain of thought that the cost of living in the US is so much higher and therefore it isn't immoral if an American coder gets so much more than someone who does the same job in Philipines or India.
Personally, I find Counter Argument 1 to be bogus. Because the truth is this - the cost of maintaining the same standard of living is about the same anywhere in the world.
A car of comparable quality sells for pretty much the same price anywhere in the world. All the stuff that you take for granted - Washing machines, dish washers, electronic goods, cellphones. Most things of comparable quality are more expensive in the developing world than in the US.
For a comparison, please take a look at the Ford India website and see the prices of the cars - Compare the car prices to those of Ford cars sold in the US - make sure that the features are the same.. You will notice that the American pricing is actually cheaper. You can visit other Indian shopping sites on the net - compare prices.. you will see that the products are actually cheaper in the US.. but I concede that certain things are cheaper in the third world - food being one.
But on average, the cost of living is about the same anywhere in the world - it is just that the standards of living are lower in the developing world than in the first world - also the purchasing power of a person in the third world is much less than a tenth of an American..An Indian or Philipino can afford far less than Americans/Europeans and therefore makes do with much less. Most people cannot afford a washing machine - leave alone a car.
What most Americans consider as essential necessities are luxuries most people from the developing world can never afford.
One other point while I am at it -In my experience I have noticed that when a person from the developed world works in a team with a person from the third world in the same geographical location, the wage disparity continues to exist. That is, the American/European will be paid far higher than the Indian/Philipino on the same project while staying in the same country. That is, the wage disparity continues to exist even when the cost of living is the same..
This is particularly true in the Middle East where Americans/Europeans get paid much higher than their Asian counterparts.
Also, while I am at it - consider the scenario where an American company recruits you to be posted onsite at a Russian oil company for completing a software project - would you be willing to take a Russian salary?
Or are you saying - no, but the American was forced to move away from the "comforts" of the US to a place which is far less "comfortable" and therefore needs to be additionally compensated for this "sacrifice"?
Well, then let me give you the second scenario - what if you were posted in a country like Portugal which is pretty much on par with the US as far as "comforts" go? Would you be prepared to accept a Portuguese salary which will be lower than an American one?
Even big companies like Ford, Caterpillar etc pay their American workers far higher than the local workers...
So these arguments against outsourcing don't really stand - but having said that, I do believe that the US government has a responsibility to ensure that US citizens have adequate employment - and if the American government decides to limit outsourcing to ensure this, thats perfectly understandable.. but saying things like - Americans deserve to be paid 10 times higher than Indians or Philipinos because the cost of living is higher in the US is very insulting as it implies that Americans deserve a higher standard of living than the rest of the world - and also statements like these are not based on fact.
With some thought the seperation of presentation and logic can be achieved using PHP. I have done just that - I have developed in PHP a set of libraries and a framework for seperating design, the presentation layer and business objects - this is not some toy code; I am using this extensively on multiple websites on the net.
The framework which I call PFC (short for Php form classes) that I have developed draws inspiration for ASP.NET and FunFormkit libraries (Python) to achieve this layered seperation.
The framework supports multiple fields types, chained validations with multi-language validation error reporting, compound fields...and can be easily customized (within an hour or two) to support specialized user agents such as browsers running on cellphones..
I am in the process of determining how to open source the code - but right now I need the money.
Turbo Assembler (later versions) from Borland did support a level of object orientation. It actually shipped with examples of object oriented assembly code.
XUL apps which can be installed on the server side and not on the client desktop - I am not sure if this is already possible. Allow integration to server-side scripting languages so that server-side databases can be accessed and this could really be useful.
I mean, I should be able to define an entire site as an XUL application - say, I might have my website www.myshop.com as an XUL app and mozilla users could, on visiting the site, access the site like they would a local XUL application.
Like I said, I don't know if this is already possible. The last time I saw, all XUL apps needed to be registered manually and placed somewhere in the mozilla chrome directory to be used.
If XUL could use SVG for rendering the UI widgets, that would be great. But does SVG have support for UI widgets? I know about the SVGGUI project, but I don't see any code coming from it.
Basic stuff: 1. Copy/Paste should work - it works haphazardly now.
Software installation: 1. Graphical installers and uninstallers. No rpm -i types.. Kinda like the Mozilla installer. 2. The installation of the software icons into the desktop needs polish - for instance, if I uninstall a software, the icons should disappear from the desktop; similarly when I install a software such as mozilla, the icon should appear on the desktop. 3. The installed software should be available on other user's desktops as well - again, this could be an option during installation - "Make available to all users / Make available to selected users / Only you".
Samba integration: 1. Stuff like SAMBA should come as standard since most users require access to SAMBA shares. 2. Samba needs to be integrated into apps well - for instance, it should be possible to open files over SAMBA in open office and what not - smb:\\server\filename should work with the appropriate login prompt popping up when necessary.
Device drivers: 1. Allow for loading of device drivers dynamically using an easier to use interface - choose a driver and click install.. and the right click the driver in the "hardware settings" screen to get a context sensitive menu with a setup option for the driver.
Configuration management: 1. Include stuff like libgda/libgnomedb as standard along with the database configuration tool. Include this in the "control panel". 2. Include stuff for configuration management like gconf - manage configuration using a single tool; the configuration could be saved across multple files using "exporter" plugins and read using "importer" plugins. Include an extensive API which all apps can use; get rid of the many configuration files lying all over the place; have the files in a single directory and utilizing a consistent naming scheme. 3. Support versioning of configurations - so that a user can rollback to a earlier more stable version if some configuration changes cause problems.
Incidentally one curious fact that I have noticed about the Indian programmers is this - at least 30 percent of them are women, which I believe is an higher ratio than in most other parts of the world. This is primarily because IT jobs are one of the most women-friendly occupations in India.
Just something about myself - I am an Indian - I head the technology division at my firm based out of India - I am also the lead programmer.
I have worked in programming jobs for over 9 years now.. both within US as well as many other nations across the world. Right now I am living in India.
All I see in this discussion group are rehashed stereotypes. Let me address these;
Misconception 1 - American programmers are better. Not necessarily. Indian programmers aren't necessarily better either. The averages are about the same. But there are exceptional programmers in both camps and then there are a lot of duds.
Misconception 2 - Indians are not innovative. One of the aspects of being in a developing world is that budgets for research and development are always very hard to come by.. But not any more. Indian companies are throwing money at research and development now...Everyone here knows that the service industry for pure outsourcing cannot last for ever.. So there is a desire to innovate and get into new areas.. to innovate as much as possible when money is not a problem. This is not just true of India - look at China, see how fast they are innovating.. in all fields. See the number of headlines on Slashdot about new products under development or new ventures being planned. You didn't see this much before, did you?
I have played a lead role in a very large project for an American publishing company - this project would not have had the slightest chance of even taking off the ground if it weren't for our team. The American end of the programming team was quite antogonistic when we started - had some really racist remarks thrown my way. But within a month, we had won their confidence and I have had multiple mails from the same people about what wonderful work we had done. One of these projects later went on to win a Java Developer Journal award.
PWC was involved in another part of the same project and there was a desire within the American programmers to have PWC thrown out and have us take their place. NOTE: Not from the management but from the programmers. The only reason this didn't happen was because there was an ex-PWC chap in the management team.
I have worked on other projects as well which were being managed and programmed by American teams - which were floundering. Since we have taken over, these companies now have a product they can sell.
This is not to say that we haven't had failures - we have had our share. But please don't make it seem like we are incompetent idiots who can only obey orders and even then do the job badly.
Apple has a low market share not because their technology is inferior but because it does not concentrate on international markets as much as other manufacturers like IBM, Dell and HP. This has resulted in the following problems:
1. Lack of availability For instance, here in India where I stay, it will be difficult for a person to purchase Apple even if they wanted to. The number of shops stocking Apple or dealing in Apple parts is very low - around 3 or 4 in this entire city of Chennai and Chennai is one of those happening IT places - outside of Chennai in the smaller cities you just cannot purchase Apple at all. I know this because I have tried to purchase Apple Macs before and I found out about these shops only after doing a lot of looking around.
Getting software for Apple is another problem altogether.
2. Inflated Pricing Apple computers are priced very high compared to PCs in India..(the price difference is much sharper in India than in the US) and this difference in price (this is just a guess) is probably due to the fact that Apple computers are directly imported into India - that is, they are not assembled locally. The import duties differ significantly between any product which is directly imported and that which is imported as parts and assembled locally.
Apple might be able to reduce their prices considerably in India if only they imported parts into India and assembled them locally here..
I find is astonishing that Apple does not do more to market themselves in countries like India when the local companies are investing so heavily in IT purchases.
As Apple's visibility increases this paucity in Apple software will also disappear. But for this Apple really needs to pay more attention to their marketing and manufacturing strategies.
The fact remains that India has a pretty skewed set of priorities. We (yes, I am an Indian) have always prided ourselves on the space programme, but what about:-
1. Rural education - The primary education (mostly the only kind that is found in rural areas) continues to degrade. Yes, it is becoming worse.. too little is being spent to modernize or even sustain it.
2. The national power problems - we have far less supply than there is demand and there does not seem to be any concrete proposal to address this problem. Large parts of India, including Bangalore (India's version of the Silicon Valley) languish under long powercuts.
3. National water crisis - We continue to have severe problems even if the monsoons are delayed by even a week - there simply isn't enough infrastructure form storing up rain water during the monsoons; this leaves very little water for irrigation and even for drinking. As far as drinking water goes, it is well known that the water which is piped out is too polluted and dirty to be considered potable.
4. National highways project - The national highways project currently on is for the construction of 4 lane highways - which are estimated to handle the traffic only for a maximum of another 5 to 10 years, while China has embarked on a project for building 10 lane highways. The lack of high quality highways has directly and indirectly affected the economy of India.
Now these are the more immediate and pressing problems that need to be resolved and all of these projects can definitely benefit very significantly if the amount that is being spent on sending man to the moon is diverted to it.
There is really no good sense in a manned mission to moon other than a strong desire for bragging rights. The moon has been studied and mapped and analysed to such excruciating detail that it is very possible that a new manned mission to Moon will yield nothing in terms of advancing our understanding of either the Moon or space.
This decision to focus on a manned mission to moon reeks of juvenile mine-is-bigger-than-yours attitude and will not be beneficial for India.
Actually you will probably not have to learn a new language. English should be enough.
I welcome you to come to India. It is not such a bad place and there is work available. I have Amercian and Canadian friends here working for Indian companies. Give it a shot, it might be fun
I think Excel supports concurrent edits by multiple users across the network.. that support has been there since Office 97 atleast. You will need to enable a "share" option - don't quite recall where.
Windows 95/98 password
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Stupid Security
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· Score: 2, Funny
the password prompt that pops up on system startup, which can be safely ignored.
Slashdot Mirror
The US educational system has its problems = primarily in that it tries to dumb down education a lot - this is particularly evident if you compare the standards of education against those available in parts of Asia like Japan, India etc..where the syllabus, on the average, has a much higher degree of difficulty.
However, the US educational system has one killer advantage over many of the Asian systems in that it allows high achievers to advance very quickly..for instance, a particulary bright student can skip grades and finish school much quicker than the rest of the class.
As far as I know, this doesn't happen in places like India where no matter how good you are, you advance at the same rate as the rest of the class.. skipping grades is very rare... and also schools and colleges strictly enforce age restrictions.. For instance, you cannot join the undergraduate programme in the Indian Institute of Technology if you are older than 18/19 (I forget the exact age) or less than 17.
Also, in Asia, scholarships are much harder to get.. unlike in the US where the bright kids will get these scholarships and advance into highly rated colleges... and the US colleges are definitely some of the world's best.
So yes, the US educational system has its problems but the situation is not as bleak as people would have us believe.. a bit more emphasis on increasing the depth of each course of study will definitely help cure some of its ills. Also, there must be a greater emphasis on teaching about the rest of the world as well - my experience has taught me that many Americans have very little knowledge of anything outside their own state or nation.
Make no mistake about this - putting a computer in the hand of a peasant won't drammatically improve his state as much as setting up a system for irrigation, procuring farm products etc.
Most of these so called steps to "bridge" the gap, are really misdirected. There is something to be said about developing infrastructure and frameworks for development and much less to be said (in favour of) giving toys to the poor.
Prem Kurian Philip
IT Research and Development
Songbird Technologies
http://www.songbirdtech.com/
The last elections were not a mandate against technology and change, but rather a mandate against the insensitive, block-headed policies of the previous government.. a government which couldn't see past its own rhetoric and coined the phrase "India Shining" which was an insult to the vast majority of Indians whose living standards had not improved but instead had worsened.
It is fine and dandy to talk about IT, fancy cars, fancy electronics but when your talk also indicates an attitude of utter disregard for people who were committing suicides due to poverty caused primarily because of governmental negligence, then we have the classic scenario where an old phrase fits - the case of an insult upon injury.
The people of India, for once, decided not to tolerate that.
Does Inkscape allow embedding of fonts in SVG?
Personally, I think QT/KDE is an excellent framework and Gnome/GTK is coming along very well too..But neither of them provide quite the same breadth of API as is needed. By that I mean that I cannot write an app which utilizes pretty much all the functionality of a Linux system and use no additional library other than either QT/KDE or Gnome/GTK.
Also, both these libraries support scripting languages using additional libraries such as PyQT.. neither of them provide quite the same functionality as is found on Windows - on windows, I can access pretty much any registered component using a simple "CreateObject" or a "CreateOleObject" function call. Granted there are many security implications associated with this, but again like I said earlier, I am sure there is a secure way of implementing even this.
I am not sure about Cocoa, GnuStep/OpenStep and I don't have much hands on experience with any of these and so I really cannot comment.
However, I have been thinking of working on just such a comprehensive framework. Extending Gnome libraries is an idea that I am toying with. Other ideas are welcome. Anyone wants to join?
Comparing XUL with .NET is like comparing apples to house boats. XUL does not come close to matching the depth and breadth of .NET in terms of API, speed etc.
.NET for Linux either because no matter what Miguel and the rest of the Mono team might believe, the possibility that Microsoft can put a stop to Mono development does exist - either by a legal process (read patents, injunction, cease & desist....) or simply by making changes to the .NET framework.
.NET app? or would a company support Mono as a framework for their .NET app? both these scenarios are highly unlikely. There is very little incentive to use Mono either for development or for deployment.
.NET (but without an obvious link to .NET) such as a well design API, a garbage collection system, the common language runtime and running as a native app. No, Java doesn't count. And neither does QT because QT requires an expensive developer license when the application being developed is a commercial one.
.NET, MS's decision to make the framework itself free but charging just for the developer tools has helped its adoption. It might have been better if Trolltech had developed a development environement which they were selling instead of charging for using the QT framework itself.
And speaking of Mono - Mono is not really an answer to
And even if MS didn't stop development on Mono, who uses Mono anyway? Would any development team use Mono for developing a commercial
But having said that, a framework similar to Mono but which is not encumbered by an obvious and irrefutable link to any specific MS technology is absolutely needed for Linux.
We do not have a framework which runs on Linux which brings with the many advantages of
I can understand that Trolltech has to charge for QT, but this is drastically limiting its adoption. In the case of
Linux desperately needs a technology like QT to ship standard with most distributions and this coupled with an excellent configuration storage and management facility will definitely put an end to the dependency hell that is now a part of Linux.
Once such a framework is in place, the app installation tools like rpm, yast, apt-get etc could get much more advanced and include facilities similar to installshield, wise etc, which make use of scriptable interfaces to configure and manage the OS environment.
Now, before I am flamed for saying - "scriptable interfaces" with the expected comments abouts vbscript, macros and viruses, there is really no reason why a scriptable interface cannot be safely and securely implemented. Just because MS screwed up its implementation does not mean that such a system cannot be implemented well.
The scriptable interfaces on Windows (accessible via COM) allow for the creation of advanced applications such installers much more intuitively without having to go and mess around with application configuration files which may be spread around the system in different directories.
So thats my 2c.
Thanks a lot for the tip! I didn't realize this was possible, I managed to check out the link that you sent over and was most impressed.
How is that not much mention is made of this? This is a killer web-application development feature.
Thanks again.
For XUL to be really useful, I think there should be a provision for the XUL app to be loaded from a server.. say, if I hit http://www.mysite.com/store, it should be able to load the shopping site xul onto my browser without requiring any client-side installation.
As far as I know (I could be wrong) I don't think this currently works in Mozilla. At the moment, all XUL apps need to be registered in the chrome (put into this folder?) before it can be used - so a client-side installation is mandatory.
Therefore there is no compelling reason to develop an app in XUL when wxwindows, qt, gtk etc serve the same purpose better (performance is definitely better than xul and qt/gtk/wxwindows are all cross-plaform to varying levels)
Mozilla can already load apps directly into a browser and do some pretty nifty things with it, so adding this ability to load apps across the network would greatly increase its usefulness.
Integrate SVG and SVG based UI widgets and we really could have a killer platform.
I know this message won't be popular around here - but to go beyond the simple installers which basically uncompress files from the source tar ball /rpm over to a directory on disk, Linux will need to evolve the concept of a registry of some sort.
Not to say that it should be like the one that is currently used in Windows; in Windows the registry is one large file (and a backup) which is prone to corruption - but I guess Linux could use a configuration storage system which utilizes a database of some sort which stores the configuration system across multiple files which are all managed using a single application. The individual configuration files should be text and not binary so that it can be edited using a simple text editor if needed.
For those who think that a registry is error prone and therefore useless - Have you tried to setup a complex application which needs a database engine, multiple transactioned COM components, set roles and rights for various users etc on Windows?
Doing these things is quite easy on Windows because of all the "objects" that are accessible on windows - for instance, to connect all the said tasks - setting up the users and their access rights, setting up the database engine (or detecting an existing one and using it) can all be done by accessing the various objects such as the IIS Administration objects, the MSDE Management objects, the Active Directory objects etc..
Windows also allows for the OS to be upgraded easily via an executable.
All this is possible because of the registry which stores the object references (COM registry).
Ok, you might argue that this makes Windows insecure and buggy.
That is true, but with some effort, I believe it is still possible to develop a secure, powerful OS with administration objects (perhaps utilizing a registry mechanism without the registry corruption problems of Windows) which will still be secure.
Linux does not currently lend itself to being easily configured programmatically - the administrator will still need to fiddle around with a lot of configuration files to get something complex setup. If this is addressed, it could go a long way towards easy automated complex installs which goes beyond just copying files from the source destination to a directory on disk.
SVG - or more specifically, the Adobe Plugin for SVG, has some interesting features that makes the use of SVG even more interesting..
The Adobe SVG provides the user a getURL() (or similar named) method which allows the browser to read information from the server or any other arbitary url on the web without any form submits of page refreshes.
This is useful, for instance, to have a stock exchange ticker which continuosly reads data from a stock exchange server and renders a graph of the values on the screen - without requiring the browser to refresh.
Another interesting aspect of SVG is that it can be compressed using gzip and so a fairly complex svg image could still be in a very small file. The data that is passed into the SVG could also be compressed.
I read a lot of comments here about how people in the Philipines and India get 1/10th of what an American coder earns.. and therefore an assertion is made by some on this thread that it isn't immoral if more and more work flows towards these poorer nations until the wages reach comparable levels..
The replies to these posts also follow a similar pattern - I refer to this as "Counter Argument 1" - This argument follows the chain of thought that the cost of living in the US is so much higher and therefore it isn't immoral if an American coder gets so much more than someone who does the same job in Philipines or India.
Personally, I find Counter Argument 1 to be bogus. Because the truth is this - the cost of maintaining the same standard of living is about the same anywhere in the world.
A car of comparable quality sells for pretty much the same price anywhere in the world. All the stuff that you take for granted - Washing machines, dish washers, electronic goods, cellphones. Most things of comparable quality are more expensive in the developing world than in the US.
For a comparison, please take a look at the Ford India website and see the prices of the cars - Compare the car prices to those of Ford cars sold in the US - make sure that the features are the same.. You will notice that the American pricing is actually cheaper. You can visit other Indian shopping sites on the net - compare prices.. you will see that the products are actually cheaper in the US.. but I concede that certain things are cheaper in the third world - food being one.
But on average, the cost of living is about the same anywhere in the world - it is just that the standards of living are lower in the developing world than in the first world - also the purchasing power of a person in the third world is much less than a tenth of an American..An Indian or Philipino can afford far less than Americans/Europeans and therefore makes do with much less. Most people cannot afford a washing machine - leave alone a car.
What most Americans consider as essential necessities are luxuries most people from the developing world can never afford.
One other point while I am at it -In my experience I have noticed that when a person from the developed world works in a team with a person from the third world in the same geographical location, the wage disparity continues to exist. That is, the American/European will be paid far higher than the Indian/Philipino on the same project while staying in the same country. That is, the wage disparity continues to exist even when the cost of living is the same..
This is particularly true in the Middle East where Americans/Europeans get paid much higher than their Asian counterparts.
Also, while I am at it - consider the scenario where an American company recruits you to be posted onsite at a Russian oil company for completing a software project - would you be willing to take a Russian salary?
Or are you saying - no, but the American was forced to move away from the "comforts" of the US to a place which is far less "comfortable" and therefore needs to be additionally compensated for this "sacrifice"?
Well, then let me give you the second scenario - what if you were posted in a country like Portugal which is pretty much on par with the US as far as "comforts" go? Would you be prepared to accept a Portuguese salary which will be lower than an American one?
Even big companies like Ford, Caterpillar etc pay their American workers far higher than the local workers...
So these arguments against outsourcing don't really stand - but having said that, I do believe that the US government has a responsibility to ensure that US citizens have adequate employment - and if the American government decides to limit outsourcing to ensure this, thats perfectly understandable.. but saying things like - Americans deserve to be paid 10 times higher than Indians or Philipinos because the cost of living is higher in the US is very insulting as it implies that Americans deserve a higher standard of living than the rest of the world - and also statements like these are not based on fact.
I read a lot of comments here about how people in the Philipines and India get 1/10th of what an American coder earns.. and therefore an assertion is made by some on this thread that it isn't immoral if more and more work flows towards these poorer nations until the wages reach comparable levels..
The replies to these posts also follow a similar pattern - I refer to this as "Counter Argument 1" - This argument follows the chain of thought that the cost of living in the US is so much higher and therefore it isn't immoral if an American coder gets so much more than someone who does the same job in Philipines or India.
Personally, I find Counter Argument 1 to be bogus. Because the truth is this - the cost of maintaining the same standard of living is about the same anywhere in the world.
A car of comparable quality sells for pretty much the same price anywhere in the world. All the stuff that you take for granted - Washing machines, dish washers, electronic goods, cellphones. Most things of comparable quality are more expensive in the developing world than in the US.
For a comparison, please take a look at the Ford India website and see the prices of the cars - Compare the car prices to those of Ford cars sold in the US - make sure that the features are the same.. You will notice that the American pricing is actually cheaper. You can visit other Indian shopping sites on the net - compare prices.. you will see that the products are actually cheaper in the US.. but I concede that certain things are cheaper in the third world - food being one.
But on average, the cost of living is about the same anywhere in the world - it is just that the standards of living are lower in the developing world than in the first world - also the purchasing power of a person in the third world is much less than a tenth of an American..An Indian or Philipino can afford far less than Americans/Europeans and therefore makes do with much less. Most people cannot afford a washing machine - leave alone a car.
What most Americans consider as essential necessities are luxuries most people from the developing world can never afford.
One other point while I am at it -In my experience I have noticed that when a person from the developed world works in a team with a person from the third world in the same geographical location, the wage disparity continues to exist. That is, the American/European will be paid far higher than the Indian/Philipino on the same project while staying in the same country. That is, the wage disparity continues to exist even when the cost of living is the same..
This is particularly true in the Middle East where Americans/Europeans get paid much higher than their Asian counterparts.
Also, while I am at it - consider the scenario where an American company recruits you to be posted onsite at a Russian oil company for completing a software project - would you be willing to take a Russian salary?
Or are you saying - no, but the American was forced to move away from the "comforts" of the US to a place which is far less "comfortable" and therefore needs to be additionally compensated for this "sacrifice"?
Well, then let me give you the second scenario - what if you were posted in a country like Portugal which is pretty much on par with the US as far as "comforts" go? Would you be prepared to accept a Portuguese salary which will be lower than an American one?
Even big companies like Ford, Caterpillar etc pay their American workers far higher than the local workers...
So these arguments against outsourcing don't really stand - but having said that, I do believe that the US government has a responsibility to ensure that US citizens have adequate employment - and if the American government decides to limit outsourcing to ensure this, thats perfectly understandable.. but saying things like - Americans deserve to be paid 10 times higher than Indians or Philipinos because the cost of living is higher in the US is very insulting as it implies that Americans deserve a higher standard of living than the rest of the world - and also statements like these are not based on fact.
With some thought the seperation of presentation and logic can be achieved using PHP. I have done just that - I have developed in PHP a set of libraries and a framework for seperating design, the presentation layer and business objects - this is not some toy code; I am using this extensively on multiple websites on the net.
The framework which I call PFC (short for Php form classes) that I have developed draws inspiration for ASP.NET and FunFormkit libraries (Python) to achieve this layered seperation.
The framework supports multiple fields types, chained validations with multi-language validation error reporting, compound fields...and can be easily customized (within an hour or two) to support specialized user agents such as browsers running on cellphones..
I am in the process of determining how to open source the code - but right now I need the money.
Turbo Assembler (later versions) from Borland did support a level of object orientation. It actually shipped with examples of object oriented assembly code.
OOPs in TASM
XUL apps which can be installed on the server side and not on the client desktop - I am not sure if this is already possible. Allow integration to server-side scripting languages so that server-side databases can be accessed and this could really be useful.
I mean, I should be able to define an entire site as an XUL application - say, I might have my website www.myshop.com as an XUL app and mozilla users could, on visiting the site, access the site like they would a local XUL application.
Like I said, I don't know if this is already possible. The last time I saw, all XUL apps needed to be registered manually and placed somewhere in the mozilla chrome directory to be used.
If XUL could use SVG for rendering the UI widgets, that would be great. But does SVG have support for UI widgets? I know about the SVGGUI project, but I don't see any code coming from it.
Basic stuff:
1. Copy/Paste should work - it works haphazardly now.
Software installation:
1. Graphical installers and uninstallers. No rpm -i types.. Kinda like the Mozilla installer.
2. The installation of the software icons into the desktop needs polish - for instance, if I uninstall a software, the icons should disappear from the desktop; similarly when I install a software such as mozilla, the icon should appear on the desktop.
3. The installed software should be available on other user's desktops as well - again, this could be an option during installation - "Make available to all users / Make available to selected users / Only you".
Samba integration:
1. Stuff like SAMBA should come as standard since most users require access to SAMBA shares.
2. Samba needs to be integrated into apps well - for instance, it should be possible to open files over SAMBA in open office and what not - smb:\\server\filename should work with the appropriate login prompt popping up when necessary.
Device drivers:
1. Allow for loading of device drivers dynamically using an easier to use interface - choose a driver and click install.. and the right click the driver in the "hardware settings" screen to get a context sensitive menu with a setup option for the driver.
Configuration management:
1. Include stuff like libgda/libgnomedb as standard along with the database configuration tool. Include this in the "control panel".
2. Include stuff for configuration management like gconf - manage configuration using a single tool; the configuration could be saved across multple files using "exporter" plugins and read using "importer" plugins. Include an extensive API which all apps can use; get rid of the many configuration files lying all over the place; have the files in a single directory and utilizing a consistent naming scheme.
3. Support versioning of configurations - so that a user can rollback to a earlier more stable version if some configuration changes cause problems.
Incidentally one curious fact that I have noticed about the Indian programmers is this - at least 30 percent of them are women, which I believe is an higher ratio than in most other parts of the world. This is primarily because IT jobs are one of the most women-friendly occupations in India.
Just something about myself - I am an Indian - I head the technology division at my firm based out of India - I am also the lead programmer.
.. in all fields. See the number of headlines on Slashdot about new products under development or new ventures being planned. You didn't see this much before, did you?
I have worked in programming jobs for over 9 years now.. both within US as well as many other nations across the world. Right now I am living in India.
All I see in this discussion group are rehashed stereotypes. Let me address these;
Misconception 1 - American programmers are better.
Not necessarily. Indian programmers aren't necessarily better either. The averages are about the same. But there are exceptional programmers in both camps and then there are a lot of duds.
Misconception 2 - Indians are not innovative.
One of the aspects of being in a developing world is that budgets for research and development are always very hard to come by.. But not any more. Indian companies are throwing money at research and development now...Everyone here knows that the service industry for pure outsourcing cannot last for ever.. So there is a desire to innovate and get into new areas.. to innovate as much as possible when money is not a problem. This is not just true of India - look at China, see how fast they are innovating
I have played a lead role in a very large project for an American publishing company - this project would not have had the slightest chance of even taking off the ground if it weren't for our team.
The American end of the programming team was quite antogonistic when we started - had some really racist remarks thrown my way. But within a month, we had won their confidence and I have had multiple mails from the same people about what wonderful work we had done. One of these projects later went on to win a Java Developer Journal award.
PWC was involved in another part of the same project and there was a desire within the American programmers to have PWC thrown out and have us take their place. NOTE: Not from the management but from the programmers. The only reason this didn't happen was because there was an ex-PWC chap in the management team.
I have worked on other projects as well which were being managed and programmed by American teams - which were floundering. Since we have taken over, these companies now have a product they can sell.
This is not to say that we haven't had failures - we have had our share. But please don't make it seem like we are incompetent idiots who can only obey orders and even then do the job badly.
I am an Indian too.. I agree completely.
Apple has a low market share not because their technology is inferior but because it does not concentrate on international markets as much as other manufacturers like IBM, Dell and HP. This has resulted in the following problems:
1. Lack of availability
For instance, here in India where I stay, it will be difficult for a person to purchase Apple even if they wanted to. The number of shops stocking Apple or dealing in Apple parts is very low - around 3 or 4 in this entire city of Chennai and Chennai is one of those happening IT places - outside of Chennai in the smaller cities you just cannot purchase Apple at all. I know this because I have tried to purchase Apple Macs before and I found out about these shops only after doing a lot of looking around.
Getting software for Apple is another problem altogether.
2. Inflated Pricing
Apple computers are priced very high compared to PCs in India..(the price difference is much sharper in India than in the US) and this difference in price (this is just a guess) is probably due to the fact that Apple computers are directly imported into India - that is, they are not assembled locally. The import duties differ significantly between any product which is directly imported and that which is imported as parts and assembled locally.
Apple might be able to reduce their prices considerably in India if only they imported parts into India and assembled them locally here..
I find is astonishing that Apple does not do more to market themselves in countries like India when the local companies are investing so heavily in IT purchases.
As Apple's visibility increases this paucity in Apple software will also disappear. But for this Apple really needs to pay more attention to their marketing and manufacturing strategies.
The fact remains that India has a pretty skewed set of priorities. We (yes, I am an Indian) have always prided ourselves on the space programme, but what about :-
1. Rural education - The primary education (mostly the only kind that is found in rural areas) continues to degrade. Yes, it is becoming worse.. too little is being spent to modernize or even sustain it.
2. The national power problems - we have far less supply than there is demand and there does not seem to be any concrete proposal to address this problem. Large parts of India, including Bangalore (India's version of the Silicon Valley) languish under long powercuts.
3. National water crisis - We continue to have severe problems even if the monsoons are delayed by even a week - there simply isn't enough infrastructure form storing up rain water during the monsoons; this leaves very little water for irrigation and even for drinking. As far as drinking water goes, it is well known that the water which is piped out is too polluted and dirty to be considered potable.
4. National highways project - The national highways project currently on is for the construction of 4 lane highways - which are estimated to handle the traffic only for a maximum of another 5 to 10 years, while China has embarked on a project for building 10 lane highways. The lack of high quality highways has directly and indirectly affected the economy of India.
Now these are the more immediate and pressing problems that need to be resolved and all of these projects can definitely benefit very significantly if the amount that is being spent on sending man to the moon is diverted to it.
There is really no good sense in a manned mission to moon other than a strong desire for bragging rights. The moon has been studied and mapped and analysed to such excruciating detail that it is very possible that a new manned mission to Moon will yield nothing in terms of advancing our understanding of either the Moon or space.
This decision to focus on a manned mission to moon reeks of juvenile mine-is-bigger-than-yours attitude and will not be beneficial for India.
Actually you will probably not have to learn a new language. English should be enough.
I welcome you to come to India. It is not such a bad place and there is work available. I have Amercian and Canadian friends here working for Indian companies. Give it a shot, it might be fun
*Widows* Rights Management Services to be released later this year
Microsoft seems pretty serious about this social rights management thing..
I think Excel supports concurrent edits by multiple users across the network.. that support has been there since Office 97 atleast. You will need to enable a "share" option - don't quite recall where.
the password prompt that pops up on system startup, which can be safely ignored.