I knew someone - and Indian, who had a Ph.D from MIT and who worked in NASA JPL and a few other fancy places - and who had a few patents to his name, who settled down in India to become a missionary. He later applied for work as a project manager in a small software company in India. How do I know? I was the guy who had to turn down his application because he was just too over qualified for the job..
But I do admire the man for this strength of conviction...and his family who seemed to share the same conviction.
I am sure there a lot of people who have chucked very promising careers for starting on a life in a distant place doing things they love because of this overwhelming conviction they have.
I believe SVG does allow embedding of raster images and fonts. Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw (the new versions), allow export to SVG and some limited scripting facility as well.
The rest of the world seems to have suddenly developed a hugely self-righteous attitude towards the Americans.. Its getting to be quite irritating.
No, I am not American.. and no, I do not agree with a lot of things US is doing at the moment.. including the war on terror, all the rhetoric about the Axis of Evil etc..
I think it is rather unfortunate that Linux or GPLed Software as a whole has been referred to as FREE software. Because to the common man - FREE means Free as in Free Beer, or Free as in cheap.
It might have been better to choose a word that more accurately describes free as in freedom. I know Liberated Software or even Freedom Software sounds corny, but I think it conveys the idea better. The GPL community should perhaps consider a branding exercise to get the concept across.
But then again, I have always wondered if the common man's perception of Free as in Beer hasn't been the largest contributor to making GPLed software so popular.
No matter what one might say in favour of KDE and GNOME perhaps playing nice to form a single unified desktop environment, it is probably for the best that we have two competing environments because without it the speed of innovation in desktops will go down drastically.
It is good that now there is even competition for browsers - Konqueror vs Mozilla.. keeps the pressure on for getting good stuff out quicker.
As far as interoperability between these desktop environments - someone will figure out a way to make that work without too much pain. Redhat's bluecurve was an attempt in that direction. I am sure there will be many more such attempts and this is good for the rest of us users.
It is normally assumed that those who chose to stay back in India were deficient in some way.
Not true.
Yes, my view is a little biased since I have stayed back. I chosed to stay back because I wanted to start a firm in India - I have since then done just that. Prior to that I worked in New Zealand, UK, and ofcourse the USA before deciding to return for good.
There are lots of very good coders who have stayed back for reasons such as family, elderly parents and so on.
The best textiles come from Western Europe, US and Japan. Third world nations produce crap.
And on exactly what do you base this "finding"? Some of the best textiles in the world comes from countries like Egypt, China and India..
Other stuff - many of the so-called Italian shoes (considered perhaps the best in the world) are actually made in India but branded in Italy and sold worldwide.. (Yes, I know a company which does this in India)
A lot of work actually happens in the developing world - European and American companies design products but actually source these products from developing nations. These products are then put through quality control checks, branded and then sold worldwide (at a huge premium) as made in Europe or made in US stuff.
What is happening now is these smaller companies which worked just as sweat shops are evolving their own marketing and branding strategies to sell their products directly in Europe and the US. This allows these companies to get a better profit for their work.
Ofcourse, they will go through the same problems that many European and American firms have already tackled. These Asian companies have historically relied heavily on the European and American associates to design and market products for them. But now that they are going it alone, they will need to learn how to go about designing their products themselves.. how to do the Quality checks properly.. how to sell their services/products abroad etc.
We can see the same pattern in IT as well - Indian software companies have primarily concentrated on selling services and not products. But now they are shifting tracks a bit - now more and more firms are looking at producing products.
While it is true that Wipro and Infosys are benefiting from the fact that companies in the US are outsourcing work to them, it is also true that these larger indian companies, who are CMM certified, adhere by strict standards and therefore are required to invest heavily in software and hardware - most of these are sourced from the US.
Incase you are wondering, Wipro and Infosys do NOT use pirated software. Incidentally, Wipro is one of the larger distributors of packaged software - they are distributors for Macromedia, Adobe, Borland and many other US based firms.
It would be interesting to consider how much money is actually being spent by these Indian companies in purchasing software from the US. They also do purchase most of their hardware from companies like IBM, HP/Compaq and dell.
So money does flow both ways though the amount of money flowing into these Indian companies is much larger.
But the opposite is true for many other industries - For instance,India buys most of its planes from Boeing.. and some of them from Airbus..
I was a Delphi developer for about 4 years and during this time, I have used several TP products and have found them to be very well developed and easy to use.
I am sad to see them go. I wish all the people involved with TurboPower the very best in whatever venture they get into now.
I agree with most things you say..especially the part about Indians being a boastful lot. yes, I am Indian too.
Some inaccuracies though - India didn't get "any sort of computer" in the 90s.. I have owned and worked on computers in India since the early 80s.. and India has had computers being used in oil exploration, weather forecasting, nuclear research, simulation etc.. from around the late 1960s and early 1970s..
One might argue that what has held back India is the socialism - but that isn't entirely borne out by the facts. Socialism has helped the villages to some extent - for instance, the national banks would not have set up loss making branches in the smaller towns and villages if they were driven by pure commercial interests.. the setting up of these banks have helped the villages in many ways - it has set free large groups of people from the tyranny of loan sharks since these branches had the mandate to give low interest loans to the poor rural folk. Similarly, the railways have setup a network which has included otherwise very hard-to-reach locations..many of these locations do not yield any revenue for the government of India but it has helped the people in these places tremendously.
Ofcourse in the end socialism became a burden on the system - the side-effects of socialism such as the over bearing bureacracy, an inefficient and often very corrupt judiciary and the executive and a legislative system which has lost all sense of right and wrong have all contributed to make the governing system irrelevant and redundant.
So now the private sector will need to flourish in India inspite of the government - not because of it.
It also hasn't helped that Indians keep boasting of the accomplishments of a distant past - the human resource minister is fond of stating how the computing revolution owes its existance to the invention of 0 by the Indians in ages past. I think this reflects on a certain sense of inferiority in the minds of the average Indian - hence the desire to expound on every little achievement however puny it might be.
Such vain and often self-defeating notions of grandeur have held us back - now, we need to shed those and grab the "real" oppurtunities and make the "real" difference.. I am glad that this has started to happen.
I find the attitude on this site towards the Chernobyl disaster distressing. Thousands died in that disaster and many of those who died were people involved in rescuing others - who willingly put their lives at great risk for others.
I am sure the attitude will be less flippant towards events such as the WTC and Pearl Harbour disasters.
I could use the speed. Where I work we sometimes need to create presentations for clients in Director/Flash etc and these will need to be replicated onto multiple CDs - upto around 100 or so.. We use a standard CD RW for doing this.. if I am able to save 30 seconds on writing any CD, and I am doing 100 CDs.. I save a cool 50 minutes, which is not bad considering how boring the activity really is.
Also, we could use the speed when we need to backup the servers onto CD ROMs..
The assumption that an up and coming artist can attain wide popularity by putting his music up for download on the net might be flawed..The reason - well, most people search for music on the net by artist name or band name.. and choose to download music only from artists that they already know.. it is not often that someone will risk wasting their bandwidth and time downloading songs from a band or artist who they haven't even heard off.
Having said that, if there is an independent group of music lovers and critics, comprising perhaps of well known musicians, who will possible review the songs of unknown artists and make a mention of the better ones on the site, it is possible that the more adventurous among us might actually download and distribute the music around thereby increasing the artist's popularity.
I think we need an open forum where music contributed by unknown artists can be reviewed and criticed. Would go a long way towards promoting real talent.
Use Borland Kylix for C++. It has a robust database engine called the BDE (Borland database Engine) which abstracts the differences between the different databases as long as you stick with SQL 92/99. It compiles happily on both Linux and Windows.. it makes use of a concept called database aliases which can be setup using the BDE Administrator..using this you can completely change the database - say, from SQL Server, you could move to Oracle for instance without even having to recompile your application.
Some corporations do have different pricing policies outside the US - I am personally aware that atleast MS does price their software considerably cheaper in India (thats where I am).
But you are right in that most companies actually do charge the same rates in developing/third-world nations as they charge in the US. Sometimes the software is even more expensive since Tax/Duty etc get added on.
Piracy is therefore quite rampant - even in business circles. This is changing quite fast though since the governments have been cracking down quite hard following pressure from US based software companies - I know of companies here in India being raided by the anti-piracy squads.. and equipment and property being confiscated.
But it does take a tremendous amount of resolve from the management of the companies in developing nations to actually purchase the software they use.. simply because software purchase costs are very high when you relate it to other costs...For instance, the cost of a Macromedia Flash Design studio is over 2 times the average monthly salary of a Flash designer...and about 8 times the salary of a receptionist or a first level clerk.
I am an Indian and I draw an indian salary..it has costed me about quarter year's salary to purchase the software that I use - since I decided to stick with legal software.
I don't think companies make their plans based on what is purportedly tiring them.
There are a few things NOT going for.NET
1. The cross platform hype is a farce for most REAL apps.
If you look at the facts of the case -.NET is pretty much just an API which exists over the Win32 API - but the.NET standard is a small subset of the Win32 API.. and it covers just over 150 (or roundabouts) classes. The Win32 API is far richer than the.NET API. Ofcourse one could argue that PInvoke can be used to call external apps - but that is a kludge not a solution.
Most non-trivial apps will require access to the classes not covered under the.NET standard. But if those classes are used, the application ceases to be "cross-platform" compatible.
Currently, the Java API standard covers a lot more ground than the.NET standard... and also, a lot of work has already been carried out to make sure that Java works about the same on most platforms.
2. Limited API - non availability of native specialized libraries
Even the 1500+ classes which form part of.NET don't necessarily suffice for most complex apps.
Most apps will require access to specialized libraries - for instance compression libs, image handling libs, encryption libs etc...
For example, A sophisticated image viewer application like ACDSEE might need to interact with specialized external libraries for processing different image formats and so on.
The companies creating these specialized libraries (in languages such C++, Delphi, VB etc) have been developing and polishing up these libraries for years. It is very unlikely that these same companies can deliver libraries for.NET, which will retain the maturity of their current offerings in "legacy" languages like C++, Delphi etc.
Also, most of these companies have already made massive investments in porting their libraries to Java.
3. Developer availability and technology comfort.
There is nothing or very little that.NET offers that Java doesn't already offer. From standard apps, to web based apps and services, Java handles them all just as well as.NET does. Java's cross platform features and its rich API are already fairly well know. A lot of programmers are already fairly familiar with Java. To get these programmers to use.NET, they will need to be retrained and there really doesn't seem to be any benefit in that.
So in all, IMHO.NET isn't really a viable option for most businesses.
Music CDs are much cheaper outside the US and parts of Europe.
No, I am not talking about pirated CDs.. All these labels sell their music abroad - In India, a typical CD from any large music shop (like Sony Music shops) would cost about Rs.325/Rs.350, which if you do the math is about US$6.7.
By the way, Rs.325 is still quite a lot considering the purchasing power of the average Indian..
But given that, its still interesting to note that the same labels are charging much less for the same CDs outside the US.. obviously they are continuing to make a very decent profit..so exactly how much does it really cost them to produce a CD?
From what you say, you are planning on making these changes to clean up the code and make it prettier.
I would strongly urge you to reconsider this as the probability that you will end up breaking parts of the code while "cleaning" it up is quite high..especially since you seem to have a fairly large code base ~1MB
Ugly code containing redundant stuff is still better than beautiful code that doesn't work.
The penny-per-page principle is never going to work.. It brings in too many complications and there are way too many avenues for abuse.
But subscription services can still work. A lot of websites have gone into the subscription model where people pay for the service for a period of time - but they need to allow some flexibility to the customer in determining these periods of time.
There are a lot of people who probably don't want to subscribe to a website for a month - they perhaps needs a single document or a bit of information on a particular day. These people can be served if these websites come up with more fine grained subscription policies - they could perhaps provide temporary subscriptions for a day or two, accesses to specific documents or information etc..
Also, subscription policies can be easily implemented unlike any penny-per-page type of revenue model.
I use Visual SlickEdit - its neat.. I use ANT for builds. It supports the usual features, syntax hightlighting, code insight.. etc. Its available on a lot of platforms. its very customizable and very quick. Highly recommended.
Stipulating that all encryption technologies should include backdoors can be counter-productive.
For one thing, foriegn governments and agencies will be far less keen on making use of encryption technology developed in the US. They will develop their own technology bypassing these restrictions.
And for another - there is already a lot of free encryption tools in the market without these backdoors and these are available world wide - The usage of these will increase.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew someone - and Indian, who had a Ph.D from MIT and who worked in NASA JPL and a few other fancy places - and who had a few patents to his name, who settled down in India to become a missionary. He later applied for work as a project manager in a small software company in India. How do I know? I was the guy who had to turn down his application because he was just too over qualified for the job..
But I do admire the man for this strength of conviction...and his family who seemed to share the same conviction.
I am sure there a lot of people who have chucked very promising careers for starting on a life in a distant place doing things they love because of this overwhelming conviction they have.
I believe SVG does allow embedding of raster images and fonts. Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw (the new versions), allow export to SVG and some limited scripting facility as well.
I agree completely with the parent.
The rest of the world seems to have suddenly developed a hugely self-righteous attitude towards the Americans.. Its getting to be quite irritating.
No, I am not American.. and no, I do not agree with a lot of things US is doing at the moment.. including the war on terror, all the rhetoric about the Axis of Evil etc..
I think it is rather unfortunate that Linux or GPLed Software as a whole has been referred to as FREE software. Because to the common man - FREE means Free as in Free Beer, or Free as in cheap.
It might have been better to choose a word that more accurately describes free as in freedom. I know Liberated Software or even Freedom Software sounds corny, but I think it conveys the idea better. The GPL community should perhaps consider a branding exercise to get the concept across.
But then again, I have always wondered if the common man's perception of Free as in Beer hasn't been the largest contributor to making GPLed software so popular.
No matter what one might say in favour of KDE and GNOME perhaps playing nice to form a single unified desktop environment, it is probably for the best that we have two competing environments because without it the speed of innovation in desktops will go down drastically.
It is good that now there is even competition for browsers - Konqueror vs Mozilla.. keeps the pressure on for getting good stuff out quicker.
As far as interoperability between these desktop environments - someone will figure out a way to make that work without too much pain. Redhat's bluecurve was an attempt in that direction. I am sure there will be many more such attempts and this is good for the rest of us users.
It is normally assumed that those who chose to stay back in India were deficient in some way.
Not true.
Yes, my view is a little biased since I have stayed back. I chosed to stay back because I wanted to start a firm in India - I have since then done just that. Prior to that I worked in New Zealand, UK, and ofcourse the USA before deciding to return for good.
There are lots of very good coders who have stayed back for reasons such as family, elderly parents and so on.
Not all of us worship the almighty dollar.
The best textiles come from Western Europe, US and Japan. Third world nations produce crap.
And on exactly what do you base this "finding"? Some of the best textiles in the world comes from countries like Egypt, China and India..
Other stuff - many of the so-called Italian shoes (considered perhaps the best in the world) are actually made in India but branded in Italy and sold worldwide.. (Yes, I know a company which does this in India)
A lot of work actually happens in the developing world - European and American companies design products but actually source these products from developing nations. These products are then put through quality control checks, branded and then sold worldwide (at a huge premium) as made in Europe or made in US stuff.
What is happening now is these smaller companies which worked just as sweat shops are evolving their own marketing and branding strategies to sell their products directly in Europe and the US. This allows these companies to get a better profit for their work.
Ofcourse, they will go through the same problems that many European and American firms have already tackled. These Asian companies have historically relied heavily on the European and American associates to design and market products for them. But now that they are going it alone, they will need to learn how to go about designing their products themselves.. how to do the Quality checks properly.. how to sell their services/products abroad etc.
We can see the same pattern in IT as well -
Indian software companies have primarily concentrated on selling services and not products. But now they are shifting tracks a bit - now more and more firms are looking at producing products.
While it is true that Wipro and Infosys are benefiting from the fact that companies in the US are outsourcing work to them, it is also true that these larger indian companies, who are CMM certified, adhere by strict standards and therefore are required to invest heavily in software and hardware - most of these are sourced from the US.
Incase you are wondering, Wipro and Infosys do NOT use pirated software. Incidentally, Wipro is one of the larger distributors of packaged software - they are distributors for Macromedia, Adobe, Borland and many other US based firms.
It would be interesting to consider how much money is actually being spent by these Indian companies in purchasing software from the US. They also do purchase most of their hardware from companies like IBM, HP/Compaq and dell.
So money does flow both ways though the amount of money flowing into these Indian companies is much larger.
But the opposite is true for many other industries - For instance,India buys most of its planes from Boeing.. and some of them from Airbus..
I was a Delphi developer for about 4 years and during this time, I have used several TP products and have found them to be very well developed and easy to use.
I am sad to see them go. I wish all the people involved with TurboPower the very best in whatever venture they get into now.
I agree with most things you say..especially the part about Indians being a boastful lot. yes, I am Indian too.
Some inaccuracies though - India didn't get "any sort of computer" in the 90s.. I have owned and worked on computers in India since the early 80s.. and India has had computers being used in oil exploration, weather forecasting, nuclear research, simulation etc.. from around the late 1960s and early 1970s..
One might argue that what has held back India is the socialism - but that isn't entirely borne out by the facts. Socialism has helped the villages to some extent - for instance, the national banks would not have set up loss making branches in the smaller towns and villages if they were driven by pure commercial interests.. the setting up of these banks have helped the villages in many ways - it has set free large groups of people from the tyranny of loan sharks since these branches had the mandate to give low interest loans to the poor rural folk. Similarly, the railways have setup a network which has included otherwise very hard-to-reach locations..many of these locations do not yield any revenue for the government of India but it has helped the people in these places tremendously.
Ofcourse in the end socialism became a burden on the system - the side-effects of socialism such as the over bearing bureacracy, an inefficient and often very corrupt judiciary and the executive and a legislative system which has lost all sense of right and wrong have all contributed to make the governing system irrelevant and redundant.
So now the private sector will need to flourish in India inspite of the government - not because of it.
It also hasn't helped that Indians keep boasting of the accomplishments of a distant past - the human resource minister is fond of stating how the computing revolution owes its existance to the invention of 0 by the Indians in ages past. I think this reflects on a certain sense of inferiority in the minds of the average Indian - hence the desire to expound on every little achievement however puny it might be.
Such vain and often self-defeating notions of grandeur have held us back - now, we need to shed those and grab the "real" oppurtunities and make the "real" difference.. I am glad that this has started to happen.
I find the attitude on this site towards the Chernobyl disaster distressing. Thousands died in that disaster and many of those who died were people involved in rescuing others - who willingly put their lives at great risk for others.
I am sure the attitude will be less flippant towards events such as the WTC and Pearl Harbour disasters.
I could use the speed. Where I work we sometimes need to create presentations for clients in Director/Flash etc and these will need to be replicated onto multiple CDs - upto around 100 or so.. We use a standard CD RW for doing this.. if I am able to save 30 seconds on writing any CD, and I am doing 100 CDs.. I save a cool 50 minutes, which is not bad considering how boring the activity really is.
Also, we could use the speed when we need to backup the servers onto CD ROMs..
The assumption that an up and coming artist can attain wide popularity by putting his music up for download on the net might be flawed..The reason - well, most people search for music on the net by artist name or band name.. and choose to download music only from artists that they already know.. it is not often that someone will risk wasting their bandwidth and time downloading songs from a band or artist who they haven't even heard off.
Having said that, if there is an independent group of music lovers and critics, comprising perhaps of well known musicians, who will possible review the songs of unknown artists and make a mention of the better ones on the site, it is possible that the more adventurous among us might actually download and distribute the music around thereby increasing the artist's popularity.
I think we need an open forum where music contributed by unknown artists can be reviewed and criticed. Would go a long way towards promoting real talent.
Congratulations on your marriage Rob.
I appreciate the work you have been doing at Slashdot..I wish you and Kathleen a great marriage!
Regards,
Prem Kurian Philip
I guess you don't know how close you got to something...!
The word which sounds exactly like "nam" (as in vietnam) means name in Hindi and Sanskrit. So "whats your nam?" could mean "whats your name?"
try www.net4domains.com based out of India.. they are even cheaper - about $14.9 for two years.
Use Borland Kylix for C++. It has a robust database engine called the BDE (Borland database Engine) which abstracts the differences between the different databases as long as you stick with SQL 92/99. It compiles happily on both Linux and Windows.. it makes use of a concept called database aliases which can be setup using the BDE Administrator..using this you can completely change the database - say, from SQL Server, you could move to Oracle for instance without even having to recompile your application.
Highly recommended.
Some corporations do have different pricing policies outside the US - I am personally aware that atleast MS does price their software considerably cheaper in India (thats where I am).
..it has costed me about quarter year's salary to purchase the software that I use - since I decided to stick with legal software.
But you are right in that most companies actually do charge the same rates in developing/third-world nations as they charge in the US. Sometimes the software is even more expensive since Tax/Duty etc get added on.
Piracy is therefore quite rampant - even in business circles. This is changing quite fast though since the governments have been cracking down quite hard following pressure from US based software companies - I know of companies here in India being raided by the anti-piracy squads.. and equipment and property being confiscated.
But it does take a tremendous amount of resolve from the management of the companies in developing nations to actually purchase the software they use.. simply because software purchase costs are very high when you relate it to other costs...For instance, the cost of a Macromedia Flash Design studio is over 2 times the average monthly salary of a Flash designer...and about 8 times the salary of a receptionist or a first level clerk.
I am an Indian and I draw an indian salary
This script didn't work for me. The server still hasn't gone down.
There are a few things NOT going for
1. The cross platform hype is a farce for most REAL apps. .NET is pretty much just an API which exists over the Win32 API - but the .NET standard is a small subset of the Win32 API.. and it covers just over 150 (or roundabouts) classes. The Win32 API is far richer than the .NET API. Ofcourse one could argue that PInvoke can be used to call external apps - but that is a kludge not a solution.
.NET standard. But if those classes are used, the application ceases to be "cross-platform" compatible.
.NET standard... and also, a lot of work has already been carried out to make sure that Java works about the same on most platforms.
If you look at the facts of the case -
Most non-trivial apps will require access to the classes not covered under the
Currently, the Java API standard covers a lot more ground than the
2. Limited API - non availability of native specialized libraries .NET don't necessarily suffice for most complex apps.
Most apps will require access to specialized libraries - for instance compression libs, image handling libs, encryption libs etc...
.NET, which will retain the maturity of their current offerings in "legacy" languages like C++, Delphi etc.
3. Developer availability and technology comfort.Even the 1500+ classes which form part of
For example, A sophisticated image viewer application like ACDSEE might need to interact with specialized external libraries for processing different image formats and so on.
The companies creating these specialized libraries (in languages such C++, Delphi, VB etc) have been developing and polishing up these libraries for years. It is very unlikely that these same companies can deliver libraries for
Also, most of these companies have already made massive investments in porting their libraries to Java.
There is nothing or very little that
So in all, IMHO
Music CDs are much cheaper outside the US and parts of Europe.
.. obviously they are continuing to make a very decent profit..so exactly how much does it really cost them to produce a CD?
No, I am not talking about pirated CDs.. All these labels sell their music abroad - In India, a typical CD from any large music shop (like Sony Music shops) would cost about Rs.325/Rs.350, which if you do the math is about US$6.7.
By the way, Rs.325 is still quite a lot considering the purchasing power of the average Indian..
But given that, its still interesting to note that the same labels are charging much less for the same CDs outside the US
From what you say, you are planning on making these changes to clean up the code and make it prettier.
I would strongly urge you to reconsider this as the probability that you will end up breaking parts of the code while "cleaning" it up is quite high..especially since you seem to have a fairly large code base ~1MB
Ugly code containing redundant stuff is still better than beautiful code that doesn't work.
The penny-per-page principle is never going to work.. It brings in too many complications and there are way too many avenues for abuse.
But subscription services can still work. A lot of websites have gone into the subscription model where people pay for the service for a period of time - but they need to allow some flexibility to the customer in determining these periods of time.
There are a lot of people who probably don't want to subscribe to a website for a month - they perhaps needs a single document or a bit of information on a particular day. These people can be served if these websites come up with more fine grained subscription policies - they could perhaps provide temporary subscriptions for a day or two, accesses to specific documents or information etc..
Also, subscription policies can be easily implemented unlike any penny-per-page type of revenue model.
Just my 2 cents..
I use Visual SlickEdit - its neat.. I use ANT for builds. It supports the usual features, syntax hightlighting, code insight.. etc. Its available on a lot of platforms. its very customizable and very quick. Highly recommended.
Stipulating that all encryption technologies should include backdoors can be counter-productive.
For one thing, foriegn governments and agencies will be far less keen on making use of encryption technology developed in the US. They will develop their own technology bypassing these restrictions.
And for another - there is already a lot of free encryption tools in the market without these backdoors and these are available world wide - The usage of these will increase.