You have dissed the language while it is amply clear that you have never used it. However let me clear this up - Matlab may not have the advanced features of c/c++, but it is designed to be a prototyping language - something that will help you test your algorithms fast. You can write code that will solve your differential equations, or do some signal processing with just a few lines - working with matrices becomes extremely simple since you don't have to worry about coding the intricacies of matrix manipulation. It makes FORTRAN look retarded as far as usability and speed of coding goes. It is definitely not as fast as programs created in C/FORTRAN, but it's not the speed of the code that's the objective here -it's how fast you can write up some code.
Which means you've all missed the largest lesson that you should have learned when we let you into our country to study.
I'm assuming that your statement is about personal liberty, and if so, I* agree wholeheartedly with you. Also, there' the fact that all this 'dual' purpose technology is not impossible to develop elsewhere - those who want it will create it, while the brilliant minds that want to learn and contribute here will be scared away. I hate the thought of having to prove that I'm not a potential terrorist.
Losing the Chinese and Indian students will be a big problem for the US in the years to come. Right now, the main reason why Chinese and Indians come to the US to study is that they can get opportunities here that they cannot get in their home country. We all know how China and India are developing - what happens that they can get the same opportunites at home? Who will do the graduate research in American universities? Instead of preparing for that eventuality, I see that you have stuff like 'leave no child behind'. I'm not trying to be condescending here - as a great lover of education, it pains me to see that education is nobody's priority in this country.
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From their best practices page: Don't include more than one ad unit per article. Feeds represent an uncluttered, highly targeted medium, and these characteristics should be preserved to maintain and grow an audience. The AdSense for feeds ad format has been designed to be very streamlined to ensure that users are not overwhelmed with advertising.
Place the ad unit at the end of articles. The content of an article is what users are most interested in, and that should be placed first. Then they can read the ad with more context.
$400,000 which was won by the top team is eqvt. to Rs 1.8 crore (180 million) which is a huuuge sum.. even when split 5 ways. Enough for them to start their own company or do their own thing for a lonnng time.
I submitted the story, so I should take responsibility for the typos there. 1. $1mn... stupid me, that should have been $1M. 2. DMBS... aah..dyslexia? well, that should have been DBMS.
Also, the reason why I said that this model will produce cheaper (obviously) and better code is that since it will be open-sourced, even if the original code might have taken shortcuts to make the deadline, it is still out there for anyone to tinker with and fix (if needed). And it almost guarantees continuous development.
that this will affect only the companies that sell software to the Chinese government - which still leaves the entire Chinese market free. I'm sure it will not affect companies much - remember that there are certain states in the US that do not allow any foreign company to sell software or software services to them - to prevent outsourcing. That hasn't affected the global economy and nor will this.
Seriously, I can't believe they ended up using the term 'thought thieves' even though any thought-crime is strongly associated with '1984'. What better way to reinforce the big brother image. Whoever thought this thing up deserves a mention in the annals of great PR history!
Look, you don't understand how the whole university-research thing works. Said university professor cooks up a grandiose project proposal which may or may not end up with a successful implementation, and someone in the government with money to spend in a particular area decides to accept the proposal. Now said professor/university may not be able to come up with anything that works like Google or even like anything that the proposal intends, but they will be funded well for years. Professor is happy, and the govt. department is also happy since they can show in their reports that they spent money for so-and-so research project.
Results are not always necessary in these projects:-)
Almost the entire PC market in India uses english as the language for most computing tasks. Sure there is plenty of localized software and local language tools, but almost everyone I know uses english. Frankly, there's not much education you can get in India without learning english, so there is no way you can segregate the market between english speakers and hindi/local language speakers.
AFAIR there are quite a few countries which explicitly disallow such things (making any related paragraphs in the license void)
Dunno about software, but in India books are regularly sold with that clause. Since no one in India would buy $100 textbooks, all textbooks available in the US are sold in India for a fraction fo the cost (Paperback editions, usually marked as 'Eastern economy edition') and they all say 'For sale in the Indian subcontinent only'. So I am assuming that there is no law preventing that in India.
The problem is that in India, there is no language called 'Indian'. Every state speaks a different language, and even people within a state sometimes speak different languages. To add to the complication, most work is done in English. So people will want XP that works with English.. and guess what, the rest of the world will be able to use that too:-)
Very few people in India use regional languages for computing.
And for reference, that £400 is a 24th my annual before tax income.
And a Rs. 25,000 PC in India is an 8th of the annual income of a person earning Rs 200,000. Most people who buy PCs earn even less. So you get an idea how how expensive it is:-)
Joe public, whether in india or america or afghanistan hasn't a cluebie the difference between XP starter edition and XP pro.
Trust me, they do. I know it's wrong to generalize, but here's a fundamental difference between a PC buyer in the US and a PC buyer in India. In the US, PCs are pretty much commodity items - people buy it the way they buy television sets, which means that many people just buy whatever the salesperson at Best Buy recommends to them.
In India, from my experience, people do a lot of research before spending a large part of their savings on a PC. Which means that the model is recommended by some geek friend (and in India there are plenty of computer geeks to be found all over the place) and trust me - no one will ever recommend XP starter edition.
The above statement is NOT intended to show how well informed the Indian buyer is compared to the American buyer. All I am trying to say is that the demographic in India that spends money on a PC is different from the one in the US.
Well, you're right, but what I meant when I mentioned the exchange rate is this: According to the exchange rate, $1 ~= Rs 46. According to the purchasing power parity (PPP), $1 ~= Rs 8.
So a straight conversion of a dollar price to a rupee price using the exchange rate instead of the PPP makes stuff very expensive.
Is the price of hardware that highly differentiated that you get a state-of-the-art P4 desktop machine, with no Windows, for $200 in India?
No, you don't get a P4 for $200 in India. Zenith, one of the big dealers, sells this P4 computer for Rs 25,000 (~~$540). Local assemblers will sell you a P4 for even less. That's where the cost of a legal OS (~$200) becomes comparable.
Note to you: apparently you don't get it. Microsoft sells this directly to PC makers, it doesn't matter if the end-user wants it or not.
IT matters to the PC makers since they operate on extremely low margins that can be as low as $25-$50. Now why would someone put Windows -crippled edition (which no customer would want) for $15 when they can put XP-professional for free.
f you sold Microsoft licenses in India for cheaper, you would see them on eBay for minimal prices as well.
You are talking about selling legal copies of Windows on eBay. The simple way out is to brand the copies sold in India as Windows - India edition, with no other differences. Make sure that the license says that the India edition can be sold only in the Indian subcontinent - that way no one would be able to sell them on eBay legally unless the buyer is in India.
Before someone says that a licence is not going to stop someone from selling it outside India - note that we are talking about selling it legally - if we talk about pirated editions, then it doesn't matter what Microsoft sells them for - the cost is always $0.
Having lived in India, I can tell you why this won't work. The users who pirate Windows are not people who need computers only for basic word processing - they are proper users who use computers as part of their lifestyle, much like people elsewhere in the world do. They do not like their OS to be crippled in any way. Why then, you ask, do they have to pirate Windows? The reason is cost: A user can afford to spend $100-$200 for a legal copy of Windows in the US, but in India due to the exchange rate it becomes a huge amount! It's comparable to the actual price of the desktop, and note that people spend a large fraction of their income to buy a desktop in the first place. Microsoft does not price their software according to purchasing power, instead it does a straight conversion of $$ to Rupees.
If Microsoft offers a cheaper Windows for a lesser price, people will just keep pirating the 'proper' OS for free. And sometime later, they will migrate to Linux when they find that Linux can offer them pretty much the same functionality. If MS wants people to use Windows and PAY for it, all they need to do is offer an uncrippled OS for a price that is affordable in India.
Note to Microsoft: People don't want to buy your crippled software, even if it cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
You have dissed the language while it is amply clear that you have never used it. However let me clear this up - Matlab may not have the advanced features of c/c++, but it is designed to be a prototyping language - something that will help you test your algorithms fast. You can write code that will solve your differential equations, or do some signal processing with just a few lines - working with matrices becomes extremely simple since you don't have to worry about coding the intricacies of matrix manipulation. It makes FORTRAN look retarded as far as usability and speed of coding goes. It is definitely not as fast as programs created in C/FORTRAN, but it's not the speed of the code that's the objective here -it's how fast you can write up some code.
Which means you've all missed the largest lesson that you should have learned when we let you into our country to study.
I'm assuming that your statement is about personal liberty, and if so, I* agree wholeheartedly with you. Also, there' the fact that all this 'dual' purpose technology is not impossible to develop elsewhere - those who want it will create it, while the brilliant minds that want to learn and contribute here will be scared away. I hate the thought of having to prove that I'm not a potential terrorist.
Losing the Chinese and Indian students will be a big problem for the US in the years to come. Right now, the main reason why Chinese and Indians come to the US to study is that they can get opportunities here that they cannot get in their home country. We all know how China and India are developing - what happens that they can get the same opportunites at home? Who will do the graduate research in American universities? Instead of preparing for that eventuality, I see that you have stuff like 'leave no child behind'. I'm not trying to be condescending here - as a great lover of education, it pains me to see that education is nobody's priority in this country.
(* I'm Indian)
From the best practices page:
Syndicate the full text of your articles. The more content that is available in a site's feed, the better the user experience, and the more likely people are to subscribe your feed. If you can't put the full text of your articles in your feed, then in addition to the headline of each article, include as informative a snippet as possible of the article's text.
Don't include more than one ad unit per article. Feeds represent an uncluttered, highly targeted medium, and these characteristics should be preserved to maintain and grow an audience. The AdSense for feeds ad format has been designed to be very streamlined to ensure that users are not overwhelmed with advertising.
Place the ad unit at the end of articles. The content of an article is what users are most interested in, and that should be placed first. Then they can read the ad with more context.
1. You are perfectly free to use Adblock, especially since you do your share of paying for websites.
2. Those who cannot pay, should not mind seeing ads, especially if they are as unobtrusive as the Google ads. There are no flashing banners or nasty popups from Google and they seem to believe that it should be kept that way.
From their best practices page:
Don't include more than one ad unit per article. Feeds represent an uncluttered, highly targeted medium, and these characteristics should be preserved to maintain and grow an audience. The AdSense for feeds ad format has been designed to be very streamlined to ensure that users are not overwhelmed with advertising.
Place the ad unit at the end of articles. The content of an article is what users are most interested in, and that should be placed first. Then they can read the ad with more context.
All the I-love-google-and-want-to-have-its-baby stories on Slashdot had to pay off some day!
And they made a cool $400,000 while others made $0. So who's the bright one again?
Here you go
$400,000 which was won by the top team is eqvt. to Rs 1.8 crore (180 million) which is a huuuge sum.. even when split 5 ways. Enough for them to start their own company or do their own thing for a lonnng time.
I guess it just means that the topcoders site is not popular within India.
I submitted the story, so I should take responsibility for the typos there.
1. $1mn... stupid me, that should have been $1M.
2. DMBS... aah..dyslexia? well, that should have been DBMS.
Also, the reason why I said that this model will produce cheaper (obviously) and better code is that since it will be open-sourced, even if the original code might have taken shortcuts to make the deadline, it is still out there for anyone to tinker with and fix (if needed). And it almost guarantees continuous development.
will they support software that's developed in their country and works with the software used by the government?
:-)
I'm guessing that they'll choose the best tool for the job, regardless of the origin. Patriotism rarely mixes with business sense
that this will affect only the companies that sell software to the Chinese government - which still leaves the entire Chinese market free. I'm sure it will not affect companies much - remember that there are certain states in the US that do not allow any foreign company to sell software or software services to them - to prevent outsourcing. That hasn't affected the global economy and nor will this.
Seriously, I can't believe they ended up using the term 'thought thieves' even though any thought-crime is strongly associated with '1984'. What better way to reinforce the big brother image. Whoever thought this thing up deserves a mention in the annals of great PR history!
Look, you don't understand how the whole university-research thing works. Said university professor cooks up a grandiose project proposal which may or may not end up with a successful implementation, and someone in the government with money to spend in a particular area decides to accept the proposal. Now said professor/university may not be able to come up with anything that works like Google or even like anything that the proposal intends, but they will be funded well for years. Professor is happy, and the govt. department is also happy since they can show in their reports that they spent money for so-and-so research project.
:-)
Results are not always necessary in these projects
Almost the entire PC market in India uses english as the language for most computing tasks. Sure there is plenty of localized software and local language tools, but almost everyone I know uses english. Frankly, there's not much education you can get in India without learning english, so there is no way you can segregate the market between english speakers and hindi/local language speakers.
AFAIR there are quite a few countries which explicitly disallow such things (making any related paragraphs in the license void)
Dunno about software, but in India books are regularly sold with that clause. Since no one in India would buy $100 textbooks, all textbooks available in the US are sold in India for a fraction fo the cost (Paperback editions, usually marked as 'Eastern economy edition') and they all say 'For sale in the Indian subcontinent only'. So I am assuming that there is no law preventing that in India.
The problem is that in India, there is no language called 'Indian'. Every state speaks a different language, and even people within a state sometimes speak different languages. To add to the complication, most work is done in English. So people will want XP that works with English.. and guess what, the rest of the world will be able to use that too :-)
Very few people in India use regional languages for computing.
And for reference, that £400 is a 24th my annual before tax income.
:-)
And a Rs. 25,000 PC in India is an 8th of the annual income of a person earning Rs 200,000. Most people who buy PCs earn even less. So you get an idea how how expensive it is
Joe public, whether in india or america or afghanistan hasn't a cluebie the difference between XP starter edition and XP pro.
Trust me, they do. I know it's wrong to generalize, but here's a fundamental difference between a PC buyer in the US and a PC buyer in India. In the US, PCs are pretty much commodity items - people buy it the way they buy television sets, which means that many people just buy whatever the salesperson at Best Buy recommends to them.
In India, from my experience, people do a lot of research before spending a large part of their savings on a PC. Which means that the model is recommended by some geek friend (and in India there are plenty of computer geeks to be found all over the place) and trust me - no one will ever recommend XP starter edition.
The above statement is NOT intended to show how well informed the Indian buyer is compared to the American buyer. All I am trying to say is that the demographic in India that spends money on a PC is different from the one in the US.
Well, you're right, but what I meant when I mentioned the exchange rate is this:
According to the exchange rate, $1 ~= Rs 46.
According to the purchasing power parity (PPP), $1 ~= Rs 8.
So a straight conversion of a dollar price to a rupee price using the exchange rate instead of the PPP makes stuff very expensive.
Is the price of hardware that highly differentiated that you get a state-of-the-art P4 desktop machine, with no Windows, for $200 in India?
No, you don't get a P4 for $200 in India. Zenith, one of the big dealers, sells this P4 computer for Rs 25,000 (~~$540). Local assemblers will sell you a P4 for even less. That's where the cost of a legal OS (~$200) becomes comparable.
Note to you: apparently you don't get it. Microsoft sells this directly to PC makers, it doesn't matter if the end-user wants it or not.
IT matters to the PC makers since they operate on extremely low margins that can be as low as $25-$50. Now why would someone put Windows -crippled edition (which no customer would want) for $15 when they can put XP-professional for free.
f you sold Microsoft licenses in India for cheaper, you would see them on eBay for minimal prices as well.
You are talking about selling legal copies of Windows on eBay. The simple way out is to brand the copies sold in India as Windows - India edition, with no other differences. Make sure that the license says that the India edition can be sold only in the Indian subcontinent - that way no one would be able to sell them on eBay legally unless the buyer is in India.
Before someone says that a licence is not going to stop someone from selling it outside India - note that we are talking about selling it legally - if we talk about pirated editions, then it doesn't matter what Microsoft sells them for - the cost is always $0.
Having lived in India, I can tell you why this won't work. The users who pirate Windows are not people who need computers only for basic word processing - they are proper users who use computers as part of their lifestyle, much like people elsewhere in the world do. They do not like their OS to be crippled in any way.
Why then, you ask, do they have to pirate Windows? The reason is cost: A user can afford to spend $100-$200 for a legal copy of Windows in the US, but in India due to the exchange rate it becomes a huge amount! It's comparable to the actual price of the desktop, and note that people spend a large fraction of their income to buy a desktop in the first place. Microsoft does not price their software according to purchasing power, instead it does a straight conversion of $$ to Rupees.
If Microsoft offers a cheaper Windows for a lesser price, people will just keep pirating the 'proper' OS for free. And sometime later, they will migrate to Linux when they find that Linux can offer them pretty much the same functionality. If MS wants people to use Windows and PAY for it, all they need to do is offer an uncrippled OS for a price that is affordable in India.
Note to Microsoft: People don't want to buy your crippled software, even if it cheap.
My bad.