> But what is the point? Are they going to get any crucial new data on what the Moon rock is made of?
Maybe, maybe not. Consistent with the primary objective of using space technology for societal benefits, Department of Science (DOS) has implemented the satellite sytems systems that form important elements of the national infrastructure today for providing vital services in the areas of telecommunication, television broadcasting, meteorology, disaster warning and resources survey and management. The progress made in the application of space technology during the year is highlighted in the following sections. If you want to know what those application are, take a look here
Secondly, such space missions may not directly affect the country's economy or the well-being of the people directly, but the knowledge gained is then applied to other areas. Such low-cost missions also enable the country to be self reliant so that they dont have to be dependent upon fickle, external, happy-to-go-war-for-oil powers who refused India cryogenic technology for ill-founded fearsM, which incidentally, had no long-term consequences excepting for some delays in India launching its indigenous rockets.
> Or is this solely a demonstration of power?
If that's what you think. We believe it is a step towards self-reliance.
> A sort of an international dick-waving contest?
That is the most pompous, ignorant, half-assed comment as any that I've heard. So developing countries should not try to break free from the shackles of poverty, by using technology? Or do you think such technology has just one direct application and no transferable by-products? Or that such technology is the domain of only the rich? What rubbish!
> You are not grown up until you send some expensive junk to the moon or something?
Just so you dont growel in your own ignorance that this is the only Indian space programme, here is the complete list to relieve you of your pain:
There are others. But I'm too tired to respond in far more detail. Oh, and just so you understand how old Indian space programme is, have a look here
> Those eighty million might have bought the country one more university or one more hospital - which, I believe, have a better chance of saving / educating a person which makes an important scientific discovery than that pile of junk has of making a good return on its moon trip
Hospitals? You gotta be out of your mind. Just google about healthcare in India and the healthcare "tourists" that India attracts every year.
Sure, despite all this, I know it's a poor land. But to trample all over it, because you have a self-formed belief that it should focus only on hospitals, is being clueless
That's not entirely true. About 15 years ago, in my school in a then-rural town (which is now a city) in India, they had introduced computers. Not many people knew anything about it, not the teachers even. They all had a basic understanding of how it worked, how to boot up (those were dos 2.1 or so days) and basic troubleshooting. FYI, these were old IBM busybee computers (if I remember correctly).
However, the school went about teaching "computers" in the same way everything else was addressed - starting with the basic first. The first year we spent understanding a lot of theory (admittely a part of learning was by rote), however, second year onwards they started teaching us to program (using BASICA or GWBASIC). This immediately changed the entire perspective towards computers. Whereas earlier when we (us students, the kids) would be happy to just spend a while fiddling with the keyboard or being in awe at the capability to delete characters as well on the screen (the earliest thing we had seen was the typewriter), now, there were hordes of students spending extra hours after school doing their assignments, learning programming fundamentals, etc. Sure, we weren't great programmers or weren't working on anything mission critical, but those computers made a hell of a lotta difference in our lives.
In the subsequent years, not only almost every other school got the computers, the students graduated with a reasonable computer background, and went on to take better paying jobs. I can go on and on about the benefits...
>but really paying to educating teachers in india more, and providing better facilities would help more than a room full of Apple IIs
Teachers in India are paid a reasonably good salary. In fact, most women prefer teaching jobs since they are not too onerous, give them a number of benefits (the state covers the medical bills, and though you go to the state-owned hospitals, the doc appointments can he had within a day's notice usually). Secondary school (or high school) teachers, degree-level teachers and professors get paid even better of course.
However, I agree on better facilities. Sure, that'd make a big difference, but it's a long way in coming. I like to think that computers changed my small town in so many different ways (it is now one of the hubs of computer education in that part of my state, the jobs are plenty and people even freelance producing utility software for local businesses), and I'm sure the government is keen to replicate that model
Yeah, even worse would be Al Gore claiming he "invented" VoIP
Re:Backups, and being organized in a general way?
on
Database File System
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Well, you may find it funny, I've already messed up two pair of trousers - once when my phone rang and second when my friend put his hand on my shoulder to get my attention...
Re:Backups, and being organized in a general way?
on
Database File System
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Oh, and forgot to add that I wouldn't be happy if my disk begins to churn away as the "Crawler" updates its indexes, say, while I'm playing doom! Can't afford to have any other spooky, disk grinding noises, while squinting my way through those dark corridors..
Backups, and being organized in a general way?
on
Database File System
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
...I can kind of see this would make it easy to search and locate documents. What about backups though? How would a user be able to group (manually) related files together, so that the whole bunch can be backed up later, without having to search for all seeminly related (or unrelated) keywords to trace all hitherto-unrelated documents?
Secondly, with this mass of files being spread over several disks, surely, this is in a way forcing the user to "search" for everything. Or isnt it? Will the underlying FS layer still be accessible in the general way that it is?
One would have thought this would be prominently listed on their homepage. It isn't. Digging down deeper into the website (there is no search facility, mind you), here is what I found:
The news page which mentions the 4.0 GHz CPUs Now Available in Alienware Area-51 ALX Systems.
I just think there is an ever-growing paranoia in the developed countries about software job offshoring. Hasn't such offshoring of other jobs happened in the past, like say, manufacturing? Aren't most cars and other white goods manufactured in Japan and China? What happened to the workers in that industry some of who would obviously have lost jobs?
More to the issue, I'm not sure what decides the level of outsourcing - "some", "moderate" or "massive". Even when offshoring wasn't happening, a lot of companies prefered "outsourcing" - subcontracting their IT needs and business to specialist companies who had the skills and knowledge to fulfill them, leaving the parent organization free from the usual worries of delivery, quality, acceptance etc. So if the same happens now, it's bad? Because there is growing fear of losing jobs? Surely, the involved professionals would be smart enough to know that economics drives a business, not preferences!
Further, if the products of US-based companies are used/consumed by people elsewhere, from the (less) money earned from US companies, surely the profits are going back to USA. So the article gave an example of Nike. I'm sure more parallels can be drawn without stretching the imagination too far!
Finally, if the cost of building a product, be it software, is relatively less (and so is the cost of maintaining it), then the cost of direct users/consumers would be much lesser. Say, if the Air-traffic control systems cost less to build and operate, it would lead to less fees towards airlines, which means they can cut costs further and offer cheaper tickets.
And contrary to what another poster mentioned, yes, the corporates may follow the skills, but why would they distance themselves from consumers? They have nothing to gain there, if there is a growing resentment against their products/services. And if they decide to not pursue offshoring, they stand to lose considerable market share simply due to the cost-benefits offered by the competitors. So, from their perspective, its a downward spiral.
Outsourcing is happening. Live with it. Some jobs are going elsewhere. Sure. Are those the best jobs? Surely, it gives the professionals in the developed world better jobs (creative as compared to monotonous, boring, trivial).
Maybe this brouhaha is there because IT professionals have a bigger mouthpiece, and a cheaper and far easier means of voicing their concerns.
Great so they managed to make it look like MS Word, and we have a wonderful set of screenshots to see AbiWord vis-a-vis MS Word comparison (which, incidentally, is the foremost argument for "killing MS Word" here).
But what about ease of use? Do the hotkeys work as it is? Can it also save in different formats like how word does? What about introducing tables in documents? Paragraph formatting? Print previews?
There was not an absolute iota of information in that article that I could make use of, or carry over with me. It smacks of absolute useless-ness, like a number of other articles
1. A graph with different tehnologies/device listed against the time it took for them to "mature", with funny names given to each trough and crest of popularity, does not make an insightful report.
2. There has been no mention of whose definiton of "product maturity" has been used. It is a term widely open for interpretation
3. It is hilarious to compare the effectiveness, acceptability and market penetration of such varied products as DVD players and PDAs, and so on. There are host of factors that come into play, least of which is the sense of an inane need within the target customer segment.
I bet that article concludes something. Though I certainly wish it was something more focused than a wannabe "we will have more power in our hands in the future"!
First of all, as someone already mentioned, MS has deliberately kept Passport low-profile, especially since this Passport became Passport to nowhere
Secondly, I think alike Google, the mailbox size increase has happen selectively, since (I believe) this is still in testing stages. Try keeping your mailbox usage in high 80% and see what happens in a week or so.
Finally, from the end user's perspective, it doesn't matter whether its passport or just hotmail, most users related MSN messenger to their hotmail account, which is precisely the user base that MS is exploiting and trying to retain
Heritage and resultant architecture: Linux clusters are typically processors are connected through I/O links, whereas supercomputing machines where processors exchange data and instructions through shared memory.
PCI bottlenecks: This the key argument made - the bottlenecks introduced by PCI communication and the bottlenecks therein. He goes on to say that performance problems in any given such cluster tend to remain with any other such cluster. I agree with that.
High Availability: He then goes on to talk about the reliability, availability and manageability of the supercomputers against typical clusters. I think there is where the FUD creeps in, along with marketing BS.
In all fairness, he does raise a critical point, however, overall, I think considering the relative ease and popularity of building, administering and growing a cluster these days, I think cost-effectiveness of a single monolithic machine is a moot point
Isnt this kind of notifier common with other email service providers (yahoo and hotmail)?! So what makes it so special?
And with other email service providers beefing up the storage space, one would have thought this pre-occupation with a gigabyte email-storage would be over!
First of all, lets not turn this into yet another outsourcing related to flame war
Secondly, being an Indian, I can tell you this (and similar technology related efforts) make a big difference. In a lot of different ways. While these projects may or may not fulfill their key goal (whatever this may be), what it does provide is a sense of confidence to the people. A feeling of being cared for by the government. A sense of being looked after. And then, all such gadgets/advancements still generate a sense of wonder in the people. There is a sense of novelty associated to such devices/initiatives.
The point I'm trying to convey is, in the more developed world, such devices or initiatives happen far too often (and maybe even at a faster pace). For a big, poor country, that broke out of the shackles not too long ago (we have been independent only 60 years now), such initiatives bring about lot of self belief and confidence.
However, this isnt' simply about raising the stakes up to attract new users. This is also about retaining the existing ones - millions out there who are tired to Hotmail (simply because it was the first and at one time the only, free email service provider). Add to this those users who are tied to hotmail because of using MSN messenger as well.
Now with Gmail offering such a vast leap over storage space, a large number of those users would be ready to migrate (no matter how painful it would be) to other email providers. However, if Hotmail provides them similar (or better) service (read storage - since that's the only thing that has been talked about most everywhere), they would have no reason to.
This is very good news! My brother had been hurt in an accident has a child and has limited vision in one eye. The retina of his eye was damaged and several thousand dollars and hundreds of trips to clinics and hospitals later, we have been where we started!
This is early days yet, I know, but it offers some hope.
..of my initial days of tinkering around with RedHat 6.x.
My old office had two RH boxes on a static IP. There was no such thing as an administrator. As a programmer, I was supposed to install all applications, configure them and also *ensure* it was up and running.
Got a call from the ISP two days later. They had shut down the machine because of complaints from other users - apparently some application from these machines were flooding the network (I never did find out what they were doing though). Got the ISP to restart them. Frantic googling and few "security guide" downloads later, I started exploring what was wrong with them (incidentally, I was *still* accessing those machines remotely - my office wouldn't pay for me to go to the site to check the machines). Turned out there were THREE rootkits installed on one of thsoe machines. Found the traces of one of the possible three attackers - was some IP space in netherlands. Later found that that range of IP addresses was actually under contention and was thought to be not allocated and probably belonged to some malicious/rogue ISPs (I haven't understood this part yet).
Not knowing much, I got them to reinstall the OS. Of the three, two rootkits appeared within 2 days. Another re-install, this time with the Linux security guide implementations for securing the box. Things were ok for about 2 weeks or so. I then had yet another attack and someone was using my box as a IRC relay host (or something) and I was still in trouble.
Finally, after some RH updates and more tweaks (and ipchains and iptables install/config), I was able to have reasonably secure machines.
Trial by fire, but I learnt a lot!
*shiver. I hate to think how it would have been, had those been '98 machines
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, maybe not. Consistent with the primary objective of using space technology for societal benefits, Department of Science (DOS) has implemented the satellite sytems systems that form important elements of the national infrastructure today for providing vital services in the areas of telecommunication, television broadcasting, meteorology, disaster warning and resources survey and management. The progress made in the application of space technology during the year is highlighted in the following sections. If you want to know what those application are, take a look here
Secondly, such space missions may not directly affect the country's economy or the well-being of the people directly, but the knowledge gained is then applied to other areas. Such low-cost missions also enable the country to be self reliant so that they dont have to be dependent upon fickle, external, happy-to-go-war-for-oil powers who refused India cryogenic technology for ill-founded fearsM, which incidentally, had no long-term consequences excepting for some delays in India launching its indigenous rockets.
> Or is this solely a demonstration of power?
If that's what you think. We believe it is a step towards self-reliance.
> A sort of an international dick-waving contest?
That is the most pompous, ignorant, half-assed comment as any that I've heard. So developing countries should not try to break free from the shackles of poverty, by using technology? Or do you think such technology has just one direct application and no transferable by-products? Or that such technology is the domain of only the rich? What rubbish!
> You are not grown up until you send some expensive junk to the moon or something?
Just so you dont growel in your own ignorance that this is the only Indian space programme, here is the complete list to relieve you of your pain:
- Geostationary Satellite System
- Earth Observation System
- Space Applications
There are others. But I'm too tired to respond in far more detail. Oh, and just so you understand how old Indian space programme is, have a look here> Those eighty million might have bought the country one more university or one more hospital - which, I believe, have a better chance of saving / educating a person which makes an important scientific discovery than that pile of junk has of making a good return on its moon trip
Hospitals? You gotta be out of your mind. Just google about healthcare in India and the healthcare "tourists" that India attracts every year.
Sure, despite all this, I know it's a poor land. But to trample all over it, because you have a self-formed belief that it should focus only on hospitals, is being clueless
ISRO has established space systems like the:
ISRO has also developed the satellite launch vehicles PSLV and GSLV to place these satellites in the required orbits.
Here's the complete list of ISRO's geostationary satellite system
" If it is a success, we want to move into orbital flights and then, possibly, even get a hotel up there"
-Sir Richard Branson
From bbc
..that rids them of the last excuse for not finding WMD..
>Computers are overrated as an educational tool.
That's not entirely true. About 15 years ago, in my school in a then-rural town (which is now a city) in India, they had introduced computers. Not many people knew anything about it, not the teachers even. They all had a basic understanding of how it worked, how to boot up (those were dos 2.1 or so days) and basic troubleshooting. FYI, these were old IBM busybee computers (if I remember correctly).
However, the school went about teaching "computers" in the same way everything else was addressed - starting with the basic first. The first year we spent understanding a lot of theory (admittely a part of learning was by rote), however, second year onwards they started teaching us to program (using BASICA or GWBASIC). This immediately changed the entire perspective towards computers. Whereas earlier when we (us students, the kids) would be happy to just spend a while fiddling with the keyboard or being in awe at the capability to delete characters as well on the screen (the earliest thing we had seen was the typewriter), now, there were hordes of students spending extra hours after school doing their assignments, learning programming fundamentals, etc. Sure, we weren't great programmers or weren't working on anything mission critical, but those computers made a hell of a lotta difference in our lives.
In the subsequent years, not only almost every other school got the computers, the students graduated with a reasonable computer background, and went on to take better paying jobs. I can go on and on about the benefits...
>but really paying to educating teachers in india more, and providing better facilities would help more than a room full of Apple IIs Teachers in India are paid a reasonably good salary. In fact, most women prefer teaching jobs since they are not too onerous, give them a number of benefits (the state covers the medical bills, and though you go to the state-owned hospitals, the doc appointments can he had within a day's notice usually). Secondary school (or high school) teachers, degree-level teachers and professors get paid even better of course.
However, I agree on better facilities. Sure, that'd make a big difference, but it's a long way in coming. I like to think that computers changed my small town in so many different ways (it is now one of the hubs of computer education in that part of my state, the jobs are plenty and people even freelance producing utility software for local businesses), and I'm sure the government is keen to replicate that model
Yeah, even worse would be Al Gore claiming he "invented" VoIP
Well, you may find it funny, I've already messed up two pair of trousers - once when my phone rang and second when my friend put his hand on my shoulder to get my attention...
Oh, and forgot to add that I wouldn't be happy if my disk begins to churn away as the "Crawler" updates its indexes, say, while I'm playing doom! Can't afford to have any other spooky, disk grinding noises, while squinting my way through those dark corridors..
...I can kind of see this would make it easy to search and locate documents. What about backups though? How would a user be able to group (manually) related files together, so that the whole bunch can be backed up later, without having to search for all seeminly related (or unrelated) keywords to trace all hitherto-unrelated documents?
Secondly, with this mass of files being spread over several disks, surely, this is in a way forcing the user to "search" for everything. Or isnt it? Will the underlying FS layer still be accessible in the general way that it is?
- The news page which mentions the 4.0 GHz CPUs Now Available in Alienware Area-51 ALX Systems.
- The ALX configuration page - As the name suggests you can use it to configure your desired ALX
Btw, the moment you choose to configure, the price shoots up to $5,458.00 (which includes ALL rebates)!I just think there is an ever-growing paranoia in the developed countries about software job offshoring. Hasn't such offshoring of other jobs happened in the past, like say, manufacturing? Aren't most cars and other white goods manufactured in Japan and China? What happened to the workers in that industry some of who would obviously have lost jobs?
More to the issue, I'm not sure what decides the level of outsourcing - "some", "moderate" or "massive". Even when offshoring wasn't happening, a lot of companies prefered "outsourcing" - subcontracting their IT needs and business to specialist companies who had the skills and knowledge to fulfill them, leaving the parent organization free from the usual worries of delivery, quality, acceptance etc. So if the same happens now, it's bad? Because there is growing fear of losing jobs? Surely, the involved professionals would be smart enough to know that economics drives a business, not preferences!
Further, if the products of US-based companies are used/consumed by people elsewhere, from the (less) money earned from US companies, surely the profits are going back to USA. So the article gave an example of Nike. I'm sure more parallels can be drawn without stretching the imagination too far!
Finally, if the cost of building a product, be it software, is relatively less (and so is the cost of maintaining it), then the cost of direct users/consumers would be much lesser. Say, if the Air-traffic control systems cost less to build and operate, it would lead to less fees towards airlines, which means they can cut costs further and offer cheaper tickets.
And contrary to what another poster mentioned, yes, the corporates may follow the skills, but why would they distance themselves from consumers? They have nothing to gain there, if there is a growing resentment against their products/services. And if they decide to not pursue offshoring, they stand to lose considerable market share simply due to the cost-benefits offered by the competitors. So, from their perspective, its a downward spiral.
Outsourcing is happening. Live with it. Some jobs are going elsewhere. Sure. Are those the best jobs? Surely, it gives the professionals in the developed world better jobs (creative as compared to monotonous, boring, trivial).
Maybe this brouhaha is there because IT professionals have a bigger mouthpiece, and a cheaper and far easier means of voicing their concerns.
Great so they managed to make it look like MS Word, and we have a wonderful set of screenshots to see AbiWord vis-a-vis MS Word comparison (which, incidentally, is the foremost argument for "killing MS Word" here).
But what about ease of use? Do the hotkeys work as it is? Can it also save in different formats like how word does? What about introducing tables in documents? Paragraph formatting? Print previews?
First googleon the link in the article points to a news article on eWeek. The date on the eWeek article ? August 30, 2004
Um... news?
There was not an absolute iota of information in that article that I could make use of, or carry over with me. It smacks of absolute useless-ness, like a number of other articles
1. A graph with different tehnologies/device listed against the time it took for them to "mature", with funny names given to each trough and crest of popularity, does not make an insightful report.
2. There has been no mention of whose definiton of "product maturity" has been used. It is a term widely open for interpretation
3. It is hilarious to compare the effectiveness, acceptability and market penetration of such varied products as DVD players and PDAs, and so on. There are host of factors that come into play, least of which is the sense of an inane need within the target customer segment.
I bet that article concludes something. Though I certainly wish it was something more focused than a wannabe "we will have more power in our hands in the future"!
..perhaps one of those rare instances where the enabler technology (the OS in this case), has actually throttled innovation!
..unlike the more conscientious adults, I sorta half-stumbled onto slackware, resulting into this "Linux" offspring
Sad though, unlike other celebrities and their love childs, my name isn't in the credits...
First of all, as someone already mentioned, MS has deliberately kept Passport low-profile, especially since this Passport became Passport to nowhere
Secondly, I think alike Google, the mailbox size increase has happen selectively, since (I believe) this is still in testing stages. Try keeping your mailbox usage in high 80% and see what happens in a week or so.
Finally, from the end user's perspective, it doesn't matter whether its passport or just hotmail, most users related MSN messenger to their hotmail account, which is precisely the user base that MS is exploiting and trying to retain
- Heritage and resultant architecture: Linux clusters are typically processors are connected through I/O links, whereas supercomputing machines where processors exchange data and instructions through shared memory.
- PCI bottlenecks: This the key argument made - the bottlenecks introduced by PCI communication and the bottlenecks therein. He goes on to say that performance problems in any given such cluster tend to remain with any other such cluster. I agree with that.
- High Availability: He then goes on to talk about the reliability, availability and manageability of the supercomputers against typical clusters. I think there is where the FUD creeps in, along with marketing BS.
In all fairness, he does raise a critical point, however, overall, I think considering the relative ease and popularity of building, administering and growing a cluster these days, I think cost-effectiveness of a single monolithic machine is a moot pointIsnt this kind of notifier common with other email service providers (yahoo and hotmail)?! So what makes it so special?
And with other email service providers beefing up the storage space, one would have thought this pre-occupation with a gigabyte email-storage would be over!
First of all, lets not turn this into yet another outsourcing related to flame war
Secondly, being an Indian, I can tell you this (and similar technology related efforts) make a big difference. In a lot of different ways. While these projects may or may not fulfill their key goal (whatever this may be), what it does provide is a sense of confidence to the people. A feeling of being cared for by the government. A sense of being looked after. And then, all such gadgets/advancements still generate a sense of wonder in the people. There is a sense of novelty associated to such devices/initiatives.
The point I'm trying to convey is, in the more developed world, such devices or initiatives happen far too often (and maybe even at a faster pace). For a big, poor country, that broke out of the shackles not too long ago (we have been independent only 60 years now), such initiatives bring about lot of self belief and confidence.
I agree
However, this isnt' simply about raising the stakes up to attract new users. This is also about retaining the existing ones - millions out there who are tired to Hotmail (simply because it was the first and at one time the only, free email service provider). Add to this those users who are tied to hotmail because of using MSN messenger as well.
Now with Gmail offering such a vast leap over storage space, a large number of those users would be ready to migrate (no matter how painful it would be) to other email providers. However, if Hotmail provides them similar (or better) service (read storage - since that's the only thing that has been talked about most everywhere), they would have no reason to.
This is very good news! My brother had been hurt in an accident has a child and has limited vision in one eye. The retina of his eye was damaged and several thousand dollars and hundreds of trips to clinics and hospitals later, we have been where we started!
This is early days yet, I know, but it offers some hope.
this is why I said it reminded me of naivette (for Linux, in my case) :)
..of my initial days of tinkering around with RedHat 6.x.
My old office had two RH boxes on a static IP. There was no such thing as an administrator. As a programmer, I was supposed to install all applications, configure them and also *ensure* it was up and running.
Got a call from the ISP two days later. They had shut down the machine because of complaints from other users - apparently some application from these machines were flooding the network (I never did find out what they were doing though). Got the ISP to restart them. Frantic googling and few "security guide" downloads later, I started exploring what was wrong with them (incidentally, I was *still* accessing those machines remotely - my office wouldn't pay for me to go to the site to check the machines). Turned out there were THREE rootkits installed on one of thsoe machines. Found the traces of one of the possible three attackers - was some IP space in netherlands. Later found that that range of IP addresses was actually under contention and was thought to be not allocated and probably belonged to some malicious/rogue ISPs (I haven't understood this part yet).
Not knowing much, I got them to reinstall the OS. Of the three, two rootkits appeared within 2 days. Another re-install, this time with the Linux security guide implementations for securing the box. Things were ok for about 2 weeks or so. I then had yet another attack and someone was using my box as a IRC relay host (or something) and I was still in trouble.
Finally, after some RH updates and more tweaks (and ipchains and iptables install/config), I was able to have reasonably secure machines.
Trial by fire, but I learnt a lot!
*shiver. I hate to think how it would have been, had those been '98 machines
But will they still be called hard drives?