I heartily agree with the parent. One more thing I would like to add is that human effort is really cheap in India. If you recieve less money for your work, then you wont have any incentive to innovate and you will only stick to those things that bring you the maximum money.
You can already see this in action. Every guy and his grandma there wants to get into software. Yeah it's great that people are becoming IT savvy, but I'm talking about people chucking careers in English, History, the Pure Sciences and joining Tech Support companies. When you have a monoculture it is not good. It is always better to have diversity.
The long term improvement of a nation comes from RnD and I don't see a bright future for India if it's researchers migrate to the US and Europe as they don't have many opportunities back home.
I don't think that the Indian attitude to education is anyway superior to the US.
I am an Indian and I can tell you that most people here look at education as a ticket to a job.
Sure we have our fair share of geeks who want to learn stuff just cuz it's interesting, just like you have in every other country.
But opportunities here are pretty much determined on the basis of your degree, unlike in the US where one could be a bright college dropout and still get a good job on the basis of the projects that one does.
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen in India as well, but the chances are very, very limited.
Most people in India do study a lot more than students in the US, but that's because that a formal degree plays more of a role in the job market here than in the US, and not because of a greater respect for learning as you think;-)
Personally, I think that a college education in the US does a much better job of creating people who are genuinely interested in a subject than the Indian Universities here.
Indians before you sharpen your knives to kill me, please note that I am talking about the vast majority of educational institutions here in India.
I am not talking about the premier institutions like the IIT's or IISc. They don't count in this discussion as we are not talking about the attitude of students in IISc, to say that of MIT. Anybody who goes to these institutions is a uber geek anyway and there is no comparison.
What is of interest is the "average" students attitude toward education. I am saying that even though an average Indian may study more than the average US student, that doesn't mean that he has a greater love for learning as the parent supposes.
Most programmers are apathetic to the chest beating of language zealots. They don't have strong likes and dislikes, prefering to use the right tool for the right job.
I am of a similar disposition except that I have very strong feelings when it comes to java.
It has some laudable features like portability etc. Also java doesn't extract as heavy a price for errors (eg buffer overflow) unlike C, which demands a greater level of caution while programming. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
What really bugs me is it's syntax.
Any language will want to use the most simple, efficient syntax for the most commonly used words/operations. An example could be 'the', 'a', 'at' etc in the English language which are some of the words used most frequently.
Complexity in language cannot be avoided. Sometimes in order to convey a very convoluted logic or some subtle meaning, you can only do so by using words that are more complex than 'the', 'at' etc.
But what is the hallmark of a good language?
It is not one that avoids complex constructs altogether(Complexity cannot be avoided). But rather one where the complexity of the language syntax is proportional to the complexity of the message.
In other words, it should allow you to express simple ideas in simple syntax. And complex ideas in not so simple syntax. It is in this respect that Java performs badly.
Consider doing something basic as printing "Hello World" on to the terminal.
c: printf("Hello World");
java: system.out.println("Hello World");
I mean it's great if you want to use Object oriented programming. But making a programmer type all that is just bad design. No amount of extolling the virtues of object oriented design can change that.
Java does a terrible job of hiding it's complexity from the programmer.
Let's take an example of something fairly commonplace like connecting to a database.
This is something that one finds so frequently in code written by programmers the world over.
Just compare java (sun.jdbc.odbc....blah blah) to PHP's clean syntax.
I am tired of the java is good/bad debate. I think the ideals that java was meant to achieve, like portabilty etc., are very laudable. But syntax is something that the designers got dead wrong.
I think it is very important that we categorize the kinds of stresses that people deal with.
Some stresses are good for us and help us become stronger. Stresses of these nature tend to be of a shorter duration.
It's those stresses that last for a long duration that are debilitating.
The interesting thing is that it is not the magnitude of the stress that is important, but rather the duration. You might have to work crazy hours for a single week in order to add a cool new feature for a product. But when the job's done you are happy. More often than not they tend to be enjoyable learning experiences. Short term stresses like these no matter how highly intensive,are welcome.
If however you go to a job each day unable to get rid of the tiny little feeling in your head that you'd be happier doing something else, then even though the job may not be all that stressful, one can end up severely depressed.
Recognize this fact. Nobody is invincible. Everybody has their breaking point. One of the famous torture techniques is to put a man in a pitch dark room with no sensory stimulation except for the sound of a dripping faucet. To most of us it is a minor irritant. But a week in that state can break any man.
We sometimes hear stories of people committing suicide for apparently silly reasons. You hear kids commiting suicide because their parents refused to buy them a video game or people commiting suicide cuz of a bad breakup. People are too quick to judge them and mock them. However painful a breakup may be nobody kills themselves over it. It's silly. It is the cumulative effect of all the miserable experiences that they have had in their life that has driven them to it. The breakup was just the trigger.
It's not the sudden flash flood that grinds the rock, but rather the slow drip of water over a sustained period of time.
Sorry if my post was long winded, but I just wanted to illustrate the fact that you can never conquer stress. Given enough time, no matter how puny the stress, it can destroy you. Everyone breaks.
Everyone.
I tried registering into Google groups, with my yahoo email id about 5 times and I was refused. The sixth time I tried my workplace id (non-hotmail or yahoo) and I got an account immediately.
There was news sometime back how about hotmail and yahoo were blocking gmail invites.It's what you would expect an ordinary, run-of-the-mill multi-billion dollar company to do.
Kudos to Google for a great UI. But I feel a bit disappointed.
Confessions of a former self help junkie
on
Getting Things Done?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
During high school, I used to read a lot of self help books. Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Tony Robbins, Covey etc were my gurus. Now I don't read them anymore. I have become apathetic to them.
The buzz lasts only for a week or two before you realize that you are low on inspiration and go buy another book... get another fix.
As the years went by, I found just two principles that work for me.
1)Prioritize. Some tasks are more important than the others. Concentrate on them more.
2)Recognize that some info is more important than others. If you know few key things, it is enough. There is no point in learning/knowing other useless stuff.
The 1st one is just basic common sense. Except that the authors use fancy methods like "mind maps", "brain dumps", GTD software etc to help you prioritize stuff. Understand the underlying principle. It doesn't matter if you use paper computer or pda in order to achieve it.
The 2nd point, is important as it reduces info overload. Some wiseman once said "Yes. The learning curve for Unix is certainly steep, compared to other OSes. But you only have to climb it once". The value of having system administration knowledge in Win NT is much lesser than Unix sysadmin skills. Why? Because you will have to relearn it when they change the layout and placement of the buttons in Win 2k, Win XP, Win 2003. But your Unix knowledge from years ago is worth it's weight in gold, as it is still applicable now.
Recognize, this fact and you wont waste your time learning/studying/reading something that has no value.
The above are guidelines that have served me well.
I don't claim ownership of these ideas, or affix a fancy name for them. Because they are just common sense.
I have many friends who swear by self-help stuff now. It is interesting to hear them speak at length on the virtues of "mind-maps", on being "in the zone", and what not. I am glad that I completed my self help phase early on in life.
If you feel that you really could use the inspiration from these schemes, go right ahead. Otherwise you may just discover that you can actually get by pretty well in life, without paying attention to them at all.
The way it works is through lobbies and pressure groups. Lobbies have privileged access and influence with Washington. That is why even though guns kill people there is such a tough time passing gun control legislation. Purely because, the gun lobbies have a huge war chest of dollars, and have a very effective lobby.
P2P software users are just regular joes. Even though P2P doesn't present as grave a danger as guns & they are several million users of p2p software than those who own handguns, they do not have a lobby group or access to a collective war chest to fight cases.
When a user is hit with a law suit, he has only 2 options, he can choose to settle with the RIAA or he can choose to settle with the RIAA. It is mostly an individual's battle. As it is not possible for other users to support him, for obvious reasons. Any misgivings that a sued individual has about RIAA heavy-handedness is lost among the voices of other "special interest" groups in Washington.
It may make shockwaves that the RIAA has sued a 12 year old kid, but they don't reach where it counts ie., Washington.
You forget that,
It's you'r universities that are begging us to come and study there. We are their cash cows. Your university scholarships and aid which your school gives you, all comes from our pockets.
You may think that we steal your jobs, but you forget that we also pay taxes in your country, even if we don't get to enjoy the benefits because we are not citizens of your country.
You may whine about all the jobs going out to India. How ironic that you who preach the benefits of free market competition to us, can't take even a little competition from your former "students".
Slashdot Mirror
I heartily agree with the parent. One more thing I would like to add is that human effort is really cheap in India. If you recieve less money for your work, then you wont have any incentive to innovate and you will only stick to those things that bring you the maximum money.
You can already see this in action. Every guy and his grandma there wants to get into software. Yeah it's great that people are becoming IT savvy, but I'm talking about people chucking careers in English, History, the Pure Sciences and joining Tech Support companies. When you have a monoculture it is not good. It is always better to have diversity.
The long term improvement of a nation comes from RnD and I don't see a bright future for India if it's researchers migrate to the US and Europe as they don't have many opportunities back home.
I don't think that the Indian attitude to education is anyway superior to the US.
I am an Indian and I can tell you that most people here look at education as a ticket to a job.
Sure we have our fair share of geeks who want to learn stuff just cuz it's interesting, just like you have in every other country.
But opportunities here are pretty much determined on the basis of your degree, unlike in the US where one could be a bright college dropout and still get a good job on the basis of the projects that one does.
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen in India as well, but the chances are very, very limited.
Most people in India do study a lot more than students in the US, but that's because that a formal degree plays more of a role in the job market here than in the US, and not because of a greater respect for learning as you think ;-)
Personally, I think that a college education in the US does a much better job of creating people who are genuinely interested in a subject than the Indian Universities here.
Indians before you sharpen your knives to kill me, please note that I am talking about the vast majority of educational institutions here in India.
I am not talking about the premier institutions like the IIT's or IISc. They don't count in this discussion as we are not talking about the attitude of students in IISc, to say that of MIT. Anybody who goes to these institutions is a uber geek anyway and there is no comparison.
What is of interest is the "average" students attitude toward education. I am saying that even though an average Indian may study more than the average US student, that doesn't mean that he has a greater love for learning as the parent supposes.
Most programmers are apathetic to the chest beating of language zealots. They don't have strong likes and dislikes, prefering to use the right tool for the right job.
I am of a similar disposition except that I have very strong feelings when it comes to java.
It has some laudable features like portability etc. Also java doesn't extract as heavy a price for errors (eg buffer overflow) unlike C, which demands a greater level of caution while programming. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
What really bugs me is it's syntax.
Any language will want to use the most simple, efficient syntax for the most commonly used words/operations. An example could be 'the', 'a', 'at' etc in the English language which are some of the words used most frequently.
Complexity in language cannot be avoided. Sometimes in order to convey a very convoluted logic or some subtle meaning, you can only do so by using words that are more complex than 'the', 'at' etc.
But what is the hallmark of a good language?
It is not one that avoids complex constructs altogether(Complexity cannot be avoided). But rather one where the complexity of the language syntax is proportional to the complexity of the message.
In other words, it should allow you to express simple ideas in simple syntax. And complex ideas in not so simple syntax. It is in this respect that Java performs badly.
Consider doing something basic as printing "Hello World" on to the terminal.
c: printf("Hello World");
java: system.out.println("Hello World");
I mean it's great if you want to use Object oriented programming. But making a programmer type all that is just bad design. No amount of extolling the virtues of object oriented design can change that.
Java does a terrible job of hiding it's complexity from the programmer.
Let's take an example of something fairly commonplace like connecting to a database.
This is something that one finds so frequently in code written by programmers the world over.
Just compare java (sun.jdbc.odbc....blah blah) to PHP's clean syntax.
I am tired of the java is good/bad debate. I think the ideals that java was meant to achieve, like portabilty etc., are very laudable. But syntax is something that the designers got dead wrong.
Cheers!prahlad
I think it is very important that we categorize the kinds of stresses that people deal with. Some stresses are good for us and help us become stronger. Stresses of these nature tend to be of a shorter duration. It's those stresses that last for a long duration that are debilitating. The interesting thing is that it is not the magnitude of the stress that is important, but rather the duration. You might have to work crazy hours for a single week in order to add a cool new feature for a product. But when the job's done you are happy. More often than not they tend to be enjoyable learning experiences. Short term stresses like these no matter how highly intensive ,are welcome.
If however you go to a job each day unable to get rid of the tiny little feeling in your head that you'd be happier doing something else, then even though the job may not be all that stressful, one can end up severely depressed.
Recognize this fact. Nobody is invincible. Everybody has their breaking point. One of the famous torture techniques is to put a man in a pitch dark room with no sensory stimulation except for the sound of a dripping faucet. To most of us it is a minor irritant. But a week in that state can break any man.
We sometimes hear stories of people committing suicide for apparently silly reasons. You hear kids commiting suicide because their parents refused to buy them a video game or people commiting suicide cuz of a bad breakup. People are too quick to judge them and mock them. However painful a breakup may be nobody kills themselves over it. It's silly. It is the cumulative effect of all the miserable experiences that they have had in their life that has driven them to it. The breakup was just the trigger.
It's not the sudden flash flood that grinds the rock, but rather the slow drip of water over a sustained period of time.
Sorry if my post was long winded, but I just wanted to illustrate the fact that you can never conquer stress. Given enough time, no matter how puny the stress, it can destroy you. Everyone breaks.
Everyone.
A small correction. Only yahoo accounts are blocked and not hotmail.
;-)
It's not everyday that a company doesn't deem it fit to include MS in the equation, while formulating a strategy
Someone, somewhere in the MS campus is redfaced right now.
I tried registering into Google groups, with my yahoo email id about 5 times and I was refused. The sixth time I tried my workplace id (non-hotmail or yahoo) and I got an account immediately.
There was news sometime back how about hotmail and yahoo were blocking gmail invites.It's what you would expect an ordinary, run-of-the-mill multi-billion dollar company to do.
Kudos to Google for a great UI. But I feel a bit disappointed.
During high school, I used to read a lot of self help books. Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Tony Robbins, Covey etc were my gurus. Now I don't read them anymore. I have become apathetic to them.
The buzz lasts only for a week or two before you realize that you are low on inspiration and go buy another book... get another fix.
As the years went by, I found just two principles that work for me.
1)Prioritize. Some tasks are more important than the others. Concentrate on them more.
2)Recognize that some info is more important than others. If you know few key things, it is enough. There is no point in learning/knowing other useless stuff.
The 1st one is just basic common sense. Except that the authors use fancy methods like "mind maps", "brain dumps", GTD software etc to help you prioritize stuff. Understand the underlying principle. It doesn't matter if you use paper computer or pda in order to achieve it.
The 2nd point, is important as it reduces info overload. Some wiseman once said "Yes. The learning curve for Unix is certainly steep, compared to other OSes. But you only have to climb it once". The value of having system administration knowledge in Win NT is much lesser than Unix sysadmin skills. Why? Because you will have to relearn it when they change the layout and placement of the buttons in Win 2k, Win XP, Win 2003. But your Unix knowledge from years ago is worth it's weight in gold, as it is still applicable now.
Recognize, this fact and you wont waste your time learning/studying/reading something that has no value.
The above are guidelines that have served me well. I don't claim ownership of these ideas, or affix a fancy name for them. Because they are just common sense.
I have many friends who swear by self-help stuff now. It is interesting to hear them speak at length on the virtues of "mind-maps", on being "in the zone", and what not. I am glad that I completed my self help phase early on in life.
If you feel that you really could use the inspiration from these schemes, go right ahead. Otherwise you may just discover that you can actually get by pretty well in life, without paying attention to them at all.
Hurrah! Another passing fad comes along. I can't wait to know what the next "big thing" in self improvement will be called. How bout "common sense"?
The way it works is through lobbies and pressure groups. Lobbies have privileged access and influence with Washington. That is why even though guns kill people there is such a tough time passing gun control legislation. Purely because, the gun lobbies have a huge war chest of dollars, and have a very effective lobby. P2P software users are just regular joes. Even though P2P doesn't present as grave a danger as guns & they are several million users of p2p software than those who own handguns, they do not have a lobby group or access to a collective war chest to fight cases. When a user is hit with a law suit, he has only 2 options, he can choose to settle with the RIAA or he can choose to settle with the RIAA. It is mostly an individual's battle. As it is not possible for other users to support him, for obvious reasons. Any misgivings that a sued individual has about RIAA heavy-handedness is lost among the voices of other "special interest" groups in Washington. It may make shockwaves that the RIAA has sued a 12 year old kid, but they don't reach where it counts ie., Washington.
You forget that, It's you'r universities that are begging us to come and study there. We are their cash cows. Your university scholarships and aid which your school gives you, all comes from our pockets. You may think that we steal your jobs, but you forget that we also pay taxes in your country, even if we don't get to enjoy the benefits because we are not citizens of your country. You may whine about all the jobs going out to India. How ironic that you who preach the benefits of free market competition to us, can't take even a little competition from your former "students".