They build their own electronic voting machines, and outsource their prime ministers:)
Shouldn't it be the other way around? no wait.. Humm..
All said and done, we've just witnessed how a real democracy ought to operate its elections. No hanging or pregnant chads, or dimpled and pimpled ballots.. Importantly, a minority vote cannot decide the fate of a government and that of thousands of innocent people elsewhere in the world.
And most importantly, a robust, self-governed machinery that operates the elections, NOT county officials who can be influenced by the local political establishment (Florida, remember?). The election commission of India answers to nobody but the president who has luckily so far has been someone with little autocratic ambitions, and anyway there are constitutional safeguards against that. Election officials operating the poll booths are school teachers mostly from the neighborhood, meaning that they'd likely know you by name anyway. I remember seeing my primary school teacher ticking off my name at the poll booth, just as she used to do in the classroom when I was younger.
Talk about first-world and third-world democracies;)
Humm.. Should you decide to get a new laptop, you might want to consider something with a built-in Cisco aironet 350 minipci. I love my thinkpad R40 with a separately purchased (ebay) aironet 350. Everything except suspend/resume works out of the box on 2.6.
No, it's not a glitch in the Matrix. It happens whenever Intel fucks up with their processor designs and back-tracks to their previous design. E.g., P3 to P4 to P-M. lol
AKA, whenever they are making changes to the Matrix;-)
Umm.. If you trust them enough, sure. What's to stop them from analyzing your work habits/surfing habits, and start pumping specific ads to the devices, or worse?
I wouldn't let comcast, of all people, to administer my computers. Nor would anyone else want to, no matter how technically-alternatively-enabled.. And there might be (I don't know) some products specifically designed to keep your computers patched properly (no, NOT M$SFT) that one might want to subscribe to separately, with proper disclosures and agreements signed.
I whole-heartedly agree with people who complain about the pains of the gimp UI. Lately, I have been spending of the order of an hour a day with it while writing up my thesis, the topic of which incidentally is fairly close to image processing algorithms. In terms of the UI, photoshop is *far* better. I keep using gimp because I'm too lazy to boot my machine just for photoshop or to walk over to the winblows machine in the other room at the department. Regarding the functionality and algorithms supplied, gimp is fairly cutting-edge, but so is photoshop. In fact, it is acceptable in the image processing literature to compare improved algorithms with stock photoshop algorithms (the improvements are sometimes implemented as gimp plugins (: ) Swearing about a free software being better than is definitely risky, most likely dishonest barring a few notable exceptions like the mozilla project and so forth, and in the case of gimp, wrong.
It doesn't look like the author was out to bash an open-source program just for kicks.
Why not take such reviews as constructive criticism? It's actually good for programs like gimp that professionals or people who can influence the professionals have started to pay attention to free software.
So don't take it personally, guys. It's a good sign:-)
Makes sense. Besides, with a 6 hour time difference between east and west coasts, it would make sense to take abour 12 hours instead of the usual 6. Leave at 4pm, reach Europe at 10am. Leave Paris at 4pm, reach at 10pm, on time to sleep. You miss half a day of work each way, which happens anyway..
The world needs to slow down:-)
On the outbound flight, you can sleep happily, on the inbound, drink a few cups of coffee and work happily using the soon to be ubiquitous wireless connectivity.
Look at the brighter side. Would I want Linux to be used in the military and by hopefully reducing malfunctions help save lives, or let them use possibly buggy and slow operating systems that could increase risks all around?
Also, if the military increases the usage of non-free software, it's eventually MY tax $$ going to those hogs!
Originating from India, I guess I have the right to criticize the quality of work back at home.
It's all good for now, while most software being written is new, and due to the tight time-lines, not many people pay attention to the quality of software written, or service provided. I could swear I once heard a customer service rep obviously in India chewing something while talking to me (my guess is Paan, a betel leaf filled with stuff. Good thing he didn't spit it into the phone;-) ). Such maintenance/quality assurance issues are bound to pop up sooner or later. All said and done, you get what you paid for..
As the Indian service industry grows at the current pace, there is obviously going to be further dilution in the quality of services rendered. The difference is, the Indian bubble will burst even quicker than it did here; companies will pull out almost overnight, or there will be major buy-outs of the quality providers (remember the recent IBM acquisition?) while the rest will be the way the dot-com boom era code-monkeys are now. Hence the current demand by the private sector in India for more relaxation of laws governing foreign ownership of Indian corporations. They know exactly how they operate and the know that such risks exist;-) "Market Forces Rule".
At the end of it all, the US consumer will benefit by better, cheaper, personalized services (whith a verry verry Indian accent, sir!). The US techie will be a little worse-off in terms of wages, but that will be due to the fact that the US corporations will expect more sophisticated work and therefore the same pay amount will require higher qualifications. And there will be more management-type techies in US and more techie-type techies elsewhere. But look at the brighter side: you might have to go to to grad school and invest a couple more years in coursework, but you'll immediately be doing work that will be far more challanging! Don't expect the design work of your next-generation supercomputer or ultra-portable to move out of the country anytime soon! That said, shameless advertisement: If anyone wants to outsource their data mining work, let me know. I'm moving to India next year:D
Like it or not (like it if you are American or think like American, or not if you're not:) ), the US technological supremacy is here to stay for a fairly long time. And then, maybe we don't really need so many techies in this country anyway. How about more American artists and BETTER POLITICIANS instead?:^)
The rule in India is "stop if there's a cop monitoring the intersection". Maybe not in Bangalore or Pune, where the traffic is more civilized compared to some of the smaller cities.
Also, the same amount of traffic can flow much faster (yes, even in India) if everyone was disciplined.
The general principle is that once you have 'chunks' of traffic moving at about the same speed, stuff flows better, almost regardless of the speed, modulo some merging/exit issues. Therefore, anything that uniformizes vehicle speed relative to the neighborhood should help. So, this light thing could be a step in the right direction, as it 'resets' the speeders who'd then have to accelerate all over again, mostly along with rest of the traffic.
Now, of course, the traffic engineers should know better (though it doesn't seem that way here in Boston where light timings seem to be all screw'd up) about how far to reset the lights and what the delay for yellow should be with the adaptive systems like these etc...
AFAIK, that's already happening for largish transcription jobs.
Even without the patient identities, there are multiple ways to abuse such information, including selling it to drug companies as demographic data;-)
The problem, as the article pointed out, is that the US laws cannot be used in most cases to control what people abroad do with the data. The solution there is to send out sensitive data only to established corporations, and not cheapen out to such an extent. Wipro or Infosys (two largest oursourcing companies in India) would never dare blackmail their clients or compromise their data, cause their skins would be on the line for other jobs they might want in the future..
Talking about privacy, why do people assume that data in the "third-world" is so insecure? Indians are even afraid of punching in their PINs in the telephone lest someone would decode them by listening to the beeps. Ever wonder about that here in the US?:-)
Desktop PCs are still too unwieldy for most folk in India, who have not been through schooling. Especially more so, when they keep spontaneously rebooting because of the bootlegged winblows operating system they use.
Something one can carry around or pass around is very important: People tend to have a very significant communal tendency in India, and sharing/passing around a computer to look up crop prices or weather or stock prices is important. So, small size is definitely a plus there: one simputer can be used by multiple families/farmers. That was at least one of the founding principles behind the simputer AFAIK.
This stuff, once enough apps are developed indigenously, can be programmed so that stereotypical functions can be performed with one or two taps. Saves the extra learning required to operate a full-blown desktop.
In fact, zooming by accelerometer (Not sure if acceleratometer is even a term) is a nifty HCI feature good for naive users. I'd love to have something like that on my Palm:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Atal Bihari is a rare person. I think he'll be more valuable in the opposition (he's always been) than in the driving seat.
They build their own electronic voting machines, and outsource their prime ministers :) ;)
Shouldn't it be the other way around? no wait.. Humm..
All said and done, we've just witnessed how a real democracy ought to operate its elections. No hanging or pregnant chads, or dimpled and pimpled ballots.. Importantly, a minority vote cannot decide the fate of a government and that of thousands of innocent people elsewhere in the world.
And most importantly, a robust, self-governed machinery that operates the elections, NOT county officials who can be influenced by the local political establishment (Florida, remember?). The election commission of India answers to nobody but the president who has luckily so far has been someone with little autocratic ambitions, and anyway there are constitutional safeguards against that. Election officials operating the poll booths are school teachers mostly from the neighborhood, meaning that they'd likely know you by name anyway. I remember seeing my primary school teacher ticking off my name at the poll booth, just as she used to do in the classroom when I was younger.
Talk about first-world and third-world democracies
Humm.. Should you decide to get a new laptop, you might want to consider something with a built-in Cisco aironet 350 minipci. I love my thinkpad R40 with a separately purchased (ebay) aironet 350. Everything except suspend/resume works out of the box on 2.6.
I love this!! Now I can run around with my barcode enabled phone all over town, surfing for free porn at bus-stops!!
AKA, whenever they are making changes to the Matrix ;-)
Umm.. If you trust them enough, sure. What's to stop them from analyzing your work habits/surfing habits, and start pumping specific ads to the devices, or worse?
I wouldn't let comcast, of all people, to administer my computers. Nor would anyone else want to, no matter how technically-alternatively-enabled.. And there might be (I don't know) some products specifically designed to keep your computers patched properly (no, NOT M$SFT) that one might want to subscribe to separately, with proper disclosures and agreements signed.
Should they ever decide to actually ship their Efficeon chips in a laptop, it will also make an interesting comparison..
Easier still, send out a public call for suggestions. A UI bugzilla..
I whole-heartedly agree with people who complain about the pains of the gimp UI. Lately, I have been spending of the order of an hour a day with it while writing up my thesis, the topic of which incidentally is fairly close to image processing algorithms. In terms of the UI, photoshop is *far* better. I keep using gimp because I'm too lazy to boot my machine just for photoshop or to walk over to the winblows machine in the other room at the department. Regarding the functionality and algorithms supplied, gimp is fairly cutting-edge, but so is photoshop. In fact, it is acceptable in the image processing literature to compare improved algorithms with stock photoshop algorithms (the improvements are sometimes implemented as gimp plugins (: )
Swearing about a free software being better than is definitely risky, most likely dishonest barring a few notable exceptions like the mozilla project and so forth, and in the case of gimp, wrong.
It doesn't look like the author was out to bash an open-source program just for kicks. :-)
Why not take such reviews as constructive criticism? It's actually good for programs like gimp that professionals or people who can influence the professionals have started to pay attention to free software.
So don't take it personally, guys. It's a good sign
Everyone who signed up at Blogger after reading this raise your hand! (me raises his hand)
Makes sense. Besides, with a 6 hour time difference between east and west coasts, it would make sense to take abour 12 hours instead of the usual 6. Leave at 4pm, reach Europe at 10am. Leave Paris at 4pm, reach at 10pm, on time to sleep. You miss half a day of work each way, which happens anyway.. :-)
The world needs to slow down
On the outbound flight, you can sleep happily, on the inbound, drink a few cups of coffee and work happily using the soon to be ubiquitous wireless connectivity.
Any 'ol turtle with infinite disk with yield infinite data speed :-)
Look at the brighter side. Would I want Linux to be used in the military and by hopefully reducing malfunctions help save lives, or let them use possibly buggy and slow operating systems that could increase risks all around?
Also, if the military increases the usage of non-free software, it's eventually MY tax $$ going to those hogs!
Originating from India, I guess I have the right to criticize the quality of work back at home. ;-) ). Such maintenance/quality assurance issues are bound to pop up sooner or later. All said and done, you get what you paid for.. ;-) :D :) ), the US technological supremacy is here to stay for a fairly long time. And then, maybe we don't really need so many techies in this country anyway. How about more American artists and BETTER POLITICIANS instead? :^)
It's all good for now, while most software being written is new, and due to the tight time-lines, not many people pay attention to the quality of software written, or service provided. I could swear I once heard a customer service rep obviously in India chewing something while talking to me (my guess is Paan, a betel leaf filled with stuff. Good thing he didn't spit it into the phone
As the Indian service industry grows at the current pace, there is obviously going to be further dilution in the quality of services rendered. The difference is, the Indian bubble will burst even quicker than it did here; companies will pull out almost overnight, or there will be major buy-outs of the quality providers (remember the recent IBM acquisition?) while the rest will be the way the dot-com boom era code-monkeys are now. Hence the current demand by the private sector in India for more relaxation of laws governing foreign ownership of Indian corporations. They know exactly how they operate and the know that such risks exist
"Market Forces Rule".
At the end of it all, the US consumer will benefit by better, cheaper, personalized services (whith a verry verry Indian accent, sir!). The US techie will be a little worse-off in terms of wages, but that will be due to the fact that the US corporations will expect more sophisticated work and therefore the same pay amount will require higher qualifications. And there will be more management-type techies in US and more techie-type techies elsewhere. But look at the brighter side: you might have to go to to grad school and invest a couple more years in coursework, but you'll immediately be doing work that will be far more challanging! Don't expect the design work of your next-generation supercomputer or ultra-portable to move out of the country anytime soon! That said, shameless advertisement: If anyone wants to outsource their data mining work, let me know. I'm moving to India next year
Like it or not (like it if you are American or think like American, or not if you're not
The rule in India is "stop if there's a cop monitoring the intersection". Maybe not in Bangalore or Pune, where the traffic is more civilized compared to some of the smaller cities.
Also, the same amount of traffic can flow much faster (yes, even in India) if everyone was disciplined.
The general principle is that once you have 'chunks' of traffic moving at about the same speed, stuff flows better, almost regardless of the speed, modulo some merging/exit issues. Therefore, anything that uniformizes vehicle speed relative to the neighborhood should help. So, this light thing could be a step in the right direction, as it 'resets' the speeders who'd then have to accelerate all over again, mostly along with rest of the traffic. Now, of course, the traffic engineers should know better (though it doesn't seem that way here in Boston where light timings seem to be all screw'd up) about how far to reset the lights and what the delay for yellow should be with the adaptive systems like these etc...
eom.
And who says people have johnsons at Sun (c.f. Sun vs. Microsoft :)
How will Billy have jokes about college days?? :-)
How many pigeons will it take to get my email from Google everyday?
Oops! Someone dropped this one already. See below..
From the sky.. Beware, as the bandwidth usage increases, there will be more and more packets dropped..
Hey, who are you calling a nerd toy? Oops! There goes my Karma..
AFAIK, that's already happening for largish transcription jobs. ;-) :-)
Even without the patient identities, there are multiple ways to abuse such information, including selling it to drug companies as demographic data
The problem, as the article pointed out, is that the US laws cannot be used in most cases to control what people abroad do with the data. The solution there is to send out sensitive data only to established corporations, and not cheapen out to such an extent. Wipro or Infosys (two largest oursourcing companies in India) would never dare blackmail their clients or compromise their data, cause their skins would be on the line for other jobs they might want in the future..
Talking about privacy, why do people assume that data in the "third-world" is so insecure? Indians are even afraid of punching in their PINs in the telephone lest someone would decode them by listening to the beeps. Ever wonder about that here in the US?
Desktop PCs are still too unwieldy for most folk in India, who have not been through schooling. Especially more so, when they keep spontaneously rebooting because of the bootlegged winblows operating system they use. :-)
Something one can carry around or pass around is very important: People tend to have a very significant communal tendency in India, and sharing/passing around a computer to look up crop prices or weather or stock prices is important. So, small size is definitely a plus there: one simputer can be used by multiple families/farmers. That was at least one of the founding principles behind the simputer AFAIK.
This stuff, once enough apps are developed indigenously, can be programmed so that stereotypical functions can be performed with one or two taps. Saves the extra learning required to operate a full-blown desktop.
In fact, zooming by accelerometer (Not sure if acceleratometer is even a term) is a nifty HCI feature good for naive users. I'd love to have something like that on my Palm