I think [ being an Indian ] that in my entire reading of slashdot over the last one year, this is one comment that seems to come from mind rather than just following the heart and politics . People seem to believe that IT-industry is the panacea of all Indian troubles. However if you closely examine companies like Infosys, TCS, CSC and other companies all they are doing is @labor@ work or to be more educated @service@ work. R&D in India is stilll pathetic.
I really don't remember When was the last time I used a software research and developed in India. Yes components of VB.NET were built in India but Microsoft is NOT an Indian Company. Adobe Photo Album software was designed and developed in India but Adobe is NOT an Indian company. Google, Intel and other are doing R&D in India, but when was the last time I came across ground breaking paper in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry or for that matter even in Computer Science.
I really laugh my ass out when someone says India is an IT superpower, I have friends at CSC and Infosys they are ready to admit that the only reason that they have got jobs is because of cheap labor in India not only because they are skilled programmers.
Facts:
a) In India you will have to pay at least Rs 500 even when you want to register a complaint against police. Better commit suicide if the criminal has a relative in @Govt@ department.
b) Educational system is pathetic. Never does it encourage one to think. Yes we have IIT's but did you know that every year 250,000 people attempt to get into IIT and only and only 3000 get through. IIT's definitely are great but look beyond it.
c) R&D is pathetic, too much focus on encouraging the service sector is only causing harm to the overall skill level. Today as Americans are willing to go in for higher graduate studies, a lot but not all are satisfied in India to work at call center.
d) Politics, As you mention every year we come out with these policies like providing Rs 250,000,000,000 to the poor when more than three quarters goes to the pockets of corrupt politicians like Laloo. He spends what
Rs 200, 000,000 on his daughter's wedding when is monthly salary is
Rs 25,000
e) And where is the Internet growth, What are your figures on Broadband in India, still 0.01%. I live in North, there is still now sign of any one offering affordable broadband. That is all when in US you have more than half of the total population and more than 75% of the students having brodband.
Several reasons put into india being an IT-superpower
a) English speaking nation, this is by far the most important reason. Nobody would have been here if half of Chinese could speak English.
b) Skilled labor, this also can't be ignored but doesn't China has that it certainly with its R&D facility stand a better chance to beat us.
My advice to people coming India, come be my guest but do visit Bihar or any other place than Banglore. If you are able to come out of Bihar @alive@ please come and have coffee with me.
I am _aware_ of these distributions, that is why I added the tag "production". My point is that I like many others have never seen these distributions being used outside the rooms of the people who are building these. Could you tell me
a) Which government organizations are using IndLinux? b) Which private organizations are using IndLinux? c) Which _individuals_ other than the developers are using IndLinux? d) Which organizations be it Government or private have endorsed IndLinux? e) How many people in India actually know that IndLinux even/exists/?
Call me a critic, nitpicker but all I am trying to share is the real picture.
Are you sure Open Source is fledging in India. I don't think so. Consider
a) How many Open source projects have you see intitiated byIndians?
b) How man Open Source Contributers do you know from India?
Check out openbsd.org, and the geographical map they show of their devleopers, India does not figure.
c) Even after so many years there is no true Linux Distribution from India, neither have we got any production Linux distribution in regional languages. If you know one then that is only some guys final year project now lying in dust.
d) How much contribution has been made by Indians to Open Source here.
GNU India
2003
Ramanraj K (Chennai) - Rs 1,026
2004
Deeproot Linux (Banglore) - Rs 15,000
Atul Metha (Delhi) - Rs 10,000
Vimal (Kochi) - Rs. 500
For those not from India you just need to divide it by 45 to convert it to US Dollars. For lazy guys it's just $590 for TWO years.
It's all OK, but do you know that
a) The website simputer.org was last updated in 2001.
b) That it fails to satisfy the goal of providing computing to common man in India. Where by common man I refer to the 650 million+ population who live below poverty line.
c) That being an Indian, I have never heard anyone talking about it. Except the press which carried an article about 3 years back when simputer was not even launced.
Maybe I need to qualify this a bit. Answer this for yourself
a) On your desktop how much of software is indian . Now name 100 from US.
b) Name 10 product oriented companies that you know from India Now answer 100 from US.
c) If you want more, how many people from India do you see contributing to Open source {Linux, OpenBSD}. Now what about US and Canada.
I am not sure if this is the right way. The guy seems to have the brain to be "inovative". But in India the only thing he will get to do is work in "service" sector.
I am not sure if am really happy with this news because broadband in North India still costs a lot the last time I checked it it could cost easily Rs 600 p.m or $13 for 96 kbps and can only be used between 9PM and 9AM. This is even after the govt. has said that nothing less than 256kbps can be considered as broadband. Suck.
Re:Innovative practices...
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This is a "solicitation" letter from the Microsoft Corp. It's written by a software engineer, rather than the personnel dept:
I consider Microsoft an excellent home for the software wizard because:
1) its a great place to work. The company is owned (a key issue) and operated by software wizards: Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
This means :
- private offices (as many with windows as topology permits)
- informal lounges for design/discussion/rap sessions
- whatever hardware facilities are needed for the job
- Microwave ovens, refrigerators, free soda, etc.throughout the buildings
But, most importantly, you're working for and with other systems programmers that understand both the job and the people. The technical hierarchy is kept very simple and "shallow" so that there is minimal bullshit and over-organization. Since the development people report strictly to software engineers, who report directly to chairman/CEO Gates, we never do anything stupid because some manager/MBA/suit-type has power without knowledge. (When we do omething stupid,its our own fault!) Likewise, there are no "politics", just engineering.
2) The work that you do here at Microsoft MATTERS. Your work won't be canceled due to some political/financial upheaval,nor just used in-house; your work will be used by millions of people. Most sharp software people have seen endless amounts of software that "missed the boat". If you've felt this way, here's your chance to show the world (and yourself) just how good you are.I've been here over 5 years; thats the most sincere recommendation I can give. This is a place where I can literally explore the limits of my capabilities as a software engineer. The company that did the first microcomputer system software (BASIC), the first plug-in processor (the Softcard), the first lap-held computer (we conceived and designed the Tandy Model 100) and many other "firsts" lacks no boldness of vision. Since we're "owned and operated" by these same bold people, having no venture capital owners or cash crunches to limit us, the company's limits are set only by the ability of our engineers to envision great things and then to (the tough part) make them fly.
Like the variety of small startups, Microsoft offers its key technical people stock options. We can offer technical challenges as good as or better than startups, financial packages ditto, and, since we're > 90% owned by ourselves, we have no outside investors to restrict ordirect our development efforts.
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/net.jobs/msg/4 f2cf440919eeda9
How do you suppose two or three hours of warning would help in the task of evacuating 50 to 100 million people?
The fact is that Indian Goverment had about 3 hours to deal with the disaster. There were a lot of people who were enjoying at the beach. These people could have easily been told _not_ to be there.
However this did not happen.
WHY?
An interesting question of which the answer is obvious and known . Just pick up any national daily and you will know that as a means to be self reliant India did not collaborate with the Pacific warning system. Had we been subscribers to it, we could have saved a lot many people.
Actually I find it quite surprising that India wasn't warned about the tsunami's just because it did not subscribe { read:pay } for the warning system. Doesn't the scientific community have any moral responsibility?
WOW? You also from India. Great where do you come from?
The truth is that even the president of india admits that we do have a rot culture.
BTW isn't Bihar a part of India.
Being from India, this comes to me to be quite a surprise, we always seem to identify America as a place that encourages innovation. Compared to the rot culture that we have in India. I guess Junk is indeed better than Home food.
Ooopsy I blooped, but the sad truth is that I really don't get to see linux based ad's in any of the dailies that I subscribe. Once is a year is how I put it.
Being from India, and subscriber to 3 national newspapers, I can surely disagree with you. It is for me really hard to even find on most occasions anything related to Linux.
It is quite possibe that they might be selling it from an underground shop, but I don't think that is how they are going to sell it.
The truth is More than 95% of households in India run on (pirated) Windows.
You know what you make a hell of a sense, what I reckon is that if even say 1000 indians realize that they have lost job, you won't be surprised that Indian govt. will pass a regulation banning such intakes.
I remember some time back there were riots in india when migrant labour from other states{within india only} had started to come into Bihar. Many were killed.
So I just hope these european guys know what they are getting into.
After years of using google, frankly I am in desprate need of an alternative. The fact is that I belive that the overall way google works is very much flawed. When Sergery Brin and Larry Page made google they build it up using a simple notion
" Assume that there is a random surfer who is looking for information "
The fact is that treating every surfer to be a random surfer is very much flawed. Consider this when I search for "sex" I am ready to go forward any link that comes to me that is random surfing. However if I want to help myself with some assignment and research I don't want to be treated as a random surfer. I want a personalized search. Right now say if I search for "Search Engine Architecture". What I get is a bunch of links that contain links to topics like Search Engine Optimization. The main reason I get this is because I am treated just like any other Tom Dick and Harry on the street.
Also the main algorithm { PageRank(tm) } is very much flawed. What it works on is that a the greater the number of links pointing to a particular website the greater it's pagerank. That is just one thing that annoys me the most, whenever I look for any information I am getting top links to those websites that were rich enough to set "link farms" or maybe just lot of people started linking to it. Just because *someone* liked it does not mean *I* must like it. In short the search results that I get are those of "corprates".
I am also quite surprised that why people are happy with using just google. I often find much relevant information through Yahoo.
On my own personal experience often what I get in the top 100 search hits is 50% Crap and the rest 50% Distracting.
P.S. I know that google does offer Personalized search as a beta feature, but anyone who has used it must know that it is just not ready for prime time.
This is stuff that even a stupid 1 year old kid in CS would/should know.
That's just sloppy journalism. BTW I have a link about how to print Hello World in C. Would you/. it.
This was quite expected, there have been rumors about it for quite some time. The bad thing is that at least in this very particular case M$ did have an edge over google. For close to decade M$ has had an indexing tool that is quite effecient in searching through the files for text and other information. And it is quite real time too. If you search through the index and then modify any file the index is updated immediately. However because of internal conflicts in M$, they have not been able to put it at the fore front. It has a poor interface, and is disabled by default. Though XP gives a slightly better interface to it. I still don't know how many people enable it.
Too Bad I can't use it, it says that it requires 1 GB of hard disk and I only have 248 MB left.
I just wonder what reaction of/. would have been had this been the case with Microsoft Desktop.
This was quite expected, there have been rumors about it for quite some time. The bad thing is that at least in this very particular case M$ did have an edge over google. For close to decade M$ has had an indexing tool that is quite effecient in searching through the files for text and other information. And it is quite real time too. If you search through the index and then modify any file the index is updated immediately. However because of internal conflicts in M$, they have not been able to put it at the fore front. It has a poor interface, and is disabled by default. Though XP gives a slightly better interface to it. I still don't know how many people enable it.
Too Bad I can't use it, it says that it requires 1 GB(Hello I think next time it might say I have P3) of hard disk and I only have 248 MB left.
If I really had 1 GB I would be playing Halo.
Yeah I also don't understand what the big deal of *Protection* thing comes just because it is google.
http://print.google.com/print?id=aQu9z3yBFZ8C&pg=1 2&img=1&q=sex&sig=s39OTeaUlfMILaki1HZeJp7z ouE
The important thing is that are these Id's runtime specific? Or do these work on any machine.
Also how to get the entire book.
Slashdot Mirror
I think [ being an Indian ] that in my entire reading of slashdot over the last one year, this is one comment that seems to come from mind rather than just following the heart and politics . People seem to believe that IT-industry is the panacea of all Indian troubles. However if you closely examine companies like Infosys, TCS, CSC and other companies all they are doing is @labor@ work or to be more educated @service@ work. R&D in India is stilll pathetic.
I really don't remember When was the last time I used a software research and developed in India. Yes components of VB.NET were built in India but Microsoft is NOT an Indian Company. Adobe Photo Album software was designed and developed in India but Adobe is NOT an Indian company. Google, Intel and other are doing R&D in India, but when was the last time I came across ground breaking paper in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry or for that matter even in Computer Science.
I really laugh my ass out when someone says India is an IT superpower, I have friends at CSC and Infosys they are ready to admit that the only reason that they have got jobs is because of cheap labor in India not only because they are skilled programmers.
Facts:
a) In India you will have to pay at least Rs 500 even when you want to register a complaint against police. Better commit suicide if the criminal has a relative in @Govt@ department.
b) Educational system is pathetic. Never does it encourage one to think. Yes we have IIT's but did you know that every year 250,000 people attempt to get into IIT and only and only 3000 get through. IIT's definitely are great but look beyond it.
c) R&D is pathetic, too much focus on encouraging the service sector is only causing harm to the overall skill level. Today as Americans are willing to go in for higher graduate studies, a lot but not all are satisfied in India to work at call center.
d) Politics, As you mention every year we come out with these policies like providing
Rs 250,000,000,000 to the poor when more than three quarters goes to the pockets of corrupt politicians like Laloo. He spends what
Rs 200, 000,000 on his daughter's wedding when is monthly salary is
Rs 25,000
e) And where is the Internet growth, What are your figures on Broadband in India, still 0.01%. I live in North, there is still now sign of any one offering affordable broadband. That is all when in US you have more than half of the total population and more than 75% of the students having brodband.
Several reasons put into india being an IT-superpower
a) English speaking nation, this is by far the most important reason. Nobody would have been here if half of Chinese could speak English.
b) Skilled labor, this also can't be ignored but doesn't China has that it certainly with its R&D facility stand a better chance to beat us.
My advice to people coming India, come be my guest but do visit Bihar or any other place than Banglore. If you are able to come out of Bihar @alive@ please come and have coffee with me.
Yes, the reason could be
a) Better Search Algorithm
b) Smaller Index, which is good in sense that you get to see "smaller" possibly relevant web.
I am _aware_ of these distributions, that is why I added the tag "production". My point is that I like many others have never seen these distributions being used outside the rooms of the people who are building these. Could you tell me
/exists/?
a) Which government organizations are using IndLinux?
b) Which private organizations are using IndLinux?
c) Which _individuals_ other than the developers are using IndLinux?
d) Which organizations be it Government or private have endorsed IndLinux?
e) How many people in India actually know that IndLinux even
Call me a critic, nitpicker but all I am trying to share is the real picture.
In India this would translate to
$100 with exchange rate of
$1 = 45 Rs.
4500 Rs.
650 million people in India don't get to eat 2 meals per day.
a) How many Open source projects have you see intitiated byIndians?
b) How man Open Source Contributers do you know from India?
Check out openbsd.org, and the geographical map they show of their devleopers, India does not figure.
c) Even after so many years there is no true Linux Distribution from India, neither have we got any production Linux distribution in regional languages. If you know one then that is only some guys final year project now lying in dust.
d) How much contribution has been made by Indians to Open Source here. GNU India
2003
Ramanraj K (Chennai) - Rs 1,026
2004
Deeproot Linux (Banglore) - Rs 15,000
Atul Metha (Delhi) - Rs 10,000
Vimal (Kochi) - Rs. 500
For those not from India you just need to divide it by 45 to convert it to US Dollars. For lazy guys it's just $590 for TWO years.
It's all OK, but do you know that
a) The website simputer.org was last updated in 2001.
b) That it fails to satisfy the goal of providing computing to common man in India. Where by common man I refer to the 650 million+ population who live below poverty line.
c) That being an Indian, I have never heard anyone talking about it. Except the press which carried an article about 3 years back when simputer was not even launced.
Yeah, especially since it is the one that has been slashdotted :-)
Maybe I need to qualify this a bit. Answer this for yourself
a) On your desktop how much of software is indian . Now name 100 from US.
b) Name 10 product oriented companies that you know from India Now answer 100 from US.
c) If you want more, how many people from India do you see contributing to Open source {Linux, OpenBSD}. Now what about US and Canada.
I am not sure if this is the right way. The guy seems to have the brain to be "inovative". But in India the only thing he will get to do is work in "service" sector.
Nopes, it seems to have been slashdotted.
I am not sure if am really happy with this news because broadband in North India still costs a lot the last time I checked it it could cost easily Rs 600 p.m or $13 for 96 kbps and can only be used between 9PM and 9AM. This is even after the govt. has said that nothing less than 256kbps can be considered as broadband. Suck.
This is a "solicitation" letter from the Microsoft Corp. It's written by a software engineer, rather than the personnel dept: I consider Microsoft an excellent home for the software wizard because: 1) its a great place to work. The company is owned (a key issue) and operated by software wizards: Bill Gates and Paul Allen. This means : - private offices (as many with windows as topology permits) - informal lounges for design/discussion/rap sessions - whatever hardware facilities are needed for the job - Microwave ovens, refrigerators, free soda, etc.throughout the buildings But, most importantly, you're working for and with other systems programmers that understand both the job and the people. The technical hierarchy is kept very simple and "shallow" so that there is minimal bullshit and over-organization. Since the development people report strictly to software engineers, who report directly to chairman/CEO Gates, we never do anything stupid because some manager/MBA/suit-type has power without knowledge. (When we do omething stupid,its our own fault!) Likewise, there are no "politics", just engineering. 2) The work that you do here at Microsoft MATTERS. Your work won't be canceled due to some political/financial upheaval,nor just used in-house; your work will be used by millions of people. Most sharp software people have seen endless amounts of software that "missed the boat". If you've felt this way, here's your chance to show the world (and yourself) just how good you are.I've been here over 5 years; thats the most sincere recommendation I can give. This is a place where I can literally explore the limits of my capabilities as a software engineer. The company that did the first microcomputer system software (BASIC), the first plug-in processor (the Softcard), the first lap-held computer (we conceived and designed the Tandy Model 100) and many other "firsts" lacks no boldness of vision. Since we're "owned and operated" by these same bold people, having no venture capital owners or cash crunches to limit us, the company's limits are set only by the ability of our engineers to envision great things and then to (the tough part) make them fly. Like the variety of small startups, Microsoft offers its key technical people stock options. We can offer technical challenges as good as or better than startups, financial packages ditto, and, since we're > 90% owned by ourselves, we have no outside investors to restrict ordirect our development efforts. http://groups-beta.google.com/group/net.jobs/msg/4 f2cf440919eeda9
How do you suppose two or three hours of warning would help in the task of evacuating 50 to 100 million people?
The fact is that Indian Goverment had about 3 hours to deal with the disaster. There were a lot of people who were enjoying at the beach. These people could have easily been told _not_ to be there.
However this did not happen.
WHY?
An interesting question of which the answer is obvious and known . Just pick up any national daily and you will know that as a means to be self reliant India did not collaborate with the Pacific warning system. Had we been subscribers to it, we could have saved a lot many people.
Actually I find it quite surprising that India wasn't warned about the tsunami's just because it did not subscribe { read:pay } for the warning system. Doesn't the scientific community have any moral responsibility?
WOW? You also from India. Great where do you come from?
The truth is that even the president of india admits that we do have a rot culture.
BTW isn't Bihar a part of India.
Being from India, this comes to me to be quite a surprise, we always seem to identify America as a place that encourages innovation. Compared to the rot culture that we have in India. I guess Junk is indeed better than Home food.
Ooopsy I blooped, but the sad truth is that I really don't get to see linux based ad's in any of the dailies that I subscribe. Once is a year is how I put it.
Being from India, and subscriber to 3 national newspapers, I can surely disagree with you. It is for me really hard to even find on most occasions anything related to Linux. It is quite possibe that they might be selling it from an underground shop, but I don't think that is how they are going to sell it. The truth is More than 95% of households in India run on (pirated) Windows.
Well I am reminded of a recent surevey by Gartner
"80% of all PC's shipped with Linux are made to run pirated versions of Windows XP"
Anyway a recent undisclosed survey has found
"100% of all PC's shipped with FREEDOS are made to run pirated versions of Windows XP"
You know what you make a hell of a sense, what I reckon is that if even say 1000 indians realize that they have lost job, you won't be surprised that Indian govt. will pass a regulation banning such intakes.
I remember some time back there were riots in india when migrant labour from other states{within india only} had started to come into Bihar. Many were killed.
So I just hope these european guys know what they are getting into.
After years of using google, frankly I am in desprate need of an alternative. The fact is that I belive that the overall way google works is very much flawed. When Sergery Brin and Larry Page made google they build it up using a simple notion
" Assume that there is a random surfer who is looking for information "
The fact is that treating every surfer to be a random surfer is very much flawed. Consider this when I search for "sex" I am ready to go forward any link that comes to me that is random surfing. However if I want to help myself with some assignment and research I don't want to be treated as a random surfer. I want a personalized search. Right now say if I search for "Search Engine Architecture". What I get is a bunch of links that contain links to topics like Search Engine Optimization. The main reason I get this is because I am treated just like any other Tom Dick and Harry on the street.
Also the main algorithm { PageRank(tm) } is very much flawed. What it works on is that a the greater the number of links pointing to a particular website the greater it's pagerank. That is just one thing that annoys me the most, whenever I look for any information I am getting top links to those websites that were rich enough to set "link farms" or maybe just lot of people started linking to it. Just because *someone* liked it does not mean *I* must like it. In short the search results that I get are those of "corprates".
I am also quite surprised that why people are happy with using just google. I often find much relevant information through Yahoo.
On my own personal experience often what I get in the top 100 search hits is 50% Crap and the rest 50% Distracting.
P.S. I know that google does offer Personalized search as a beta feature, but anyone who has used it must know that it is just not ready for prime time.
This is stuff that even a stupid 1 year old kid in CS would/should know. That's just sloppy journalism. BTW I have a link about how to print Hello World in C. Would you /. it.
This was quite expected, there have been rumors about it for quite some time. The bad thing is that at least in this very particular case M$ did have an edge over google. For close to decade M$ has had an indexing tool that is quite effecient in searching through the files for text and other information. And it is quite real time too. If you search through the index and then modify any file the index is updated immediately. However because of internal conflicts in M$, they have not been able to put it at the fore front. It has a poor interface, and is disabled by default. Though XP gives a slightly better interface to it. I still don't know how many people enable it. Too Bad I can't use it, it says that it requires 1 GB of hard disk and I only have 248 MB left. I just wonder what reaction of /. would have been had this been the case with Microsoft Desktop.
This was quite expected, there have been rumors about it for quite some time. The bad thing is that at least in this very particular case M$ did have an edge over google. For close to decade M$ has had an indexing tool that is quite effecient in searching through the files for text and other information. And it is quite real time too. If you search through the index and then modify any file the index is updated immediately. However because of internal conflicts in M$, they have not been able to put it at the fore front. It has a poor interface, and is disabled by default. Though XP gives a slightly better interface to it. I still don't know how many people enable it. Too Bad I can't use it, it says that it requires 1 GB(Hello I think next time it might say I have P3) of hard disk and I only have 248 MB left. If I really had 1 GB I would be playing Halo.
Yeah I also don't understand what the big deal of *Protection* thing comes just because it is google. http://print.google.com/print?id=aQu9z3yBFZ8C&pg=1 2&img=1&q=sex&sig=s39OTeaUlfMILaki1HZeJp7z ouE
The important thing is that are these Id's runtime specific? Or do these work on any machine.
Also how to get the entire book.
http://print.google.com/print?id=hKkecu-g_dcC&p
Can you print it or NOT.
I see no problem.