As a matter of fact wasnt this the chap who decided to discontinue Borland's IDE business ? Wonder what he's upto with his finger in the Trolltech pie.
The guy in India just can't sit across the table from a user of whatever you are making and discuss options, quickly estimate 'lots of effort' or 'pretty easy', and help the users tell you what to create.
Terribly sorry to disappoint you but I'd like to add another little bullet point to you're list:
5) Never underestimate you're competition.
If everyone remains in a pipe dream of high caliber work never making its way to Indians, it'll lull you into a complacence that is hard to justify. What makes one assume that an Indian who works hard as hell, is more driven towards excelling in his education, and often works for sheer survival is going to fare worse than you ? In India, seeking a higher education is almost a "non-option" for most people. Everyone who is anyone will either try like hell to get into Engineering or Medicine. After they graduate, they face ten times more competition than Americans do in securing a job. All this makes Indians work they're asses off to differentiate themselves from the competition. When they go abroad, typically the odds are much much better in they're favour. I have friends who barely made the top 20 of the class in India and they excelled beyond belief in the US. One of them now is a tech lead in a firm with 30 people under him and all he was in India was a commerce graduate (read non-engineer).
So if you assume that all Indians are good for is being "code monkeys", think again.
Indians typically dont take risks (like starting a business) but they have all the technical muscle it takes to run a business to the top and charge a fraction of they're US counterparts. Thats the reason they're keenly sought after in the first place.
You wanna keep you're job. I suggest you develop and differentiate you're skills to compete at the plane Indians/Chinese do.
You know..that is a very oversimplified explanation to this problem. India and China combined still dont produce as many pollutants as the US. India and China have a combined population of TWO BILLION PEOPLE, versus the US population of under 300,000. So much fewer people are producing a lot more to damage the environment!
Even if the US altered its behavior to reduce emissions to the same level of either India/China, it would make a big difference. But little Bush doesnt seem to see the problem at all, let alone address it.
Maybe sh**ty download links from Bigpond Telestra - during the peak open source adoption phase - had something to do with it?
Noo thats probably not it. India still has some of the worst broadband connectivity in the world and Linux adoption is doing pretty well here. It's just about attitudes and comfort levels. Indians (especially the govt) feel they can save money AND get a local community around Linux/OSS - The government is promoting the use of OSS quite a bit last I checked. With more programmers in India than America and the government pushing OSS so aggressively, its hardly any wonder why Microsoft takes such a keen interest in India : it simply cannot afford not to.
The Aussies/NZers probably dont care (as much) about price and may be luke warm to change out of a comfort zone (zealotry aside, if they're okay with what they have, why should they bother changing at all)
Here's a snippet :
"The Pygmalion effect (or Rosenthal effect) refers to situations in which students performed better than other students, simply because they were expected to do so."
scores well in encoding, desktop business and a few professional rendering tests but overall it's given a run for its money by AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual-core processor, especially in gaming scenarios
Let me get this straight - we have double the cache, 3.something GHz of speed and two cores, just so that I can start Outlook faster ?!?!?
The real market for any typical high end machine is in gaming and rendering. Sure there will be a market for people who use these machines for "encoding" but if it cant compete in a billion plus gaming market that pretty much drives a lot of hardware innovation, I'd say this thing is a waste of time for Intel.
Not to disparage Solaris and FreeBSD, but DTrace is primarily for kernel developers and sysadmins.
Really ? Well imagine it like this :
I have application X that is extensively used in the market for "mission critical" sort of work. Now somehow/somewhere a client hits a problem and blames *MY* product. We investigate and see if there is any basis to the bug claim. We cant seem to see anything wrong with application X but the client still insists its you're fault. What are you planning on doing ?
If the problem does lie somewhere within the Solaris kernel, you'd better be able to prove it with the best tools at you're disposal. Because unless you do find out the issue, neither the customer nor Sun is going to lift a finger to help you
Any serious application developer writing any non-trivial application will find something like dtrace extremely valuable for other reasons as well. Out where I work if you want to see if a particular implementation of what you're doing does actually work better on the target system, Dtrace is a god sent tool. Add to the fact that you can make it report exactly what you're looking for with the bare minimum overhead (unlike stuff like truss), one cannot overestimate the value of something like this.
Especially now that this guy attracts attention. All Ballmer has to do is tell his team of mini-Ballmers, "find him!" and it won't be long.
If theres anything worse than an in house employee shooting his mount off against the company everyone loves to hate,...is a "martyred" ex-employee who will then unleash venom without the fear of losing anything.
I doubt they will be able to fire him without facing more alienation from they're own employees or at the least more alienation from the tech community.
Pretty much every single European nation balks at the idea of a European army, there are so many barriers and nightmares as to...
While I agree that you're points seem problematic, consider India's military as a working case where these issues do not present a problem.
India has about 10 times (or more) the number of languages under its hood than all of the EU and North America put together. Its military hardware while largely Russian, has Israeli, American, British and French and indigenous Indian hardware pretty widely distributed within it. As far as national pride goes about whose hardware goes where, I doubt if that would be a bickering point for long. It'll be the survival of the fittest. Clearly inferior products wont survive.
This is a fantastic idea, except for one flaw. This would only work for cities near the coast.
How does that present a problem ? If one looks at the biggest benefit this will produce, its the electricity generation and electricity can be transported massive distances (it's happening today!). Do you mean to say all our population centres are built only around power generation centres ?
When Metroviewer is shipped with Longhorn and XPSP3, pdf producers will see that they can switch to Metro and the majority if their audience will need no extra software whatsoever.
This whole argument hinges on Longhorn and/or XPSP3 being widely deployed enough to make a difference. IE could muscle out Netscape because IE was running on a Windows version affordable and practical for everyone. With the kind of hardware requirements on Longhorn, coupled with the flurry of FOSS, how many people would actually be running Longhorn to use the monopoly enough for Metro ?
Also, about XPSP3, last I checked, many businesses are still really gunshy about installing XPSP2! Also, many machines are typically configured to download critical updates and not "feature" updates like Metro so I doubt if MS will make much of a dent into PDF since its not a battle akin to Netscape vs. IE any more.
Sorry, but what competitors to VB6 does the OSS community have?
Borland Kylix. Runs cross platform COMPILED code and is a helluva lot better than VB6 ever was. Since it has Pascal under the hood it also has one of the fastest compilers in the world. They have a free version too last I checked.
You could have a mini sized CD with just enough on it to run a minimum KDE and a browser with SSL. Might not look as pretty as the full knoppix but why have the everything and the kitchen sink for such a specific task.
If Microsoft wants to appear serious about having customers develop decent code, pulling them off VB 6 is a good start.
Microsoft is only interested in one thing. Making *money*. It governs all they're actions. Its called B.U.S.I.N.E.S.S.
By trying to convert VB guys, and ending VB6 support, it basically means they expect to get a fanboy following for VB.NET or C# or whatever.
Only one glitch here however, they're plan might backfire and they will not win anyone over to.NET, alienate existing installed base customers AND possibly hasten the transition of many of these folks to open source alternatives or Java....and THAT is not good business sense and certainly NOT a good start.
While I'm largely against this foolish behavior on the part of Indian authorities, after reading a bit of details into this situation I have to at least slightly side by the Indian cops.
They're crime isnt selling porn, its about negligence.
Supposedly the reason they are holding him responsible is because the illegal copy of the porn was taken down a full 38 HOURS after it had been posted online on the site. Also, apparently it sold a LOT of copies during that time too so it must have created at least enough commotion to be noticed by someone on the staff.
Now if the CEO of a postal service distributes drugs and weapons without him knowing, he cant be held accountable. But if someone IN the post office sells drugs and weapons, I damn well would hold someone there responsible because it's under they're direct control.
Cellular would be the next logical area for apple to explorer. While i think a dedicated Apple Cellular phone would be interesting i don't think it would fly....
An apple phone with iTunes and can fly! I've gotta get me one of those;-)
From my post on a parallel thread : http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=132945&cid= 11103234
For all they're nobility the American government has a surprisingly brutal way of dealing with problems. What amazes me is the skillfulness with which they manage to hide the heinousness of the situation from they're own people.
Your ignorance is only outdone by your anti-American screed...
Wow. I think a village somewhere is missing an idiot. I am not anti-american. A lot of my best friends are American. I even work in an American firm! But I am strongly anti-stupidity and you seem to spew as well as Bush does. Clinton was a much better president and was admired the world over despite his scandals.
Sure Iraq's military wasn't a threat to the US. However Iraq's money was. Just as Saddam was paying the families of homicide bombers in Israel he was sponsoring terrorism elsewhere.
Oooh so now the WMDs arent the problem but the money is? Hmm. You should run for Parliament. Tell me something...when a country like Iraq has fought wars conseqtively for the last 30 odd years (one recently in 1991 with a much bigger foe - the US), followed by years of sanctions, how much "money" could I possibly have. Yeah. So you're solution is, pay you're military BILLIONS to bomb Iraq till the place is level forgetting all the civilians you kill? Listen "bub", the population of Falluja alone is 390,000
. And you're "ignorance" leads you to believe that you're armed forces only "killed the terrorists". When you bomb a city lifeless you will AT THE VERY MOST OPTIMISTIC ESTIMATE kill at least 1% of the innocents. Thats 3,900 people. More than September 11th. And_that_is_just_Falluja. Imagine the whole of Iraq and Afganistan and all the other places you lot set out to "liberate". I'd easily estimate at least 10 times that number and I still probably wont scrape the surface.
Dont give me horseshit like Tibet is worse off. China may be repressive but it hardly qualifies to be as bad. They never cluster bombed tibet by any stretch of imagination. And as for Russia, if radical extremists who are usually foreign mercenaries try to foment trouble in you're country I'd squeeze them too. What the hell do you know about Chechnya. Russia doesnt have the advantage of being on another continent. If I have foreign militants pouring through the borders creating trouble I'd use my arms as self defence. They are NOT invading the place. The place IS THEY'RE OWN COUNTRY.
And Oh China threatens Thailand eh? Well did they invade it ? No. What the hell have you been smoking - when you bomb the place its far worse than "threatening" last I checked.
...but gave Saddamn a free pass at murdering his own people.
For you're obtuse lack of knowledge of foreign affairs, heres a little dose of reality. Did you know that the chemical weapons Saddam used on his own people and the Iranians were..in fact...supplied by the US, and that too, in the HEIGHT of the Iran/Iraq war ? Why the hell supply those kinds of weapons to anyone in the first place and especially when you know they will be used. Also did you know OBL and his little band of troublemakers were originally trained and financed by the very own Uncle Sam ? Remember "Rambo" and all the "mujahideen" who helped him ? Oh yeah, then they werent terrorists but freedom fighters, hmm..damn convenient if you ask me. You're goverment switches opinions of weather people are heroes or villans at the drop of a hat.
The UN is a joke mainly because of countries like France. How many times do you see the UN condemn Russia of Chechyna? The UN is simply an anti-Israel and anti-American institution...
If I didnt know better I'd say you're a bloddy xenophobe. Go look that up in the dictionary "bub". The whole world isnt stupid. And barring a few countries who didnt want to piss off uncle sam for the fear of being "liberated", everyone was against the war. Sadly people like you fail to see this and vote for the mass murderer who perpetuates the problem of terrorism instead of solving it.
Slashdot Mirror
Isnt this the current CEO of Borland
As a matter of fact wasnt this the chap who decided to discontinue Borland's IDE business ? Wonder what he's upto with his finger in the Trolltech pie.
You're post makes me think your Indian.
;)
No shit sherlock
The guy in India just can't sit across the table from a user of whatever you are making and discuss options, quickly estimate 'lots of effort' or 'pretty easy', and help the users tell you what to create.
Terribly sorry to disappoint you but I'd like to add another little bullet point to you're list:
5) Never underestimate you're competition.
If everyone remains in a pipe dream of high caliber work never making its way to Indians, it'll lull you into a complacence that is hard to justify. What makes one assume that an Indian who works hard as hell, is more driven towards excelling in his education, and often works for sheer survival is going to fare worse than you ? In India, seeking a higher education is almost a "non-option" for most people. Everyone who is anyone will either try like hell to get into Engineering or Medicine. After they graduate, they face ten times more competition than Americans do in securing a job. All this makes Indians work they're asses off to differentiate themselves from the competition. When they go abroad, typically the odds are much much better in they're favour. I have friends who barely made the top 20 of the class in India and they excelled beyond belief in the US. One of them now is a tech lead in a firm with 30 people under him and all he was in India was a commerce graduate (read non-engineer).
So if you assume that all Indians are good for is being "code monkeys", think again.
Indians typically dont take risks (like starting a business) but they have all the technical muscle it takes to run a business to the top and charge a fraction of they're US counterparts. Thats the reason they're keenly sought after in the first place.
You wanna keep you're job. I suggest you develop and differentiate you're skills to compete at the plane Indians/Chinese do.
How about "Freedom Lucent"
*ducks*
I'm talking china, australia, india etc..
..that is a very oversimplified explanation to this problem. India and China combined still dont produce as many pollutants as the US. India and China have a combined population of TWO BILLION PEOPLE, versus the US population of under 300,000. So much fewer people are producing a lot more to damage the environment!
You know
Even if the US altered its behavior to reduce emissions to the same level of either India/China, it would make a big difference. But little Bush doesnt seem to see the problem at all, let alone address it.
Maybe sh**ty download links from Bigpond Telestra - during the peak open source adoption phase - had something to do with it?
Noo thats probably not it. India still has some of the worst broadband connectivity in the world and Linux adoption is doing pretty well here. It's just about attitudes and comfort levels. Indians (especially the govt) feel they can save money AND get a local community around Linux/OSS - The government is promoting the use of OSS quite a bit last I checked. With more programmers in India than America and the government pushing OSS so aggressively, its hardly any wonder why Microsoft takes such a keen interest in India : it simply cannot afford not to.
The Aussies/NZers probably dont care (as much) about price and may be luke warm to change out of a comfort zone (zealotry aside, if they're okay with what they have, why should they bother changing at all)
If the monkey clans don't have any contact, how is it explained that the second group seems to be copying the first group ?
Have you heard of the ROSENTHAL Effect
Here's a snippet : "The Pygmalion effect (or Rosenthal effect) refers to situations in which students performed better than other students, simply because they were expected to do so."
scores well in encoding, desktop business and a few professional rendering tests but overall it's given a run for its money by AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual-core processor, especially in gaming scenarios
Let me get this straight - we have double the cache, 3.something GHz of speed and two cores, just so that I can start Outlook faster ?!?!?
The real market for any typical high end machine is in gaming and rendering. Sure there will be a market for people who use these machines for "encoding" but if it cant compete in a billion plus gaming market that pretty much drives a lot of hardware innovation, I'd say this thing is a waste of time for Intel.
and deliberate mischeif?...
...would this allow mp3 swapping ??
This brings about the next question
Not to disparage Solaris and FreeBSD, but DTrace is primarily for kernel developers and sysadmins.
Really ? Well imagine it like this : I have application X that is extensively used in the market for "mission critical" sort of work. Now somehow/somewhere a client hits a problem and blames *MY* product. We investigate and see if there is any basis to the bug claim. We cant seem to see anything wrong with application X but the client still insists its you're fault. What are you planning on doing ?
If the problem does lie somewhere within the Solaris kernel, you'd better be able to prove it with the best tools at you're disposal. Because unless you do find out the issue, neither the customer nor Sun is going to lift a finger to help you
Any serious application developer writing any non-trivial application will find something like dtrace extremely valuable for other reasons as well. Out where I work if you want to see if a particular implementation of what you're doing does actually work better on the target system, Dtrace is a god sent tool. Add to the fact that you can make it report exactly what you're looking for with the bare minimum overhead (unlike stuff like truss), one cannot overestimate the value of something like this.
Especially now that this guy attracts attention. All Ballmer has to do is tell his team of mini-Ballmers, "find him!" and it won't be long.
...is a "martyred" ex-employee who will then unleash venom without the fear of losing anything.
If theres anything worse than an in house employee shooting his mount off against the company everyone loves to hate,
I doubt they will be able to fire him without facing more alienation from they're own employees or at the least more alienation from the tech community.
Pretty much every single European nation balks at the idea of a European army, there are so many barriers and nightmares as to ...
While I agree that you're points seem problematic, consider India's military as a working case where these issues do not present a problem.
India has about 10 times (or more) the number of languages under its hood than all of the EU and North America put together. Its military hardware while largely Russian, has Israeli, American, British and French and indigenous Indian hardware pretty widely distributed within it. As far as national pride goes about whose hardware goes where, I doubt if that would be a bickering point for long. It'll be the survival of the fittest. Clearly inferior products wont survive.
Yoda is that you ?
This is a fantastic idea, except for one flaw. This would only work for cities near the coast.
How does that present a problem ? If one looks at the biggest benefit this will produce, its the electricity generation and electricity can be transported massive distances (it's happening today!). Do you mean to say all our population centres are built only around power generation centres ?
When Metroviewer is shipped with Longhorn and XPSP3, pdf producers will see that they can switch to Metro and the majority if their audience will need no extra software whatsoever.
This whole argument hinges on Longhorn and/or XPSP3 being widely deployed enough to make a difference. IE could muscle out Netscape because IE was running on a Windows version affordable and practical for everyone. With the kind of hardware requirements on Longhorn, coupled with the flurry of FOSS, how many people would actually be running Longhorn to use the monopoly enough for Metro ?
Also, about XPSP3, last I checked, many businesses are still really gunshy about installing XPSP2! Also, many machines are typically configured to download critical updates and not "feature" updates like Metro so I doubt if MS will make much of a dent into PDF since its not a battle akin to Netscape vs. IE any more.
Sorry, but what competitors to VB6 does the OSS community have?
Borland Kylix. Runs cross platform COMPILED code and is a helluva lot better than VB6 ever was. Since it has Pascal under the hood it also has one of the fastest compilers in the world. They have a free version too last I checked.
You could have a mini sized CD with just enough on it to run a minimum KDE and a browser with SSL. Might not look as pretty as the full knoppix but why have the everything and the kitchen sink for such a specific task.
If Microsoft wants to appear serious about having customers develop decent code, pulling them off VB 6 is a good start.
.NET, alienate existing installed base customers AND possibly hasten the transition of many of these folks to open source alternatives or Java. ...and THAT is not good business sense and certainly NOT a good start.
Microsoft is only interested in one thing. Making *money*. It governs all they're actions. Its called B.U.S.I.N.E.S.S.
By trying to convert VB guys, and ending VB6 support, it basically means they expect to get a fanboy following for VB.NET or C# or whatever.
Only one glitch here however, they're plan might backfire and they will not win anyone over to
How about throwing in an infinite improbability drive ?
The guy pointing it must have steady hands, and damn good vision...
And must be strong with the Force.
While I'm largely against this foolish behavior on the part of Indian authorities, after reading a bit of details into this situation I have to at least slightly side by the Indian cops.
They're crime isnt selling porn, its about negligence.
Supposedly the reason they are holding him responsible is because the illegal copy of the porn was taken down a full 38 HOURS after it had been posted online on the site. Also, apparently it sold a LOT of copies during that time too so it must have created at least enough commotion to be noticed by someone on the staff.
Now if the CEO of a postal service distributes drugs and weapons without him knowing, he cant be held accountable. But if someone IN the post office sells drugs and weapons, I damn well would hold someone there responsible because it's under they're direct control.
Reminds me of an old saying that seems appropriate here :
:-D
"Those who can, do. Those who cant, teach"
Cellular would be the next logical area for apple to explorer. While i think a dedicated Apple Cellular phone would be interesting i don't think it would fly....
;-)
An apple phone with iTunes and can fly! I've gotta get me one of those
From my post on a parallel thread : http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=132945&cid
For all they're nobility the American government has a surprisingly brutal way of dealing with problems. What amazes me is the skillfulness with which they manage to hide the heinousness of the situation from they're own people.
Your ignorance is only outdone by your anti-American screed...
...when a country like Iraq has fought wars conseqtively for the last 30 odd years (one recently in 1991 with a much bigger foe - the US), followed by years of sanctions, how much "money" could I possibly have. Yeah. So you're solution is, pay you're military BILLIONS to bomb Iraq till the place is level forgetting all the civilians you kill? Listen "bub", the population of Falluja alone is 390,000
. And you're "ignorance" leads you to believe that you're armed forces only "killed the terrorists". When you bomb a city lifeless you will AT THE VERY MOST OPTIMISTIC ESTIMATE kill at least 1% of the innocents. Thats 3,900 people. More than September 11th. And_that_is_just_Falluja. Imagine the whole of Iraq and Afganistan and all the other places you lot set out to "liberate". I'd easily estimate at least 10 times that number and I still probably wont scrape the surface.
...but gave Saddamn a free pass at murdering his own people.
Wow. I think a village somewhere is missing an idiot. I am not anti-american. A lot of my best friends are American. I even work in an American firm! But I am strongly anti-stupidity and you seem to spew as well as Bush does. Clinton was a much better president and was admired the world over despite his scandals.
Sure Iraq's military wasn't a threat to the US. However Iraq's money was. Just as Saddam was paying the families of homicide bombers in Israel he was sponsoring terrorism elsewhere.
Oooh so now the WMDs arent the problem but the money is? Hmm. You should run for Parliament. Tell me something
Dont give me horseshit like Tibet is worse off. China may be repressive but it hardly qualifies to be as bad. They never cluster bombed tibet by any stretch of imagination. And as for Russia, if radical extremists who are usually foreign mercenaries try to foment trouble in you're country I'd squeeze them too. What the hell do you know about Chechnya. Russia doesnt have the advantage of being on another continent. If I have foreign militants pouring through the borders creating trouble I'd use my arms as self defence. They are NOT invading the place. The place IS THEY'RE OWN COUNTRY.
And Oh China threatens Thailand eh? Well did they invade it ? No. What the hell have you been smoking - when you bomb the place its far worse than "threatening" last I checked.
For you're obtuse lack of knowledge of foreign affairs, heres a little dose of reality. Did you know that the chemical weapons Saddam used on his own people and the Iranians were..in fact...supplied by the US, and that too, in the HEIGHT of the Iran/Iraq war ? Why the hell supply those kinds of weapons to anyone in the first place and especially when you know they will be used. Also did you know OBL and his little band of troublemakers were originally trained and financed by the very own Uncle Sam ? Remember "Rambo" and all the "mujahideen" who helped him ? Oh yeah, then they werent terrorists but freedom fighters, hmm..damn convenient if you ask me. You're goverment switches opinions of weather people are heroes or villans at the drop of a hat.
The UN is a joke mainly because of countries like France. How many times do you see the UN condemn Russia of Chechyna? The UN is simply an anti-Israel and anti-American institution...
If I didnt know better I'd say you're a bloddy xenophobe. Go look that up in the dictionary "bub". The whole world isnt stupid. And barring a few countries who didnt want to piss off uncle sam for the fear of being "liberated", everyone was against the war. Sadly people like you fail to see this and vote for the mass murderer who perpetuates the problem of terrorism instead of solving it.