While admiring the spirit of opposition to MSFT, it's worth remembering that MSFT' s strategy is to go to the end user and cut a deal involving royalties. By sowing enough fear in the minds of corporate consumers of FOSS, MSFT will get them to come to the table. The producers of open source code are not the target -- they don't buy much, if anything, of what MSFT has to sell. But, such producers would react very similarly to MSFT if someone violated the GPL. Would that not be copyright enforcement?
Regarding the $120.00 plus price for unlimited calling: Prices in the US are already too high. If you account for the fact that people here pay for unused minutes on any calling plan, the price is closer to $0.50 per minute. Compare that to India where the cost of a call is $0.02 per minute and yet the telcos there are profitable.
Apple is too big to lose its viability on the basis of Jobs' departure. Remember that in c. 1984, he came out with the first Mac at a high price point, with a choice of features that restricted its power. The subsequent lackluster sales eventually led to his departure. Following that, he did not succeed with his NeXT project. And then he returned to a different Apple under different business circumstances etc. and both he and the company thrived.
Today, he has produced a new phone with deliberate limitations, much like the Mac of 22 years ago. There's the chance it won't take off. Will that destroy Apple? No. All businesses strike out sometime or other. The good businesses have more successes than failures.
If at this point, with the stock options stain, he has developed a sense of entitlement and therefore expects to get extra special treatment, then he will be a drag on the company, and he must go. The graveyards are full of tombs of irreplaceable men. Someone will step up and fill the void. As for innovation, do you think that the hordes of Apple designers and engineers are just a bunch of dodos?
The thing is, the people who matter already respect India. The aviation and space industry has looked at India as an up-and-coming power for quite a while now. Yea they're not quite at the truly "graduate level" stuff yet like the US and Russia, but they're working hard at developing their own capabilities and that's what matters.
Nice point. Just to add a couple of items to your statement: a large number of NASA employees are Indians, several of whom are in tech. leadership positions. Check out the attached link to get an idea of what the Indians are capable of. Actually, nearly 40% of US Physicians, 30% of MS employees, and approximately a third of all NASA employees are Indians. And there are plenty more where they came from. It's painful to read comments (by others on/.) about curry and outsourcing whenever you discuss tech. advances by Indians. Indians have developed an advanced Jet trainer for a fraction of the cost it would incur in this country. They are not to be confused with Gunga Din. Now here's the link:
http://littleindia.com/february2004/HereThere.htm
Just like the tabloids criticizing celebrities for adopting third-world children. It's fine to question movitation, intent and commitment, but at the end of the day they've done something and you haven't. It's always the people on their asses that seem to worry most about a population's integrity.
You have said exactly what needs to be said. I was born and raised in the 3rd world, and I can tell you about people from my old country who, sitting in the US, railed against graft, poverty, government inefficiency etc. at home. Not one of these actually went back "home" to fix things. Instead, everyone of them now lives a fattened existence in this country.
I remember watching Regis in the show's early days, when it had class. The third question was "what kind of trees shed their leaves in winter?" The contestant sweated for a while and then asked for a lifeline. At that point a five-year-old kid in the room said "Such a big man, and he doesn't know is deciduous?"
The modern version is so dumbed down, that it resembles the equally silly descendant of another show where the hostess would skewer the unfortunate soul who failed to answer correctly. Those were the days!
One thing about the whole Indian outsourcing thing that people don't mention is that companies are increasingly going overseas not for the cheap labor, but for the talent. Remember, wage pressure in India and other outsourcing destinations is increasing, and pretty soon it won't be too much cheaper to do the work overseas.
True. Remember also that the 386 and the Pentium (and AMD's Pentium equivalent) are attributed to the same man, and Indian named Vinod Dham. He was from a decent but not outstanding engineering school in India , followed by a decent but not spectacular grad school in the US.
Putting factories in India allows Intel to get the best grads from that country (think IIT types) and returnees from the USA -- yes quite a few go back "home" -- at lower costs than here in the US. This also gets around the H1 visa bottleneck and the wails about outsourcing. Consider also that a huge percentage of Silicon Valley firms were started by Indians, and you will see that there are plenty more where they came from.
All I am adding to your points is that Intel started by a Hungarian Jew has never exclusively employed "American" talent in America.
I recall a case from the late '80s or early '90s, of a student of Indian origin who got an MD at age 21 from a noted medical school. The papers in India were full of praise for this accomplishment. Then, this man went back to India and his family tried to find a suitable bride for him. His value in the marriage market being high (MD, US Citizen, famous), there was some sort of a demand for a huge dowry (illegal in India, but practiced widely). The upshot was that he with members of his family were arrested and charged under the anti-dowry laws and for other violations. I recall vaugely that he did time in prison for it.
Would it not have been better for the individual to have spent more time at college learning the rudiments of good citizenship and interpersonal skills?
I am glad that two innovative companies would link up to give a positive impetus to streamed TV. But Apple will have to change its product's name: ITV is a British news channel that is internationally known and trademarked.
I though I made it clear, but maybe not... I think you're arguing the same point that I am. A literal interpretation of the bible goes against both the Roman Catholic, and the scientific communities respective stances on evolution.
Manno: you are right. And thanks for gently pointing out my mistake. Peace to you too!
The literal interpretation doesn't just go against the scientific community, but also the beliefs of other Christians like Roman Catholics
Sorry dude. The RCs don't have a conflict with the teaching of evolution and the Vatican has said that officially. And yes, Your comment makes sense if you are referring to the beliefs of Fundamentalists. But Please, Please, don't do head-butt or a Mel Gibson on the poor Catholics...
Quasar1999 Said: Long story short, those unaffected by outsourcing directly will agree with Bush's view that there is a market to sell other goods (that are not already outsourced to India), and that is good for the country. Those affected by the outsourcing won't give a shit about a new market, and only care about their lost job/income/life.
There ARE things that the US produces which can't be easily produced in India. These include commercial aircraft and spare parts, some kinds of machine tools, nuclear technology etc.,automobiles (yes, GM is a big force in India and China) and military supplies.
What we see here is that the US and many western countries have had a high quality of life based upon the economic fruits of the Industrial Revolution. In the early 1800s, the East (i.e. China and India) were the dominant economic powers -- estimates of their share of the world GDP are in the 50% and above range. These countries collapsed when they failed to modernize from a feudal-agricultural economy to a democratic-industrial economy, and their accumulated wealth dribbled into Europe and America. British investors, with money made in the East, financed the American railroads and ranches in the late 19th century.
Today's transfer of wealth is in the reverse direction. It's part of a cycle. It is quite true that our standard of living will go down. But then if we have been shouting out the benefits of globalization and free trade, it is inevitable that inequities will be redressed. Also, why not ask WHY an American has to be paid more than a Chinese/Indian/Filipino who does exactly the same work? From their point of view, we are overpaid for the same relative standard of living. Should Mittal Steel (Indian owned, one of the largest holding companies in the world) which owns many formerly big steel cos in the US, pay the Indian wage to its American employees? Or should Lukoil pay its gas-station employees Russian-level wages in roubles? Or should there be pay differentials based upon the local costs of living?
I would like to add that I am glad that this is slashdot where people engage in discussions and see an opposing point of view. In many other forums, asking questions like the ones here, would lead to angry criticism which would generate more heat than light, and leave no space for resolution. Peace to all!
I have heard these statistics before, but they (c. 28% and 17%) apply to women in grad school and in bachelor's programs respectively (not the other way around, as in the original posting).
Someone has to look at why, despite all the incentives for women to enter computing as Bachelor's candidates, so few of them actually do. More importantly, is the recruiting process and its incentives misdirected?
The graduate school proportion is skewed by the many women from "third" world countries -- they have no incentive program, and they have to struggle against far greater odds than their American sisters. So, it may be that American women choose not to enter the profession. If that is true, then it would be a feature of the empowerment of women, although undoubtedly unintentional.
"We" didn't colonize India. With minor exceptions such as the Portuguese in Goa it was the British who colonized India. Although I certainly don't justify colonialism and agree with most of your post, I don't see any justification for the view that India is poor because of British colonialism. The reason that India is a relatively poor country today is primarily because India has not developed the way Europe, North America, Australia, and some East Asian countries have. I don't see how that can be blamed on the British. Another major cause of India's poverty is internal: high rates of population growth coupled with inheritance customs and the rigidity of the caste
system.
......There have been cases in which a colonial power literally robbed the colony of its accumulated wealth and took control of the current sources (e.g.gold mines), but I'm not aware that this happened on any real scale in India.
The truth about colonization is more nuanced than that, although I fully agree with the last two sentences of the first quote. Firstly, India contained Dutch, French, Portuguese, and British colonies. The British annexed most of the princely states and united them into what is now modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma. And yes, they did take large quantities of the wealth. Nandan Nilekani, the founder of one of India's biggest outsourcing company, frequently cites the figure of 50% -- as the share of the world's economic output that India and China produced until c. 1830.
Britian destroyed the local economic base while increasing other forms of economic growth. It hammered the textile business: cotton produced in India was shipped to Britain, manufactured, and then re-exported to India. Locals could not build mills -- that was one reason for Gandhi's use of homespun as a form of protest. A second example is the grinding serfdom in the indigo plantations owned by British investors (George Orwell's father was one a plantation manager), and in the tea plantations. Indians were not even allowed to make salt -- witness the big march of Gandhi -- they had to buy British-manufactured product. People here have talked here about the opium trade and the destruction of China. And Britain did take control of the coal, iron ore, and gold mines; prior to South Africa's discovery of diamonds, nearly all of those came from mines in India.
Where does America come in: the British monies were invested here. Yale was founded by the legacy of a man who made it big as a governor of Madras. The railways, the big farms and other economic development of the western parts of this country in the last half of the 19th century were funded by British investors. Even the tea dumped in Boston Harbor came from India. But directly, no, America did not colonize India.
The pomp and circumstance of the Raj, Britain's ability to fight two World Wars, and even the Kohinoor diamond in the Queen's crown came ultimately from wealth taken from her colonies. Americans are unaware, when they admire democracy and Churchill: they don't see that he actively worked to deny it to more than 400 million subcontinentals. Roosevelt was at lest complicit in that. So, try putting into place an economic growth plan while you have to build a democracy from scratch.
But yes, the caste system, and the replacement of British sahibs by Indian sahibs, and mistakes made in planning, all contributed to retard economic growth. Modern India is due to the economic policies put in place after 1992 even with all those problems still in place.
In the developing countries, all OS's are free -- bootleg versions, complete with support provided by local shops. And the OS is Windows, often '98, and the applications are primarily Office, and IE.
When debating why Steve Jobs' outreach was rejected, there might be some consolation in thinking that the prospect of Linux being the permanent OS on the machine, is uncertain, unless something is done to prevent Windows being installed on the hardware. BTW, computers in the east have, for a long time been costing in the $300- $500 range for a fully configured P4 system.
I'm in an MNC operating out of India. Being part of the workforce, I know pretty well the wretched condition Indian coders work in.Our training is inadequate, faculty is of poor quality, resources are lacking and we are always in a hurry. No wonder India has never produced a world renowned software product. At this rate, it never will.
The parent post makes some good points in general, but do read the article on Oracle's acquisition of an Indian firm that produces the banking software product Flexicube which is used by c. 240 of the largest banks.
The article also contains references to the number of Oracle employees (9000) in India, and it should be clear that whatever the reported working conditions (in the parent post), there are enough people to step in should someone decide to leave.
As to quality, the big IT companies attract tens of thousands of resumes for a fraction of that number of jobs. Their ads (I am told) carry the line: those who have applied before need not apply. Draw your own conclusions about quality from that.
As to the issue of accents, there are first of all some 270 languages and dialects in India, and even Indians have difficulty with understanding one another when conversing in English. People learn the local Indian language, plus English, and a third language. The individual's English accent contains traces of his first language. A southern accent sounds different and is sometimes ridiculed by northerners. Many Indians speak and write what is called "babu-English", the language of a non-native speaker, which is characterized by long, complicated sentences with big, often Victorian, words. A large number, composed of people who have been to private schools speak and write English, as a first-language, that is recognized by the English as being of superior quality. Nevertheless, their intonation (similar to the Welsh or Scots) can be off-putting to Americans. That said, the yelping about accents that I read here on slashdot, seems to be generated by persons who are making the mistake of seeing themselves at the center of the universe -- and speaking English without a trace of an accent, and being totally reasonable in their expectations of others.
IIRC it has been proven that no time machine could take you back before the time when the machine was created, so unless someone has already created on and kept it secret we shouldn't be seeing tamper effects or visitors from the future anyway.
That's a good point. But it's overkill as far as the idea of time travel is concerned. Consider the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Going back in time would decrease entropy, and that is impossible. In other words, time travel, like the flat-earth theory, is in the realm of fiction, not science.
Is if Jobs was given CEO title of Intel/Apple and a buttload of control. Anything less than that, there is no way Jobs gives up power. Jobs is a control freak -- yeah, like he's going to hand over the keys to Apple and say to Intel, "Have fun with my personality-based cult!"
Well what are his alternatives? At this point Intel is playing horse to Apple's Lady Godiva.
The winning projects were: Shift2Ingres, submitted by Harsh Azad, Rohit Gaddi, Achal Rastogi, Geetanjali Bahuguna and Ashutosh Upadhyay of New Delhi, India, won the largest prize of $400,000; EzyMigrate, submitted by Danes John and Varghese Jacob of Kerala, India, was awarded a prize of $100,000; and DbConverter, submitted by Bipin Prasad of New York, was awarded a prize of $50,000.
>
ALL these programmers - whether India-based or from New York - are Indian. OK... one of them is probably an American.
The article available at the attached URL indicates that the memory size is 128MB. The point is that AT THE PRESENT TIME, the low-income segment of the population has no easy way to acquire a computer or, after acquiring it, pay for maintenance, power, and upgrades. So a sturdy, no-frills machine is best. As time goes by, their needs will rise and the cost of technology will drop and there will still be a happy intersection of these two graphs. Think of TV: in the 1970s Indians were introduced to black-and-white models and Lucy re-runs. I remember, living then in India, marvelling at a color TV at an international trade show in Delhi in Jan. 1981. Today such things are commonplace in high quality, and the infrastructure (really cheap cable service) has expanded to satisfy the demands.
So this sort of thing is good for the common person.
http://news.com.com/Indian+firm+unveils+low-cost+L inux-based+PCs/2100-1042_3-5701552.html?tag=nl
You know, India has stolen a lot of US jobs. It seems that most of the call centers employ people who can't speak (or understand) English very well at all -- and yet they're perfectly willing to take a contact doing phone support for Americans! But despite that, I find I have two feelings about India
Read the current issue of The Economist where you will learn: (a) that Europe is the largest market for outsourcing and (b) the largest outsourcing firms worldwide are AMERICAN.
It takes a lot of nerve to criticize Indian or other Asian firms for providing outsourcing. Consider that IBM and many of the top firms in the USA get more than 50% of their revenues from abroad -- and think of what those countries might say about outsourcing. If they protect their economies in the way Lou Dobbs acidly recommends every night, there will be far more jobs lost here.
I hope the House and other responsible parties look carefully at the wording of their law: it should permit a discreet interaction, and restrict annoying discrete intrusions.
p0 asks WTF is a crore?
It's from the (older) Indian counting system, A crore equals 100 lakhs; a lakh equals 100,000. So a crore is 10,000,000. In dollar terms, a crore of rupees is approximately $233,000. So a 384-core project is around $90 million. Not a big chunk of change here, but pretty big in context.
To get an idea of the purchasing power equivalent (not the rupee equivalent according to the conversion rate), just multiply a $ amount by 10. So, an outsource engineer earning $6000 per year in India can live like one earning $60,000 in the USA and possibly better.
Thus a 384-crore project would be "equivalent" in cost to a $3.84 billion project here. But NASA would not be able to do a moonshot for that amount.
but unless the operating system, office programs , games are translated into their local language it will not benefit much. In India still the internet and outsourcing are the possesion of a prized few who know english
Partly true. Actually, some 350 million people in India (about 30% of the population) speak, read, and write English fluently. There will probably be the need to be some translations -- but that can be done on a demand basis. Cheap pipes are not the only thing Indians enjoy: they also get all our cable TV shows for a similar low price. There is plenty of English and plenty of regional content. And yes, they get Jerry Springer and they know about Paris Hilton.
Another reason why this project is going forth is that India has had abyssmal telephone service -- a sluggish, thuggish central governmental monopoly for years, with little or no investment in modernization and infrastructure. Now, private firms are putting in new lines and the most modern technology. That's why India appears to be on a course to outrace the US.
Finally, IBM's sale to Lenovo is relevant to this context: the customers in India are going to use cheap Wintel boxes with MS software. That is their world's definition of OS and accessories. The computers will be manufactured in India or imported from China. And they will be cheaper than what we pay for them here.
Slashdot Mirror
While admiring the spirit of opposition to MSFT, it's worth remembering that MSFT' s strategy is to go to the end user and cut a deal involving royalties. By sowing enough fear in the minds of corporate consumers of FOSS, MSFT will get them to come to the table. The producers of open source code are not the target -- they don't buy much, if anything, of what MSFT has to sell. But, such producers would react very similarly to MSFT if someone violated the GPL. Would that not be copyright enforcement?
Regarding the $120.00 plus price for unlimited calling: Prices in the US are already too high. If you account for the fact that people here pay for unused minutes on any calling plan, the price is closer to $0.50 per minute. Compare that to India where the cost of a call is $0.02 per minute and yet the telcos there are profitable.
Today, he has produced a new phone with deliberate limitations, much like the Mac of 22 years ago. There's the chance it won't take off. Will that destroy Apple? No. All businesses strike out sometime or other. The good businesses have more successes than failures.
If at this point, with the stock options stain, he has developed a sense of entitlement and therefore expects to get extra special treatment, then he will be a drag on the company, and he must go. The graveyards are full of tombs of irreplaceable men. Someone will step up and fill the void. As for innovation, do you think that the hordes of Apple designers and engineers are just a bunch of dodos?
You have said exactly what needs to be said. I was born and raised in the 3rd world, and I can tell you about people from my old country who, sitting in the US, railed against graft, poverty, government inefficiency etc. at home. Not one of these actually went back "home" to fix things. Instead, everyone of them now lives a fattened existence in this country.
I remember watching Regis in the show's early days, when it had class. The third question was "what kind of trees shed their leaves in winter?" The contestant sweated for a while and then asked for a lifeline. At that point a five-year-old kid in the room said "Such a big man, and he doesn't know is deciduous?"
The modern version is so dumbed down, that it resembles the equally silly descendant of another show where the hostess would skewer the unfortunate soul who failed to answer correctly. Those were the days!
I recall a case from the late '80s or early '90s, of a student of Indian origin who got an MD at age 21 from a noted medical school. The papers in India were full of praise for this accomplishment. Then, this man went back to India and his family tried to find a suitable bride for him. His value in the marriage market being high (MD, US Citizen, famous), there was some sort of a demand for a huge dowry (illegal in India, but practiced widely). The upshot was that he with members of his family were arrested and charged under the anti-dowry laws and for other violations. I recall vaugely that he did time in prison for it.
Would it not have been better for the individual to have spent more time at college learning the rudiments of good citizenship and interpersonal skills?
I am glad that two innovative companies would link up to give a positive impetus to streamed TV. But Apple will have to change its product's name: ITV is a British news channel that is internationally known and trademarked.
I though I made it clear, but maybe not... I think you're arguing the same point that I am. A literal interpretation of the bible goes against both the Roman Catholic, and the scientific communities respective stances on evolution.
Manno: you are right. And thanks for gently pointing out my mistake. Peace to you too!
The literal interpretation doesn't just go against the scientific community, but also the beliefs of other Christians like Roman Catholics
Sorry dude. The RCs don't have a conflict with the teaching of evolution and the Vatican has said that officially. And yes, Your comment makes sense if you are referring to the beliefs of Fundamentalists. But Please, Please, don't do head-butt or a Mel Gibson on the poor Catholics...
There ARE things that the US produces which can't be easily produced in India. These include commercial aircraft and spare parts, some kinds of machine tools, nuclear technology etc.,automobiles (yes, GM is a big force in India and China) and military supplies.
What we see here is that the US and many western countries have had a high quality of life based upon the economic fruits of the Industrial Revolution. In the early 1800s, the East (i.e. China and India) were the dominant economic powers -- estimates of their share of the world GDP are in the 50% and above range. These countries collapsed when they failed to modernize from a feudal-agricultural economy to a democratic-industrial economy, and their accumulated wealth dribbled into Europe and America. British investors, with money made in the East, financed the American railroads and ranches in the late 19th century.
Today's transfer of wealth is in the reverse direction. It's part of a cycle. It is quite true that our standard of living will go down. But then if we have been shouting out the benefits of globalization and free trade, it is inevitable that inequities will be redressed. Also, why not ask WHY an American has to be paid more than a Chinese/Indian/Filipino who does exactly the same work? From their point of view, we are overpaid for the same relative standard of living. Should Mittal Steel (Indian owned, one of the largest holding companies in the world) which owns many formerly big steel cos in the US, pay the Indian wage to its American employees? Or should Lukoil pay its gas-station employees Russian-level wages in roubles? Or should there be pay differentials based upon the local costs of living?
I would like to add that I am glad that this is slashdot where people engage in discussions and see an opposing point of view. In many other forums, asking questions like the ones here, would lead to angry criticism which would generate more heat than light, and leave no space for resolution. Peace to all!
Someone has to look at why, despite all the incentives for women to enter computing as Bachelor's candidates, so few of them actually do. More importantly, is the recruiting process and its incentives misdirected?
The graduate school proportion is skewed by the many women from "third" world countries -- they have no incentive program, and they have to struggle against far greater odds than their American sisters. So, it may be that American women choose not to enter the profession. If that is true, then it would be a feature of the empowerment of women, although undoubtedly unintentional.
The truth about colonization is more nuanced than that, although I fully agree with the last two sentences of the first quote. Firstly, India contained Dutch, French, Portuguese, and British colonies. The British annexed most of the princely states and united them into what is now modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma. And yes, they did take large quantities of the wealth. Nandan Nilekani, the founder of one of India's biggest outsourcing company, frequently cites the figure of 50% -- as the share of the world's economic output that India and China produced until c. 1830.
Britian destroyed the local economic base while increasing other forms of economic growth. It hammered the textile business: cotton produced in India was shipped to Britain, manufactured, and then re-exported to India. Locals could not build mills -- that was one reason for Gandhi's use of homespun as a form of protest. A second example is the grinding serfdom in the indigo plantations owned by British investors (George Orwell's father was one a plantation manager), and in the tea plantations. Indians were not even allowed to make salt -- witness the big march of Gandhi -- they had to buy British-manufactured product. People here have talked here about the opium trade and the destruction of China. And Britain did take control of the coal, iron ore, and gold mines; prior to South Africa's discovery of diamonds, nearly all of those came from mines in India.
Where does America come in: the British monies were invested here. Yale was founded by the legacy of a man who made it big as a governor of Madras. The railways, the big farms and other economic development of the western parts of this country in the last half of the 19th century were funded by British investors. Even the tea dumped in Boston Harbor came from India. But directly, no, America did not colonize India.
The pomp and circumstance of the Raj, Britain's ability to fight two World Wars, and even the Kohinoor diamond in the Queen's crown came ultimately from wealth taken from her colonies. Americans are unaware, when they admire democracy and Churchill: they don't see that he actively worked to deny it to more than 400 million subcontinentals. Roosevelt was at lest complicit in that. So, try putting into place an economic growth plan while you have to build a democracy from scratch.
But yes, the caste system, and the replacement of British sahibs by Indian sahibs, and mistakes made in planning, all contributed to retard economic growth. Modern India is due to the economic policies put in place after 1992 even with all those problems still in place.
In the developing countries, all OS's are free -- bootleg versions, complete with support provided by local shops. And the OS is Windows, often '98, and the applications are primarily Office, and IE.
When debating why Steve Jobs' outreach was rejected, there might be some consolation in thinking that the prospect of Linux being the permanent OS on the machine, is uncertain, unless something is done to prevent Windows being installed on the hardware. BTW, computers in the east have, for a long time been costing in the $300- $500 range for a fully configured P4 system.
I'm in an MNC operating out of India. Being part of the workforce, I know pretty well the wretched condition Indian coders work in.Our training is inadequate, faculty is of poor quality, resources are lacking and we are always in a hurry. No wonder India has never produced a world renowned software product. At this rate, it never will.
The parent post makes some good points in general, but do read the article on Oracle's acquisition of an Indian firm that produces the banking software product Flexicube which is used by c. 240 of the largest banks.
The article also contains references to the number of Oracle employees (9000) in India, and it should be clear that whatever the reported working conditions (in the parent post), there are enough people to step in should someone decide to leave.
As to quality, the big IT companies attract tens of thousands of resumes for a fraction of that number of jobs. Their ads (I am told) carry the line: those who have applied before need not apply. Draw your own conclusions about quality from that.
As to the issue of accents, there are first of all some 270 languages and dialects in India, and even Indians have difficulty with understanding one another when conversing in English. People learn the local Indian language, plus English, and a third language. The individual's English accent contains traces of his first language. A southern accent sounds different and is sometimes ridiculed by northerners. Many Indians speak and write what is called "babu-English", the language of a non-native speaker, which is characterized by long, complicated sentences with big, often Victorian, words. A large number, composed of people who have been to private schools speak and write English, as a first-language, that is recognized by the English as being of superior quality. Nevertheless, their intonation (similar to the Welsh or Scots) can be off-putting to Americans. That said, the yelping about accents that I read here on slashdot, seems to be generated by persons who are making the mistake of seeing themselves at the center of the universe -- and speaking English without a trace of an accent, and being totally reasonable in their expectations of others.
Now, here is the URL to the Bloomberg News story
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&s
Well what are his alternatives? At this point Intel is playing horse to Apple's Lady Godiva.
ALL these programmers - whether India-based or from New York - are Indian. OK... one of them is probably an American.
The article available at the attached URL indicates that the memory size is 128MB. The point is that AT THE PRESENT TIME, the low-income segment of the population has no easy way to acquire a computer or, after acquiring it, pay for maintenance, power, and upgrades. So a sturdy, no-frills machine is best. As time goes by, their needs will rise and the cost of technology will drop and there will still be a happy intersection of these two graphs. Think of TV: in the 1970s Indians were introduced to black-and-white models and Lucy re-runs. I remember, living then in India, marvelling at a color TV at an international trade show in Delhi in Jan. 1981. Today such things are commonplace in high quality, and the infrastructure (really cheap cable service) has expanded to satisfy the demands. So this sort of thing is good for the common person. http://news.com.com/Indian+firm+unveils+low-cost+L inux-based+PCs/2100-1042_3-5701552.html?tag=nl
Read the current issue of The Economist where you will learn: (a) that Europe is the largest market for outsourcing and (b) the largest outsourcing firms worldwide are AMERICAN.
It takes a lot of nerve to criticize Indian or other Asian firms for providing outsourcing. Consider that IBM and many of the top firms in the USA get more than 50% of their revenues from abroad -- and think of what those countries might say about outsourcing. If they protect their economies in the way Lou Dobbs acidly recommends every night, there will be far more jobs lost here.
I hope the House and other responsible parties look carefully at the wording of their law: it should permit a discreet interaction, and restrict annoying discrete intrusions.
p0 asks WTF is a crore?
It's from the (older) Indian counting system, A crore equals 100 lakhs; a lakh equals 100,000. So a crore is 10,000,000. In dollar terms, a crore of rupees is approximately $233,000. So a 384-core project is around $90 million. Not a big chunk of change here, but pretty big in context.
To get an idea of the purchasing power equivalent (not the rupee equivalent according to the conversion rate), just multiply a $ amount by 10. So, an outsource engineer earning $6000 per year in India can live like one earning $60,000 in the USA and possibly better.
Thus a 384-crore project would be "equivalent" in cost to a $3.84 billion project here. But NASA would not be able to do a moonshot for that amount.
Partly true. Actually, some 350 million people in India (about 30% of the population) speak, read, and write English fluently. There will probably be the need to be some translations -- but that can be done on a demand basis. Cheap pipes are not the only thing Indians enjoy: they also get all our cable TV shows for a similar low price. There is plenty of English and plenty of regional content. And yes, they get Jerry Springer and they know about Paris Hilton.
Another reason why this project is going forth is that India has had abyssmal telephone service -- a sluggish, thuggish central governmental monopoly for years, with little or no investment in modernization and infrastructure. Now, private firms are putting in new lines and the most modern technology. That's why India appears to be on a course to outrace the US.
Finally, IBM's sale to Lenovo is relevant to this context: the customers in India are going to use cheap Wintel boxes with MS software. That is their world's definition of OS and accessories. The computers will be manufactured in India or imported from China. And they will be cheaper than what we pay for them here.