Every Chinese guy hates the BBC. But I think I know the real reason why. It's because of history. Britain is the only country in the world that succesfully conquered China. The Chinese have always felt humiliated by the British. The Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion , still raise deep emotions among people of Chinese origin. It's the same reason why the Chinese hate the Japanese for the Rape of Nanjing. It's all about the loss of face.
Ram Sabnis, Senior Chemist of Ascadia, Ram Sabnis is a leader among a very small group of people who can point to a dye-chemistry Ph.D. on their wall. Only a handful of universities in the world offer one, and none are in the U.S. (Sabnis got his in Bombay). He holds dozens of patents from his work in semiconductors (dying silicon) and biotechnology (dying nucleic acids).
Which university is that? Come on, why can't they say the name of the Indian university, show a little bit of respect to the institution? Is it http://www.chem.iitb.ac.in/ by any chance?
> I think Pakistan is seen as a much more attractive venue for logistical and scientific work.
Are you trolling?
If you are serious, could you provide some numbers, or facts that might substantiate your statement? Something that I could actually look at to compare between Pakistan and India. And while we're at it, let's add China to the comparison list. Let's restrict the data to things like number of scientists, amount of published research from both countries, things of that nature. Let's avoid listing "subjective points/opinions" that are not directly related such as politics, or social structure.
Prejudice is an ugly thing. But I'm not sure you can assert that the nature in which Ramanujan was referred to as "Indian math guy" in the parent post, was an artifact of prejudice, ignorance, disrespect or a combination of these things and more. In any case, the reason doesn't matter. What matters is that this article quality on/. is substandard and causing me to look for alternatives to/.
Maybe it's time that we pulled in Indian editors to/., perhaps they could help push quality up a notch.
hi everyone, for those of you who might have relatives on the south eastern indian coast, especially remote and less reported by major media places like shreitapur etc: the bayarea tamil manram has setup information pages to help track news. if you have any news from your relatives/home town/etc this would be a good place to post it.
here's the original post:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bayarea-tamil-manram/message/170
and reproducing it here:
Dear Friends,
The Bay Area Tamil Manram recognizes the need for members and friends to
exchange reliable news about their relatives, friends and loved ones
impacted by the Sumatra Tsunami.
We welcome the members to join the bayarea-tamil-forum@yahoogroups.com
mailing list to exchange news. There are several Tamil newspapers and
magazines in addition to Tamil blogs that are tracking the news of the
disaster. However, the Tamil Nadu coast is long and there are several
little hamlets that are not covered by the major news media. If you have
access to information, you may want to share that with the fellow members.
To subscribe to the forum send a message to:
bayarea-tamil-forum-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To Post a message:
send the message to bayarea-tamil-forum@yahoogroups.com
The people of China deserve better than the government that is thrust upon them
They deserve better? What is better? I didn't see any part in your post where you explained your better alternative for governing 1.6 billion people. Democracy? I don't think so. 1.6 billion people, despite an exceptional level of homogenity and subservience still encompass a significant risk to an orderly, safe, progressive society. I believe that if China were not ruled as it is currently, specifically, in a strongly militarized controlled manner, it would likely fall apart.
> This lessens the impact of IBM's news.
I don't know about that. Checking out the HTK license shows the following:
Can I build & sell products based on HTK3?
You may build a product but you are not allowed to redistribute (parts of) HTK3, i.e. you can't ship shrink-wrap boxes with products that contain HTK3 code.
That's no where close to a license providing freedom. It'll be interesting to see what license IBM picks.
You bring up fair points. I can't speak for UP. Nor can I speak for any specific Indian states. I can merely suggest that from what I observed during my visits; that corruption is on the way down. As I said, though, there is still huge room for improvement in accountability and corporate/governmental transparency. And I believe, very strongly, that it is all people: NGOs, NRIs, locals, governmental folk, Abdul Kalam, and others including American companies investing in India, that will slowly bring a halt to the disgraceful levels of bribery that manage to survive in the more shadowy corners of the Indian government.
I agree with your statement. It would be a far better solution to use biofuels. This would include biologically generated methane, ethanol as well as things like the algae generated ethanol solution. That'd be far better suited to the briny, somewhat dry environments in Northern India. If only there was someone in a position of power in India who would read slashdot and make themselves available for this type of discussion.
Donating money is not the best way for you to help. Instead of donating money, just help create a free, fair society. Let's say your hardware firm needs linux device drivers or hardware designed or software or whatever, don't just consider European and American companies, give a thought to Indian companies too. Prevent governments from instituting unfair tarrifs and sanctions [lookup US textile tarrifs and you'll see why it's cheaper and better [quality included] to make tee-shirts in India than in the US]. Vote for representatives that speak the truth, and truly care for building a better world. I've heard good things about Obama for Illinois, for example. That's the best way you can help. Punish large multinational organizations that do unfair things like attempt to bribe officials [Haliburton, Enron]. Bribery starts there, their money funds the weapons used by illegitimate governements/officials to hold back the civillian populace.
This would likely have been true in the 1990s. But today, with a substantial increase in public education standards, as well as increased cooperation with non-govermental organizations (typically populated by well educated, well meaning young individuals), corruption has been on the decrease. Here's the stats on perceived corruption index. It shows India at 2.8. 10 is squeaky clean. UK, Canada at 8.7. US at 7.5. URL is here InfoPlease
I would like to see rate of reduction of corruption. Overall, from talking with acquaintenances it has been on the decrease but clearly there's substantial room for improvement.
> I mean, I'm all for computers for the poor, but first things first... clean water and electric power.
If only things were that easy. You have to remember that building infrastructure is extremely capital intensive. You can only do that if you've got a good budget surplus, and that's something that the Indian government does not have because 1) low tax rate 2) poor tax enforcement quality 3) corruption. Further, very few Indian government officials are altruistic enough to care about development of rural areas [although that has changed significantly due to India's last election results]. I should note that corruption is also decreasing thanks to increasing education standards and knowledge amoung the poor. Also thanks to NGOs that work to address the issue. But there is a tonne more work to be done in that area.
I think the main idea is to drive the demand for infrastructure by all means possible. You give these rural areas a look at computers, an idea of how they can help. You give the teachers in the rural ideas a view of the future. You let them inspire the children and the parents. The next thing you know, the infrastructure demands will increase and slowly but surely it'll get done.
So yeah, first things first is fair enough. They're just trying a different approach to solve the problem. Drive rural demand up and these folk may just get there. You've got to remember things are not that simple when you don't have a spare billion dollars that you can throw at the problem.
agreed. at the end of the day, keeping things open is the way to go.
if the US decides to institute laws against offshoring, then great, you will see the same thing that happened with all those tarrifs applied against foreign made goods, like steel. you'll see companies pop up in the competing country, say Indian Steel, they'll see that US steel manufacturers are selling at a premium, and they'll put their 5000 IIT trained (at 1/100th the price of MIT trained but equal in skill) engineers at work on creating the next Reardon steel, or should I say Rangunath steel. Next thing you know, the US steel companies won't be able to compete since everyone will want Rangunath steel at 1/10th the price and 10* the strength of US steel. next thing you know, those companies go bust, just because the US government decided that those companies weren't allowed to outsource their research and development.
frankly, the simple way to think about this seems the most logical. give the job to the most skilled guy who is willing to do it at the lowest price. it doesn't matter if his name is Bob or Baboo, or if he lives in Bangor, Maine or Bangaloore, India. let's not bring about talks about externalities like corporate tax and other complicated stuff. as long as no one is forced [as in threatened physically] to do something, then let nature take it's course in economics as well. it typically tends to be a better solution than trying to force an unnatural solution.
> regularly use. I'm sure the market for these is there, I just don't think it's big, or the people in it are all that bright.
I disagree. If there was a portable video plus PDA device that had a good 20/30 hour lifespan, then I'd buy it. I say plus PDA because if it's got enough CPU to play video, it's bound to have enough to do all the other stuff. I use public transportation and fly around a lot. You want something hand sized that you can pull out while you're at the station waiting, or on your flight, or in the train/bus/ornithopter/rickshaw/whatever. I can see myself plugging this device into a sync station where it pulls in The Daily Show, Leno, miscellaneous video clips from several RSS feeds and stores them in ultra tiny format. It'd do this automatically. I wake up, pick it up, walk to the bus station listening to my daily morning selected audio streams, and it'd be timed so that by the time, i sit down, i'd hit a button and it'd start playing the morning video news. hit the 15 minute button and it picks the next unwatched under 15 minute video clip. gosh, i wanna build this. i can. just need capital. pxa 270 + good battery tech plus uclinux + some optimized vid libs. yeah, i can do this. you wanna give some dough to do it, mail me then.
Anyway, back to it. Yeah, I think the market for this exists. Anyone who has downtime, ie: time spent waiting for something AND you can not need to give your attention to, could use something like this. So, that's the basis for my disagreement. [Also, was your "people in it are all that bright" a flamebait?]
> or $100 bill; if it's all I've got and I need gas, food, or lodging, well, they should have to accept it. It's very easy for it to
Should _have_ to accept it? I believe that contradicts my interpretation of what a free country is all about. If I don't feel like selling you my stuff, that's my prerogative. You're free to go elsewhere to buy what you want.
That does bring up an interesting question. In life threatening situations, are hospitals are allowed to decide whether they want to treat someone? Let's say I was one of 10,000 migrants starving on a boat arriving on your shore and that I would die if I didn't get nutrition and medical care. Would your hospitals be legally required to take me in? How about if I was a citizen of your country but very desparately poor?
The article doesn't seem to say what protocol was used. I was hoping to find out if it was TCP or TCP based like iSCSI or something lower level. If it's lower level. The second thing is about the s2io card. I'd like to know if it has true TCP offload capability like stateful packet handling and processing, ie: strip headers off at NIC level and dma to host memory. Even S2IO's site doesn't elaborate on that. Anyone know?
> Chernobyl. There is no radioactive water or cooling rods in this design, and the pebbles are designed for a million year
I'm not sure the latter part of the above assertion is valid. From RTFA, I see:
The pressure vessel is lined with a layer of graphite bricks. This graphite layer serves as an outer reflector for the neutrons generated by the nuclear reaction and a passive heat transfer medium. The graphite brick lining is drilled with vertical holes to house the control elements.
This would suggest, that graphite control rods/elements ARE used to slow the neutrons to avoid meltdown. Let's consider a failure scenario: for some reason, the heat exchange mechanism fails, AND the control elements fail too, at that point, enough chain reactions may occur to bring the core temparature past the steel pressure vessel's rupture/failure temperature, at that point there'd be leakage and the associated damage.
> Less of a fluke artist than that guy that started hotmail and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Not sure I follow how hotmail's founder is a fluke artist (i assume you mean someone who succeeded just by chance?) The original hotmail, prior to MS, was innovative and an intentional success imho. They had a decent backend that had good uptime back when clustering and high availability wasn't yet widely available. Hotmail and their employees intended to create a product that provided functionality desired by its users and then it got sold to Microsoft. As for the guy who started it, Sabeer Bhatia, from what I understand, it was his intent to provide something like context specific advertising, sort of like what gmail provides today. Now if he and his team had done hotmail on a whim on his lunch break and Microsoft turned around and bought it for 400M, then I'd say that was a fluke. Come to think of it, I'm having a hard time finding flukes in the computing industry. What can you come up with that was done in a really short period of time and really, truly, unintentionally became a success.
I agree with that. Clearly, there's an overpopulation of the system tray for windows users. For Linux, something that would be nice would be a system tray icon (what do you call gnome's applets, something like rhupdate's beaming red exclamation mark?) that that could be more easily customized to incorporate useful behavior. That way, I could customize such an applet to do something like: If I get an email from people on my contacts list, then go ahead and alert me, otherwise just keep calm and change your colour mildly so that I know there's been some change.
>The invention of 0 is a usually considered a >pretty big step in western culture and one arabs >like to claim as their contribution to the world.
I'm sorry but that statement is misleading. The 0 is generally accepted to have been invented in the Dravido-Indic cultures, what is currently Southern India. See following URL:
Google Cache of Invention of 0
This was then spread through the Persian/Arab (Islamic) scientists and eventually to Europe.
Here's what appears to be a product spec. But no mention of OS choice. Looks like it's about USD$250. I hope they picked Linux.
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:tsAmaxcp7KIJ: www.iitk.ac.in/MLAsia/allppt/AllPPTs/Infothela.ppt +infothela&hl=en [google cache]
> I have every intention of maintaining the status quo so that I maintain my artificially high standard of living
Well, go ahead and do your worst, and we'll do our best. That status quo you speak of, it's crumbling more with each passing day. I see the people of India and China and so many other countries rising to build a more equitable world. Granted there are many flaws still, but I believe, I have to believe, that it'll be for the better.
I believe it has value in the sense that it inspires the rural populace. It lets them, especially the youth, see that there is more to life than a daily repetition of manual labor and suffering. It lets them see that there is a sunny world out there, with beautiful mountains and vistas, in their own country, even. You might say that providing a better infrastructure should be a higher priority. I agree. But I can see this type of project, done by indian college students (IIT), helps accelerate the process by showing people that there is stuff that they are missing out on.
> The also get paid less than the UK minimum wage. Very unfair.
May I ask why that is unfair? After all, if the pay rate for the Delhi call center workers was set to be the UK minimum wage, then I can't understand why the call center woudn't just be located within the UK?
As for your remark about "exploiting". Well, at the end of the day, India has to do what's best for itself. It's not like the US flew in B21 bombers and forced India to be it's call center and software production house. Nor are the lower prices/costs forced onto the Indian businesses.
"Left alone to develop"? Wasn't that India's policy in the 1960s? I don't think that led to any major successes? Let's see: 1. Defeated by China. 2. Decrease in effective per capita income by over 300%. The list keeps going.
The simple answer is that India will progress as much as it's citizens want too. A rickshaw with a wifi enabled computer on it can inspire it's rural populace to want more out of life. That's a good thing! The fact is that even a callcenter, at a tenth the wage of western countries, can provide these folk with an opportunity for betterment. So why fight that or complain about it. If you'd like to improve it, start a business and provide quality jobs to these folk.
Slashdot Mirror
Mammals shrink on islands and smaller ecosystems. See pygmy elephants in islands in India. It's reptiles that increase in size.
Every Chinese guy hates the BBC. But I think I know the real reason why. It's because of history. Britain is the only country in the world that succesfully conquered China. The Chinese have always felt humiliated by the British. The Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion , still raise deep emotions among people of Chinese origin. It's the same reason why the Chinese hate the Japanese for the Rape of Nanjing. It's all about the loss of face.
Ram Sabnis, Senior Chemist of Ascadia, Ram Sabnis is a leader among a very small group of people who can point to a dye-chemistry Ph.D. on their wall. Only a handful of universities in the world offer one, and none are in the U.S. (Sabnis got his in Bombay). He holds dozens of patents from his work in semiconductors (dying silicon) and biotechnology (dying nucleic acids). Which university is that? Come on, why can't they say the name of the Indian university, show a little bit of respect to the institution? Is it http://www.chem.iitb.ac.in/ by any chance?
Are you trolling?
If you are serious, could you provide some numbers, or facts that might substantiate your statement? Something that I could actually look at to compare between Pakistan and India. And while we're at it, let's add China to the comparison list. Let's restrict the data to things like number of scientists, amount of published research from both countries, things of that nature. Let's avoid listing "subjective points/opinions" that are not directly related such as politics, or social structure.
Maybe it's time that we pulled in Indian editors to /., perhaps they could help push quality up a notch.
here's the original post:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bayarea-tamil-manram /message/170
and reproducing it here:
Dear Friends,
The Bay Area Tamil Manram recognizes the need for members and friends to
exchange reliable news about their relatives, friends and loved ones
impacted by the Sumatra Tsunami.
We welcome the members to join the bayarea-tamil-forum@yahoogroups.com
mailing list to exchange news. There are several Tamil newspapers and
magazines in addition to Tamil blogs that are tracking the news of the
disaster. However, the Tamil Nadu coast is long and there are several
little hamlets that are not covered by the major news media. If you have
access to information, you may want to share that with the fellow members.
To subscribe to the forum send a message to:
bayarea-tamil-forum-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To Post a message:
send the message to bayarea-tamil-forum@yahoogroups.com
The people of China deserve better than the government that is thrust upon them
They deserve better? What is better? I didn't see any part in your post where you explained your better alternative for governing 1.6 billion people. Democracy? I don't think so. 1.6 billion people, despite an exceptional level of homogenity and subservience still encompass a significant risk to an orderly, safe, progressive society. I believe that if China were not ruled as it is currently, specifically, in a strongly militarized controlled manner, it would likely fall apart.
I don't know about that. Checking out the HTK license shows the following:
Can I build & sell products based on HTK3? You may build a product but you are not allowed to redistribute (parts of) HTK3, i.e. you can't ship shrink-wrap boxes with products that contain HTK3 code.
That's no where close to a license providing freedom. It'll be interesting to see what license IBM picks.
You bring up fair points. I can't speak for UP. Nor can I speak for any specific Indian states. I can merely suggest that from what I observed during my visits; that corruption is on the way down. As I said, though, there is still huge room for improvement in accountability and corporate/governmental transparency. And I believe, very strongly, that it is all people: NGOs, NRIs, locals, governmental folk, Abdul Kalam, and others including American companies investing in India, that will slowly bring a halt to the disgraceful levels of bribery that manage to survive in the more shadowy corners of the Indian government.
I agree with your statement. It would be a far better solution to use biofuels. This would include biologically generated methane, ethanol as well as things like the algae generated ethanol solution. That'd be far better suited to the briny, somewhat dry environments in Northern India. If only there was someone in a position of power in India who would read slashdot and make themselves available for this type of discussion.
Donating money is not the best way for you to help. Instead of donating money, just help create a free, fair society. Let's say your hardware firm needs linux device drivers or hardware designed or software or whatever, don't just consider European and American companies, give a thought to Indian companies too. Prevent governments from instituting unfair tarrifs and sanctions [lookup US textile tarrifs and you'll see why it's cheaper and better [quality included] to make tee-shirts in India than in the US]. Vote for representatives that speak the truth, and truly care for building a better world. I've heard good things about Obama for Illinois, for example. That's the best way you can help. Punish large multinational organizations that do unfair things like attempt to bribe officials [Haliburton, Enron]. Bribery starts there, their money funds the weapons used by illegitimate governements/officials to hold back the civillian populace.
This would likely have been true in the 1990s. But today, with a substantial increase in public education standards, as well as increased cooperation with non-govermental organizations (typically populated by well educated, well meaning young individuals), corruption has been on the decrease. Here's the stats on perceived corruption index. It shows India at 2.8. 10 is squeaky clean. UK, Canada at 8.7. US at 7.5. URL is here InfoPlease I would like to see rate of reduction of corruption. Overall, from talking with acquaintenances it has been on the decrease but clearly there's substantial room for improvement.
If only things were that easy. You have to remember that building infrastructure is extremely capital intensive. You can only do that if you've got a good budget surplus, and that's something that the Indian government does not have because 1) low tax rate 2) poor tax enforcement quality 3) corruption. Further, very few Indian government officials are altruistic enough to care about development of rural areas [although that has changed significantly due to India's last election results]. I should note that corruption is also decreasing thanks to increasing education standards and knowledge amoung the poor. Also thanks to NGOs that work to address the issue. But there is a tonne more work to be done in that area.
I think the main idea is to drive the demand for infrastructure by all means possible. You give these rural areas a look at computers, an idea of how they can help. You give the teachers in the rural ideas a view of the future. You let them inspire the children and the parents. The next thing you know, the infrastructure demands will increase and slowly but surely it'll get done.
So yeah, first things first is fair enough. They're just trying a different approach to solve the problem. Drive rural demand up and these folk may just get there. You've got to remember things are not that simple when you don't have a spare billion dollars that you can throw at the problem.
if the US decides to institute laws against offshoring, then great, you will see the same thing that happened with all those tarrifs applied against foreign made goods, like steel. you'll see companies pop up in the competing country, say Indian Steel, they'll see that US steel manufacturers are selling at a premium, and they'll put their 5000 IIT trained (at 1/100th the price of MIT trained but equal in skill) engineers at work on creating the next Reardon steel, or should I say Rangunath steel. Next thing you know, the US steel companies won't be able to compete since everyone will want Rangunath steel at 1/10th the price and 10* the strength of US steel. next thing you know, those companies go bust, just because the US government decided that those companies weren't allowed to outsource their research and development.
frankly, the simple way to think about this seems the most logical. give the job to the most skilled guy who is willing to do it at the lowest price. it doesn't matter if his name is Bob or Baboo, or if he lives in Bangor, Maine or Bangaloore, India. let's not bring about talks about externalities like corporate tax and other complicated stuff. as long as no one is forced [as in threatened physically] to do something, then let nature take it's course in economics as well. it typically tends to be a better solution than trying to force an unnatural solution.
I disagree. If there was a portable video plus PDA device that had a good 20/30 hour lifespan, then I'd buy it. I say plus PDA because if it's got enough CPU to play video, it's bound to have enough to do all the other stuff. I use public transportation and fly around a lot. You want something hand sized that you can pull out while you're at the station waiting, or on your flight, or in the train/bus/ornithopter/rickshaw/whatever. I can see myself plugging this device into a sync station where it pulls in The Daily Show, Leno, miscellaneous video clips from several RSS feeds and stores them in ultra tiny format. It'd do this automatically. I wake up, pick it up, walk to the bus station listening to my daily morning selected audio streams, and it'd be timed so that by the time, i sit down, i'd hit a button and it'd start playing the morning video news. hit the 15 minute button and it picks the next unwatched under 15 minute video clip. gosh, i wanna build this. i can. just need capital. pxa 270 + good battery tech plus uclinux + some optimized vid libs. yeah, i can do this. you wanna give some dough to do it, mail me then.
Anyway, back to it. Yeah, I think the market for this exists. Anyone who has downtime, ie: time spent waiting for something AND you can not need to give your attention to, could use something like this. So, that's the basis for my disagreement. [Also, was your "people in it are all that bright" a flamebait?]
> or $100 bill; if it's all I've got and I need gas, food, or lodging, well, they should have to accept it. It's very easy for it to
Should _have_ to accept it? I believe that contradicts my interpretation of what a free country is all about. If I don't feel like selling you my stuff, that's my prerogative. You're free to go elsewhere to buy what you want.
That does bring up an interesting question. In life threatening situations, are hospitals are allowed to decide whether they want to treat someone? Let's say I was one of 10,000 migrants starving on a boat arriving on your shore and that I would die if I didn't get nutrition and medical care. Would your hospitals be legally required to take me in? How about if I was a citizen of your country but very desparately poor?
The article doesn't seem to say what protocol was used. I was hoping to find out if it was TCP or TCP based like iSCSI or something lower level. If it's lower level. The second thing is about the s2io card. I'd like to know if it has true TCP offload capability like stateful packet handling and processing, ie: strip headers off at NIC level and dma to host memory. Even S2IO's site doesn't elaborate on that. Anyone know?
> Chernobyl. There is no radioactive water or cooling rods in this design, and the pebbles are designed for a million year
I'm not sure the latter part of the above assertion is valid. From RTFA, I see: The pressure vessel is lined with a layer of graphite bricks. This graphite layer serves as an outer reflector for the neutrons generated by the nuclear reaction and a passive heat transfer medium. The graphite brick lining is drilled with vertical holes to house the control elements. This would suggest, that graphite control rods/elements ARE used to slow the neutrons to avoid meltdown. Let's consider a failure scenario: for some reason, the heat exchange mechanism fails, AND the control elements fail too, at that point, enough chain reactions may occur to bring the core temparature past the steel pressure vessel's rupture/failure temperature, at that point there'd be leakage and the associated damage.
> Less of a fluke artist than that guy that started hotmail and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Not sure I follow how hotmail's founder is a fluke artist (i assume you mean someone who succeeded just by chance?) The original hotmail, prior to MS, was innovative and an intentional success imho. They had a decent backend that had good uptime back when clustering and high availability wasn't yet widely available. Hotmail and their employees intended to create a product that provided functionality desired by its users and then it got sold to Microsoft. As for the guy who started it, Sabeer Bhatia, from what I understand, it was his intent to provide something like context specific advertising, sort of like what gmail provides today. Now if he and his team had done hotmail on a whim on his lunch break and Microsoft turned around and bought it for 400M, then I'd say that was a fluke. Come to think of it, I'm having a hard time finding flukes in the computing industry. What can you come up with that was done in a really short period of time and really, truly, unintentionally became a success.
I agree with that. Clearly, there's an overpopulation of the system tray for windows users. For Linux, something that would be nice would be a system tray icon (what do you call gnome's applets, something like rhupdate's beaming red exclamation mark?) that that could be more easily customized to incorporate useful behavior. That way, I could customize such an applet to do something like: If I get an email from people on my contacts list, then go ahead and alert me, otherwise just keep calm and change your colour mildly so that I know there's been some change.
>The invention of 0 is a usually considered a >pretty big step in western culture and one arabs >like to claim as their contribution to the world.
I'm sorry but that statement is misleading. The 0 is generally accepted to have been invented in the Dravido-Indic cultures, what is currently Southern India. See following URL: Google Cache of Invention of 0 This was then spread through the Persian/Arab (Islamic) scientists and eventually to Europe.
Here's what appears to be a product spec. But no mention of OS choice. Looks like it's about USD$250. I hope they picked Linux. http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:tsAmaxcp7KIJ: www.iitk.ac.in/MLAsia/allppt/AllPPTs/Infothela.ppt +infothela&hl=en [google cache]
> I have every intention of maintaining the status quo so that I maintain my artificially high standard of living Well, go ahead and do your worst, and we'll do our best. That status quo you speak of, it's crumbling more with each passing day. I see the people of India and China and so many other countries rising to build a more equitable world. Granted there are many flaws still, but I believe, I have to believe, that it'll be for the better.
I believe it has value in the sense that it inspires the rural populace. It lets them, especially the youth, see that there is more to life than a daily repetition of manual labor and suffering. It lets them see that there is a sunny world out there, with beautiful mountains and vistas, in their own country, even. You might say that providing a better infrastructure should be a higher priority. I agree. But I can see this type of project, done by indian college students (IIT), helps accelerate the process by showing people that there is stuff that they are missing out on.
> The also get paid less than the UK minimum wage. Very unfair. May I ask why that is unfair? After all, if the pay rate for the Delhi call center workers was set to be the UK minimum wage, then I can't understand why the call center woudn't just be located within the UK? As for your remark about "exploiting". Well, at the end of the day, India has to do what's best for itself. It's not like the US flew in B21 bombers and forced India to be it's call center and software production house. Nor are the lower prices/costs forced onto the Indian businesses. "Left alone to develop"? Wasn't that India's policy in the 1960s? I don't think that led to any major successes? Let's see: 1. Defeated by China. 2. Decrease in effective per capita income by over 300%. The list keeps going. The simple answer is that India will progress as much as it's citizens want too. A rickshaw with a wifi enabled computer on it can inspire it's rural populace to want more out of life. That's a good thing! The fact is that even a callcenter, at a tenth the wage of western countries, can provide these folk with an opportunity for betterment. So why fight that or complain about it. If you'd like to improve it, start a business and provide quality jobs to these folk.