Useless 300Mb worth of sh*t because it cannot authenticate my google id (I am behind a proxy). Why do I have to be connected to the internet to have a peek at the OS?
It appears to me that most posters are falling prey to one of these two fallacies:
a) Moving jobs out of US is bad for the US economy. This is false because of two major reasons. First, when Indians spend their new salaries, they do it mainly on electronics and cars, and guess who owns a majority of these companies -- the First World nations. A significant amount of the money is coming back to the developed nations.
b) A jobless American worker cannot contribute to the US economy. That is partly true and that too in the very short term. It will be interesting to check what happened when most of the manufacturing was moved to China, Taiwan and Korea. The dollars involved there were much more than those in outsourcing, after correcting for inflation ofcourse. Seems to me that the US survived that phenomenon alright. Free market dictates that if others do not want your goods or skills, then you have to evolve and invent. Americans have been the pioneer in this, so I do not know what the hue and cry is all about. The Indian government, on the other hand, generally is much more conservative and highly averse to change and evolution. The poo will really hit the fan in India when the outsourcing is itself re-outsourced to places like Phillipines and Vietnam. It is already happening.
I say this with much conviction because I am an Indian myself and have had quite a few contacts in the contact-center industry over the course of 2-3 years.
America will ride this storm like it has before. The timing of all this with the Iraq thing and the oil prices make this appear much worse than it actually is.
So you mean I can fly my Corvette-ish sportplane with my lone existing hand (after, ofcourse, I have read the instruction manual in braille) and I don't even have to show up for a med-exam. Dude, this rocks!
China has been the world's manufacturer for decades now. True, there are a handful of Chinese companies which make and sell stuff like electronics, household appliances etc., but I doubt if they have ever stolen IP regarding those. The danger(or lack thereof) to Oracle is the same as that to the other American/Japanese cos that manufacture there.
Also, even in the worst case, I doubt if Oracle would be bothered by any new startup Chinese company that sells database products. Those who buy closed-source products go for brand name - Oracle/MS etc and those who go for open source dont give a rat's ass for anything apart from Postgres, MYSQL, BerkeleyDB etc.
No there is a big difference here. The article says that Oracle now considers China's domestic market to be profitable enough to invest. I am sure that the R&D centre in China will be more or less focussed on making China-specific products.
As an analogy, IBM's research lab in India is focussed on making eGovernance solutions, machine translation solns from/to Indian languages, Hindi speech reco etc.
Also, it goes without saying that it adds to the overall prestige of Oracle as well.
Was doing an assignment in college and had created a bunch of.o and.c files. Once everything was ready and running, I tried to clean everything by doing a "rm -f *.o" - thats right, i mistakenly gave a space between * and . and as they say, I had to work all through the weekend to redo the project. Wasnt funny then !
The problem with prediction systems is that they people use them to thwart the 'unwanted future' and in turn create an unknown, potentially more chaotic situation.
In this case, as the story points out, all drivers accesing the prediction may use the same exit roads, or the same alternate route - which defeats the purpose of the system.
One useful alternative is : make a centralized system, say to monitor a city traffic. Whenever, a driver perceives that he is entering a slow traffic/jam situation, he contacts the system. The system, dynamically assigns one of the alternative routes to the driver. Here it is important that there be atleast two or more alternate routes (because in case of only one alternate route, it will become jammed). The route selection by the system can be done probabilistically so as to get highest 'expected' utility, i.e. best route utilization and throughput. Also, it should be easy in principle, say using GPS, for the system to monitor the exact traffic at any point in the city.
Infact, I did a similar computer experiment in my undergrad days - comparing static route selection vs dynamic route selection and no guesses as to who came out to be the winner by miles !
It seems that you had some bad experiences with a handful of Indians, which understandably has prejudiced your opinions. Fine. Let me try and correct some of your perceptions.
First of all let us get the premise right. Neither are the Indians saying that "India is the best country" nor are we asking any foreigner to believe it.
Okay, you say that the Indian guys hired by your boss were bad. It simply means that your company simply didnt use a rigorous selection process. Remember, there are tons of programmers in India, some of them pathetic, and some of them very good. So your company could have taken some time to review the applications.
I was based near Dusseldorf for a 3 month internship in a univ research group back in 2000. The green card program had just started then. At that time, I was interviewed by a college newspaper, and I was astonished at find that the paper had twisted the facts and said that "the first green card aspirants have arrived at...".
I was a college junior at that time who had absolutely no ambitions for a green card. Things like these and some others (like being called a brownie at the supermarket) created a bad taste in the mouth but I _do not_ blindly brand the Germans as racist xenophobes. I do hope that you get a chance to change your perception. Btw, my _entire_ code was accepted in an industrial strength compiler, so that is a testament to the programming abilities you were referring to.
Other than that, the bottomline is that its the patriot in you who is speaking out, who is wary of the total Indian stranger. I understand that and do hope that you do not let your judgement be misguided by that.
Same mad gesturing happens in stock exchanges....surprisingly it works...although in case of Tokyo Stock Exchange it is pure silent gesticulation and in the case of Bombay stock exchange, it is accompanied by decibels of noise and an almost-stampede like situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot should be held responsible for idiotic comments on its pages. Oh, and 3rd post!
welcome the precursors to our new overlords.
..ought to be enough for everybody.
2012. Yes sir! That's when the really big attack is gonna be.
Useless 300Mb worth of sh*t because it cannot authenticate my google id (I am behind a proxy). Why do I have to be connected to the internet to have a peek at the OS?
It appears to me that most posters are falling prey to one of these two fallacies:
a) Moving jobs out of US is bad for the US economy. This is false because of two major reasons. First, when Indians spend their new salaries, they do it mainly on electronics and cars, and guess who owns a majority of these companies -- the First World nations. A significant amount of the money is coming back to the developed nations.
b) A jobless American worker cannot contribute to the US economy. That is partly true and that too in the very short term. It will be interesting to check what happened when most of the manufacturing was moved to China, Taiwan and Korea. The dollars involved there were much more than those in outsourcing, after correcting for inflation ofcourse. Seems to me that the US survived that phenomenon alright. Free market dictates that if others do not want your goods or skills, then you have to evolve and invent. Americans have been the pioneer in this, so I do not know what the hue and cry is all about. The Indian government, on the other hand, generally is much more conservative and highly averse to change and evolution. The poo will really hit the fan in India when the outsourcing is itself re-outsourced to places like Phillipines and Vietnam. It is already happening.
I say this with much conviction because I am an Indian myself and have had quite a few contacts in the contact-center industry over the course of 2-3 years.
America will ride this storm like it has before. The timing of all this with the Iraq thing and the oil prices make this appear much worse than it actually is.
Yahoo hired Prabhakar Raghavan today, who is a very well known person in the area of randomized algorithms and information retrieval.
twelve thousand monkeys furiously coding for 3DRealms posted that Duke Nukem Forever should be out anytime soon...
the licence to kill...
So you mean I can fly my Corvette-ish sportplane with my lone existing hand (after, ofcourse, I have read the instruction manual in braille) and I don't even have to show up for a med-exam. Dude, this rocks!
But the brighter side is ofcourse, no more flat tires, unless someone manages to get one while landing/taking-off.
Also, even in the worst case, I doubt if Oracle would be bothered by any new startup Chinese company that sells database products. Those who buy closed-source products go for brand name - Oracle/MS etc and those who go for open source dont give a rat's ass for anything apart from Postgres, MYSQL, BerkeleyDB etc.
the 'big Oh' notation in computer science. What were you thinking about :-p ?
As an analogy, IBM's research lab in India is focussed on making eGovernance solutions, machine translation solns from/to Indian languages, Hindi speech reco etc.
Also, it goes without saying that it adds to the overall prestige of Oracle as well.
for whom 'big O' is NOT oracle but something else ;-)
10000 of them, typing randomly on their keyboards...
Was doing an assignment in college and had created a bunch of .o and .c files. Once everything was ready and running, I tried to clean everything by doing a "rm -f * .o" - thats right, i mistakenly gave a space between * and . and as they say, I had to work all through the weekend to redo the project. Wasnt funny then !
In this case, as the story points out, all drivers accesing the prediction may use the same exit roads, or the same alternate route - which defeats the purpose of the system.
One useful alternative is : make a centralized system, say to monitor a city traffic. Whenever, a driver perceives that he is entering a slow traffic/jam situation, he contacts the system. The system, dynamically assigns one of the alternative routes to the driver. Here it is important that there be atleast two or more alternate routes (because in case of only one alternate route, it will become jammed). The route selection by the system can be done probabilistically so as to get highest 'expected' utility, i.e. best route utilization and throughput. Also, it should be easy in principle, say using GPS, for the system to monitor the exact traffic at any point in the city.
Infact, I did a similar computer experiment in my undergrad days - comparing static route selection vs dynamic route selection and no guesses as to who came out to be the winner by miles !
I was based near Dusseldorf for a 3 month internship in a univ research group back in 2000. The green card program had just started then. At that time, I was interviewed by a college newspaper, and I was astonished at find that the paper had twisted the facts and said that "the first green card aspirants have arrived at...". I was a college junior at that time who had absolutely no ambitions for a green card. Things like these and some others (like being called a brownie at the supermarket) created a bad taste in the mouth but I _do not_ blindly brand the Germans as racist xenophobes. I do hope that you get a chance to change your perception. Btw, my _entire_ code was accepted in an industrial strength compiler, so that is a testament to the programming abilities you were referring to.
Other than that, the bottomline is that its the patriot in you who is speaking out, who is wary of the total Indian stranger. I understand that and do hope that you do not let your judgement be misguided by that.
Sig! We dont need no damn sig !