Bharat Rakshak

Singha wrote:in the days of yore college campuses had no distractions - no internet, next to no girls (and those that existed were not good), no money, no pool parlors nearby, no bakeries/juice junctions to 'treat' girls to, a moth eaten
movie hall maybe, bad food, no ethernet in rooms => no p0rn on tap, no torrents, CC shut down at 8pm in most colleges .....

Interesting anecdote: I spent more years at my college than were good for me and actually managed to see the change in culture that comes with the ethernet-in-room . I don't think it was an improvement. Things got pretty bad, with hostel games suddenly not having enough players, and in the end the institute had to actually issue a 8am-6pm "No Internet" fatwa, and put out notices warning freshers that they required a minimum level of attendance if they were to be allowed to write their exams

ArmenT wrote:Actually, on Sequent hardware running Dynix, you could configure oracle to bypass the OS and directly access the hardware, which did wonders for performance.

You still have the Oracle "bloatware" layer with the huge amount of unwanted functionality. You should have used a Jedi laser sword and dumped OraKill and used indexed files , if you wanted "max" performance (at the cost of long term maintainability, coz you cant hire abduls out of the market with such kind of skills)

ArmenT wrote: Incidentally, I worked on a recent project where oracle wasn't fast enough for us -- we needed some extremely fast query responses for lots of data. Solution: Daemon with in-memory tree structures and a query parser and voila!

.

. Again Shri Shri Rahul Mehta Maharaj Ji is right. AWMTA. Welcome back to 1960 and the world of COBOL and Fortran!. These languages had the feature where you could define a data structure as "In Memory" and load it and query against them for super super - hyper fast performance!. You should have used COBOL or Fortran for those and probably used a common run time (which is available on nearly every platform today ) to link with that module!. Like I said, the more things seem to change, the more they remain the same. plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

SRoy wrote:
I'm not talking about office work to be clear. Nobody asks me to work on Saturday afternoons. Other way round none of my bosses have suceeded in making me stay beyond 5:30 in the evening on workdays. That's clear.

I was referring to your working on sales presentations ityadi.

The point is my (most people will agree here) my org pays me do stuff as the customer demands, they don't care to address anybodies interests or creative urges. And if you have interests you are on your own.

There is a reason we are called "IT coolies" and little or no Indian names show if you start scanning open source projects. It has do with the reasoning that you have putv forward.

Quite true since at the end of the day it's all about the money you bring back for your master. Like I said, its a personal choice. For some the hobby is an extension of what they do for work, for some its not. More power to both!

vina saar,

Actually Rat Fart In Dignity sensors are being used in all trucks just to track inventory (and not just SDRE passive tags either)....the cold chain ones also have temp., pressure, light level ityadi for monitoring 'health' of certain products.

ArmenT wrote: Completely agree with you saar. I once wrote code for one of these babies for a custom controller. There's a lot of beauty in small packages as well.

I used to have one of 'em, fashioned into a keyring ornament (non-working dud one from lab bench) , now I have a chipzilla PIV

Linux has a "developed" Kernel(Core OS) but its GUI system sucks. There has been not a single Linux version whose GUI philosophy and user experience standards matches with MS Windows.

To compare Windows 7 GUI with Linux is like comparing a mature GUI system with an amateur system.

Linux is good for Server systems but requires a deeper and tedious learning curve for administrators and web developers. On other side, Windows server systems are easier to learn on and has better tools and technologies for developers. Thats a prime reason why newbie developers choose to write applications for Windows rather than Linux systems.

ArmenT wrote:Actually, on Sequent hardware running Dynix, you could configure oracle to bypass the OS and directly access the hardware, which did wonders for performance. Incidentally, I worked on a recent project where oracle wasn't fast enough for us -- we needed some extremely fast query responses for lots of data. Solution: Daemon with in-memory tree structures and a query parser and voila!

With every layer added, there is ought to be additional "redundancies" and its not avoidable. "Bypassing" is a custom solution in that case and it doesn't solve inherent redundancies of the Oracle in other cases.

Oracle isn't the fastest RDBMS system. Also, its expensive.

It depends on what your needs are. Sometimes you choose Oracle because of brand "Oracle". Sometimes because you trust the people behind it who charge you through your neck.

I wonder why there is no proprietary RDBMS system from India. There is a good market for one. People are already bugged with expensive MSSQL and Oracle shit.

vishwakarmaa wrote:Linux has a "developed" Kernel(Core OS) but its GUI system sucks. There has been not a single Linux version whose GUI philosophy and user experience standards matches with MS Windows.

To compare Windows 7 GUI with Linux is like comparing a mature GUI system with an amateur system.
Linux is good for Server systems but requires a deeper and tedious learning curve for administrators and web developers. On other side, Windows server systems are easier to learn on and has better tools and technologies for developers. Thats a prime reason why newbie developers choose to write applications for Windows rather than Linux systems.

GUI system sucks?

This message coming from Ubuntu + Gnome and Firefox.
I had the same impression until someone pointed me to Ubuntu.
I must say I am mighty impressed. And I believe that Ubuntu can be ideal for IT for the masses in India

Here are some of my observations which are relevant for most users.
1. Installation
20 minutes after a few clicks, i had Ubuntu up and running on a Windows machine. I now have dual boot. I did not read any documentation whatsoever.

2. Desktop use and feel
Boy oh boy, you just need to feel the Ubuntu colours. Amazing. Plus I now have
a 3D desktop Cube from http://www.compiz-fusion.org/. Total time 20minutes

3. Configuring network
0 minutes. But it was a wired connection. 5 minutes max for wireless I guess.

4. Sound and video
Sound no issues. Video needs a little time as I experienced in-continuity with flashes. Sorted in 30 mins

5. Installation
Synaptic package manager. Search and install along with dependencies

6. Internet and IM
no complaints whatsoever
But I haven't tried embedded video players

Very basic knowledge required for Ubuntu installation. If you already have a Windows machine, no problemo. Just download Ubuntu iso, use Daemon Tools or burn Disk and then keep going.
Warning : Addiction alert!

I wonder why there is no proprietary RDBMS system from India. There is a good market for one. People are already bugged with expensive MSSQL and Oracle shit.

For SME type firms, wouldn't mySQL be a decent choice? Just wondering onlee.

yes, MySQL is good for SME types.

There are ample opportunities in product development. Why not just make decent DB drivers so people can combine power of mySQL and .Net applications.

It saves them MS SQL license costs plus they get more productive with .Net

What am I missing here ? MySQL like nearly every database on earth supports ODBC and will thus work perfectly in Windoze. What is the piraablem saar?. I am sure the ODBC driver for that is free as well. I never had to pay for anything for my version of MySQL anyways!. Works fine.

Are you sure ODBC is free?

vishwakarmaa wrote:Linux has a "developed" Kernel(Core OS) but its GUI system sucks. There has been not a single Linux version whose GUI philosophy and user experience standards matches with MS Windows.

To compare Windows 7 GUI with Linux is like comparing a mature GUI system with an amateur system.

Linux is good for Server systems but requires a deeper and tedious learning curve for administrators and web developers. On other side, Windows server systems are easier to learn on and has better tools and technologies for developers. Thats a prime reason why newbie developers choose to write applications for Windows rather than Linux systems.

Quite an interesting take, however I'm unable to agree with.

I used the Windows 7 beta release for a few week. Here's my feedback.

1. Windows GUI, I'm presume you got impressed with Aero, falls far behind when you pair a *NIX system with Compiz window manager. It will still give you that glassy look and aqua tints without demanding gigs of RAM. Compiz already supports other W 7 gimmicks like thumbnail preview of open windows, stacking etc.

Yet, Compiz has been around for some time. W7 still doesn't support other fancy effects like elastic / floating window during drags, translucent inactive windows etc. etc.

W 7 is just catching up.

2. My webcam that used to work under XP and Vista does not work with W 7. Yet it works with Debian/Freebsd out of the box.

W 7 looks good, but I'm not paying for it to do stuff that *NIXes already do.

Last I heard that MS is about to roll out Web version of MS Office. In any case, unless someone sends me a real screwed up Office doc, I manage with OpenOffice (~80% of time).

I'd wager that W 7 is the last product from the MS OS business.

However, watch out for Google's Android. After its launch with HTC smartphones, it is due to appear in some HP netbooks. MS days of monopoly is over.

Raja Bose wrote:

SRoy wrote:
I'm not talking about office work to be clear. Nobody asks me to work on Saturday afternoons. Other way round none of my bosses have suceeded in making me stay beyond 5:30 in the evening on workdays. That's clear.

I was referring to your working on sales presentations ityadi.

Well, it might not work for everyone. Since, I do not stay late in office and absolutely no chance of driving there on weekends, any spill over has to be handled in the weekend at home.

I found it that, my little daughter and SHQ are happy if am around after normal working hours and certainly over the weekend. There one gets to be interrupted after every slide or page being completed, but since my kid my attention and feels happy about it the balancing act works for me.

I prefer to finish all my work including learning (which actually is a bigger component of work for me since I work in a research lab) during the weekdays.

Doctor sahib, assuming that it is not a matter of national security( requiring level-A clearance), could you please give a general idea of what your work is like?
Also, how does a IT/vity Dactar know so much about DEVGRU/SFOD-D/SG ityadi,ityadi? <jealous icon>

Im always curious about what sort of jobs do Pee.Yeh.Dees do in IT cos, esp in super duper massaland? (Indian IT scene is said to be a bad place for PhDs since they do not get the work they desreve for their degrees except in few rare exceptions,, IIRC)

Moi is humble researcher in intelligent environments/ubicomp/ityadi onlee pretending to do useful work to earn khota dallahs while others do the real work.

SF stuff info mostly from reading (sometimes between lines), anecdotal stuff thru personal contact with ex-/serving personnel in a few Indian and western units (some unfortunately deceased now). SFF stuff mostly through grandfather's stories and his circle of acquaintances (incld. Kao who was our neighbour - ofcourse even in old age that man had an intensity in his eyes which was scary even to a short-pants kid like me ).

massa-land is hardly super-duper. Industry though is beginning to look on Pee Yech Dees favourably again after a long time. However most Pee Yech Dees in ITvity still do the same work which MS/BS abduls do and which dont require your Pee Yech Dee skills/experience in daily grind.

vina wrote:

ArmenT wrote: Incidentally, I worked on a recent project where oracle wasn't fast enough for us -- we needed some extremely fast query responses for lots of data. Solution: Daemon with in-memory tree structures and a query parser and voila!

.

. Again Shri Shri Rahul Mehta Maharaj Ji is right. AWMTA. Welcome back to 1960 and the world of COBOL and Fortran!. These languages had the feature where you could define a data structure as "In Memory" and load it and query against them for super super - hyper fast performance!. You should have used COBOL or Fortran for those and probably used a common run time (which is available on nearly every platform today ) to link with that module!. Like I said, the more things seem to change, the more they remain the same. plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Vehicle will have wheels, an engine and something to connect them all together, I guess. But then people need different stuff and brochure writers too need a job

ArmenT, there are some free and commercial "in memory DBs" (HP, Lucent etc had them) which are used a lot by telcos. Process sucks up everything from disk during start up and loads it in memory. high performance due to elimination of further writes and retrieves from disk. Telcos use them to load the millions of connections and their presence etc. Some of them do a periodic archiving of their in memory data, but in general not preferred for law-suit prone IT-vity areas

TOI.

INDY has laid off 2500 people for performance reason. around 4% of the 60K who were appraised.

per Pai sahib the "tolerance for non-perf has come down to zero". and he darkly hinted that usual such rate is
5%

anyway the astonishing fact is that the missing 45K other employees who are not appraised (guess its not due yet before 1 yr service?) are ALL "trainees" !!

so were these 45K all inducted within the last one year? effectively a doubling in strength with 50% of all troops being freshers orcs/uruk hai ?

Aye Oracle is a pretty decent rdbms ; when it comes to implementing real world entities it actually does allow the modeler to leverage the concepts of OODBMS . People need to appreciate the simble fact that Oracle is to DB world what MSFT is to OS's . The sheer number of Oracle developers/architects in the market along with the excellent product support from Oracle is a major factor towards it wide spread popularity and use.

Dont know about their RDBMS but one of Oracle's dining rooms in Redwood City is purty nice

For real super-fast performance the timesten products from Oracle can be used, I am currently taking training for that and will be working on that onlee from Monday....

In Silicon Valley, recruiting clashes with immigration limits - A google whiz searches for his place on earth

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/busin ... lobal-home

Ameet wrote:In Silicon Valley, recruiting clashes with immigration limits - A google whiz searches for his place on earth

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/busin ... lobal-home

A good read about one person's experience. Despite being fairly well-to-do, this fellow seems to be taking the train/bus home and living in a 2 bd apartment with his parents. Doesn't seem like a spendthrift ITvity sort - that lamp in his living room is a SDRE $15.- Walmart lamp, same one that I have

However, some parts of the article are truly Booby Jindal-esque:

He thought everything important in life was American — from Baskin-Robbins and Nike Airs to the Hardees’s and Domino’s in the food court at the shopping mall. When in the car, he and his older brother played a game, naming all the things they could see that came from the United States.

He started at Google in August 2003, as a product manager on the teams that developed Google News and the Google toolbar, then worked on the look and feel of the video search, and on the early versions of Google Maps for cellphones.

He has been with Google for 6 years and moreover has been in US since school. Wonder what visa is he under and why his GC is still ongoing? One of my friends had a similar issue (he is from Lebanon)...he came to US during teen years, went to school, college here but after graduation had to move to Canada as he could not get a work visa. Really a shame since his entire family is in US.

But back in late 2006, maps produced by the service were taking too long to download and appear on phones. As customers waited for the maps to form, they racked up huge bills from cellphone providers, which at the time were charging for every minute or every byte of data transferred.

Enter Mr. Mavinkurve, who floated an alternative: cut the number of colors in each map section to 20 or 40 from around 256. The user would not see the difference, but the load times would be reduced 20 percent.

Sorry fella! But Google Maps on cellphones (esp. non-TFTA QVGA displays) look horrible. That innovation of yours notwithstanding. But why 20 or 40, why not 16, 32 or 64???

Mr. Berry says his skills and education — a bachelor’s degree in computer science from California State University, Sacramento — are denigrated by an industry that asserts that the best talent comes from overseas, via Ivy League schools.

Mr. Berry seems to have a chip on his shoulder. Maybe he wants US companies to institute Arjun-Singh-style quota?

He does not believe that skilled immigrants are essential to innovation. In fact, he argues the opposite. “In my experience,” he said, “foreign software programmers are less likely to step out of the box and present alternatives to management.”

Yes quite true. We SDREs are "conservative caste-bound onlee" Then Mr.Berry needs to be asked how come so many SV companies got founded by these 'furriners'?

Bose sahib go easy on the guy...dont take it personally ....we all are here in massa and we know that he is not entirely wrong but nytimes has published his views under a theme and selectiveness galore. For writing something on immigrations - IT, Indians and Google (in the sequence) - is the best combination.

now since we are discussing this topic, what are the good/emerging product companies founded by Indians in India. Tejas networks comes to mind..what are the others...

C'mon....I heaped praise on the guy (actually he seems like a good chap) and only one little jab onlee like a true guerilla ghazi!

What product cos. in India? That is a good question which I had first wondered about many moons back when most-admired company was being paraded as the symbol of Indian IT expertise. Can jingos list such companies for us as I am completely ignorant in this matter

Singha wrote:TOI.

anyway the astonishing fact is that the missing 45K other employees who are not appraised (guess its not due yet before 1 yr service?) are ALL "trainees" !!

so were these 45K all inducted within the last one year? effectively a doubling in strength with 50% of all troops being freshers orcs/uruk hai ?

singha ji, 45K would include laterals, fresher and employees beyond a certain role (sales, management ityadi) who are not appraised like regulars combatants. For fresher’s actual period can stretch to 1.5 years. But even then 45K sounds like a big number to me.

SRoy sahib something for you...as I said keep adding people in the bottom layer and keep loading performers with more work but fast promotions. Move best ones to sales/account management and next ones to unit management roles. For others (mediocre or non performers) salaries are increasing in a fast pace always (compared to rest of peers (and their abilities) in non ITvity) and if they are not promoted they can always jump to other companies in same role but better packet (not possible beyond a role though). This will all come crashing now as like sub-prime mortgage this model was built on increasing sales on YOY basis. With decrease in sales orders model is coming under strain.

Raja Bose wrote:He has been with Google for 6 years and moreover has been in US since school. Wonder what visa is he under and why his GC is still ongoing?

Probably F1 to H1 after his Harvard bachelor's degree. If he applied for his GC based on his bachelor's degree, he's probably got another 10 years to go before he gets it. Last month I signed off on a relocation+telecommute deal for a similar case where the person applied for his GC in 2001.

Raja Bose wrote:What product cos. in India?

For software, it's pretty much every company in the QQQQ. All the startups I know of were PIO founded although there seems be some action by Indian citizens lately.

Some links-

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4

Raja Bose wrote:C'mon....I heaped praise on the guy (actually he seems like a good chap) and only one little jab onlee like a true guerilla ghazi!

What product cos. in India? That is a good question which I had first wondered about many moons back when most-admired company was being paraded as the symbol of Indian IT expertise. Can jingos list such companies for us as I am completely ignorant in this matter

The Pramati folks who came up with a world class web server, I have heard INFY uses Pramati significantly...especially for their banking products...

tejas is doing quite well per my spies. more work than they can handle really. co is not big on sw features but focuses on layer1 electrical and optical type issues.

The most admirable company has done it and see we already have the dirty linen being washed in public.

Infy fires 2,100 for poor performance

comments section:

Nandita Gurjar,Bangalore,says:This is all a HIGH DRAMA.... They are doing just a CORRECTIVE STEP for heir BLUNDER that they committed in the PAST--- which was a MASSIVE HIRING - that they did in an UNPLANNED MANNER!!! More over they are not getting any projects these days!!.....Nandita Gurjar (HRD, Infosys)

I recall Shiv sir giving an analogy of a small kid who wets/soils the floor and then points to it innocently as if it was not his/her mistake .

hiring frenzy is sometimes seen in product cos too. like gorilla almost doubled in number
from 2k to 4k between 2006-08. A lot of people got in who should never have got in. now
they act like a boat anchor and provide the "resources" for weak managers to imagine they have a kingdom...the type who are always looking to create work by "transitioning" old products to the india team!!
if there was a Plan behind this bulbous growth I dont see it. now we can't walk away from
it but expend precious time dragging along the incompetents and walking wounded who
need micro managing, hand holding and five reminders to get anything done...and who
constantly pollute the newsgroups with their inept whines on all issues and crib
about salary and perks.

hopefully most will migrate into IIM/ISB soon should reduce hydrodynamic
drag on the SSN and noise signature as well.

run fast, run silent, run deep with 50x21" torpedoes should be the motto. Cos need
to be lean fighting machines than a pompous roman leadership galleon with
peacocks and drummers parading on deck.

Singha wrote:tejas is doing quite well per my spies. more work than they can handle really. co is not big on sw features but focuses on layer1 electrical and optical type issues.

IIRC, they have massive BSNL/other desi agencies orders?

vina wrote: . Again Shri Shri Rahul Mehta Maharaj Ji is right. AWMTA. Welcome back to 1960 and the world of COBOL and Fortran!. These languages had the feature where you could define a data structure as "In Memory" and load it and query against them for super super - hyper fast performance!. You should have used COBOL or Fortran for those and probably used a common run time (which is available on nearly every platform today ) to link with that module!. Like I said, the more things seem to change, the more they remain the same. plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Saar, could you give me some pointers as to how to do this in FORTRAN. It's not like I can convince anyone in the office to change to FORTRAN, but I figure I'll learn about it in my spare time just because .

For all those talking about MySQL being a cheap alternative, it is cheap until you start talking about Enterprise MySQL. In that case, the MySQL guys actually charge more than Oracle does per year and their terms are way more stringent. For one, even if you stop using their MySQL enterprise product, they still reserve the right to come over and surprise-audit you at any time at your expense for the next two years, to ensure you aren't using their product. Talking from first hand experience here.

Every DB engine has its pluses and minuses. Seems more Indian DB guys are Oracle biased though, vs. stuff like MS SQL Server, Sybase or DB2. Any good reason why?

ArmenT saab , for COBOL, I remember that it was a feature of the language. For Fortran, I am not sure, but I think it maybe was a DEC extension (just like COBOL was IBM, and Basic was Microsoft, Fortran was DEC's preferred language with many extensions on the platform). Anyways, for me it was like decades ago and I don't remember details. But Google Saar would bring you up to speed in a second. Better you do that than me..

Also, dont worry, Sybase might be an "Amriki or more specifically Chini- Amreeki" product, but overwhelming bulk of abduls who designed and wrote that product were from Yindia, specifically shopped over from a company based in Dilli/Noida (the owner has a beard and a bridge playing wife) , knew some of those abduls first hand. There were entire groups of those guys in Emoryville in the Bay Area in those days and to this day when deprived/ starved "Peninsula/City" types used to suggest Viks in Berkeley as a "go to for brunch place" , I used to get screamed at , cos those guys practically ate there every day in those days. Why the Dilli beard guy's company ?. Because, it seems that those guys had developed a database called Integra for some govt/in collaboration with Govt agency, which got canned / couldn't market/sell. So entire herd of abduls moved over to Bay Area per my grape vine.

ArmenT wrote: Saar, could you give me some pointers as to how to do this in FORTRAN. It's not like I can convince anyone in the office to change to FORTRAN, but I figure I'll learn about it in my spare time just because .

Oddly enough, some places still do write high-performance code in fortran. Older netlib algorithms are in fortran, and are *correct* versions of stuff that you can sometimes just plug into simulation code. The modern ones are of course switching to the great matrix laboratory, which is a mixed blessing. I assume the intel fortran compiler is also free for noncommercial use on linux, which should meet your needs nicely. Your query is likely too complicated for C mujahids like me, but the way I'd do this is to keep a single process with a huge block of memory/mmap, and process that data (which sounds a lot like a db without the guarantees)

For DB2, at least, I think a significant factor may be the difficulty in getting training and hands-on experience. MySQL can be learnt from free off-the-web tutorials, and can run on a cheap machine, which is all people really need to learn it.

ArmenT wrote:Every DB engine has its pluses and minuses. Seems more Indian DB guys are Oracle biased though, vs. stuff like MS SQL Server, Sybase or DB2. Any good reason why?

Oracle is the dominant database platform and the vendor to beat.

Market share-

Oracle - 44%
IBM - 21%
Microsoft - 18%

Link

vina wrote:ArmenT saab , for COBOL, I remember that it was a feature of the language. For Fortran, I am not sure, but I think it maybe was a DEC extension (just like COBOL was IBM, and Basic was Microsoft, Fortran was DEC's preferred language with many extensions on the platform). Anyways, for me it was like decades ago and I don't remember details. But Google Saar would bring you up to speed in a second. Better you do that than me..

Also, dont worry, Sybase might be an "Amriki or more specifically Chini- Amreeki" product, but overwhelming bulk of abduls who designed and wrote that product were from Yindia, specifically shopped over from a company based in Dilli/Noida (the owner has a beard and a bridge playing wife) , knew some of those abduls first hand. There were entire groups of those guys in Emoryville in the Bay Area in those days and to this day when deprived/ starved "Peninsula/City" types used to suggest Viks in Berkeley as a "go to for brunch place" , I used to get screamed at , cos those guys practically ate there every day in those days. Why the Dilli beard guy's company ?. Because, it seems that those guys had developed a database called Integra for some govt/in collaboration with Govt agency, which got canned / couldn't market/sell. So entire herd of abduls moved over to Bay Area per my grape vine.

Yes I tried googling first before I posted above and couldn't find anything specific to FORTRAN. Even added DEC as a keyword to the search, but no love.

Never knew Sybase had an Indian background at all. My first experience with Sybase-like DB was really MS SQL Server 6.5, which was heavily based on Sybase code. MS SQL server is one Microsoft product that I'll freely admit to liking (Their C++ compiler series is another world class product). Thanks for the info.

@vera_k: I suspected that market dynamics might have something to do with that. Thanks for the confirmation.

ArmenT, I take it you've never had to "fix" template-heavy C++ code to work on older VC compilers?

Microsoft did clean up their act after VC2005, and VC2008 is really good. The intel compilers are better, but only if you're developing for intel chips.

vina wrote: Also, dont worry, Sybase might be an "Amriki or more specifically Chini- Amreeki" product, but overwhelming bulk of abduls who designed and wrote that product were from Yindia, specifically shopped over from a company based in Dilli/Noida (the owner has a beard and a bridge playing wife) , knew some of those abduls first hand.

These were abduls from Hot Chicks Limited?