Bharat Rakshak

negi wrote: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 .

sum wrote:Werent there rumours that NSN is buying one of Nortel's divisions?

Btw, Gurulog: Does anyone have the lowdown on NSN, esp its India wing? Few of my friends who hae offers from there wanted a "expert opinion" and where better than BR for that?

Wanted similar opinion on Alcatel Lucent (esp India wing).

rachel wrote:Guys wrt NORTEL going under, what do u think of the possibility of TEJAS buying a piece?

Fleeing Silicon Valley
By Daya Baran at April 13, 2009 13 Comments


Thousands of people are fleeing Silicon Valley; and, it not just migrant workers but also skilled workers. They all say the same thing - that opportunities exist in more places today and the opportunity costs are much lower. The economics of Silicon Valley are not working as they used to.

In fact, it’s hard to get a moving truck in Silicon Valley and it costs about $3800 to rent a U-Haul truck from San Jose to the Mid West, but only $1500 to move the other way. This is because far more people are moving out of the Bay Area than are moving in. The exodus has been going on since 2005 but has accelerated due to the down turn, residential rents are falling and top tier office rent is down 25% in a year. Many in Silicon Valley aren’t even aware of the exodus, they are working even harder just to keep up, in a ecosystem where the opportunities are shrinking and resources are getting expensive.

Recently, a friend on mine quit his $200,000 VP job at a public company in Silicon Valley to move to North Carolina to work for 25% less. He said in North Carolina, things cost much less and you can buy the best house in the best neighborhood for $500,000. Something that is not attainable in Silicon Valley.

With the proliferation of the Web, location is no longer a necessary element for success as it once was. Capital and skilled workforces are also available in many place such as North Carolina, India, Singapore, South America, Eastern Europe, parts of Sub-Saharan African, and the Middle East. The reality is the rest of the world has caught up, the gap has narrowed and the Silicon Valley is not the only place with those unique advantages any more.

Companies have recognized this for a long time which is why they have been outsourcing. But now, entrepreneurs are recognizing it too, and starting their businesses in places other than Silicon Valley. The founders of Scrabulous, a popular Facebook app, was developed by two kids barely 18 from India - and they minted a boat load of money without being in the U.S., because the skill sets and know-how were available to them from India.

CNBC’s, Becky Quick, pointed out to David Gregory on Meet The Press (paraphrasing here) that the “recovery will not be the same…the standard of living will not be what people have come to expect…there will have to be adjustments…”.

becky quickSo, will Silicon Valley and the U.S. be left with low paying jobs? Every year on April 1, the lottery for 65,000 H-1B visas opens, and every year, within days it gets flooded with so many applications that the government stops accepting them. This year, they have only received enough petitions to fill half of the 65,000 available visas. This may be due to the recession but employers are also finding employees in other places. The employees are opting to stay in their home countries, for reasons such as family, also their home countries have modernized significantly in the last 10 years and can offer them similar benefits to western countries without having to move.
http://www.webguild.org/2009/04/fleeing ... valley.php

Acharya wrote:

Fleeing Silicon Valley

The New York Times


April 15, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Big Profits, Big Questions
By WILLIAM D. COHAN

AT its nadir last November, Goldman Sachs’s share price closed at $52, nearly 80 percent below its high of around $250. By then, many of its chief competitors — Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and UBS — were dead or shadows of their former selves. Even Morgan Stanley, long considered Goldman’s archrival, had nearly died. But somehow, less than five months later, on the heels of a surprisingly profitable first quarter of fiscal 2009, Goldman Sachs is once again riding high, with its stock closing Tuesday at $115 a share.

The question many Wall Streeters are asking is just how Goldman once again snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Many point to Goldman’s expert manipulation of the levers of power in Washington. Since Robert Rubin, its former chairman, joined the Clinton administration in 1993, first as the director of the National Economic Council and then as Treasury secretary, the firm has come to be known, as a headline in this newspaper last October put it, as “Government Sachs.”

How can one ignore, the conspiracy-minded say, the crucial role that Henry Paulson, who followed Mr. Rubin to the top at both Goldman and Treasury, played in the decisions to shutter Bear Stearns, to force Lehman Brothers to file for bankruptcy and to insist that Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch at an inflated price? David Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer, acknowledged in a conference call yesterday the important role the changed competitive landscape had on Goldman’s unexpected first-quarter profit of $1.8 billion: “Many of our traditional competitors have retreated from the marketplace, either due to financial distress, mergers or shift in strategic priorities.”

But he was largely mum on American International Group, which, Goldman’s critics insist, is the canvas upon which the bank and its alumni have painted their great masterpiece of self-interest. A few days after Mr. Paulson refused to save Lehman Brothers last September — at a cost of a mere $45 billion or so — he came to A.I.G.’s rescue, to the tune of $170 billion and rising. Then he decided to install Edward Liddy — a former Goldman Sachs board member — as A.I.G.’s chief executive. Goldman has since received some $13 billion in cash, collateral and other payouts from A.I.G. — that is, from taxpayers.

Why kill Lehman and save A.I.G.? The theory, we now know, was that the government felt it needed to save the firms, including Goldman Sachs, that had insured many of their risky ventures through the insurer. Indeed, had Mr. Paulson decided not to save A.I.G., its counterparties would have suffered serious losses. Lehman’s creditors will be lucky to get back pennies on the dollar.

In a conference call he held last month, Mr. Viniar made the shocking claim that Goldman “had no material exposure to A.I.G.” because the firm had “collateral and market hedges in order to protect ourselves.” If so, then why did Goldman need the government’s help in the first place? During yesterday’s conference call, Guy Moszkowski, an analyst from Merrill Lynch, asked Mr. Viniar what role the $13 billion Goldman has collected from A.I.G. had on its first-quarter showing. But Mr. Viniar would have none of it: Profits “related to A.I.G. in the first quarter rounded to zero.” Hmm, how then did Goldman make so much money if that multibillion-dollar gift from you and me had nothing to do with it?

Part of the answer lies in a little sleight of hand. One consequence of Goldman’s becoming a bank holding company last year was that it had to switch its fiscal year to the calendar year. Previously, Goldman’s fiscal year had ended on Nov. 30. Now it ends Dec. 31.

As a result, December 2008 was not included in Goldman’s rosy first-quarter 2009 numbers. In that month, Goldman lost a little more than $1 billion, after a $1 billion writedown related to “non-investment-grade credit origination activities” and a further $625 million related to commercial real estate loans and securities. All told, in the last seven months, Goldman has lost $1.5 billion. But that number didn’t come up on Monday. How convenient.

Which leaves us with the real reason Goldman has cleaned up this year: the huge misfortunes of its major competitors. Those other firms have disappeared or have become severely wounded, and as a result have more or less been sitting on their collective hands since the collapse of Lehman last September.

As part of its busy day on Monday, Goldman also announced it was raising $5 billion of equity capital and that it intended to pay back the $10 billion from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program that Mr. Paulson forced on the bank last October. Being free of the TARP yoke will give Goldman yet another competitive advantage: the ability to pay its own top talent and new recruits whatever it wants without government scrutiny.

This is significant, since it is unlikely any of Goldman’s remaining competitors will be able to make a similar move anytime soon. There is a reason Bill Gates once said Microsoft’s biggest competitor was Goldman Sachs. “It’s all about I.Q.,” Mr. Gates said. “You win with I.Q. Our only competition for I.Q. is the top investment banks.” And then there was one.

William D. Cohan, a contributing editor at Fortune, is the author of “House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street.”

vina wrote:
David Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer,

Tanaji wrote:One really wonders... Freudian slips can be so revealing at times....

Tanaji wrote:Verve

ArmenT wrote:

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?

C Simultaneously handle two files. One file used to read
C the data and another file to write the modified data.
DIMENSION IDATA(100)
C Open the file to write data
OPEN (7, FILE = 'DATA03.TXT', ACCESS = 'APPEND',STATUS = 'NEW')
C Open file for read data
OPEN (8, FILE = 'DATA01.TXT')
WRITE(7,*) 'Here is the data'
ISUM=0
DO 10 I=1,100
READ(8,*) IDATA(I)
ISUM=ISUM+IDATA(I)
WRITE(7,*) IDATA(I)
10 CONTINUE
C Close read file
CLOSE(8)
WRITE(7,*) '-------------------------------'
WRITE(7,15) ISUM
C Float will convert Integer into Real
WRITE(7,20) FLOAT(ISUM)/100
15 FORMAT(' Summation = ',I4)
20 FORMAT(' Average = ',F7.2)
CLOSE(7)
STOP
END

Paul wrote:This sets the stage for the next stage in the world of software and services. Should the Oracle-Sun merger work out in the next 2-3 years, expect IBM, HP, MSFT or Cisco to make a move on SAP….If I were a SAP consultant, I would looking at options to move out of the SAP space.

IBM already has a flourishing services business, and HP is on the way with the EDS acquisition…What we are seeing is cos slowing trying to develop a one stop hardware, software (ERP, DB, middleware) and services (integration, consulting, BPO) solution.

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. 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.

vina wrote:Oracle acquires SUN. I think with that MySQL is now a dead duck and will get killed. Also Yechh Pee's Unix Bijness is in trouble, coz no "home database" onree saar!. IBM has DB2, Oracle/Sun has it's own. On Windows, Mickey Soft has an offering. So that leaves Sybase as the only guy left. Expect mating dances to begin now between Yechh Pee and Sybase or Yechh Pee goes and acquires PostGres or some such no customer database!

negi wrote:^ If they cant compete with SAP they would BUY it . .Siebel ,Hyperian,IFLEX all were gobbled up by Oracle Inc. . As it is in any case with likes of Oracle,IBM and now HP venturing into this services business the small fish are gonna have tough time (watch out for the hiring patterns of these cos in India ).

vina wrote:Oracle acquires SUN. I think with that MySQL is now a dead duck and will get killed. Also Yechh Pee's Unix Bijness is in trouble, coz no "home database" onree saar!. IBM has DB2, Oracle/Sun has it's own. On Windows, Mickey Soft has an offering. So that leaves Sybase as the only guy left. Expect mating dances to begin now between Yechh Pee and Sybase or Yechh Pee goes and acquires PostGres or some such no customer database!

Satya_anveshi wrote:Why will HP get into DB space? Don't we see HP-Oracle combined adv in WSJ and is it not reflective of current thinking?

Singha wrote:why does HP or anybody else need to constantly buy and grow bigger?

Satya_anveshi wrote:Why will HP get into DB space? Don't we see HP-Oracle combined adv in WSJ and is it not reflective of current thinking?

Jayram wrote:

Satya_anveshi wrote:Why will HP get into DB space? Don't we see HP-Oracle combined adv in WSJ and is it not reflective of current thinking?

Dont know about that Ad however Oracle/Sun combo is going to be a competetor to HP alone in Data Centers for sure..
Thats what this is all about.. Oracle/Sun/Java combined platform against HP + Oracle + Java .. The formers product rollouts are going to be just that much earlier and faster and more optimized and if there is no equivalent to Oracle (which depending on the particular deal/Client prefs there may not be) then expect a full court press by Oracle to win that deal no?
JM2 Cents