Bharat Rakshak

Spotlight: IT: A Passage Through India, The Statesman, April 5,2009
http://thelongrevolution.blogspot.com/2 ... chive.html

When men of mettle clash, sparks fly.
......
Who else but Mahalanobis could inspire Samarendra Kumar Mitra and Soumyendra Mohan Bose, outstanding engineers of the times, to go through the junkyards of Chandni Chowk to dig up war material to build India’s first ‘analogue electronic computer’ in 1953 at the ISI’s Electronic Computer Laboratory, made ready for this specific purpose in 1950?

Finally happy to see my grandfather (SK Mitra) get some recognition for developing India's first computer. In a country where indig. efforts are still sneered at (and compared with the west's supposed advances), it is good to finally see a small measure of the recognition due to him.

Raja Bose wrote:Spotlight: IT: A Passage Through India, The Statesman, April 5,2009
http://thelongrevolution.blogspot.com/2 ... chive.html

When men of mettle clash, sparks fly.
......
Who else but Mahalanobis could inspire Samarendra Kumar Mitra and Soumyendra Mohan Bose, outstanding engineers of the times, to go through the junkyards of Chandni Chowk to dig up war material to build India’s first ‘analogue electronic computer’ in 1953 at the ISI’s Electronic Computer Laboratory, made ready for this specific purpose in 1950?

Finally happy to see my grandfather (SK Mitra) get some recognition for developing India's first computer. In a country where indig. efforts are still sneered at (and compared with the west's supposed advances), it is good to finally see a small measure of the recognition due to him.

Indeed!! We owe recognition and tribute to such men behind the curtains who have made modern India possible.

Raja Bose wrote:Spotlight: IT: A Passage Through India, The Statesman, April 5,2009
http://thelongrevolution.blogspot.com/2 ... chive.html

When men of mettle clash, sparks fly.
......
Who else but Mahalanobis could inspire Samarendra Kumar Mitra and Soumyendra Mohan Bose, outstanding engineers of the times, to go through the junkyards of Chandni Chowk to dig up war material to build India’s first ‘analogue electronic computer’ in 1953 at the ISI’s Electronic Computer Laboratory, made ready for this specific purpose in 1950?

Finally happy to see my grandfather (SK Mitra) get some recognition for developing India's first computer. In a country where indig. efforts are still sneered at (and compared with the west's supposed advances), it is good to finally see a small measure of the recognition due to him.

Hakim Saheb, I did not know this. Quite an impressive lineage you got! Nice...

great men beget great grandkids! a lot of what we are today is shaped by experiences and caliber of our ancestors hundreds of years ago.

one of my ancestors was named gathiya (shorty). those days in mid 1800s, people used to walk long distances
and camp in villages enroute to get hard to find stuff (like stone mortars in NE). so he was on a trip from guwahati to barpeta carrying a sack of stone stuff. on the outskirts of a forest, a wandering leopard came after
him. dropping the sack, he is said to have run round and round a pile of bamboo and straw in the field until the leopard gave up and walked away.

See! the ability to run rings around bradmins coming to maul my poor starving self was built up then its all genes.

Singha wrote:so he was on a trip from guwahati to barpeta carrying a sack of stone stuff. on the outskirts of a forest, a wandering leopard came after
him. dropping the sack, he is said to have run round and round a pile of bamboo and straw in the field until the leopard gave up and walked away.

See! the ability to run rings around bradmins coming to maul my poor starving self was built up then its all genes.

This has to be X-posted to humour or Nukkad for others to enjoy!

Well, my contributions to interacting with my grandfather as a kid, solely consisted of trying to tie his big toes together with jute rope and showering him with pillow stuffings while he was talking on the phone. He himself was ofcourse a #1 prankster and there was one incident in the 1950s when he found that the smell in $hit is apparently due to 2 chemicals - Indole and Scatole (something which I think only got verified in the late 1990s!) and he could manufacture artificial $hit so that instead of teargas, police could lob $hit at the commie protesters in Calcutta and break up their hartals in no time! [runs aways and hides under a Tora Bora rock, from BRedator drones]

This is getting interesting..

Sun Microsystems kills chip project

BOSTON: Sun Microsystems Inc killed development of an advanced server chip it hoped would leapfrog its technology past rivals IBM and Intel Corp , the New York Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Officials with Sun, the world's No. 4 maker of computer services, declined comment on the report about the abandoned chip project, which Sun has dubbed Rock.

Sun, which has agreed to sell itself to software giant Oracle Corp for about $7 billion, had invested more than five years and billions of dollars in the project, according to the newspaper. It had hoped to use the home-brewed chips in new machines, rather than ones from Japan's Fujitsu Ltd, which now run the bulk of its high-end servers.

News of the chip's demise came after Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison recently said he planned to boost investment in developing Sun's server chips after he closes the acquisition.

Rock had been scheduled to start shipping last year, but was delayed several times as Sun engineers discovered glitches, according to the New York Times report, which said its sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Sun designed the chip for high-end servers, which primarily compete with machines from International Business Machines Corp and Hewlett Packard Co.

What the heck is this?

Cash really existed: Infosys assures investors

Does this mean that they don't have that cash now, even after reporting 30% YoY growth for several years?

Papers reporting that Nortel finally announces sellout of its wireless biz to NSN officially. It will soon announce who gets which other parts of Nortel.

Finally, the RIP of one time crown jewel of Canada.

^^^Does this make NSN the Gorilla now?

in the mobile infra arena definitely yes - and its a growth area for emerging mkts + 3G+ overhauls in around 50 nations already onto 3g.

ericsson, huawei and zte are probably the other strong competitors, with alalu having 'some' say too.

Which cities in India actually have 3G from MTNL/BSNL finally working ? has anyone checked ?

Nortel sold the CDMA + LTE to Nokia Siemens. Nokia did not have any major share in CDMA, and its LTE offering was no great shakes either. In fact, the first major operator that plans to deploy LTE in a big way is Verizon, and it bluntly told Nokia that its offering was inferior to others and it would much prefer it if they got something else if they wanted any piece of the mega million dollar pie. (Verizon had liked Nortel's solution but refused to deal with a bankrupt, dying company). AS a result, the acquisition was bound to happen.

Further up for grabs is the Enterprise and VoIP business... Nortel's Carrier VoIP is really a repackaged DMS and everyone knows the DMS installed base. Someone should be able to make a tidy profit in this line.

Sad that the company is going away for all practical purposes. They had the worst management in the last 5 years, and the current CEO probably was amongst the worst of all... he appeared totally clueless in handling or appreciating the crisis the company was in.

The employees and the shareholders are the ones that have been completely screwed in this. In a lot of cases, the employees hold a lot of stocks: some bought a lot of stocks at $100 CDN, the stock has now been delisted on both Toronto and NYSE.... plus the employees are out of a job without severance.

Raju wrote:Which cities in India actually have 3G from MTNL/BSNL finally working ? has anyone checked ?

15 till feb 2009
Agra, Ambala, Jalandhar, Jaipur, Dehradoon, Shimla, Lucknow, Ranchi, Durgapur, Haldia, Patna, Jammu,
Delhi ,Mumbai and Chennai.

3G is pointless unless the telco is offering a cheap data plan. Anyone know what the rate is and how it compares?

In theory, there is nothing to stop me from running a SIP client on my mobile and sc*ew the telco of paying long distance charges.

Incidentally, India has one of the most restrictive VoIP regulations in the world.

Remember that VoIP was outright illegal till recently. When we took the first leased line in 1998, we had to sign an undertaking that we will not use it for VoIP, not even for interconnecting PBXes. The babu from VSNL even threatened that they have installed "sniffers" to catch if we cheat.

^^^

Things have slightly loosened up now. You can make a call between the US office and the Indian office via VoIP, but you can't use the same link to do toll avoidance or Least cost routing. So I can call a colleague of mine in the same company in the states over VoIP, but I can't call a US customer using VoIP to break out in the US: it has to be a complete PSTN call. No idea how they regulate or monitor this.

I have no idea how Reliance gets around this for their calling cards.

Tanaji wrote:^^^

Things have slightly loosened up now. You can make a call between the US office and the Indian office via VoIP, but you can't use the same link to do toll avoidance or Least cost routing. So I can call a colleague of mine in the same company in the states over VoIP, but I can't call a US customer using VoIP to break out in the US: it has to be a complete PSTN call. No idea how they regulate or monitor this.

I have no idea how Reliance gets around this for their calling cards.

Actually, you can call US PSTN network. What is not allowed is inter-connecting the VoIP to PSTN at the India end. At the overseas end they have neither jurisdiction nor control. There are plenty of cheap VoIP services legally sold in India that allow you to make a VoIP call to overseas PSTN at a lower rate. To summarize:

India end IP to Overseas end IP - Allowed (obviously)
India end IP to Overseas end PSTN - Allowed
India end PSTN connected using India end IP to Overseas end PSTN - Not Allowed

bart wrote:India end PSTN connected using India end IP to Overseas end PSTN - Not Allowed

Exactly. If I am not mistaken Reliance had tried doing this. They even used to do some faking on this. Reliance exchanges in Mumbai picks up the VOIP signals, but substitute a local number and then route it to the PSTN network. The end receiver sees the number, and it would be a local number from Mumbai. But finally the Babus caught up with this scam.

In our office VOIP is used to contact any external number (be it a VOIP # or even a PSTN in the foreign country). Off course to some countries ISD calls are preferred, because it seems they are more cheaper.

people are leaving cos for higher study or relocation to other cities and replacement reqs are not approved. so headcount is steadily decreasing. some ODCs operate on a 'cost center model' wherein the cash$$ is proportional to number of employees,
even for those that dont, 'leaders' are seeing their empires (number of reports) shrink, managers are becoming jarnails leading a platoon

managers seem to spend a lot of time these days figuring out how to retain their
headcount (and hence funding). all sorts of 'visibility initiatives' are being tried to show their relevance. no doubt the welfare of the co and product line is #last and #last-1 in the priority.

unfortunately when the sea level is falling, all ships will fall no matter how high one jumps up and down on the deck.

Top500.org releases its results for June 2009
http://www.top500.org/list/2009/06/100

Tata at #18

18 Computational Research Laboratories, TATA SONS
India EKA - Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c, Xeon 53xx 3GHz, Infiniband / 2008
Hewlett-Packard 14384 132.80 172.61 786.00 a

Why more engineers are losing jobs
Read the comments too...

Intersting one...

By Adam Smith
From Dallas, TX, 06/17/2009

All is rubbish about the talent in India and the this Indian guy Vivek always lies about the talent of his countrymen. It is because of the greed of corporate CEOs to make more earnings for themselves. Just like financial regulation there is a need for a tougher regulation for outsourcing if we don't do it now then it would be too late. The only reason because USA is super power is because of its Engineers and Scientists and innovation, now what these greedy CEOs are doing is sending the jobs to India and giving a message to American students that don't study maths, science and engineering and if you do just move to a third world country like India and share few inches of land with 1Billion hungry people.
This will hurt us because in 20 years we won't have no one in the engineering school and we will become like third world India. Real economic threat for USA in next decade would be India not China.

The average American college graduate is unemployable, but Indian ones are not? Really?

IMO, the Indian outsourcing industry is not doing itself any favours when CEOs make inflammatory statements. These companies would be a lot more credible if their US workforces included significant numbers of non-Indians.

shravan wrote:American tech grads are unemployable: HCL CEO

The man just wants coolies to slave weekdays and weekends for a pittance so he can make his crores.

Though this statement is not expected from CEO of a company that depends on outsourcing business from massaland, I think, he is just pointing out the reality that you get no special advantage by using US graduates, who happen to be very expensive in a globalized world. Let us not compare top school graduate in US with a third rate school graduate in India.

it seems due to large number of vendor employees being released at end of contract and no replacements authorized, some managers who er used to manage these external teams have been forced to become individual contributors

shravan wrote:American tech grads are unemployable: HCL CEO

He should have provided concrete reasons why he thinks this is true. Certainly the average Indian grad studies more languages while in school and takes more professional coursework in college without spending time on humanities requirements like the Americans.

Recession has rattled the Indian IT services companies their CEO's are making desperate statements ; on a positive side I wish some of these should now start giving the product arena a serious thought ..it won't happen overnight but at least the vision or a roadmap should exist for a start else I don't see 30-40+ % growth per quarter sustainable for long.

I wonder how successful will Android be in side-swiping M$ as the OS of choice Preferences for a personal computer are shifting from the desk to the palm and M$ is going nowhere with its Windows Mobile and its Midori OS which is supposed to do what Android is attempting and more, is nowhere even near alpha. Google always knew that unseating M$ in desktop is like unseating Jayalalitha amma at a buffet so it went into a segment which is supposed to replace desktops and where M$ is weak. The other 2 competitors are a bit neutered due to their own past histories - Apple already runs a version of its Mac OS on its iPhone but has no experience like M$ in letting it run on tom, dick & harry devices which don't meet Apple's unique standards of L&F, integration etc. NOK which is making Symbian open source is hamstrung by the very reason why Symbian was (and is to a certain degree) so successful till now - it is very tightly designed for resource constrained mobile devices but on the negative side it has a steep developer learning curve and not-so-good developer experience in order to squeeze as much performance as possible from the device. Even when the S60 UI is taken out and replaced with slicker Qt-based UIs, the underlying layers will still be the same. Technically Symbian is way ahead of the others but it is also less flexible to change in order to embrace mobile devices with new computing roles.

I wonder if that leaves Maemo to go up against Android?

Raja Bose wrote:I wonder how successful will Android be in side-swiping M$ as the OS of choice Preferences for a personal computer are shifting from the desk to the palm and M$ is going nowhere with its Windows Mobile and its Midori OS which is supposed to do what Android is attempting and more, is nowhere even near alpha. Google always knew that unseating M$ in desktop is like unseating Jayalalitha amma at a buffet so it went into a segment which is supposed to replace desktops and where M$ is weak. The other 2 competitors are a bit neutered due to their own past histories - Apple already runs a version of its Mac OS on its iPhone but has no experience like M$ in letting it run on tom, dick & harry devices which don't meet Apple's unique standards of L&F, integration etc. NOK which is making Symbian open source is hamstrung by the very reason why Symbian was (and is to a certain degree) so successful till now - it is very tightly designed for resource constrained mobile devices but on the negative side it has a steep developer learning curve and not-so-good developer experience in order to squeeze as much performance as possible from the device. Even when the S60 UI is taken out and replaced with slicker Qt-based UIs, the underlying layers will still be the same. Technically Symbian is way ahead of the others but it is also less flexible to change in order to embrace mobile devices with new computing roles.

I wonder if that leaves Maemo to go up against Android?

Bose babu. From my discussions with "executives" of IT/Vity types who do the cell phone bijness, it seems that Nokia Symbion is sort of losing out, coz Nokia itself is unclear. Now Qualcomm wants to make /has made Brew Open source as well. Very two bit phone manufacturer is going to use the apps and platform route to differentiate themselves.

Another interesting piece I head is that Nokia and Qualcomm are porting Symbian for Qualcomm chipsets! .Must be a big comedown for Nokia which steadfastly refused to use Qualcomm earlier.

Another shockingly interesting thing I heard is that the new Apple iPhone 3G does not have a single qualcomm chip. Even the base band chip is an Infineon chip. Kind of makes you scratch your head. I thought Qualcomm had all the patents on WCDMA and many of the 3G standards.So is infineon killing themselves by paying out license and then lowering margins by trying to undersell Qualcomm ?. Sounds crazy. Has to be a catch somewhere.

Android, everyone seems gung ho about. See it as one nice big opportunity to unseat Mickeysoft. Actually, think about it. Same OS (largely) in the phone and computer. Just economies of scale are massive, especially , if the apps can be cross leveraged with just the UI being different in terms of biz possibilities.

Sure.. Very interesting times indeed.

Nilekani to have Cabinet minister rank as Identification project head
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Nile ... 701148.cms

pandyan wrote:chipzilla has its own version of linux for portable devices called moblin. they have established a partnership with nokia to further develop s/w, h/w. only time will tell what bunny they are going to pull out.

Moblin is still old arrack in new wine bottle. Only time will tell if they succeed - they failed in the past.

vina wrote: it seems that Nokia Symbion is sort of losing out, coz Nokia itself is unclear. Now Qualcomm wants to make /has made Brew Open source as well. Very two bit phone manufacturer is going to use the apps and platform route to differentiate themselves.

Symbian for some of the reasons above is struggling to move from pure cellphone to portable computer type functionality. Its technical advantages are becoming its cause for failure now. NOK itself has been quite complacent - just look at the N97!

Another interesting piece I head is that Nokia and Qualcomm are porting Symbian for Qualcomm chipsets! .Must be a big comedown for Nokia which steadfastly refused to use Qualcomm earlier.

Target is mainly Snapdragon....perhaps hedging its bets wrt OMAP?

Android, everyone seems gung ho about. See it as one nice big opportunity to unseat Mickeysoft. Actually, think about it. Same OS (largely) in the phone and computer. Just economies of scale are massive, especially , if the apps can be cross leveraged with just the UI being different in terms of biz possibilities.

Exactly the point I was making. Also note that the phone and computer are converging so in a few years there may not be a differentiator. Instead of a computer on every desk, you might just have a tiny docking station on every desk with actual computer in your pocket. HW wise it is a cinch to pull it off - SW is the key and that is where Android is kinda leading for now. It might be easier for Maemo to move into this space rather than Symbian with all its baggage of legacy code and design.

But to unseat Mickeysoft, Google needs to convince ppl. to let go off IE, MS Office, Outlook and atleast provide a non-Linuxy full GUI similar to XP to allow ppl. to shift smoothly. Google is trying to be the Mickeysoft of the next generation PCs in a way - can they pull it off? Only time will tell. What I do see happening is a lot more ganging up against the NOK elephant which in the past has been the 1-stop shop for device hw and sw - lot of massa foreign policy type tactics at play here. For NOK, main focus should be to revamp its user facing technologies (touch, UI, apps) and break in the NA market which is small but sets the me-too trends. HW wise and tech features wise NOK is still way ahead but nowadays users care more about L&F than raw tech specs. Ofcourse what would be great if they can come up with the next big thing in services (and not necessarily devices), this will require them to break out of their conventional European staid thinking.

Hi folks, please restrict discussions on this thread to Indian IT matters, not general tech/mobile topics.

Suraj,

Wish one could but where are the products from Indian IT which are worth talking about? Apart from a small handful, we still seem to be just proud to do other people's laundry and heavy lifting - as evidenced by the HCL chief's recent statements.

pandyan wrote:

Raja Bose wrote:Moblin is still old arrack in new wine bottle. Only time will tell if they succeed - they failed in the past.

yep. but this time there is some ammo esp with success of atom. btw, they also bought wind river recently. if they play the cards right, this has the potential to propel them to the top in the smartXXXXX market

Atom was initially a failure becoz it was aimed at smartphones - the netbook niche came later. Buying Wind River gets them into the embedded space big time esp. in the likes of automotive, as long as they dont screw up the Intel way. In this case it actually helps the likes of NOK in many ways than one.

Raja Bose: as fascinating as the mobile discussion is (I am an Iphone user ) this is still not a general tech discussion thread. This is a very long-running thread, though there are slow news days.

Suraj,

Then can we have a separate General IT thread on the T&E forum coz a lot of posts made here anyway seem to be more relevant to general IT products and news around the world (mainly US it seems) rather than India-specific IT products and news?

Raja Bose - The General Discussion forums would be better. Our (moderators') reasoning is that we want to use this forum for Indian issue discussions, while personal interest/humour/unclassifiable topics go to the General Discussions forum. Feel free to create a thread in the GD forum - we already have the analogous Cameras/Photography thread on similar lines there as an example. Thanks.

Suraj,

All the exe koo tives I talked to were in Namma Bengalooru onree, much of the work in many of the phone models happens out of India, even if sold as Motorola, Samsung, Nokia etc, lot of good old Yindian work goes into it!. Most end up getting sold in Indian markets onree.

So, sort of directly relevant to India and for the folks I talked to and boor stratejee types like moi, it is vitally important to read the tea leaves right.. After all, whether you are in the game 6 months to 1 year down the line depends on the bets we take right now .

Therefore , directly relevant to Yindian IT onree saar!. Money is made, bijness done, beebul work, it gets into the hands of people and used in all galis and hallis. So belongs here only, I submit