Thought Garage

We Are, What We Think. Think About It.

Archive for August, 2005

Why does India still kneel before World Bank for loan?

with one comment

India is seeking loan from World Bank for its “Bharat Nirman” program, aimed at developing rural infrastructure. Why the much hyped super power nation is kneeling before World Bank for a loan to build infrastructure  There are so many nations in the world that desperately need those funds from world bank.
 
The government impose surcharge on every conceivable thing to contribute to meaningless and truly political war against Pakistan. How can India afford so much on military while they invest so less on infrastructure. Why don’t they impose surcharge towards building the much needed infrastructure?
 
Why doesnÂ’t the Indian government ask the IT corporate houses to contribute towards building infrastructure? Keep aside the social responsibility; IT big houses are the ones minting money on the existing infrastructure and hefty pro-business incentives (that are making an ordinary citizenÂ’s life much harder), and they should pay back.
 
The government has decided to break the backbone of the nation by cutting all the subsidies given to the agriculture sector, the largest sector in India, but increased hefty incentives to the corporates. Land is free, no tax, uninterrupted power….. list goes on, while 8 hours a day residential power supply became a precious gift to the rural areas.

Written by murali

August 19th, 2005 at 8:13 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with ,

Which is secure? Java or .NET?

without comments

The following posting at MSDN .NET security blog points to a comparison study, “Comparing Java and .NET Security: Lessons Learned and Missed” done by  Nathaneal Paul and David Evans from the University of Virginia Computer Science Department. The research was funded by National Science Foundation and DARPA.

Link to the Document : http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~nrp3d/papers/computers_and_security-net-java.pdf

Comparing Java and .NET Security
http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnfa/archive/2005/08/17/452760.aspx

It is very interesting and very informative to compare .NET and Java in depth on what matters for security. In summary, .NET has ZERO major security vulnerabilities reported while Java has its list growing.    

Update on 10th Feb 2005: 7 more vulnerabilities found in Java runtime. Read the sun’s announcement.

Written by murali

August 17th, 2005 at 3:36 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with

Some things will never change in India..

without comments

Some things will never change in India like relying on Astrologers to do any thing
important.  Go and seek an astrolger to start some thing. Go and seek Astrologer if some thing does not workout.  Go and seek Astrologer if some thing works out well.
 
If it worksout well, then soon the astrolger would become a saint. He will be worshipped. If not, never mind, people will look for another. This goes on until they find one Astrologer where some thing will finally workout. And a few days later, they start searching again.
 
I recently came to know about an incident, where a girl who has been searching for a  job in Bangalore, was advised by an Astrologer to try in a different direction, as  in Bangalore nothing would workout for her. She also had to goto a famous temple to do special rituals. They decided to move from Bangalore to Hyderabad to look for a job.
 
I do not understand how it would help. And neither they do. This is what they believe in. This is quite common everywhere. Be a computer science engineer in Bangalore, doctor  in Delhi or
a farmer in the village. Astrologers have a special place in everybody’s life in India. India’s super Computer itself was inaugurated at a time set by an Astrologer. No wonder, any thing else is done without an Astrologer.

Written by murali

August 8th, 2005 at 10:15 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with

Slogging Epidemic?

without comments

A few years back, if you are spending around 55 hours a week on your computer, you better be a geek. You are working out of passion to create some breaking product or in a Silicon Valley startup company. But this is no longer true. These days, most of the Software Developers are ’spending’ atleast 55 hours a week, ending up in a 11 hour day at office or work through the weekend. I wonder, why the life is becoming so hard for the software developers.

Here are some of the responses I came across:
–> Work load is too much. Organizations are cutting the costs by reducing the man power while the amount of work keeps going up.
–> Software development is becoming highly complex and to stay current, you have to spend lots of time in managing the new stuff.
–> If you are not slogging, you must have finished your assigned job and you may get new assignment. So to avoid new work, pretend slogging.
–> If you are not slogging, then you are looked as if you are not committed to the success of the project, so you will be in the next pink slip list. You just can’t afford.

While I agree one need to spend extra hours to get things done ocassionally, particularly in software development where almost everything is uncertain, I do not believe in slogging every day. If you slog almost every day in 4 consecutive weeks, some thing is seriuosly wrong.

Whatever may be the reason, the slogging epidemic is unreasonable. And I do not believe that any of these slogging teams can ever produce a better quality product. I found that these slogging teams spend good chunk of their time in fire fighting and fixing the bugs they created while they were slogging.

I agree fully with the argument of Joel [Hitting the High Notes], that best programmers under best working conditions produce the best software. “The quality of the work and the amount of time spent are simply uncorrelated.”

Written by murali

August 3rd, 2005 at 1:58 pm

Posted in inspions

Tagged with ,