Absurdly easy to get a "computer science degree" in India
It wasn't easy at all for me. I spend three years doing graduation in Bachelor of Computer Applications in India (early 2000). The coursework alone was so much that you would have "learn" something. On top of that, I did private diploma from NIIT for "practical" exercises (at that time NIIT and Aptech were quite popular among students)
While I came to Australia for Masters, most of my friends did Master of Computer Applications (three years) in India. Six years of computer studies are bound to give you some knowledge!
I shouldn't have spoken so generally, and I apologize. My knowledge of the situation is derived from researching the coursework involved in receiving a PhD in Computer Science from Bangalore University. At the time I researched it, it required (American) high school level math and then 6 months of additional courses. I had a professor who had 2 PhDs from this 'school'. In an 'Intro to Object Oriented Programming with C++' course, he taught us the wrong way to use cin to get a number from the user then assigned homework writing a program that accepted two integers and printed out their sum. At the next class, he announced that anyone who wrote the code as he instructed would receive an A despite it not working... and anyone who looked up how to make it actually work would get an F for not listening to him. A group of fellow students and I went straight to the department chair and he was shortly fired. That inspired me to research where he got his 'degrees' from.
Great! I was having trouble taking full size screenshots using UI last time I tried (apart from adding a custom device for desktop). This time I found "Laptop with HiDPI screen" as well which I believe was not there earlier.
Thanks for the link. I always found it hard to know what is happening in new versions of chrome and which feature became available when. This is exactly what I needed - Thanks!
Also found chrome dashboard easier to use than IE dashboard but that's understandable as this is new effort.
And, if anyone from IE team is here, how about some consistency with developer tools with other browsers as well. The web developer UI in IE 11 is so different that I struggle to found simple things - maybe I am not good in recognizing new icons :)
This is a beautiful ad and will make you emotional. As a person of Indian background I was able to relate to it easily but I wonder what others think of it? Are you able to feel the strong emotions based on reading subtitles or does language hamper the feelings and it loses its impact.
Kudos to the team involved in this and thanks for posting this.
I'm a Russian American. I've travelled to India for a few weeks and have some friends from the region, but I don't really understand the ethnic issues beyond a very surface level.
The ad made me very emotional. It's a very human story. The fact that the characters in the story happen to be from India and Pakistan are almost tangential to the point. The same story could have been told about east and west Germany before unification, and it would have been just as powerful.
At least for me, the background song (from renowned singer and lyricist 'Piyush Mishra') adds a LOT in making me emotional - which they didn't translate. So I decided to add a rough translation for the same in the comments, but thanks to new Google+ integration - only junk is at the top on Youtube now.
Here's it again (translation of only the BG song), timed for those who are interested:
0:59 : Those narrow streets of childhood jump in joy again ...
Tying those little sweet thefts along with it ...
1:35: (Same two lines above, then ... )
Where I would fly like a kite, like a bird ...
That was the time .. when my heart felt like a free peacock ...
2:21: When I would sit immersed in those paper boats all day long,
... or 'entangle' myself with those windows peeking outside ...
Oh, what a time that was, when there were no restrictions in the heart ...
... That was the time .. when it felt like a free peacock ...
This is partly why I wonder if people can get the same emotional experience... Songs play such an important role in the Indian media and it can be very hard to describe. On the other hand I am glad to see that people still find it very moving (even from other cultures/languages).
Yes, agree. All the feelings in the original language can never be translated. The poetry is lost! I still love to translate things that move me, just to give non-Hindi speakers a rough context. :)
Being of Pakistani background, I could relate to it a lot. I'm actually just stunned by how well done the ad is in every aspect. I find it a little strange that a big Internet company did this, one wouldn't have expected such a thing. The reaction from my Pakistani friends is overwhelmingly positive too by the way.
No Indian background in me but I still teared up. This ad would work in any culture, but the separation they talk about in Indian culture makes it a realistic plot. All you need to relate is to understand what a good friendship is like, maybe even less than that.
I'm from the US, my parents are of European descent. I've never been to India, and I only know English. The story moved me, and it likely would have even without the subtitles.
It was absolutely beautiful, and I watched it without subtitles. The searches are in English, and there is an intro on the page that gives you enough information to let the images and the music do the talking.
Texan here. The ad series is great - I don't necessarily relate to the India/Pakistan split well, but the emotion presented in the ad is quite easy to relate to.
Wow, a long article but still relevant. As I was reading this I realised how closely it matches even the latest metro ui fiasco (for developers). Indeed "MSDN Camp" has won. Thanks for the link!
So if I were to offer you $25 or $1000 which
would you take?
That's not a great analogy.
For much of the life of the internet, we had the experience where everything was slow and awkward. Modems sucked. But now, people have things they want to do online and they find it's fine - they can access their email, and websites, and youtube, and play games.
There was a similar transition with computers. All computers used to be slow, and they used to suck. Then during the Windows XP era, the slowness and suckiness of a computer started to decline, and people didn't think about it any more. They stopped buying new desktops and wanting OS upgrades.
You can point out things that would be possible with faster computers or bandwidth - fine. Regardless, for the things that people are doing now, people tend to be content about things where ten years ago they were unhappy, often very unhappy.
The opposition case to the NBN claim that the government was forcing taxpayers into a vast, unbudgeted public works scheme, and that it wouldn't even be delivering something that was strongly needed by the people. The opinion of the man in the street about their current internet is a reasonable metric in estimating the value of the NBN.
Maybe the reason that Australians only have the speed that they currently have is because there isn't a pressing need for more speed. Imagine that. Billions of dollars saved with no effort.
From a cursory scan of the comments, it seems like there's a time element: $25 'soon' or $1000 'later'. I suppose which you'd take depends on how quickly you need the money, and whether you trust the $1000 plan to actually get finished.
For reference, I'm in the UK and have a 6Mbps connection, which I could upgrade if I thought it was worth paying more.
It's what can you do with a 40 mbps upload speed that you can't do with 1mbps?
Which is, you know - a lot. In the age of user created content, telecommuting and cloud services being unable to upload faster then 128 kilobytes per second is a killer.
If you're dealing with any type of multimedia content you can be needing to move 10-20 megabytes per cycle between a few people with ease - that time adds up, and it constrains how you work.
Mobile devices have been used as misdirection throughout the NBN debate, because very few people are uploading large YouTube videos from their smartphones over 3G and for anything that's got some level of production to it they'll be working on it on laptops and desktops at home and the like.
So the future of Australia's economy, and the reason that an entire continent should be wired with FTTH, hinges on citizens being to efficiently upload to YouTube from their homes?
Yes. Clearly no value of any sort has ever been created from the digital economy, and the richest companies in the world definitely produce nothing to do with content creation and distribution over the internet.
But this "raging" is over the fact that your passenger jet can only do Mach 0.75, not Mach 0.85? In the big picture, a hell of a lot can be done with 25 mbit and at this point in history you're hitting diminishing returns by jumping another order of magnitude.
Maybe in the future we'll all need 1 gbit backbones, but not today.
But we can't do 25mbit. 25mbit today is the extreme upper end that you never achieve. My household connection can do about 12mbit. I can't buy a faster service even if I want to, I'd have to literally buy a commercial building in the CBD to get that type of access. And the upload speeds on that will never exceed 1mbit a second.
If we were talking about enabling everyone to buy say, 10/10 or 20/20 symmetric service then I would not particularly care - in fact a lot of people advocating for FTTH would be placated. But it is not possible to do that with current infrastructure because current infrastructure sucks. Symmetric DSL tops out at 2/2 for about $600 a month.
There was an episode in "Through the wormhole" where it showcased some experiments in how the subconscious mind can be utilized more. I bet this will become normal in coming decades.
Google bought Motorola for 12.5 billion and then sold off it's Home division for 2.3 billion. At the time of the purchase, Motorola had 2 billion in cash so in the end, Google probably paid 8 billion ish for Motorola. Considering that in those 1.5 years, Moto and Nokia's values have been decreasing as well, I think they are pretty close in value.
I screamed after seeing this headline in hacker news!
I knew my colleague is looking for a mobile as he lost his one last weekend. He wants a mid range one as he keeps losing/breaking his mobile! I told him about this one but he had already ordered one yesterday. Well, he cancelled his order and has now placed the order for Nexus 4!
I've gone through two 8GB models in the last two months. Lost the first one (slid out my pocket), then had to buy a replacement at a jacked up price from a different supplier as I was starting work on an Android job the next day.
At least I know that the next time I lose it, a replacement will be cheaper :-)
It wasn't easy at all for me. I spend three years doing graduation in Bachelor of Computer Applications in India (early 2000). The coursework alone was so much that you would have "learn" something. On top of that, I did private diploma from NIIT for "practical" exercises (at that time NIIT and Aptech were quite popular among students)
While I came to Australia for Masters, most of my friends did Master of Computer Applications (three years) in India. Six years of computer studies are bound to give you some knowledge!