FDI in the wrong places
---------------------------
FDI in multi-brand retail okayed because it is going to create jobs, while it is
going to make kirana shop owners go out of business. So, now kirana entreprenuers have
to learn English and be sales boys at Walmarts or at best be suppliers to walmarts.
Manmohan's UPA sucks. It is Without any policy of what to allow FDI in and in what not to.
As it is, in the IT industry, everyone has been turned into an outsourcing shop
or a coder
for MNCs. There is no product industry in IT. There is
no funding available for innovation or products. India's best IT products are online
shopping malls and we are saying our IT product industry has finally come of age.
With no insult meant for the online shopping mall entreprenurs --- every entreprenuership
is tough --- what saddens me is that today
there is no value for technological innovation in India. If one has to give oneself
a shot at a high tech product startup, silicon valley in the US is the place to be in.
Even in other areas where thousands of crores of public money is being spent, there is
no innovation or research. For instance, the UID project that spends thousands of crores
on a biometric technology product does zilch research in biometrics. Consider someone
from India who has done a PhD in biometrics; he will have to leave the country. The
same is with the nuclear power industry.
For one of the largest mobile industry in the world, except Tejas Networks, there are not
many
Indian companies worth their name that make serious equipment for mobile networks. And
for one of the biggest banking industries in the world, almost every prodcut bought by
banks
is either from a US company or some other place abroad.
Consider fabs needed for chip manufacturing; India has zero fabs and we
import all our hardware from china or elsewhere.
Who is making our technology policies? Do they have any vision?
At this rate, we are setting ourselves to be clerks of the world and on top patting ourselves
on our backs.
We need to have a policy where foreign investors need to be given incentives for funding
innovative product ideas in India. We need policies that give concessions to those having
founder-level shares in startups.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
printf ("Good bye Dennis Ritchie \n");
Hearing the news of the death of Dennis Ritchie, the co-inventor of
C and Unix, brought back old memories of 25 years back.
Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ
where Ritchie and Thomson invented the C programming
language and Unix used to be the mecca of
research in the computing sciences in the 80s.
Those were the days when the craze for startups and being the next
billionaire wasnt there. In a sense it was a golden age, where
we youngsters measured ourselves by whether we could get a research
paper published in the top Computer Science journals or not. And
stories of geniuses from Bell Labs were legion. Bell Labs was
where the transistor, arguably the most influential invention of
the 20 th century was invented. The transistor changed computing
for good. And communications was influenced by people such as
Claude Shannon who came up with a marvel called Information Theory.
Information theory told you exactly how much information can be
passed over a wire over noisy channels. Try pushing more information
and
you will certainly fail. Shannon showed that there was
a natural limit on how
much sensible information one can communicate over a wire over noisy
channels. And
Hamming, the master of coding theory, came up with an error-correcting
code called the Hamming code. Errors arise because of noise when
information is passed over a wire and one needs error-correcting
code to retrieve the right information when received. These concepts
are widely used in communication today.
Thomson and Ritchie were pioneers no less than Shannon, Hamming or
Schokley who invented the transistor. The fact their inventions
are still used widely 40 years later shows their profoundness and
the wide impact.
For us, even to have a glance of these guys from far during our
occassional visit to Bell Labs was an achievement of a lifetime.
When I finished my PhD and joined
as a research professor at Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey
california where Hamming was a professor emeritus, seeing Hamming
walking on a lawn from far off used to be something to tell the world
about.
Ritchie, from all reports, was a very private person. He said of
the C programming language which he invented "C is quirky,
flawed and an enormous success." And of Unix, he said this "Unix is
simple; it just takes a genius to understand its simplicity".
Unix itself was developed out of utility programs written
to support game development on a PDP-7 computer.
Tinkering with things, rather than pursuing deadlines, seems to be a major
theme of those times. Writes Doug McIlroy one of the participants in the
Unix project,
“Peer pressure and simple pride in workmanship caused gobs of code to be rewritten
or discarded as better or more basic ideas emerged. Professional rivalry
and protection of turf were practically unknown: so many good things were
happening that nobody needed
to be proprietary about innovations”.
For us, as students in the 80s,
Getting root (that is, administrator in Windows-speak)
access to a unix machine used to be our
prized possession.
Ritchie was awarded the Turing award besides many others. Indeed,
in those days, we used to look forward eagerly who gets the Turing
award for the year. Turing, an eccentric genius, came up with the
concept of a Turing machine, a most fundamental discovery that
underpinned the concepts on which computer science is based. And
ferverently wishing that I could come up with something similar, I
remember reading all research papers
available in related area, including the original one by Turing,
during my PhD prgram. Narendra Karmarkar,an
Indian
who was at Bell Labs then, and who made the pioneering discovery
of an algorithm that helped solve the simplex optimization problem
in what is technically called polynomial time, and saved millions
of dollars to organizations was a special icon of ours
matching others at Bell Labs.
Times have changed now. We worship businessmen, and money-makers more
than those who spend their life times with intellectual pursuits. And even though the world
has grown more prosperous, there is increasingly less time to tinker
with things, or pursue research for its own sake.
Close to 25 years back when I applied for my PhD, what
mattered most was how interested I was in independent
thinking or pursuing independent research. Today, I am told
it matters more in the US is whether there is a funding available
for the project in which you are interested in a PhD.
Bell Labs still exists today, but it is Apple which is more famous.
However, Apple's Mac OS X or iphone's iOS is based on Unix which
Ritchie invented. And objective C, the language used to program
iphone apps, is an object oriented extension of C.
So, Ritchie is gone. It is a sad day. All I can say now is using C, the language
Ritchie invented -- printf("Good bye Ritchie \n");
Bangalore 13 th October 2011
C and Unix, brought back old memories of 25 years back.
Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ
where Ritchie and Thomson invented the C programming
language and Unix used to be the mecca of
research in the computing sciences in the 80s.
Those were the days when the craze for startups and being the next
billionaire wasnt there. In a sense it was a golden age, where
we youngsters measured ourselves by whether we could get a research
paper published in the top Computer Science journals or not. And
stories of geniuses from Bell Labs were legion. Bell Labs was
where the transistor, arguably the most influential invention of
the 20 th century was invented. The transistor changed computing
for good. And communications was influenced by people such as
Claude Shannon who came up with a marvel called Information Theory.
Information theory told you exactly how much information can be
passed over a wire over noisy channels. Try pushing more information
and
you will certainly fail. Shannon showed that there was
a natural limit on how
much sensible information one can communicate over a wire over noisy
channels. And
Hamming, the master of coding theory, came up with an error-correcting
code called the Hamming code. Errors arise because of noise when
information is passed over a wire and one needs error-correcting
code to retrieve the right information when received. These concepts
are widely used in communication today.
Thomson and Ritchie were pioneers no less than Shannon, Hamming or
Schokley who invented the transistor. The fact their inventions
are still used widely 40 years later shows their profoundness and
the wide impact.
For us, even to have a glance of these guys from far during our
occassional visit to Bell Labs was an achievement of a lifetime.
When I finished my PhD and joined
as a research professor at Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey
california where Hamming was a professor emeritus, seeing Hamming
walking on a lawn from far off used to be something to tell the world
about.
Ritchie, from all reports, was a very private person. He said of
the C programming language which he invented "C is quirky,
flawed and an enormous success." And of Unix, he said this "Unix is
simple; it just takes a genius to understand its simplicity".
Unix itself was developed out of utility programs written
to support game development on a PDP-7 computer.
Tinkering with things, rather than pursuing deadlines, seems to be a major
theme of those times. Writes Doug McIlroy one of the participants in the
Unix project,
“Peer pressure and simple pride in workmanship caused gobs of code to be rewritten
or discarded as better or more basic ideas emerged. Professional rivalry
and protection of turf were practically unknown: so many good things were
happening that nobody needed
to be proprietary about innovations”.
For us, as students in the 80s,
Getting root (that is, administrator in Windows-speak)
access to a unix machine used to be our
prized possession.
Ritchie was awarded the Turing award besides many others. Indeed,
in those days, we used to look forward eagerly who gets the Turing
award for the year. Turing, an eccentric genius, came up with the
concept of a Turing machine, a most fundamental discovery that
underpinned the concepts on which computer science is based. And
ferverently wishing that I could come up with something similar, I
remember reading all research papers
available in related area, including the original one by Turing,
during my PhD prgram. Narendra Karmarkar,an
Indian
who was at Bell Labs then, and who made the pioneering discovery
of an algorithm that helped solve the simplex optimization problem
in what is technically called polynomial time, and saved millions
of dollars to organizations was a special icon of ours
matching others at Bell Labs.
Times have changed now. We worship businessmen, and money-makers more
than those who spend their life times with intellectual pursuits. And even though the world
has grown more prosperous, there is increasingly less time to tinker
with things, or pursue research for its own sake.
Close to 25 years back when I applied for my PhD, what
mattered most was how interested I was in independent
thinking or pursuing independent research. Today, I am told
it matters more in the US is whether there is a funding available
for the project in which you are interested in a PhD.
Bell Labs still exists today, but it is Apple which is more famous.
However, Apple's Mac OS X or iphone's iOS is based on Unix which
Ritchie invented. And objective C, the language used to program
iphone apps, is an object oriented extension of C.
So, Ritchie is gone. It is a sad day. All I can say now is using C, the language
Ritchie invented -- printf("Good bye Ritchie \n");
Bangalore 13 th October 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)