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Submission + - Installous shuts down (cnet.com)

nagasrinivas writes: Installous is shut down now. Here is the story from cnet. The sentiment seems to be sadness. I fail to understand how practically stealing something is fine. Having the ability to put any stereo in my car is nice (jailbreaking), but how is stealing my neighbors ok (installous)?

Comment Nothing to do with Poverty. (Score 1) 135

Basic necessities, infrastructure and other issues that people pointed out are issue in India - but how does that equate to wasting money on building a supercomputer? Would you rather have it that they spend much more buying when they can build it locally for cheaper? Also after all the dust of 'they should rather help the poor instead' argument has settled you can see that despite so many issue they still need to predict the weather.

Comment Is this 2012? (Score 5, Insightful) 95

Most of this article reads like its 1999 now.

“The skilled, motivated staff that grew up with the internet don’t want to work with closed, old fashioned systems,” ...
"Norton cited studies from the London School of Economics which found that investments to deploy open source in-house drives longer-term savings of 20 percent over the alternatives"...
"It advises CIOs, for example, not to separate current support teams from new development teams"

It then goes on to explain the fish that they are trying to fry:

“We commissioned this study to highlight to our customers and shareholders our use of open systems and contribution to open systems,”

Ok great so you have opensource software. Before you propose any solution (any open source or proprietary) you'd think of a large number of factors. ROI is one of them. The capabilities of your staff and the availability of skills in the market would be another. The example of Tomcat and jQuery are lame to say the least. Some of the companies I worked for have use proprietary solutions AND save money in the process. For "enterprise" applications the major costs of running the show arent whether the software is open source or not. Maintenance over the life of the product costs much more (salaries, infrastructure, etc).

Comment Why it matters (article misses the point) (Score 2) 361

The article tries to associate test scores and attainment levels with the 'US being a titan of innovation' despite them. To innovate you need incentives, funding and a set of highly talented individuals. And I mean innovation in the real sense (and not like bounce-back lists on your phone). Doing poorly in attainment levels implies that we are not doing too well creating that talent pool. When you have cash and you can provide incentives to people to do that work you just get a bunch of immigrants to do that work for you. In countries like China and India education is easy to get for those in the middle class or above. For peanuts in fees they can get the best education the country can provide that people in America can't because their government pays for it. This is something someone in the US can't pull off without exhausting a good amount of her parents savings or taking on a sizable loan. Oh yeah: before you say thats socialism and its 'bad' consider: these countries look at it as an investment (much like a businesses put into training programs for their employees) though its too bad that some of these will leave the country (or business in the analogy) for greener pastures. America has always had the policy of attracting and retaining the best in the world. Its just that having poorer attainment levels in the US undermines the workforce in the country and slowly substitutes it for another. A consequence of this is that the policy effectively translates to saving money in educating this generation because its cheaper to skim off the cream from other countries. I think this article does a great disservice by pretending that the attainment levels are irrelevant by looking at the results in innovation and ignoring underlying issues.

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