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India Plans A Supercomputing Grid 389

Posted by timothy from the intrasubcontinental dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article at CNET, India is building a country-wide High Speed Network. Named the "I-Grid" (I is for 'Information' silly !), its a feat for the Indians who have been bogged down by U.S. sanctions in the recent past -- besides, with a country as big as theirs, its one helluva project!"
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India Plans A Supercomputing Grid More

India Plans A Supercomputing Grid

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  • Go for it! (Score:2, Funny)

    by bcilfone ( 144175 )
    Hopefully they can pull it off... maybe then the US government will encourage its tech workers instead of threatening to throw them in jail in the name of a cartoon mouse.
    • Yeah, blame it on Disney. That is pretty weak. Do you even know what you are saying? Do you have anything to even make that statement mean something? Do you realize Disney employees people in India? Pull your head out of your ass and have a look around....
    • We'll all have to emigrate to India. That's OK. I like curry. I'll miss hamburgers though...
  • And not for developing shitload of nukes [bullatomsci.org] to destroy Pakistan with. It sure sounds like the kind of thing perfect for nuclear simluations. [armscontrol.org] Not that I'm fond of Pakistan's idea of leveling India with Nukes [bullatomsci.org].

    Braving the sanctions, C-DAC has built four versions of its Param series of machines, putting India in an elite club of supercomputing nations like the United States, Japan, Israel and China.

    Oh wow, it's a who's who of nuclear powers. Considering that the US hasn't ruled out bombing the shit out of Afghanistan [globalresearch.ca] we're certianly in good company. The U.S. sanctions thing is bogus. They are close enough to Japan, France, Israel, &c to get all the shit they need.

    • Re:I really hope this is for good.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @08:38PM (#3115449)
      First, India's really a second-world nation. The first/second/third world definitions were western/communist/other, but India's definitely not 3rd world (Uganda, Sudan, Afghanistan), and definitely not first world.

      Second, India is less likely to use Nukes than Pakistan -- and U.S. citizens can thank the CIA for giving Pakistan nuke technology. Look up "Gary Powers" in your history books. His U-2 that was shot down over Russia began its flight in Pakistan. The U.S. has been in thick with Pakistan and less-than-honest deeds since. Pakistan was also a favored point for inserting people into the old U.S.S.R, and it touches China, making for more flight options to bases in Japan.

      Back during the previous Bush presidency, India and Pakistan were in another heightened state of alert. Pakistan had fighter jets sitting on the tarmac, hot-seating pilots in 2-hour shifts, waiting for the word to sprint across the border and hit large cities like Delhi and Bombay. The previous President Bush, who understood the world far better than his offspring combined, probably deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for calming things down.

      Third, Pakistan is the lawless nation here. Their previous female prime minister was forced out partly because of video tape taken by her secret service detail of her having sex with her own husband. (This is too absurd for me to make up, mind you.) Pakistan is currently controlled by a military dictatorship, which puts it into the same category as Pinochet, Hussein, Castro....

      Fourth, a "poor" country deciding to spend a LOT of money on a private Internet backbone should scare the begeezus out of people. India is as more proximal to large population pockets than any other country. If you wanted to network Asia, Africa, and Europe, India is the place to do it.

      Fifth, India was/is on the U.S. watch list because of grain sales back in the 1970's between Russia and India, and because of the U.S.'s need for a place to launch CIA spy plane flights (see Gary Powers reference above). The old "friend of my enemy is my enemy" simplistic notions of how the relationships between nations should work. India needed food, Russia was willing to sell it cheaper than the U.S., and so the simple rules of capitalism landed India on the watch list.

      Sixth, there is great education in India. Who here among us has not had an Indian classmate? For seeing so many of them, remember that you are only seeing the ones that got accepted over here, and/or had the money to come over. There are many brains in India, well-educated, disciplined, and hungry for the opportunity to prove they are good, and to improve their lot in life. They lack only the chance, the opportunity....

      • Re:I really hope this is for good.... (Score:4, Informative)

        by spasm ( 79260 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @11:26PM (#3116103) Homepage
        " First, India's really a second-world nation. The first/second/third world definitions were western/communist/other, but India's definitely not 3rd world (Uganda, Sudan, Afghanistan), and definitely not first world."

        Kinda ironic india invented the term 'third world' and applied it to themselves - the idea was the world was polarizing into the russian / american camps, & India saw that small, poor nations that cozied up to one or the other didn't do all that well, so decided to go down the route of 'independent neutrality'. Supposedly the rationale for this was all sorts of world-peace type reasons, but the (presumably hoped for & planned) outcome was the US and USSR outdid each other to see who could throw the most money & toys at the Indian Govt. Dig out an old copy of Janes from the 80s or earlier & have a look at which countries produced major chunks of hardware in the Indian military - a weirder mix of USA/USSR you won't find almost anywhere.

        Can't think of too many other countries that did as well out of joining the 'third world' camp though, and it quickly became a catch-all term for places mostly thought of by westerners as stupefyingly poor.
      • Actually, building a massive internet backbone in India is a really bad idea for two reasons:
        1) India needs cheap, regular phone service first. I don't know if much has changed in five years, but last time I was there (not in a big city, mind you, but not exactly out in the boonies.. Udupi, Karnataka, near Mandgalore .. if that means anything to you) but local phone calls weren't cheap and you only made STD (long-distance) calls if you were an important businessman. And the sound quality wasnt good enough to support 9.6kbps.
        2) India needs reliable elctricity! I know this one still holds true, I recently read something about the average electricity in India being 8 hours a day. I remember not being able to sleep cause the mill next to us would have to turn on its diesel generators every other night
        Once India gets these acts together, then it should worry about getting a huge Internet network.. basics first, guys..
        • There was a big drop in call charges in India in the new year. The phone lines support 56k modems - I was reading slashdot from Hyderabad this christmas. Indeed a year and a bit ago I would have had more luck getting an affordable DSL connection in an Indian city than the UK! Broadband has got better in the UK but it still sucks if you don't live in a large city.

          As for power a UPS is essential for a computer over there but 8 hours a day is just not true - on average there seemed to be a cut every other day for half an hour max - not great but bearable.

          A big problem with electricity in India is the amount of theft - bare wires from the junction box into someones house - nice!
    • putting India in an elite club of supercomputing nations like the United States, Japan, Israel and China.

      Oh wow, it's a who's who of nuclear powers.


      Japan wouldn't be too amused at being called a nuclear power.
    • Come to think of it, if they can allocate money for a nuke program, they can certainly afford to get appropriate number crunching equipment which is solely in the hands of the weapon designers, not shared by half the academics in the country. You know, nuclear weapons research is usually classified something like "top secret"... I doubt they'd let outsiders access their stuff solely for security reasons.
    • I knew a physics PhD student from India who said that when he was in the military there, anything they couldn't get from the US, they'd buy from Denmark, or make themselves. Example: he said that he himself had to design a mounting system for an infrared camera on a helicopter.

      If anything, sanctions are probably good for India in the long term, as they encourage the development of local talent. (A lot of whom still want to leave India, so I guess it ends up being good for the US, too)
  • Shouldn't roads and irrigation be more important. Hospitals. Schools.
    • Shouldn't roads and irrigation be more important. Hospitals. Schools.

      Do so many people really believe that if a country isn't spending all their money on development, they might as well not be spending any?

      ...Come on, people, it's not like it's a one-or-the-other decision. It's possible to build roads and computers at the same time, leaps of black-and-white "logic" aside. :P

      -PS

    • Shouldn't roads and irrigation be more important. Hospitals. Schools.

      If you spend all your time building roads and irrigation without developing technology, you'll get clobbered. These things need to happen concurrently. Always set your Science spending to at least 40% and let the roads and irragation sort themselves out in good time. (hint, set the workers on auto)
  • Being as most Americans think of India as a 3rd-world country, I say "what better country to pull it off"?

    Actually, there is some sense to my suggestion... They don't have any archaic and esoteric infrastructure in place. They'd have to build this from the ground up, no?

    Okay, I'm gonna go read that article now... (I'm prolly misinformed...)

    --X...

  • Where do they go for outsourcing? (Score:3, Funny)

    by cmdr_beeftaco ( 562067 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @08:26PM (#3115389)
    Where will they go for contractors when the project is 6 months behinds schedule and 50 million over budget? Will they farm out the programming to Pakistan? China? I need answer.
    • It is interesting to note that here in the UK, the laws for immigration have changed significantly. Laws are getting tougher for assylum seekers but being relaxed for immigrants that would help the UK economy... and many of these are Indians because they are smart and well educated. Indeed, I have heard of many a project that have been outsourced to India because skilled labour is so much cheaper there. India have the skills and manpower to pull this off
    • Perhaps they'll get Battle School grads to do the work in forced-labor camps. Probably only need some kind of a psycho who's willing to kill to keep 'em in line.
  • C-DAC's computers, built on a sophisticated clustering of microprocessors, would use advanced software to securely network the machines, much like a high-voltage electricity grid.

    Can anyone work out what they're trying to say here? Do high-voltage electricity grids use advanced security software? Perhaps they're saying that anyone who tries to tamper with the network will get shocked? Or...

    • It sounds like two issues to me, or else misuse of the word 'security.' I think the word they were looking for was 'robustness,' in that severing a single line shouldn't cause discontinuities.

      I know, my power gets cut off from time to time, too. But I think the 'high-voltage' (ie. non-residential) grids have redundancy in the same way that this proposed network will have better redundancy that the pedestrian Internet (where too many pidgeons on a line in Minneanapolis causes my connection to slow to a crawl).
    • They're saying that the computers will be all over the place connected with networks, just like how substations are connected with electrical cables.

      I sure hope you failed English in high school.
    • Obviously the 'sophisticated clustering of CPUs' is generating a heat shield. So the effect must be a server room that causes anyone who attempts to tamper with the systems to collapse from heat stroke and/or suffer second degree burns. Or perhaps a more simple solution that the server nearest the door has a peltier device redistribting heat to the door knob so no one can enter the server room.
      ;-)
  • So we expect more of em on Yahoo chat? (Assumming Yahoo chat stays up long enough as its down again atm:D ) More "I Love you" , "Happy Valentines Day" PMs :D

  • Heh (Score:3, Funny)

    by EricKrout.com ( 559698 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @08:28PM (#3115397) Homepage
    India's new i-Grid follows a long line of previously successfull Apple products, the i-Pod and the i-Mac being two of them.

    When reached for comment, Apple's visionary Steve Jobs stated that his engineers "would worry about the technical difficulties" associated with such a large distributed system after they "dealt with the more important stuff first, like what fluorescent color to make the transparent wires and stuff".

    monolinux.com :: GNUs For Nerds. Flawless Grammar. [monolinux.com]
    • now that's comedy...too bad my mod points expired this past weekend.
    • Yeah looks good but it too fucking expensive. When will Apple learn that it can't foist overpriced distributed computing networks onto unsuspecting countries. Someone should tell them they can get a much cheaper Grid by using PCs and Linux.

      Also, I hear it only supports one button mice. Sigh.
  • Quoth CNet:

    India's state-run agency for advanced computing plans to build a nationwide grid of supercomputers for mammoth applications.

    Mammoth, as in wooly mammoth [prehistory.com]? I suppose they'll be excavating Cobol programmers to write the code for it...

    • grid of supercomputers for mammoth applications.

      No, you must not have seen the network diagram. It's very explicit, as it has an elephant standing on the back of a turtle (and so on).

      Check your Visio2000 India Symbols pack [microsoft.com]. It's all there.

      *scoove*
      • Skeptic: But what does the turtle stand on?
        True Believer: It's turtles all the way down!
        • Well, at least get it right...dug this off the web A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the entre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."

  • India the Next Superpower (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pyrrho ( 167252 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @08:31PM (#3115410) Journal
    There is no doubt in my mind that India is the next big superpower.

    (1) Lots of unspoilt natural resources
    (2) Smart People
    (3) Most Important (A LOT OF PEOPLE)
    (4) and it doesn't hurt they speak english allowing them to segue their way in.

    My premise..? Numbers don't lie. A giant market is a giant period. This prediction does cover China too, their population makes them a sleeping giant. Except that China does not have an open society. India is struggling against years of exploitation and it's own caste system... but given the adoption of democracy there I can't imagine it won't arrise from these difficulties and when it does, it will have more resources than anyone will be able to (or want to) stop.

    • There is no doubt in my mind that India is the next big superpower.

      Good arguments, but I'm not sold (as much as I'm impressed with India's efforts and potential).

      Is there really any good evidence of the emergence of a superpower from a ethnically diverse and incompatible populace, absent significant suppression by the elite minority of the other groups?

      China and South Africa are good examples of the potential for advancement under suppression.

      I'm really more curious than serious on my argument - I'd have to believe there's a /.'er polysci major that knows of some good material on the topic.

      Need some bedtime reading this weekend!

      *scoove*

    • Re:India the Next Superpower (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Superpower!! Looks like you know all there is to know about india. Try making a long distance call in India at peak time within 1 hour .... or finding a drivable road .... or any place without millions of miserable poor people with nothing to eat.

      India is a sick, failed nation with a future which will continue to be the same unless there is a revolutionary change of mindset and prompt action to abandon and destroy their bureaucratic and corupt institions (including entities like C-DAC) and systems. If you know India this means building pretty much everything from scratch.

      Will India become a superpower? Not in next 50-100years and certainly not unless it abandons it current system as well as its egotistical stand on Kashmir, which is to hold on it even if it means economic depravation and starvation of the vast majority of its billion souls. That formula is no recipe for success, it does however gurantee that the nation is stuck in this cycle until there is mass revolution or a post-apocalyptic reconstruction.
      • Anonymous Coward, India is not stuck in any cycle, but a progressive, broad-minded, free and democratic nation. It will be good for the Pakis to outgrow their obsession with Kashmir... i yet have to watch one Pak News, without reference to India or Kashmir! Unfortunately for them, India seeks to grow and blossom, progress and prosper, without being obsessed with something.
    • My premise..? Numbers don't lie. A giant market is a giant period.

      That is not strictly true. I am from India, and I have worked in China and in UK. Based on my experience, numbers are not everything. While I also see a lot of potential in the huge population of India and China, there are major hurdles to overcome.


      1. Education:

        The education system in India is still the same system which aimed to churn out clerks to serve under the colonial British masters. The bright Indian professionals you meet in the western world are bright inspite of all the negatives of the education system


      2. Personal Responsibility:

        As a direct result of the poor education system, you can see laws being flouted at all levels (right from the traffic system to awarding government contracts). When you have a big mass of people who are not following the rules, (unless watched over by the police,) most of the energy is drained in watching out rathern than performing


      3. Corruption

        Again, following the above two, the system is corrupt through and through. NOTHING gets down without palms being greased and even after greasing, in many places nothing gets down EVER



        To mask their inefficiency, the political class resort to religeous fundamentalism, casteism and war mongering.



      I also hope that we can wish away all these. But these are the sad realities. The silver lining is the functioning democracy and the remarkable shrewdness of the ordinary man in seeing through all this.



      Thus, we are slowly inching towards progress, but as we say, sometimes you climb an inch and slip a foot, so it is tough

    • Superpowers are bad. They centralize control in a way that leads to autocratic control. Even if they start off with the best of intentions, it doesn't matter. This is basically a structural thing:
      When you create a center of power, the people most interested in occupying it will be those who are addicted to power, who will do anything to get it. And they do. Some are subtle, some are crass. A few people try to get the center to accomplish some other goal, but they have less motivation to seek it then the crazy ones. So you frequently end up with a crazy person controlling everything. (You might look at recent civics and history.)

      Of course, it is possible that you are only predicting, not desiring, and that I read you wrong (lack of vocal tone leads to such problems).

      This is like the "Linux will conqueor the world" joke seriously. As a joke it was quite humorous. As a serious goal ... well, it's a better choice than Windows, but the goal is a bad one. The goal should be to develop Linux into an operating system that would satisfy the needs of everyone in a manner that appears to us to be superior to all of the alternatives. Not to insist that everyone agree with us. It does help, however, that the us is a diverse enough group to include almost all of the points of view. E.g., GUI lovers and command line lovers (and the moderates). Experimenters and conservatives, and the moderates. etc. And that nearly anyone who wants to can become a part of the us.

      This brings us back to India. India is very important to us, because it contains a large number of computer users who can't afford MS prices. As Linux becomes "good enough" to satisfy their needs, and as copyright enforcement spreads, Linux will become more popular. And India is one of the places. Perhaps not a large fraction of the population is technically skilled (I'm certain that I have seen a biased sample!), but it contains a sufficiently large number. And they frequently use hardware that won't adequately support the recent versions of Windows. But on Linux they can get as far down as the command line, and scale up through BlackBox and TWM (etc.) to KDE and Gnome, depending on what their hardware will support. And they can generally all run the same programs (well, they can all run the same programs as the command line people, and most of them can run the same programs as the BlackBox people, and ...).

      Now consider this "computing grid": This will necessarily mean improving the communicaitons systems. This should have benefits throughout the society (perhaps not maximal...but their allocation isn't our choice). Etc.

  • It's no secret that India has a high disparity between the rich and the poor. Some of you might even seen it on TV (remember Amazing Race?). Somehow it makes me feel that this project is a waste of money for Indians.

    Now with sectarian violence threatening to rip the country apart, they still have time to think of an I-Grid?

  • From the article:
    "Such a grid would share or combine diverse computer memories and software in parallel processes to aid environmental modeling, fast analysis of satellite images, advanced chip design and simulation of heavy-duty equipment like turbines."

    I think it's interesting how when one nuclear agressive country imports Playstation 2's we freak the fuck out [theregister.co.uk], but when another nuclear agressive country creates the worlds largest supercomputing grid we say, Bravo!


    Ah well, such is life.

  • Colleges (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Telastyn ( 206146 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @08:38PM (#3115452)
    From what I understand this will be a large project to interconnect India's largest technical colleges (Institutes of Technology, which are very prestegious and good) and have smallish (by US standards) supercomputers at each one. They would then resell the pooled computing resources as needed.

    The American equivalent would be having a supercomputer at Stanford, MIT, UMich, CMU, GATech, and maybe 4 other places, connected via internet2 and ssh tunnels.
    • yeah I think its kind of the national supercomputer centers that the US universities had in late 80s/early 90s. They were called NCSA .. thats where Mosiac came from.

      • Re:Colleges (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Specifically, NCSA at UIUC. I think the NCSA "alliance" thing came later. I would add UIUC and Berkeley to the parent poster's list.
    • I hope you aren't suggesting using a SSH tunnel for the entire connection. You would need those massive systems *just* to encrypt/decrypt the traffic, you'd have nothing leftover for applications. And AFAIK, SSH tunnels are severely limited. You would need a fixed port for the tunnel on the client end and you would only be able to connect to a single remote site through it. We are not talking about a encrypted proxy here.

      Would you want to have to use a single port for every host you'd want to connect to over the network? www.uni1:8000, www.uni2:8001, www.slashdot:8050, on and on. You wouldn't be able to connect to more than 65k sites without constantly changing your local profile. Talk about a waste of resources..
  • How do I get a work visa to go to India to help them implement this? They can't have any tech people left over there.

    ~D
    • once in a while I see annoucements here at my university for programming/cs-related jobs available in India. It doesn't pay, it offers you a "valuable" experience... i think they pay for food and housing :p
      i doubt they would let american hacker kids get their hands on such a major project though... they got enough smart people over there... well i see i lot of them here in the states too, but that's neither here no there... i need to quit... *Esc*

  • Logo (Score:1)

    by halo8 ( 445515 )
    Is any one TOTALY DISTURBED by the logo of that govt agency?

    the black one with the bird, how nazi'ish

    geeezzz mabye these ppl protesting world trade are onto somthing here.. that logo is down right scary

  • India : Some Facts (Score:4, Informative)

    by matrix0040 ( 516176 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @08:56PM (#3115540)
    I guess the replies reflect a general ignorance about india and indians in general. India might have it's own problems with poverty and all but still countries in europe and US relied on indian brain power for their IT needs.

    About supercomputing in India. CDAC had developed it's first supercomputer long back and has been making a lot of progress in this field. And before raising a nuclear alarm, India already has nuclear capability (and can launch a satellite into orbit (2+2 = ?) ) besides there are many other civilian applications on parallel computing .. ever heard of weather prediction (farming and fishing happen to be the largest industry in India and weather prediction is critical for these industries) Now i am not going to make a big list of all the applications of parallel computing but developing nuclear weapon is just one among the vast number of critical applications. Hell even the cows in india need the supercomputing power (they're the ones plowing the farms ;-)

    • I used to know people that developed super computers back in eastern europe back before the curtain lifted. And they used to put wheather predictions first on their list on potential uses of their computers. In any event their computers were made exclusively for military purposes for russia. No i am not calling you a liar but i want to point out that wheather predictions have been a cover up for military use for supercomputers for a very long time. I dont even know whether we have any mathematical practical working mathematical models for pedicting the wheather that would make large ammounts of computing power useful.
      • ignore one of the mathematicals i guess:)

        and i will start using preview.
      • From Times of india [indiatimes.com]
        C-dac, based in the western city of Pune, plans to link the seven Indian institutes of technology (IITs), the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science and other academic institutions in the I-Grid, Arora said.
        The IIT's and IISc and CDAC (as someone pointed out) are all open places. You can just walk into the place. No pass or clearance (for iit's i know for sure) needed.

        I can tell you for sure that the terms of use of computational facilities at IIT's prohibit the use of computers for any nuclear or missile research. We don't do those kinds of work there. They're done in BARC and ISRO (though ISRO has joint projects with a few of iit's). But yes you can never draw a line between civilian and defence research. There are many applications of research. People will always find ways to use the civilain reseach for defence purpose but that doesn't mean one should not do research at all and go back to living in caves and hunting animals (ok a bit of exaggeration ;-))

    • The usual practice of US govt is to grant permission for the export in a case by case basis. e.g. if for weather forecast/ banking => okay,
      ICBM design => no,no.

      I have got a feeling that they want to get away with the supercomputing export control this time (for military use ???). Their proposed use is so general that it makes control impossible. Take an example of another "tier 3" export control region: Hong Kong. I remember that in 1999, Hong Kong Government granted a permission to buy a supercomputer (16 CPU 19.2 GFLOPS peak) for weather forecasting. The standard practice is the supercomputer must be hosted in a heavily secured room in the observatory, and the observatory must hold a list for personel who can have acess to the computer. Also, the local US embassy has the right to inspect the premise and gears for irregularities...

      Hong Kong as a major weather forecast hub in Asia will have to crank out a weather report each day. The chance to "sell" the spare CPU time out is pretty remote. But, still, US govt takes a lot of precautions. For a general purpose supercomputer distributed so widely like this and with many so-called "out-sourced contracts", do you think US govt can keep an eye on it effectively? BTW, in most cases, IT in Indian does not need supercomputer. But, their ICBM and advanced fighter (LCA) project will definitely need supercomputer in urgent....
      • I know about US export control. They sold us an IBM SP2 computer
        IBM SP: 15 Power 3 processors, SQ switch, 8 GB RAM, 9 GB Internal HDD per Node, 90 GB External HDD on SSA
        which was capable for gigabit network but didn't sell us the gigabit network equipment (switch/cards etc) saying it can be used for weapon research. Now I failed to understand the point behind this. They sold SP2 because they got $ for it but gave only 10MBps network with it.

        P.S. Param uses Solaris 6 ( i had mentioned this in a previous post but didn't have the version )

  • And there i was thinking I stood for Idiot, the Idiot-Grid :D Glad u cleared that up.
  • Or they are going to have lots of network downtime.
    • Why not? Last I checked, Kashmir was a part of India. The International Law recognizes the accession of Kashmir into India. Even the United Nations agreed that Kashmir would be a part of India (until the plebiscite is held). What it does not recognize is the occupation of a part of Kashmir by Pakistan.
      The plebiscite has not been held because Pakistan continues to illegally occupy a third of the region. Once Pakistan withdraws, there should be no problems in holding a plebiscite.
      Coming back to the topic at hand, I hope this network (or something similar) will spread to every nook and corner of the country, bringing high-speed access to the masses.

  • Indians (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by dansef ( 564423 )
    Q. Who are CEOs of the following well-known companies? A. Please find the answers yourself...... * AppNet America Online (The Largest ISP in the World) * Lucent Technologies (Pioneer in Fiber Optics) * Proxicom Network Solutions (The sole web domain assigner) * General Dynamics Corporation * Lazard Freres * Litton PRC * Columbia Capital * Primus Communications * Discovery Communications * Bell Atlantic * Cable & Wireless * The Motley Fool * Hughes Network Systems * Cybercash * MCI Worldcom * PSINet * Motorola * MicroStrategy * Equalfooting.com * Teligent, Inc. * MindBank * U.S. Airways * CIENA Corp. * BioNetrix * Net 2000 Communications * Computer Associates * SAIC * Startec * INOVA Health System * Cvent.com * Eglobe * Metrocall, Inc. * DynCorp * Consumer Elec. Ass'n * The Carlyle Group * Cyveillance * Nextel Communications * Fannie Mae * Intelsat * Draper Atlantic * Venture Fund, L.P. * Freddie Mac * Manugistics * Raytheon Systems Corporation * Spacevest * HSBC * United Airlines. What did you find? Do you find anything common between them? Yes, they are all Indians. They are known as the IT Mafia. They are the wealthiest among all ethnic groups in America, even faring better than the whites and the natives. There are 3.22 Million Indians in America; 38% of Doctors in America are Indians. 12% of Scientists in America are Indians. 36% of NASA employees are Indians. 34% of MICROSOFT employees are Indians 28% of IBM employees are Indians 17% of INTEL employees are Indians 13% of XEROX employees are Indians
    • AOL = Gerald Levin
      LU = Particia Russo
      PXCM = Acquired 9 months ago
      GD = Nicholas Chabraja (a fat old white guy)
      Lazard = Bruce Wasserstein
      LIT = Acquired in 2001
      Columbia = a pissant little firm with partners and no CEO

      Etc, etc...

      I don't mean to diminish the contributions of Indians to the world of business, but you obviously either have an agenda or are woefully misinformed.

  • Another article on same report (Score:4, Informative)

    by gupg ( 58086 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @09:22PM (#3115662) Homepage
    Here is an article on the same subject in the Times of India: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp ?art_id=2867426 [indiatimes.com]
  • When they have it all hooked up, when one of their citizens calls for tech support, to what country will their call be forwarded?


    "How about India?"


    "d00d! W3 R Indi4!"

  • Sounds perfect for transfering large quantities of ripped Indian Porn... wonder if they're all musicals.
  • India's buracrecy(sp?) will never let this go through. Itll be plauged by poor funding, secrutiy problems, and stupidity. If this does go through, and WORKS, its a miracle.
  • now we can saturate their tech market with h1-b visa workers from the US!!
  • From http://www.mac.doc.gov/sanctions/faq.htm [doc.gov]:
    The only sanctions remaining on India and Pakistan are restrictions on exports to Indian and Pakistani entities of nuclear or missile proliferation.


    What sanctions are we talking about here?

    --grendel drago
  • Here we go again. Yet another nation ignoring it's problems with common poverty, mass starvation, etc. while turning its attention towards an expensive information infrastructure. Shouldn't you fix domestic problems before you strive for technology, or is it a means to an end, i.e. having this wonderful network will feed the starving and shelter the homeless?

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