so, what laptap would you recommend ?? how would you rate the current indian market scenario with the local brands like wipro etc ?

Ananth

Baishampayan Ghose wrote:

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Ananth,

...

so, what laptap would you recommend ?? how would you rate the current indian market scenario with the local brands like wipro etc ?

I will heartily recommend a Toshiba. It's a premium brand and the quality of hardware is impeccable. I own a Toshiba myself and after three years of extremely heavy duty use (Compiling GNOME, Linux on a daily basis) and a fair amount of travelling, it still rocks. Regards, BG

Even I have same opinion about Toshiba. For corporates HCL is giving very good support in Mumbai. No idea about their quality of service towards the home segment.

/Benoy

On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 15:28 +0530, Ananth A wrote:

All the Sun employees in bangalore have a nice Ferrari machines .....i meant the Acer model with 2gig ram n amd64bit etc ;=)

Ananth

yup, Those are the ones....

Think sun got a volume discount ? :)

Erle

On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 18:17 +0530, Mukund Deshmukh wrote:

Have I subscribed to Laptop list or Linux list?

The thread is marked [OT] :))

On 21/04/06, Mukund Deshmukh betacomp_ngp@sancharnet.in wrote:

...

...

Have I subscribed to Laptop list or Linux list?

The thread is marked [OT] :))

Otherwise also this list has many non linux threads, like in last two month,

1. Laptop
2. Webhosting in India
3. MTNL
4. PCQ Linux
5. GPL voilation
6. Disclaimer on Qmail.
7. OSS Philosophy
8. Dialup Connectivity

if novice asks questions learned fellows direct them to google.com i get ur point about OT threads ... but imagine they r not there and then our list will have only 10-20 mails per month.

and who says that the topics[marked OT] are not at all related in some or other way to linux/open source ?

regards, Ranjeet Walunj ------------------------------------------ hum bolega to bolte hain bolta hain ! ------------------------------------------

PCQ Linux is not about linux ??? hmm... interesting... :=)

Read the thread carefully, you will find your answer.

sorry... coudnt help noticing it... imo its better to have some discussion going on than none!

Then should we discuss following also, 1. Job quota in private sector (where linux is used) 2. Receipi of pizza and coffee (needed while linux is installed) 3. Life Insurance Policy (beacuse LIC uses Linux)

Best Regards,

Mukund Deshmukh. Beta Computronics Pvt Ltd 10/1, IT Park, Parsodi, Nagpur-440022 Cell - 9422113746

On Thursday 20 April 2006 02:43 pm, Erle Pereira wrote:

On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 21:42 +0530, Dinesh Joshi wrote:

...

Personally, I am not biased against the Chinese but Chinese goods tend to have the "cheap" feel to them and I think that they have

Given the prices they seem to have a much more expensive finish than many of the "branded" goods around here.

...

definitely lowered the quality and have cut costs at the same time while trying to improve their margins.

What say the group?

Its not a bias. No matter what, Lenovo will find it very hard to match the quality and reliability of an IBM.

And what exactly is the magik that IBM has?. IBM has been outsourcing since the past three decades (maybe earlier). First Japan, then Taiwan and now China. Could be India or thailand or Burkina Faso. And the very same arguments were bandied about 25 yrs ago and will be in the future. Notice how nobody talks about bad quality if it is made in Ireland or "East Germany". IT is a cultural bias. Given the same amount of monetory inputs any one would produce quality, and has very little to do with location (and by implication people).

--- Erle Pereira biz@erlepereira.com wrote:

I Agree totally, but the Implication is not really about Location or People but about skewed company polices. IBM has proven that it can get a good laptop out in the market. It remains to be seen if the same can be achieved under lenovo leadership.

There is no implication of geographical bias in this.

Bull. Ofcourse there is a race bias here.

Why is it so difficult for people to digest the fact that an "Indian" or a "Chinese" company can be truly world class; i.e. Global in all respects? I find it a bit immature and presumtous(sic) when you think that Lenovo, a multi billion $ conglomerate may possibly not know their shit. Just because the majority shares of that division by held by a company which is ethnically chinese, but in all respects global, you are thinking that its a chinese company. Even if it is, so what? You think they'll have general Mao's screensavers default?

And the "Cheap feel" chinese goods that you talk about ARE cheap. and they are not branding/marketing them as ever lasting. You get what you pay for.

Could you elaborate on some of these skewed company policies please?

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Hi,

I was extremely happy to read your e-mail, Philip. I concur with your statements.

My thoughts below:

--- Philip Tellis philip.tellis@gmx.net wrote:

In general, I've seen more programmers from China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea who are keen on learning than in India.

I agree. You can also include Americans, Europeans, Russians and the Japanese.

During my MS I have worked/done projects with students from different parts of the world, and I really found them all to be very, very, very hard-working. They also have their fun when they have to.

Indians seem to want people to tell them what to do and they'll gladly do it.

This "need to be spoon-fed" culture comes from the current education system in most institutions. Some thoughts that I had written:

http://shakthimaan.com/misc/to-students.html

Web standards, accessibility, new trends are available online for anyone to study and build prototypes. Yet, I see more people from the US and UK,

I agree.

From all the colleges/universities that I have visited

so far:

* Out of say 40-60 students in a class, only 5-6 students are serious about "learning".

* Most of the students waste their time with gossip, movies, sports and they live in their own "shell", without knowing the world around them.

* Management themselves don't know about "quality" education/research and simply get an ISO standard because everyone has to.

* Faculty are not motivated to contribute/learn for themselves or to help their students *learn*.

* Some colleges motivate faculty to do a M.Tech. or PhD so they can show off that they have x number of PhDs, but, really don't contribute to the community or do research thereafter.

* People are lazy and have a very "indifferent" attitude towards their own country.

and even Taiwan trying these things out than from India.

Taiwan is a country that is a big player in VLSI fabrication, next to Japan, considering that even China doesn't have fabs. They, again, are very hardworking people.

In the UK, US and Korea, people are so well versed with the specs that they crack jokes about it in pubs. Again, this has to do with how keen people are to learn rather than being told what to do.

I agree. They are self-motivated.

I'm not really interested in the reasons. I just find that Indians in general do not like to take the initiative.

I agree. Its always, "Why do I care, why should I do it? Let him/her do it" attitude.

They're very good at doing what they're told to do as long as you don't tell them to think.

:)

So, to answer the question - people can't accept the fact that an Indian company is truly world class, because it isn't.

Indeed. Most of the IT hype is probably just to keep the share-holders happy?

One of my friends, Prof. Visweswaran, former Professor, Purdue University, West Lafayette campus, told me this:

"If you take the complexity of problem solving in a scale of 0.0 - 10.0, then:

< 1.0 = Service industry (majority in India) 3.0 = Simulation of an aeroplane projectile 5.0 = Embedded systems/VLSI 8.0 = Simulation of a nuclear fission reaction"

So, if you see what most people do in India, the complexity of problem solving is nothing and doesn't require much thinking.

India, it's far more likely to encounter a bad engineer than it is to encounter a good one.

I agree.

I always explain the "indifferent" attitude amongst students in India in all my presentations/workshops, to show them what real "education" is in other countries, and why we are not in par with anyone else, and how we can use FLOSS to change all this. I don't know if we can change this in India, but, my efforts will continue ...

SK

-- Shakthi Kannan http://www.shakthimaan.com

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On Thursday 20 April 2006 13:21, Philip Tellis wrote: *snip*

So, to answer the question - people can't accept the fact that an Indian company is truly world class, because it isn't. It's not like there are no bad/lazy engineers in other countries (I've encountered a few terrible American engineers), it's just that in India, it's far more likely to encounter a bad engineer than it is to encounter a good one.

[rant] I guess your observation is 100% correct. But 150 years under the British whip does that to you. I am glad that I am not one of them. I am one of the new breed Indians that think for themself, take initiative and have enthusiasm.

BUT I've found this country and its people are more bent on following the beaten track than think out of the box. You know what that does? It kills whatever enthusiasm, initiative that we have. Most of us succumb to doing what we are being told - no more and no less. It's a vicious cycle that nobody is ready to break.

Nobody comes forward and says "To hell with the reservations, to hell with everything we will take in only talent". My friend and I were denied admission to a programming contest, hosted by a very well known institution, since we were too *young* ( a couple 7th graders couldn't compete. The min requirement was 9th grade ). I am not saying that we would've won but at that age we were doing some pretty amazing stuff like writing GUIs ( using VESA ) in Qbasic and starting out with C. While the typical 9th grader was still trying to understand what a FOR...NEXT loop does. What kind of sick country kills its talent?

And we aren't getting wiser by the day. Introducing quotas in our premier institutions which shelter the little talent that we have is going to see to it that we are going to completely fail as a society in the not-so-far future.

I had the rare opportunity to meet Dr.Nagarjuna and spend a few hours understanding the Gnowsys project. During one of his wonderful explanations he told me about the kind of testing that will help judging the real merit of a person. Yet nobody adopts this kind of testing ( forget about our schools. what about IT companies? )

Its simple to criticize than to change the situation. I dont know you personally but I surely hope that you do something to change the situation. There are bad engineers in India only because nobody is ready to take the lead in creating an atmosphere that will harbor talent rather than kill it. May be I am ignorant or naive. If someone knows of such an institution please let me know. [/rant]

Getting back to the topic, many people seem to have misunderstood my point. Lenovo is now under a Chinese management. The general outlook towards the Chinese is that they produce cheap ( as in Cost as well as Quality ) goods. Will the Chinese be able to maintain the brand image that IBM Thinkpads had? Ever since they have taken over, more and more people have migrated to other machines and the existing ones dont have much faith in them. People were aware of the fact that their machines were manufactured in China while the company was owned by Americans. Now that the ownership + manufacturing is in China, will people trust the Lenovo brand as much as they trusted IBM?

Most have answered my question. The brand loyalty as fallen.

On Thursday 20 April 2006 16:46, Philip Tellis wrote:

One of the reasons I gave up teaching. It was very frustrating dealing with students who didn't want to learn. I didn't have to worry about the few who wanted to learn because they learnt even without me, and it didn't seem like I was cut out to help the others. All I can do now is incite people to rebel against the system - whether it's at work or when I talk at conferences.

You chose to walk away? Teaching is a gift. Not everyone has it. I personally would've loved a teacher who knew what he was teaching. I have learnt through hardship & manuals ( something that people today aren't accustomed to ). You should atleast teach those who really want to learn. You can save them a lot of work and wasted efforts.

On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 09:41:13PM +1000, Erle Pereira wrote:

On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 16:00 +0530, jtd wrote:

...

IT is a cultural bias. Given the same amount of monetory inputs any one would produce quality, and has very little to do with location (and by implication people).

I Agree totally, but the Implication is not really about Location or People but about skewed company polices. IBM has proven that it can get a good laptop out in the market. It remains to be seen if the same can be achieved under lenovo leadership.

I agree on this point. Its not about bias but a general reputation that goods manufactured in certain countries create. Bad export attitudes, corruption in the Govt., lax quality laws, local attitudes towards customers play an important role in quality. A company may be a global one but it will procure its raw material locally as much as possible to reduce costs. Raw material manufactured in the third world and in the developed nations may differ in quality. The very reason to set up production units in third world nations is to reduce costs otherwise what is wrong with USA or Europe for production? Another factor is the importance given to R&D. The developed nations are far ahead of the developing ones in research and innovation.

One other factor that I will take a risk to mention is the attitude of managers in Indian companies and their response to suggestions and improvements. A firend of mine works for an MNC at the management level and he travels abroad on assignments to its international offices. He finds a big difference in attitudes of managers here and outside and very often gets frustrated by the local politics and stubborn attitudes.

An example of local attitudes towards customers is our own country where even the MNCs from developed nations give sloppy service and the customers have to accept whatever is dished out to them. The mechanism to thrash them is not as strong as in the developed ones. So the country of manufacture does make a difference. Having said that, now practically everything is made in China, so it is the brand that will make the difference not region. Hope Lenovo lives up to IBM's quality or even better.

Regards,

Rony. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com