I wish everyone realizes what a joke this publicity-seeking exercise of a politician/bureacrat is (just as the so-called $10 laptop was). Discussing the technical merits or demerits of this whole absurdity would only give it more legitimacy.
Block Development Officer - Officer in charge of administering a block (a block in turn is a small administrative area typically a few villages).
SC - Scheduled Castes
ST - Scheduled Tribes
OBC - Other Backward Classes
SC, ST, OBC are different categorization of the castes.
Indian institutions (govt. jobs, colleges etc) have to offer atleast 49.5% seats to people belonging to these sections. This is kind of an affirmative action. This affirmative action is based on the archaic caste system and not on the something tangible like income. So quite often the rich people of these castes end up reaping the benefits. Because of this reason most of the intellectuals of India oppose such an affirmative action. Politicians still do it, because its a easy way to get votes.
Class IV employees - Employees under a particular government pay grade. The lowest grade in government pay scale. People in this grade form unions and assert their labour rights through frequent strikes.
Babus - may refer to either bureaucrats or the clerical staff in their office. Both are known to be admirers of red tape and corruption.
Those translations are handy but I think you kill the joke if you have to explain it. You have to know and have experienced the 'babu-culture' to appreciate the article, there's no way around it.
With less than 1% marriages inter-caste, they literally hate each other.
Since Economic mobility != Social mobility it is better for India to give autonomy to FC/BC/SC/ST/Minority regions with a single passport and currency across these regions.
Some of them are quite funny at their own. Like this one.
3. The default state of processes is “sleep” which is where they are found 95% of the time.
It's obviously meant as a joke, but if you think about it, your real processes in your real OS are (on average) going to spend even more time sleeping, and it's exactly what you want.
Don't worry, that's crystal clear, i didn't post the original link above just for that reason, an nonsensical/hilarious announcement.
But that announcement made me remember of that security researcher sent to jail for his analysis of the voting machine last month or so, who knows how that ended...
I am an Indian myself. Sadly the media here publishes news without analysing or questioning it. The same media made ankit fadia as a "hacker", who didn't even write a single exploit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankit_Fadia#Controversy . For all your information , Indian government has "created" an operating system out of debian, it is named as BOSS - http://bosslinux.in/ .
I sometimes wonder what the world would look like now if the UK govt had said right, computing is strategic, we need to maintain that capability, and had gone all-out to equip the public sector with the BBC Master or the Archimedes. Business would have followed suit. Or if the German govt had done the same with the Amiga.
Of course what would actually happen is they'd have bought Amstrad word processors and e-mailers from that snake-oil salesman Alan Sugar. Oh well.
I have a few friends who worked at DRDO, and the stories I've heard make them out to be total clowns. They're clueless where it comes to anything except missile design. I have no doubt that this is yet another clever plot to waste taxpayer money in the name of national security.
Based on what I've read (which admittedly isn't a whole lot), it sounds like they need to take a few minutes to read Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"[1].
Another attempt at Security by obscurity .. Security by obscurity is mostly an illusion .. And it's not like MSFT has it easy either as far as keeping their OS secure inspite of having hundreds of people working on it.
anyway, I have no idea what Real-time system with "Windows"
software really means. Bad quoting or they really need to polish up on what they say in press conferences.
disclaimer: I'm Indian and while this is all typical in terms of getting publicity, I have no idea on who makes these decisions.
This seems like a recipe for a failed project - a government agency building an OS. Either that or it will be another linux fork branded as "Government of India."
It sounds to me like a recipe for a successful project, if your definition of success is extracting money from the government. The technical aspect, of course, sounds pretty dodgy.
No, it's just that the linked article says that India is going to be designing and developing a completely new architecture, and I'm suggesting that no country has ever done that. And that the likely result will be monstrous cost and time overruns followed by a quick and dirty forking and rebranding of linux to save face.
I don't have a link to the official announcement, so I can't be certain, but I doubt they're going to build their own hardware architecture. It's reasonable to think they will develop a new OS; one can only hope to see an actual OS based on the principles behind Minix, but that's my little dream world there. :-)
There has been an attempt by C-DAC called "Bharat Operating System(BOSS)", based on Debian, in collaboration with NRCFOSS. It was endorsed by the Government of India for adoption and implementation on a national scale.
Grand plan right? Then, it went no where. Dead. period.
Having known a thing or two about C-DAC & DRDO, I seriously doubt this grand secret OS plan.
> Having known a thing or two about C-DAC & DRDO, [...]
A friend of mine used to work at C-DAC in the late '80s and early '90s. I remember talking to him about the work they were doing in the area of parallel processing. My memory is vague, but I remember he was quite excited to work there. Not sure when things had started to go downhill.
I can see some worth in the idea where a country/culture creates a home spun version of a Linux distro as it could come complete with the appropriate language packs and more relevant software included.
However, I can't imagine building an OS from the ground up for the purpose of fending for their own cyber security being a good idea.
India has already done the former, with BOSS Linux. It's essentially Debian with some different default language packs. Their web site also boasts "unique features" like the ability to serve web pages from their server edition (wow!), so I'm not sure how much they've actually added and how much is just hype.
Brazil tried this stunt in the 80s. Google "Brazilian Informatics Policy". Even when such a project fails its primary objective, it may advance the human resources immensely.
>"The only way to protect it is to have a home-grown system, the complete architecture ... source code is with you and then nobody knows what's that."
That is a choice quote. It's amazing that India is the go-to place for outsourcing when they have such backwards ideas about security and software development. Historically, the most secure operating systems on the market have been "open", not closed.
It's amazing that India is the go-to place for outsourcing when they have such backwards ideas about security and software development
That's a horrible generalisation. India has millions of developers. Just because one thinks security by obscurity is a good idea, doesn't mean they all do.
We in India tend to think of it as defined by its diversity of culture and opinion. That multifarious landscape has its fair share of idiots and charlatans.
This is just one of them with a soapbox and the sort of government grant that keeps on giving.
I'd like to apologize for making that statement. It was a gut reaction -- hastily typed -- toward the actions of the Indian government. I, as an American who doesn't agree with most of what our government does, should understand that the people and the government are not the same. Sorry for that.
I'll just say that I think the belief that closed == secure is a stupid notion given the history we all know, no matter who holds the belief.
can you provide some justification for "Historically, the most secure operating systems on the market have been "open", not closed."?
if you take security to be assured in some sense, TCSEC might be a reasonable standard. I do not know of any open source operating system certified to A1, but there is at least one closed source OS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTS-400
if you mean track record, in terms of number of compromises, i'd be interested to see the data.
> I do not know of any open source operating system certified...
Certification costs money which is most likely the real reason why open source OS's have not been "certified" as secure, not because they're intrinsically insecure. OpenBSD, for example, has a reputation for being secure.
Instead, I would humbly point you to http://greatbong.net/2010/10/14/the-grand-secret-os/, which recognizes this for what it actually is. At least you can have some fun talking about it.