pkj's comments

"The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade."...

That's wildly optimistic. The reality is unemployment rate for indian engineering graduates now ranges from an optimistic 50% upto 80%..

[1] http://www.livemint.com/Industry/HCWB4sLvFBxfIFyNBYtqOP/Degr...

[2] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-18/news...

AppFog was built originally around another PaaS, Cloud Foundry. Wonder how this offering will compare with that. I can understand that there would be more control because of the IaaS nature of the offering. Anything stopping them from doing the same with Cloud Foundry ?

Most companies use a variant of stack ranking. If you agree with the core philosophy that more productivity => better pay, then you need to implement some sort of a differential pay algorithm. Having said that the implementation really sucks. It is not natural and continuous, rather people get pigeonholed into discontinuous buckets.

Let me take a concrete example closely mirroring my experience. There are 4 fixed performance buckets. Top 5%, Next 20%, Next 65%, Bottom 10%. They get hikes of 20%, 8%, 4%, 0% respectively. Again, these are fixed numbers. Let us assume there are 4 people A,B,C,D and out of a hypothetical score of 100, score 95, 90, 87, 85 respectively based on various parameters. You would assume that since D differs in ability with A by 10%, he would get 90% of A's hike. But sorry, due to the stack implementation he gets 0%, while A gets 20% ! Let's say if the scores of A, B, C, D were instead 100, 50, 25, 5, the hikes would have make much more sense.

Summary: Discrete curve of benefits works well only when it closely matches the curve of people productivity. This is rare. So it just ends up being unfair and creates an unhealthy rat race.

Have been a vi user for a long time. For c/c++ it is awesome and good enough. Sublime is fine too. Surprised no one mentioned Source Insight though ( unfortunately only windows ), was used in pretty big projects I was involved in. Speedy with auto-completion, caller/callee functions, beautiful syntax highlighting etc..

For large web programs ( html/js etc), once you use Sublime, no going back to VI. The plugin ecosystem for js fwks are awesome.

>never had to download "random codecs" from "random codec packs"

Second that. I have had videos which couldn't be played on VLC (codecs or missing frames) play nicely with mplayer. Easily the best versatile player, especially if you are conversant with the command line options ( or take a quick look at man page).

I doubt people really know ON/OFF by reading the text. More of a sense of alignment. In India, you don't have text on the switches. Also, it's opposite to the direction of the switches in US (Pressing down is ON). Further, if you have 2-way switches there is no way of labeling them.