Coimbatore in top 70 preferred destination for Outsourcing

Six Indian cities - Bangalore, Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune - are among the eight top global destinations for outsourcing of services, according to a new survey released Tuesday.

The other two are the Philippines’ Manila NCR and Ireland’s Dublin city, according to the 4th Global Services-Tholons Top 50 emerging outsourcing destinations survey, jointly done by Global Services from CyberMedia and Tholons, a services globalisation advisory firm.

The Next 10 Outsourcing Destinations considered to be ‘Top 10 Aspirants’ from a total of 68 destinations is dominated by China’s Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, Poland’s Krakow, Argentina’s Buenos Aires, Egypt’s Cairo and Brazil’s Sao Paulo.

Avinash Vashistha, CEO of Tholons says: “For a CIO today, finding a Centre of Excellence is more than just lower cost. It must consider location, risk mitigation for business, cultural affinity and scalability of the skilled workforce.”

“The service providers need to think through their offerings so as to differentiate as the competitive advantage is rapidly vanishing due to cut throat competition and market saturation,” adds Vashishtha.

India continues to top the list with revenues of US$40 billion in IT-BPO export services in 2008. Indian IT-BPO export services posted 35 percent year on year growth rates in the last five years.

Interestingly, India’s FDI inflows posted the largest increase globally at 46 percent in 2008 - from $25 billion to $46 billion even as global FDI flows decreased from $1.9 trillion to $1.7 trillion and several developing economies struggled to acquire investments from client nations.

Compared to the previous year’s rankings, this year’s study reveals minimal shifts in rankings because of the overall slowdown in the pace of outsourcing activity in the face of global recession.

Seven Chinese cities - Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Dalian, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Tianjin - and six Indian cities - Chandigarh, Kolkata, Coimbatore, Jaipur, Bhubaneswar, Thiruvananthapuram - make it to the list of next 60 outsourcing destinations.

The study lists India, Philippines, Ireland, China and Brazil among Top 5 Offshore Nations “with a high degree of maturity and record of successful delivery capabilities.”

Canada, Russia, Mexico, Vietnam, Poland are listed as Top 5 Emerging Nations. The difference between the Top 5 and the Next 5 offshore nations is most pronounced in the service level maturity, the study said.

Courtesy : The Hindu

Tamil Nadu Tourism Board

A new effort taken by the Tamil Nadu Tourism Board to promote "Enchanting Tamil Nadu".

The link gives a 360 degree view of several monuments in the state.

Take a Virtual Tour of the monuments.

The views are really beautiful and breathtaking.


P.S. : Zoom in and take a close look.. you might see a few inscriptions in some of the monuments...

COBOL turns 50!!!

COBOL celebrated its 50^th birthday on September 18, 2009. Many developers see COBOL as a relic, a dying dinosaur, or a stodgy language that has been superseded by more powerful systems. I believe that viewpoint as being uninformed. In honor of COBOL’s 50^th birthday, here’s an overview of COBOL’s history and place in the current development landscape.

COBOL’s origins

COBOL was designed by the late, great Grace Hopper. Ms. Hopper had an extraordinary influence on the computing industry, including writing the first compiler, the “A compiler.” In addition, she served in the U.S. Navy, eventually attaining the impressive rank of rear admiral; there is even a U.S. Navy destroyer named after her in honor of her service.

COBOL was designed by committee, including representatives from the three government agencies and six major companies. The initial seed was planted in April 1959. On September 18, 1959, the committee picked “COBOL” for the name, and by the end of 1960, COBOL compilers had been completed and working programs had been made. (Thanks to Wikipedia for information about COBOL’s history.)

COBOL is an interesting language. Originally, it did not have many of the features that we have come to rely upon. For instance, you would not expect to find object oriented capabilities in 1959, but there were not even local variables then. The structure of a COBOL program is also different from what you would expect, being divided into different “divisions,” each of which serving a particular purpose. COBOL is best known for batch processing, in which large amounts of data are fed in and acted upon on a regular basis. In recent years, COBOL has undergone many changes and adapted to the needs of modern programmers, including adding object-oriented programming capabilities.

COBOL applications run the world

The average person deals with a COBOL-powered system 13 times a day. ATMs, inventory systems, airline ticketing, and health insurance all run on COBOL.

COBOL has been ported to numerous platforms, and currently runs on everything from traditional mainframes to Windows PCs on the .NET Framework. Forrester Research analyst Mike Gilpin says, “32% of enterprises say they still use COBOL for development or maintenance.” That is remarkable penetration for a language that has been around so long and that has been supposedly “superseded.”

In fact, I recommend COBOL as a job skill for developers looking for a long-term, stable career. The simple truth is the COBOL applications out there cannot be replaced. It is an impossible task in reality. In and of itself, this would not necessarily mean a strong job market. But for a variety of reasons, fewer and fewer colleges are giving their students exposure to COBOL, and new programmers have a negative perception of it and avoid it, meaning that the pool of new programmers is quite small. To make matters worse, the COBOL workforce is aging rapidly, and these developers are transitioning to management, retiring, and dying faster than they can be replaced. Meanwhile, new developers on these projects can take years to become fully acquainted with what it takes to maintain a million line application. This all adds up to a great environment for someone looking for a steady job over the years to come.

Courtesy : TechRepublic

Swine Flu

Don't panic, be careful. That's the advice from health experts who point out that the H1N1 influenza is milder than the seasonal flu and that 55 percent of the more than 1,000 cases in the country have already been cured and discharged from hospitals.

India has so far has reported 1,079 swine flu cases and 12 deaths. While 589 have been discharged, the others are still undergoing treatment in various government hospitals in the country. "The swine flu virus is a mild strain and, in fact, is less virulent than the seasonal flu, which causes more deaths... We have treatment for it, which is Tamiflu. It is a curable disease, not an incurable one," said Health Secretary Naresh Dayal. According to Randeep Guleria, head of medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, worldwide about 95 percent of those hospitalised have been discharged. "Global data shows that less than six percent of those affected needed hospitalisation, while one third (of those in hospital) needed ICU care. However, those who have recovered from the flu are not immune to the infection and have to take care as others. But the next time they get the virus, it would be a mild one," Guleria said. Officials also reassure those panicking at the rapid spread of the disease that an indigenous vaccine to tackle the viral disease is on its way. "The work to develop an indigenous vaccine and testing kit is also going on at a fast pace and we will have a vaccine by year-end when we are expecting a more virulent strain of flu to be active," said M. Katoch, secretary in the department of health research. A total of 4.6 million people have been screened for swine flu across the country in the past three-and-a-half months; of these 5,000 people were tested for the flu. The central government has spent over Rs.30 million (Rs.3 crore) for testing - 1,079 positive cases and 3,921 negative. The swine flu testing kits are imported from a US company and each positive test costs Rs.10,000 while a negative test costs Rs.5,000, the government says. Courtesy : in.com

Space station toilet breaks down :P

The main toilet has broken down on the International Space Station (ISS), currently home to a record 13 astronauts, Nasa said.

Mission Control told the crew to hang an "out of service" sign until the toilet can be fixed.

The crew of the shuttle Endeavour is confined to using the craft's loo. ISS residents are using a back-up toilet in the Russian part of the station.

If repairs fail, Apollo-era urine collection bags are on hand, Nasa said.

"We don't yet know the extent of the problem," flight director Brian Smith told reporters, adding that the toilet troubles were "not going to be an issue" for now.

Bad plumbing?

The main toilet, a multi-million-dollar Russian-built unit, was flown up and installed on the US side of the space station last year.

It had broken down once before, requiring a rush delivery of a replacement pump by the shuttle Discovery in 2008.

And another toilet-related row broke out earlier this year, when a Russian cosmonaut complained that he was no longer allowed to use the US toilet because of billing and cost issues.

Despite the latest housekeeping setback, astronauts managed to transfer spare par

ts from the shuttle Endeavour to the ISS on Sunday, the second day of

a planned 11-day mission.

Nasa was also investigating why Endeavour's tank shed an unusually large amount of insulating foam during its launch.

Courtesy : BBC News

The King of Bugs

One bug to rule them all - IE5,IE6,IE7,IE8,Netscape,Firefox,Safari,Opera,Konqueror,
Seamonkey,Wii,PS3,iPhone,iPod,Nokia,Siemens.... and more.

Reference : [GSEC-TZO-26-2009] - One bug to rule them all
CVE : CVE-2009-1692 (created by Apple, this bug has same root cause)
Credit: Thierry Zoller

Affected products :

• Internet Explorer 5, 6, 7, 8 (all versions)
  
• Chrome (limited)
  
• Opera
  
• Seamonkey
  
• Midbrowser
  
• Netscape 6 & 8 (9 years ago)
  
• Konqueror (all versions)
  
• Apple iPhone + iPod
  
• Apple Safari
  
• Thunderbird
  
• Nokia Phones : Nokia N95 (Symbian OS v.9.2),Nokia N82, Nokia N810 Internet Tablet
  
• Aigo P8860 (Browser hangs and cannot be restarted)
  
• Siemens phones
  
• Google T-Mobile G1 TC4-RC30
  
• Ubuntu (Operating system sometimes reboots, memory management failure)
  
• possibly more devices and products that support Javascript,
  

Patch status :

• Mozilla : Fixed in Firefox 3.0.5 and 2.0.0.19
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=460713
  
• Thunderbird (unknown)
  
• IE : No fix for IE5,IE6,IE7,IE8 until IE9
  
• Konqueror : unknown (did not respond)
  
• Apple iPhone&iPod : patched
  
• Nokia : unknown, opened a case but never came back
  
• Aigo P8860 : unknown
  
• Siemens : unknown
  
• Chrome : Patched, version unknown (only tab was affected anyways)
  
• Webkit : fixed in r41741 - https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23319
  
• Opera : Patched after version 9.64
  
• Sony PS3 - still affected
• Nintendo Wii Opera - still affected, Opera sent a "notice" to Nintendo, never heard back from Opera
• Others ? Find out by visiting the POC at http://crashthisthing.com/select.html
  

I. Background

Quoting Wikipedia "ECMAScript is a scripting language, standardized by Ecma International in the ECMA-262 specification and ISO/IEC 16262. The language is widely used on the web, especially in the form of its three best-known dialects, JavaScript, ActionScript, and JScript."

II. Description

Calling the select() method with a large integer, results in continuous allocation of x+n bytes of memory exhausting memory after a while.

The impact varies from null pointer dereference (no more memory,hence crashing the browser) to the reboot of the complete Operation System (Konqueror&Ubuntu).

There had never been a limit specified as to how many html elements the select call should handle, after the report of this Bug, vendors apparently agreed to a limit of 10.000 elements : "Talked to some Apple and Opera guys at the WHATWG social, and we decided this was a good number"

III. Impact

The impact varies from browser to browser and sometimes from OS to OS

• Konqueror (Ubuntu)- allocates 2GB of memory then either crashes the Browser or (most often) the OS reboots. Ubuntu's memory management system is configured as to NOT stop the process that consumes too much memory, but a random process. This sometimes leads to processes that are vital for the OS to be killed, hence the reboot. I am not kidding. Thanks to 'FX' for the memory management hint.
• Chrome : allocates 2GB of memory then crashes tab with a null pointer
  
  
• Firefox : allocates 2GB of memory then the Browser crashes
  
  
• IE5,6,7,8 : allocates 2GB of memory then the Browser crashes
  
  
• Opera : Allocated and commits as much memory as available, will not crash but other applications will become unstable
  
  
• Nintento WII (Opera) : Console hangs, needs hard reset
  Video: http://vimeo.com/2937101 (Thanks to David Raison)
  
  
• Sony PS3 - Console hangs, needs hard reset
  Video: http://vimeo.com/2937101 (Thanks to Chris Gates)
  
  
• iPhone - iPhone hangs and needs hard reset
  Video: http://vimeo.com/2873339 (Thanks to g0tcha)
  
  
• Aigo P8860 (Browser hangs and cannot be restarted)
  

IV. Proof of concept

URL: http://www.crashthisthing.com/select.html

Some have not understood what this code does, it does NOT loop as some vendors claimed, it just calls select.lenght() ONCE with a huge integer. One might wonder if over the 9 last years that this bug existed, nobody ever entered a large number in a select.lenght() call.

V. Disclosure timeline

Nothing particular to note.

V. Thanks
Chris Gates, David Raison, Fahem Adam,a team of engineers that recognise themselves, oCert
for not helping coordinate this bug.

Note: All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

Courtesy : G-SEC

Funniest Thread!!!

Hey this is one of the funiest post i ve ever read in a technical forum...

Go ahead read it and have a good laugh....