I was watching the Business News channel Monday, Aug. 13, and they had a
short blurb that HP has won a bid to take over MS help desk support.  Has
anyone else out there heard this?

If it's true I wonder what accent you will hear when you call for MS
support?

-----Original Message-----
From: Wirt Atmar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2002 2:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] HPQ Moving Much Of Its Technical/Customer
Support Offshore


Ken wrote yesterday:

> Literacy in U.S.: 97%
> Literacy in India: 52%

In the general categories of Indian scientifc & technical literacy and "if
you can do this, you can do anything", the following appeared in today's NY
Times:

======================================

New Method Said to Solve Key Problem in Math

By SARA ROBINSON

Three Indian computer scientists have solved a longstanding mathematics
problem by devising a way for a computer to tell quickly and definitively
whether a number is prime -- that is, whether it is evenly divisible only by
itself and 1.

Prime numbers play a crucial role in cryptography, so devising fast ways to
identify them is important. Current computer recipes, or algorithms, are
fast, but have a small chance of giving either a wrong answer or no answer
at
all.

The new algorithm -- by Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena of
the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur -- guarantees a correct and
timely answer. Though their paper has not been published yet, they have
distributed it to leading mathematicians, who expressed excitement at the
finding.

"This was one of the big unsolved problems in theoretical computer science
and computational number theory," said Shafi Goldwasser, a professor of
computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the
Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. "It's the best result I've heard in
over 10 years."

The new algorithm has no immediate applications, since existing ones are
faster and their error probability can be made so small that it is
practically zero. Still, for mathematicians and computer scientists, the new
algorithm represents a great achievement because, they said, it simply and
elegantly solves a problem that has challenged many of the best minds in the
field for decades.

Asked why he had the courage to work on a problem that had stymied so many,
Dr. Agrawal replied in an e-mail message: "Ours was a completely new and
unexplored approach. Consequently, it gave us hope that we might succeed."

The paper is now posted on the computer science department Web page at the
Indian Institute of Technology (www.cse.iitk.ac.in).

Methods of determining whether a number is prime have captivated
mathematicians since ancient times because understanding prime numbers is
the
key to solving many important mathematical problems. More recently,
attention
has focused on tests that run efficiently on a computer, because such tests
are part of the underlying mathematics of several widely used systems for
encrypting data on computers.

So-called primality testing plays a crucial role in the widely used RSA
algorithm, whose security relies on the difficulty of finding a number's
prime factors. RSA is used to secure transactions over the Internet.

On Sunday, the researchers e-mailed a draft of the paper on the result to
dozens of expert mathematicians and computer scientists. Dr. Carl Pomerance,
a mathematician at Bell Labs, said he received the paper on Monday morning
and determined it was correct.

After discussing the draft with colleagues over lunch, Dr. Pomerance
arranged
an impromptu seminar on the result that afternoon.

That he could prepare and give a seminar on the paper so quickly was "a
measure of how wonderfully elegant this algorithm is," Dr. Pomerance said.
"This algorithm is beautiful."

======================================

Wirt Atmar

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