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IT Cutbacks For 2012 London Olympics
Slatterz writes "The IT backbone for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games is to be cut. According to the Games' chief integrator, Michele Hyron of Atos Origin, each section of the computing infrastructure will be made more efficient in order to minimise redundant equipment and hopefully reduce energy consumption. Unlike the Beijing Games, the results will be relayed via the public wireless network which will be available in the Olympic Park — this means cutting out the 2,500 results terminals. The team of workers will deliver more than 1,000 servers, 10,000 PCs and 4,000 printers."
Sport is sadly where the money is.
Getting special perks (better grades, better treatment etc) in school due to a sporting-interest always pissed me off.
I am probably contributing 10 times more to the economy with the job I do now with an engineering degree compared to the asshole who took some BS social studies degree on a sporting scholarship.
Giving people scholarships is all well and good, but at least require them to perform as well scholastically as they do in sports.
On a different subject... Why would you cut redundancy for such a huge event? I would love to see the primaries go down with no backup during a major event... I sure as hell wouldnt want to be the one responsible if it hits the fan at some point :-p
Londoners go on about how London subsidises the rest of the country, but this has actually always translated as "controls the banking system and so rips off your profit and claims it as its own". This has just gone massively pear shaped...so now the Government wants the rest of the country to pay for the Olympics through general taxes.
Don't get me wrong, I am an expat Londoner. But the mismanagement of London, where some of the most deprived areas of the country are next to some of the richest, and people earning £1 million a year try to avoid paying their cleaners even minimum wages, is truly horrible. I'm glad to live in a much more egalitarian part of the country where we don't have the resulting crime and drug problems.
GB cannot really afford the Olympics, which has become completely bloated owing to the ludicrous over promotion of the IOC. We should either tell the IOC to go deflate itself and run a Games that London can afford, or let Beijing have it a second time, thus helping them to pay for all those facilities. I favour the first option...in which case this should only be the start and there should be rigorous pruning of excess. Beginning with replacing Tessa Jowell and Sebastian Coe with Second Life avatars who won't be able to spend lots of public money on entertaining corrupt functionaries.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It's probably quite accurate wording. Unfortunately the government have failed to realise (yet again) that when you cut the backbone of anything you leave it paralysed.
Wankers, the lot of them!
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
The olympics encourage people to take up sports and get fit
Anything to back up that claim, it seems very unlikely. If it is true, what about the strain that sports related injuries would place on the NHS?
They promote tourism
Agreed, they promote tourism - to London, the place where most tourists go and only a small proportion actually get out and look at the rest of the country.
It's developing an area of London that has been run down for decade
Fine, but I suspect that what this run down area really needs isn't unused stadia. Other cities have used the Olympics as a way of improving infrastructure (e.g. Athens built a new cross-city public transport system), what comparable projects are going on in London? And this Northerner (living on the edge of the M25) agrees that London gets too much money spent on it, the fact that it is unfairly distributed is beside the point.
Finally, you can pump as much money as you want into schools and research and it tends to dissapear into a black hole
Part of the reason why the NHS introduced a new layer of middle managers was that this is what was recommended by the 'Management Consultants' who were brought in to look at it. I can't see any hint of vested interest there, can you? Using the NHS as an example for not funding public services isn't a good idea, it was the reduction in investment during the 80's and 90's that allowed it get into the state it is in. A constantly fully-funded NHS would likely have been cheaper in the long-term than allowing it to run down and then build it back up again.
a large screened terminal is still looking at around 125-150W and have the added disadvantage of being incredibly hard to sell off after the olympics.
No, money is created from something. What bankers do that makes money insubstantial is called leverage. A typical leverage structure in a functional economy is 10:1, where there is 10 times as much money issued on loan as there is in actual existence. Sounds crazy, but it works.
The current economic fiasco is due largely to excessive leverage, just like the crash of 1929. Currently, American banks that have either collapsed or are begging for bail-outs were leveraged over 100:1.
The shit hasn't quite hit the fan in Europe yet. Most major European banks are leveraged far more than 100:1, most notably German banks that exceed 400:1. So when European banks start to go tits up (and they will), keep in mind there is no treasury for the Euro. The only bailout funds are from individual countries, who are no doubt going to care more about themselves than an economic union that failed to protect them. So imagine changing currencies in the middle of the greatest economic crisis in 80 years. Think that's a good thing, or bad?
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
The Venue may be ready, but the transport links are no-where near ready. So they've got a venue but no-one will be able to get there. The Motorway (Freeway) ends 40miles from the Venue. Where the motorway ends there is a steep hill that has two lanes. HGV (Semi Trucks) crawl up at about 30mph. Even now in summer it take 10 - 15 minutes to travel 3 miles.
From about 30 Miles area from the venue is a mixture of narrow twisty single carriageway road with roundabouts (traffic circles) and dual carriageway. They are spending 83Million GBP sorting out the last 3 miles. But nothing is planned for the rest of the single carriageway road. Its total joke
Boris (don't look at the hands, look at the eyes) Johnson, has scrapped the western extension to the London Congestion charge. He asked a survey of 28000 what they wanted and apparently between 67 % and 86% of businesses wanted it scrapped. Sounds democratic, but I think that mob rule better fits the bill. Since the extension was introduced, roughly 30,000 fewer vehicles a day have passed through that zone. That's a line of cars over 55 miles (90km) long that haven't been clogging the streets on their way somewhere else. If you take into account the reduction caused by the original zone (70,000 vehicles), and you can add 131 miles (210km) to that figure. 186 miles of traffic NOT entering an area roughly 10 miles in diameter every day. I would have thought that was a good thing, but apparently not. What about the other 250,000 vehicles who still enter the area daily ?
...
Still, as long as he's popular
I worked the distances out using 1 car = 3 metres long. If some of those were trucks, then the line gets longer, and most cars are longer than 3m anyway.
Yes this is relevant to the Olympics. Efficient transportation is kind of essential at large events.
While cutting back is probably a bad idea, because the Olympics are hard enough to pull off even without cutbacks, part of me cheers because the Olympics is SO WASTEFUL and its good to see a little less waste. Billions of dollars to build a bunch of temporary facilities and showpieces that will have to be maintained at vast expense and eventually destroyed or converted to something else. And then it happens again in 4 years.
Though it would suck for everyone else, I sort of think the Olympics should just go around the same few venues and actually MAKE USE of the already built facilities.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Yes, enjoyment is a part of life, but as always, the balance is the key.
When a country spends around $20 billion (with a "b") on a single sporting event, one has to question whether the balance is right, or whether, somewhere along the way, we've lost the ability to prioritize social goals appropriately.
Just to put that sum into perspective, it is roughly two hundred times greater than the highest estimated amount of money required to immunize every child in Africa against malaria, which kills one child about every 16 seconds. So we can't take 0.5% of that budget for such a cause?
The increase in technological capacity of the so called "first world" in the last 100 years or so is surpassed only by the increase in callous disregard for others, and I think this is the OP's point.
I hate printers.