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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."
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."
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
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 ?
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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.