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Comrade, You Are So Not Getting a Dell
theodp writes "At the World Economic Forum, Michael Dell's pitch to help Russia with its computers got the cold-as-Siberia shoulder from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. 'We don't need help,' shot back Putin. 'We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity' (video — rant starts at 1:24). 'Our programmers are some of the best in the world,' Putin continued. 'No one would contest that here — not even our Indian colleagues.'"
Actually, ex-soviet computer scientists apparently where not happy with the former governments choice to use non-soviet produced computers and protocols. They felt that it dampened the ability for them to make their own technologies.
Check out the history of Soviet computer technology on wikipedia sometime, its interesting. Most of it cuts off in the 60s and 70s and then they just started using IBMs and stuff.
Exactly. Most of the best Russian programmers are currently either making botnets or breaking DRM. During the late stages of the Cold War, they spent most of their time buying or stealing code from the West. A fact that the CIA once exploited to cause one of the largest non-nuclear man made explosions.
While you might like the DRM breakers, nothing here is much to get excited about.
Not a typewriter
Don't give them too much credit. Now that the petrodollar tap has been turned off, Putin is terrified of any real decline in standard of living. Like China, authoritarianism works on a population accustomed to it and enjoying a rapidly rising standard of living. Manufacturing brought this to China, and oil exports (and some raw materials exports) brought this to Russia.
With the collapse in oil prices and raw materials demand, Putin is in a tough spot. His currency sucks and they've wasted a ton of money trying to defend the ruble, pissing away a lot of their foreign currency reserves in the process. The stock exchange has been closed down a number of days due to declines.
If a bad global economy wasn't enough, the little tete-a-tete they had with Georgia made a lot of nervous investors even more nervous and they pulled a lot of resources out of Russia fearing all the usual problems that come with a nationalist thug like Putin.
We've seen what the USSR could accomplish as a go-it-alone economy, and it wasn't enough. Having a nominally capitalist system will help, but Putin needs to stop with the saber rattling and the blind nationalism.
According to the TopCoder algorithm competition stats:
1 Russian Federation 2930.06
2 China 2843.33
3 Poland 2842.79
4 Ukraine 2557.06
5 Japan 2483.83
6 Canada 2426.56
7 United States 2320.98
8 Slovakia 2291.73
9 South Korea 2226.98
10 Belarus 2206.81
Let's just hope the next war isn't fought with robots.
I'm not entirely convinced that you are 100% correct here. Recent tech spats with Russia et al include MS and piracy in Russian schools, OSS software directives, and several minor stories I seem to remember about the Russian government pulling away from outsiders. I'm pretty certain that after the cold war they have more reason to not want 'help' than any of us might imagine. My point is I don't think this is an isolated incidence of over reaction. I think it fits with an overall plan for IT infrastructure for government, as far as I can tell.
In truth, after RefFlag Linux and some other efforts around the globe, I've been waiting for Russia et al to announce something that more or less tells Redmond to get stuffed. By way of guilt by association reasoning, if Putin and Russia manage to thumb their noses at North American software/hardware manufacturers, it's nearly certain that many others will follow suit. I suspect there are a lot of politics involved though... and that causes me curiosity.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Um, given the nature of computing based on electricity trinary computing would have simply been higher order code, unless your talking about levels of electric power, say 0, 1/2, and 1, but then the tech would have been vastly more complicated and almost certainly more prone to breakdown for a relatively small return.
-1, 0, 1?
I've worked with a few H1-B's, and that's generally the impression I got. We had one guy who had a CS Masters from some Indian university, but after 6 months of trying, he still couldn't write a simple text processing app. At another job, we had hired a Crystal Reports 'expert' to create some reports that none of the staff had time for. For a couple of days the guy would ask how to make the numbers round down, rather than just rounding off. On the second day I took pity on him and showed him the joys of the Floor function. I had never programmed anything in CR, but I knew that there had to be a floor operator in there somewhere.
I'm sure there are good Indian programmers. I'm also relatively certain that most of them are here on student visas, working on their grad school degrees. Those not in school most likely expect the same level of pay as their American counterparts. Never forget that you get what you pay for.
If price fell, it's good management to cut down production.
At least the Russian government is smart enough to steal money making industries as opposed to the US which bails out money losing businesses.
\u262D = \u5350
He's got a point. Building computers is simply not a terrifically difficult business.
I was in St. Petersburg (Putin's hometown) a few months ago visiting in-laws, and I helped them pick out their first computer from a local vendor. What they got was a pretty nice machine for the money. The selection was good. A fine consumer experience, overall.
Do they need a foreign corporation in that market locally? Would they benefit immensely from that? Not really.
Ahh, but now you bring up the second Russian socio-political hangup from Tsarist times - fear of being invaded, of having their territory taken away, of being manipulated. they have good reason, as well - they HAVE been invaded a number of times, and it cost them dearly. But it's become a blockade to better relations - they see ALL interaction with the West as potential to lose something - territory, prestige, resources.
I saw a map by a Russian political thinker which shows the US split into 4 regions, with Canada taking the North Central states, Mexico taking South Central over to Florida, China taking the West Coast, and the EU taking the East Coast. The map was wholly preposterous (can you imagine SC and NY in a voluntary political union?), until you looked at the cultural background of the author. The Russian's greatest fear is being invaded by outsiders and parceled up. So they projected that onto the US, looking at the States as territory and not individual political entities.
Besides which, I already know how it will go after the USA falls apart: the New England states will form the nation of...New England; NY will go their own way, California will split into 3, and the Confederacy will rise again.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
If the advice of foreign consultants was so bad - why has it worked fine for the other members of the Eastern bloc? If the fault is of the foreigners coming up telling Russia what to do, then how did Poland end up democratic and prosperous while Russia is autocratic and at the whim of oil/gas prices?
The problem is that their culture and everything else is diametrically backwards from the rest of the western world. Someone reading Russian literature will notice the extreme difference from western, same with lots of other things. a couple of my Russian friends were able to crack the encryption on a Home automation systems software encryption in literally minutes. It would have taken me days to do it. They try to explain it to me but you have to "think Russian", as they put it to me, to understand it.
Backwards and different is not a bad thing, I think it's a great thing... But their desire to be "like us" is nuts. Be yourself instead.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
3. It's about time Russia asserted itself internationally. For nearly a decade and a half, Russia did exactly as IMF and Washington DC told it. Needless to say, neither of the two had Russia's interests in mind.
Questions?
Yes, I have questions. Do not change the subject by talking about what America does. What I want to know from you, since you seem to think you are an expert is... How does this "reassertion" benefit non-Russians?
Is there more to this reassertion than simply supporting noxious dictators (ie. Sudan, Cuba) and stealing territory from other countries (ie. Georgia)?
I'm not going to deny that Russia benefited little from doing what it was told to do, mostly because President Bush was too idiotic to understand the concept of "quid pro quo", but I fail to see how this new, proud Russia is really any better than the old Soviet one, which also supported noxious dictators and stole land (end of WWII for example).
Agreed. Capitalism is the system that requires a steadily rising standard of living to survive. Authoritarian states are created and thrive when standards of living are low.
In fact, if a Capitalist states endures a falling standard of living for long enough, it will often end up being replaced by force with an authoritarian controlled economy.
I think you're overlooking the billion plus people to the south that would gladly reallocate their people to resource ratio at the expense of the Russians.
I think Westerners don't understand that the word
'help' has a very negative almost insulting
connotation in many countries. In the West,
especially in the US, it is used casually
("Can I help you?", "How can we help?", etc.).
If Michael Dell had phrased his question differently
he would have got a more benign answer.
Revolutions are never child's play.
You can make whatever rationalization you like, but hard sales pitches ARE insulting. Dell's hard sales pitch was especially insulting given the context in which it was delivered.
To any true socialist (which I doubt Putin is), Dell's comments are even more insulting. Allow me to rephrase Dell's question to be more transparent to his motives: "What goods and services can we sell you at inflated prices, so that we may unfairly enrich ourselves and our own and disadvantage you and yours?" Remember, a goal of socialism is exchanges of equal value in every transaction, as much as that is humanly possible. What Dell's offer implied was anything but philanthropic or socialistic.
And Dell did this on a public stage at an economic forum. Putin had every reason to be insulted.
I would suggest that authoritarianism does not require a rise in living standards to keep on going, and indeed I would suggest that a perception of danger and mass insecurity in the face of either economic or military threat is what often creates it in hard times. If you are American you have surely just lived through a period where the political utility of the perceptual emergency was clear.
military threats and economic threats are pretty different. military threats are generally external and so they don't seem to always damage the regime that's in power, but economic threats generally are perceived to be due to an internal problem and so people want a change to rectify that problem. Right now Putin is trying to emphasize that he thinks that the economic problem was caused by the US and not their own system, so that he can avoid just that problem.
Naomi Klein answers (among others) this question in The Shock Doctrine. The Poles are where they are despite the 'foreign consultants' and have had a very rough time.
An excerpt from a NY Times review:
I highly recommend Shock Doctrine, a good antidote against Friedmannism. She makes some comparisons I feel uneasy about, but overall a worthwhile read.
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He's off to a fair (6 and 1) start. Track it here http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid.
This makes me think that if we have three states -- negative, zero, and positive -- we can use two alternative binary systems on the same computer. One with base 2, the other with base (-2).
The advantage of the (-2) system is that it doesn't require special treatment of negative numbers.
For example:
-7 would be "101", -7 == (-2)^3+(-2)^0,
7 would be "11011", 7 == (-2)^4 + (-2)^3 + (-2)^1 + (-2)^0 .
The dis-advantage is that with the (-2) base we have longer number representations. Which reminds me that there is a proof that with the ternary base one has the most economical number representation.
A visitor to the USSR brought home a Soviet clone of the Apple II, which they called IIRC a "Blaht," which means apple in Russian. He wrote an article about it for Byte.
It was a pretty clunky, unreliable device. It was kind of disappointing that the Soviets couldn't clone a western computer cheaply, something that gave the Taiwanese and Koreans no trouble.
One theory was that the Soviets could equal western technology when they made it a top military priority, but not otherwise.
Loren Graham, the MIT professor who probably knows more about Soviet science than any American, said that the Russians had the "blackboard theory": anything you could do with a blackboard and chalk, they could do. But when they actually had to build something, they had trouble. This was ironic for an ideology built on materialism.
But give them credit -- they did have the first satellite in space, the first man in space, and the first woman in space. The Moscow Institute of Cardiology developed the precursor of what would turn out to be tissue plasminogen activator, which is used today to treat people with heart attacks and strokes. Graham said that one thing they did well was their education system. They educated more chemists than anybody else in the world.
If my gradually fading secondhand knowledge of history is still accurate, it was more the rate of the USSR's modernization that was so alarming. Stalin began industrialization initiatives that, though absolutely brutal on the people, did result in rapid modernization. They saw no alternative: "modernize or perish".
Then there was Sputnik... imagine seeing that (the booster was essentially the first ICBM) in 1957 and then hearing that the USSR was building missile bases in direct striking distance of the USA five years later. It would have certainly freaked me out, and secondhand as my knowledge of the Cuban Missile Crisis may be, I'm old enough to remember the air raid drills that still took place three decades after it ended.