Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
and said "Well ... ok then."
you're getting a polonium 210!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not going back far enough. The Russian fear of being perceived as backass country folk goes all the way back to the Tsars. Russia really wanted to be counted among European nobility, but could never really cut it, so they are hyper-sensitive to anything indicating that they are not up-to-date/cutting edge. AFAIK, "nekulturny" (literally, uncultured) is still the highest insult you can throw at a Russian.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Did anyone actually watch the clip? It appeared to me that Putin gave a very mild rebuke to Dell, and then went on to do just as much marketing of Russian IT :-) It was not a big "F-You Dell, F-you The West" like the headlines imply.
It's just as well. They can configure the OS scheduler to divide time equally between all processes.
In Putin's defense, he was slapping down a marketing pitch. The linked article gets it wrong on a subtle but significant detail: Mr. Dell didn't ask "If" Dell could help, he asked "How" Dell could help.
Who can blame Putin for being offended by the implication that Russia needed Mr. Dell's help? So he let him have it with both barrels, much as any of us might react to an unwanted and annoying telemarketer, if they gave us a similarly arrogant pitch.
And by the way, shouldn't the lame jokes be changed to start with "In post-Soviet Russia"?
Not that I agree with him, but I understand Putin's response. Look at it from Putin's POV: Putin is a very strong nationalist. And just about every country, not least Russia, tends to be quite sensitive to American condescension or arrogance, real or perceived. So when Dell says, in what would be an okay-ish remark between Americans, 'how can we help you', it's easily felt as condescending in foreign eyes. Especially Russian ones and especially Putin's. Add to that the cultural factor of Russian temperament and you get what Putin said. Dell probably should have phrased it in a more neutral manner. For instance, he could have been more generalized and simply ask "How can the IT sector in Russia be expanded to better utilize the reserves of talent there?" Or something similar. By his response, you'll find out if there's a role for you or not. So simply by dropping the 'How can we help' bit, you avoid the implication that they _need_ help (even if they do, nobody really wants to be told that by someone else) and the further implication that 'we' are the only ones who can do so.
Unless, of course, the owner of a process is a Party official.
Putin wasn't reacting to Dell offering computers so much as Dell suggesting that Russia had a problem with technical talent that needed addressing, which *is* obviously absurd! Even if Russia did have a problem developing IT talent, the solution isn't a big order of Dell computers, even if Dell honestly thinks it is.
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.
Here.
âoeYou know, the trick is we're not someone in need of help. We're not invalids. Help is something that you should give to poor people, to people with limited capacities, to pensioners, to developing countries... As for Russia and our partners in Europe, in the United States, in some Asian countries, there should be a partnership of equals.â
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
That's an unreasonable expectation. If you fuck up for eight years in a row, you don't simply stop hearing about it a few weeks after you begin to stop.
"Mister SVCHost, Tear Down This Thread!"
In India, we have thousands (literally) of kids graduating with computer engineering degrees every year. Now, the thing is, a lot of these degrees are pretty useless since the college/university that issued them is basically a money making machine, and nothing else.
However, there are a bunch of good places that produce very good engineers. The Indian Institutes of Technology are the most well known, but there are some others that are equally good (some of the top Regional Enginnering Colleges, and so on)
I think it boils down to numbers. Say we have 30,000 comp sci grads every year. Now say 60 percent of them are hacks who know nothing much and are only good for repetitive code work and stuff like that. 20 percent will be quite good, easily as competent as a good programmer in the US or wherever. 10 percent will be skilled at code and other stuff like management, the types who end up heading into upper management, 8 percent will be very good, and 2 percent will be fantastic.
The 2 percent mostly heads off to MIT, or CMU, or $TOPSCHOOL to do an MS or a Phd, but that still leaves a pretty substantial number of good people.
Now, when you realize that 30,000 is a low estimate, since the acutal figure is 175,000 (source: http://www.timesascent.co.in/index.aspx?Page=article§id=2&contentid=20080930200809301249051997b5b53a, and http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/jun/09bspec.htm ) you begin to see that while we do have a huge number of terrible programmers, we have a pretty good talent pool too. It's all about the numbers!
It's just as well. They can configure the OS scheduler to divide time equally between all processes.
Except for the colonel of course, he always seems to get more than the normal process.
-1, 0, 1?
And of course, FILE_NOT_FOUND.
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
USSR _did_ have successful computers using ternary math: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
Unfortunately, it was abandoned in favor of copying foreign binary computers :(
Obama is that less of the money will go to the military-industrial complex and tax cuts for the rich, and more into infrastructure and services that benefit greater number of people. I think that's potentially good, but doesn't change the fact that the federal budget deficit is downright terrifying and unsustainable.
I have no argument that Bush (and both GOP/Democrat congresses) spent way too much, but the current "Stimulus/Recovery/Whatever-the-hell" bill is good money after bad. A significant portion of the money goes into Medicaid, Medicare, and "state-aid".
Cover state budget holes, and state legislatures will spend the money on something else. Meanwhile, the federal budget gets a new, higher, $1 trillion dollar deficit a year floor.
You want Keynesian Stimulus? Spend $200-400 billion on infrastructure. You want Reagan Stimulus? Spend $200-400 on infrastructure, and another $200-400 on pro-business tax cuts.
The current bill is neither of those things, pays a small amount towards national 'capital' assets, and borrows a vast amount of money to fill structural holes in state budgets.
*shrug*
I don't think you can stimulate the economy, or fix long-term structural budgetary problems, by kicking funding for schools, healthcare, and other transfer payments down the road 2 years (which is *exactly* what this bill does). So; Pell Grants get $20 billion for 2009-2010? What about 2011? Not only does the shortfall get bigger, but then we have to cope with the additional interest on the borrowed money to fill today's budgetary hole.
I'm all for targeted tax cuts that increase future tax revenue (capital gains taxes). I'm all for infrastructure funding that either reduces future budgetary needs (energy efficiency can do that), or increases economic activity (better ports, internet, and highways ->more business->bigger tax base).
But if we spend/borrow $1 trillion, and don't get a significant amount of long term growth out of it, we're just digging a deeper hole, and that's exactly what the big O is planning to do.
I've told other people, and I'll post it on Slashdot, for which I'll get ridiculed. Unless there are some dramatic sunset provisions in this bill, or the economy starts magically growing at 4-5% a year, people will remember the days of Bush as "The Good Old Days", when budget deficits were no more than a few hundred billion, and the national debt was under $20 trillion. When spending $600 billion on a war over 5 years was considered profligate waste.
We've pole-vaulted over the $1 trillion dollar per-year deficit level, and we don't even have anything cool to show for it (like, I dunno, space factors, a city on the moon, or Nuclear Fusion).
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
1) Putin did not address the economy well. Rising commodity prices addressed the Russian economy. No structural problems were addressed, and until they are, Russia will falter every time commodity prices go down. What happened to the scientific prowess of the Soviet Union? Putin has not restored that. Russia is not a leader in any high-tech industries, despite what Putin thinks.
3) Putin is asserting Russia's interests in a typically moronic Russian manner. That is to say, he is trying to set Russia up as a Great Power and an ideological competitor to the West. But it doesn't have the population, resources, or technology to do this, so all it is doing is spending its money wastefully on these vanity projects. I mean, take something like selling missiles to Syria. It gains Russia almost nothing (some small money in arms sales and close ties with an country that still leaves Russia without any real leverage in the Middle East), but Russia pursues it because it is a poke in the eye to America. Much of Russia's policy seems more geared towards annoying the US (to prove that Russia can do what it wants) than doing anything useful for Russia.
Let me put it this way. In 20 years, China and India will be rich and fully integrated into the global system. Russia, which 20 years ago was far ahead of both, will likely not be. For that, Putin needs to answer.
4) What Dell said is standard business/political talk. It's a polite way of asking, "Is there anything we can invest in that would make both of us rich?" That's why politicians go on foreign trips trying to drum up business from investors, and why countries fly their own investors overseas to meet with foreign countries to solidify relations. Even if there are no specific opportunities for Dell right now, it is incredibly stupid for Putin to respond this one. It just sends a message to foreign investors that they are not wanted in Russia (a message already sent by Putin's actions to seize foreign investments in Russia's oil). How does eliminating foreign investment help the Russian people?
AFAIK, "nekulturny" (literally, uncultured) is still the highest insult you can throw at a Russian.
I see that you've read Heinlein. However, that particular thing that he wrote wasn't true then, much less now.
Depending on the social class, the highest insult you can throw at a Russian is probably either "intelligent" (as in belonging to intelligentsia) when directed by a prole against someone he perceives as a smartass, or "bydlo" (this is a Polish loanword that literally means "cattle", and figuratively someone who lives to eat and copulate, and nothing above that) when it is the other way around.
Exactly! Everything in history is the fault of the DemocRAT party.
It's not as if $7.5T of the $10.5T debt was run up under Republican presidents. It's not like $5T was run up under Bush while his party had control of the House, Senate, Supreme Court, and Federal courts. It was the LIEberals!
It's all the fault of TAX and SPEND Democrats who.. uh.. had a surplus when they were last in office? Uh. No it HAS to be Clinton's fault, otherwise there might be some flaw in my world view. That's impossible, because I'm a Conservative!
Er, yeah. Clinton fucked a chubby intern. That's what caused this mess. If he hadn't done that, Alan Greenspan would never have left interest rates criminally low for too long. In 2004, the SEC would never have raised the leverage limit from 12:1 to 30:1 (making a 3% decline in asset values wipe our your company).
And whatever wasn't the fault of Clinton was CARTER's fault. That damn CRA, which passed in 1977. It broke the economy 30 years later because it forced the GSEs to make loans to black people (a.k.a. the lazy poor who are only poor because they are irresponsible and they drive Cadillacs and have cable TV that they buy with their welfare checks which they don't deserve) even though the mess extends far beyond subprime mortgages and that private, non-GSE mortgages account for 3/4 of the problem. It's the fault of Clinton, Carter, Fannie, and Freddie. All LIEberals.
(I'm not racist. My church once had a black guy in it. I just think all black people are lazy. But that's not racism. Read the "Bell Curve", a fine scholarly work.)
And, anyway, Bush's tax cuts worked as promised. His tax cuts created the same number of jobs in eight years as Clinton created in thirteen months! They are why we located all those WMDs and why the fundamentals of our economy are strong. It was TOO MUCH REGULATION that caused the problems that are purely psychological. There's no problem with the economy, except for all the problems with it, which are ONLY the fault of DemocRATs.
Also, the media is liberal. Like Joe Scarborough. I mean, it's not like liberal MSNBC would put a Conservative congressman on TV for three hours a day. (Shout out to Lori Klausutis!)
Yup. I can't believe how quickly the LIEberals on Slashdot forget the details of history.
I'm a small government, free market Conservative who wants Sarah Palin to be Dictator for Life. She gives me star-bursts in my pants.
--
Did I get that right? I think that's the current Conservative orthodoxy. It's certainly got all the wonderfully truthy proclamations I've heard from Conservatives THIS FUCKING WEEK.
"Except for the colonel of course, he always seems to get more than the normal process."
That's because some processes are more equal than others.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson