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Russia, Europe Seek Divorce From U.S. Tech Vendors
dcblogs writes "The Russians are building a 10-petaflop supercomputer as part of a goal to build an exascale system by 2018-20, in the same timeframe as the US. The Russians, as well as Europe and China, want to reduce reliance on U.S. tech vendors and believe that exascale system development will lead to breakthroughs that could seed new tech industries. 'Exascale computing is a challenge, and indeed an opportunity for Europe to become a global HPC leader,' said Leonardo Flores Anover, who is the European Commission's project officer for the European Exascale Software Initiative. 'The goal is to foster the development of a European industrial capability,' he said. Think what Europe accomplished with Airbus. For Russia: 'You can expect to see Russia holding its own in the exascale race with little or no dependence on foreign manufacturers,' said Mike Bernhardt, who writes The Exascale Report. For now, Russia is relying on Intel and Nvidia."
Do what the Chinese do and copy the hell out of Nvidia and Intel.
China has a tremendous skill-set that while works very well for reverse engineering and building things, does not work so well where free-thinking innovation are needed to make advances. The Russians have these abilities, and will be able to develop their own ideas where the Chinese can only copy.
An Russian developed and built all-purpose computing chip on the consumer market could be quite the interesting thing... But the Chinese will always be copying Intel and nVidia (and soon some Russian company).
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
We'll probably have Petaflop computers on our desks, if not in our laps. Apparently so we can manage the bloat of operating systems (which will no longer be popping up balloons, but nagging you with voice and expecting voice back) and gigabyte webpages, which tell you nothing you can't see now, but are built layer upon layer of cruft.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
we once more have a broad set of different processors and architectures to choose from. Competition will stimulate more creative designs and solutions.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
When the russians copied our b-29 superfortress to make the Tu-4, they made perfect copy. However, they also gained enough understanding that they based a whole line of aircraft on the tu-4.
The Russians have these abilities, and will be able to develop their own ideas where the Chinese can only copy.
Like they "innovated" during the Communist Era?
VAX: When you care enough to steal the very best.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It's not a lack of free-thinking that the Chinese are experiencing; it's merely a strategy.
The Chinese are playing catch up to Japan / America / Europe / possibly Russia. At this point in the game, it costs less to copy everyone, than to innovate. Once they've caught up, they'll switch to innovating, as copying will not pay as well in comparison. The same thing has happened before with the United States, Britain, etc.
I am John Hurt.
China has a tremendous skill-set that while works very well for reverse engineering and building things, does not work so well where free-thinking innovation are needed to make advances.
It's a big mistake to underestimate their abilities... Just 3 days ago we read that China surpassed the USA as top patent filer.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
The russians already tried to design an all-purpose CPU : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_2000
(the Elbrus Team and it's IP has been bought by Intel. Surprise...NOT.)
Thank you for that. I was just getting ready to post that but you beat me to it. Slow trigger finger tonight. ;)
"[Technology segment] is a challenge, and indeed an opportunity for Europe to become a global [segment] leader", said [person], who is the European Commission's project officer for [some thing].
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Patent filing has nothing to do with legitimate abilities.
What did they copy to make the first space satellite? First man in space? Hmmmm...
*Billion, obviously. Stupid slashcode.
But the Tu-4 weighed more than the B-29, they couldn't build the tires and had to buy them on the US Military Surplus market post-war.
They used their captured German rocket engineers to develop their rocketry. That said, the US had their own German rocket engineers too, most notably Wernher von Braun, who led its rocket development up to the Saturn V.
Nazi Germany's V-2, so did the U.S.
@de_machina
Russia doesn't have the silicon crystal production facilities, they'll be stuck using the same European, American and Japanese lithography tools everyone else does, no fabs, no economies of scales for production like Samsung, Intel, AMD, Toshiba, etc have.
"Our"?
Unless you own Boeing stock, the correct word is "their".
They copied the Germans (who based a large part of their program on the work of Robert Goddard).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It might not be China or Russia or not. It might be some other country or countries. But it *will* be someone. Yes, America will be surpassed and it won't be because somebody stole their precious "IP".
Microsoft forever, faggots, and there isn't a goddamned thing you can do about it.
I'm pretty sure the Russians could still hit Redmond with an ICBM.
Such irony—the Russians invented the art of reverse-engineering American chips. Observe!
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Or maybe not.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
look i grew up my whole life during the cold war, my dad worked on bombers, my uncles were in the navy / air force.
it was the same shit day after day : "The Russians dont know how to invent everything, they copy from us"
now the cold war ends. what do we find out?
The Soviets did quite a shitload of innovative, amazing stuff. They built a lunar rover, that i never was taught about in school. Their rocket program was amazing. Korolev was amazing. Sakharov invented a different way to do Hydrogen bombs - and then he became a dissident. The Soviet computers had some interesting features - there is a video of a physics-simulated cat on a BSEM6. Solzhenytsin's book The First Circle is about scientists working in a prison research institute... what were they working on? Voice print recognition. Sure, it was horrible, and in service of an evil state... but technologically they didn't copy anything from anyone. Then there are the late model SU and MiG jets. Not to mention the Mig 15 which killed our boys in Korea.
now people are saying all this shit about China. well, its bullshit. China will be 'non creative' until they invent some invisible airplane or something. They are people, and people are creative. Human beings are creative.
I fear this is true. The remarkable shortage of visionaries in leadership positions handicaps US relative to nearly everyone else. ./ crowd should be working to counter. Much more important than which window manager to use.
Add the effect of the Wall Street/investment shysters and We are scrod (past pluperfect for the grammar nazis).
IMHO, this is the problem the
2012 will certainly not be a happy new year unless We make it better.
That is as cheerful as I can be.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
Way back in the beginning you could see them as single computers but nowadays a supercomputer looks more like a local network of computers or a local cloud/cluster. Where does the computer start and stop?
Science centers certainly need the computing power but I can't see how relevant it is to think of these specialized clusters as a single computer or how one rates against another. These clusters are constantly being upgraded and expanded. The interconnects and topology is the only interesting thing but you can't necessarily compare two systems since every system is specialized for certain calculations and software.
No, the German scientists did most of the heavy lifting. The Soviet rocket program was pretty much non-existent post WWII. The politicization of the science and engineering fields, as well as the Pogroms and purges that got rid of a lot of their leading scientists set them back decades.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Well the Chinese only have another 50 years to catch up, the Russians another 20 or so. Murdering your free thinkers, has a tendency of driving you back into the dark ages. Especially in the name of "progress".
Om, nomnomnom...
The funny thing is, the USSR has not used any VAX designs.
I lived there for a while, went to Uni there, am married to a Chinese person and have many Chinese friends, both here and in China. I'm very comfortable saying that Chinese people do not innovate very well. In general, creativity and innovation are not traits that are encouraged in Chinese society. The culture encourages conformity and the like. In school, they study very, VERY hard but it's route memorization not creativity. They are much better at copying others' ideas than coming up with their own. That's not US marketing speaking, that's my own observations.
I have an acquaintance who went over to China and worked with their manufacturing sector for several years. He loved the country, thought the people and culture were very nice, but was not impressed *at all* with their engineering prowess.
The problem isn't that the people are incapable of innovating. The problem is they have no culture or institutions to support innovation. They are trying desperately to change this, but China is run as an enormous top-down bureaucracy. Change isn't going to happen even at a modest pace.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
They said exactly the same thing about the Japanese, 40-50years ago.
Even when Japan started making superior products at lower prices.
Then Japan took over most high-end manufacturing for a while.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
But that got harder when we shrunk our processes. That had the result of forcing them to learn how to design their own chips, thereby boosting their economy.
My cousin speaks fluent Russian. There is no room to stand let alone sit in his apartment because of all the giant stacks of books. I know enough Russian that I could tell what the books were about. All of them were advanced physics and electrical engineering texts.
The Russians are no fools. Their educational system is excellent. It had to be under the soviets to have any hope of them surviving the cold war.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2
according to the first paragraph .. it was the "first known human artifact to enter outer space" (with a citation too).
also for fun..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieseler_Fi_103R_(Reichenberg)
So the V2's did make it to space - not a full orbit.. and there was a version of the V1 designed to carry a person.. had they not been in the middle of a world war - and given a few years.. yea i bet they would have had bot down just fine..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Because they weren't competent enough. The East Germans were, though.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I was aware of that. According to The Rocket and the Reich by Michael Neufeld, A V-2 reached an altitude of 176 km (109 mi) on a vertical launch. That's not going to give you much of an orbit.
References to Communist Era (when talking about Russia) are as dated as references to pre-WWII tech. Soviet Union doesn't exist even as a memory anymore.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I had no idea Slashdot predates the end of the Cold War.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
One of the big things that improves the speed of innovation is the ability to fail. This is still one of the big problems that needs to be conquered. You need lots of groups trying different avenues to ferret out the key innovations that push the state of the art forward. One of the problems with the command-style-economies is that although they could build up industries efficiently, they are simultaneously captive to those industries by continued government funding resuting in economic inefficiency (in the best case), or a military/industrial complex (in the worst case). From what I can tell, basically you need lots of serial entrepenuers, copy-cat followers and venture capital to push tech forward.
Not to say that the USA has this problem licked (see the defense spending culture or wall street as examples), but there are no clear signs yet that china, europe or russia has a sustainable approach to this problem that the USA seems to have. If they get better at figuring out how to fund innovation and defund obsolete industries, they will probably have both the ingredients needed to create a sustainable tech revolution that could wean itself from the USA tech industry.
From what it appears, right now china and europe are in focus-on-money mode trying to attract multi-national corporate investment which gets lots of progress quickly, but doesn't seem that sustainable as the government is still picking the winners and losers (e.g. who gets the tax breaks and who gets the operating licences). I honestly don't follow the situation in russia very closely for tech, but my understand is that big investment is still mostly in traditional industries rather than tech (natural resource expliotation). If this is true, the result of this is a problem of not enough native customers for native tech companies (another problem for sustainable growth).
Not to say they won't get there, but at least it seems to me that the evidence isn't there that they are on the cusp of anything... Remember, the leaders/founders of Intel and Nvidia didn't just graduate from school and start billion dollar companies. They worked for other multi-million dollar companies before starting those companies. And not all of those people that worked for those same multi-million dollar companies and left to start companies went on to found billion dollar companies either. And it wasn't just about Intel and Nvidia either, if Applied Materials didn't exist, you probably wouldn't have Intel fabs (or TSMC fabs) and so-on and so-forth. A whole ecosystem of companies need to exist. And for each of them, there needed to be some losers for there to be winners and some people willing to take a chance to lose some money to make some money.
Education was only 1/2 the problem. Ironically, education is perhaps the easiest 1/2 to solve (in the USA, apparently we just import people to educate and to do the education).
Really? USSR exists very well in my memory, since I lived there for 15 years.
Seems to me that China is well out their way to out innovate the US.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/21/us-china-patents-idUSTRE7BK0LQ20111221
Actually they had them train Russians by getting them to work on a dummy project with Russian assistants. Once the assistants had learnt all they could they were shifted onto the real work, and once enough assistants had been trained the German engineers vanished. That gave the Russian engineers a large enough skilled workforce.
It's amusing that your attempt to disparage the USSR and patrioticly beat your breast is a lot more complimentary than the very scary reality.
Well how about that. A reason to continue using Imperial units.
Not this shit again. The whole world is laughing at your ridiculous arbitrary system of measurement. Christ what a hunk of shit.
For instance, F-35 JSF started its life as a carbon copy of Yak-141, blueprints for which Locheed Martin blatantly stole from Russians by first forming and then dissolving a "partnership" with the Yakovlev bureau all in the span of about a year. Don't believe me? Check out the videos below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23ohOKthO18 - Yak 141, circa 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki86x1WKPmE - F-35, 2011
See other videos of Yak-141, and see it from the rear in particular. F-35 is a blatant copy, just with today's electronics and stealth.
As a scientific user of large HPC machines like Franklin, Hopper, HECToR etc., this race for exascale machines seems like the tail wagging the dog. There are currently very very few codes which can actually use an exascale supercomputer, due to the extreme parallelism needed. If you have to make use of several hundred thousand cores, anything beyond embarrassingly parallel montecarlo problems have problems moving data around. Something like Intel's Knight's Corner chip might help OpenMP-MPI hybrid codes, but a lot of conferences now are focussed on how to design codes to make use of these big machines. More useful would be to put the money into more smaller (say 100,000 core) machines, so more runs can be done with different inputs.
The CS guys love doing a single massive run which burns through CPU time on headline-grabbing number of processors, but actually that's not very useful for scientific research. More useful is to be able to run the code tens or hundreds of times with a quick turnaround (not waiting days in a queue) with different inputs. Whilst this exascale race is a good way to get money into the maths/CS labs, in my opinion it's not going to give the massive leap in understanding which is promised.
But the Tu-4 weighed more than the B-29, they couldn't build the tires and had to buy them on the US Military Surplus market post-war.
Due to limitations on resources rather than limitations on engineering expertise.
Wasn't there a recent article about China leading the world in patent applications?
Fuck the world. The more we do to please the world, the further behind we fall. I don't care that a quart of milk causes your granny to have apoplexy when she tries to convert it. Just fuck the world. We don't WANT to be like you - half the world is beating a path to our front door (back door in the case of Mexicans) because they want to be like us!
Besides which, your metrics are no less arbitrary than the length of a king's foot, or the first joint of his thumb, or any other damned unit we use.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The situation is that the large operating system vendor (Microsoft) in the world hails from the US, and is prepared to do anything in order to maintain that position.
The largest Microprocessor vendor (Intel) hails from the US and is prepared to do anything in order to maintain that position.
The largest artistic software manufacturer (Adobe) in the world hails from the US and is prepared to do anything in order to maintain that position.
The list goes on...
Meanwhile, every country in the world gives them all the tools they need to in order to maintain that position (patents, insane copyright laws, etc.) We see that specifically with Apple, who does not like Android (which is a serious competitor on the mobile phone market for its iOS). Apple is using patents as an extortion mechanism and nobody is doing anything about it.
Until this legal environment, which favors large companies, is dealt with; the situation will remain the same. YOu see, the moment somebody has an interesting idea he's either bought out or destroyed by any of these companies.
The other aspect of the problem is that the US government refuses to do anything about this situation, while these very companies are killing the world economy.
Wow. No more cappuccino for you, man.
You can idiot proof things only so much. Boeing is not immune from idiocy, and there are as many examples to that. Recall Aeroflot Flight 821 (aka Perm crash).
Some people have very short memories. In fact, there is a quote for them: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Sir Winston Churchill
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
No cappuccino, thank you. I take my caffeine American style, drip brewed with Folger's coffee. And, since the subject is units of measurement, why does Mr. Coffee think that a cup is only six ounces? WTF? I brew twelve cups of java, drink 4 (12 oz) cups, and the coffee is down to those nasty looking dregs. Seems to me that a 12 cup coffee pot should hold just about 96 ounces, which should mean that I get 6 of my (12 oz) cups of coffee, before there are nasty solids visible in the bottom.
It's probably a freaking FRENCH conspiracy!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Well, the difference between then and now is pure xenophobia versus some xenophobia mixed in with some real observations.
History is not inevitable. It may have even been true that the Japanese did ape American and European designs, but what will differentiate the Japanese design renaissance and a Chinese one is that Japan wasn't under the control of an autocratic government like China is, nor is their history full of autocrats and strict living.
Some? sure, and it's enough for us in the west to see it as restrictive.
A lot? not enough to stifle innovation and progress. Nissan's able to make a AWD car that is faster around the Nurburgring than Porsche's flagship model that costs twice as much. Sony, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Yamaha, et al are doing similar work. In Korea? LG, Samsung and so forth are also in the same boat.
Will a Chinese firm do the same? Only time will tell; but I'm willing to bet no. And only 10 bucks because it's possible I could be very wrong.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
References to Communist Era (when talking about Russia) are as dated as references to pre-WWII tech. Soviet Union doesn't exist even as a memory anymore.
How old are you?
A gin in the hand is worth two in the bottle.
Talking about leading edge computing...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#November_2011
Top ten are all running Linux...
Trolling is a art!
Stupid rednecks are very innovative people! You should see the things they can do with beer cans alone.
In all seriousness, even if Chinese culture/education doesn't promote creativity or thinking outside of the box, with 1.3 billion people there are bound to be enough 'innovative' engineers for the Chinese to compete with whomever they choose.
>the German engineers vanished.
Nope, almost all of them returned to Germany in the early 50s, just a few stayed in USSR, presumably by choice.
we once more have a broad set of different processors and architectures to choose from. Competition will stimulate more creative designs and solutions.
We did! At one point, we had, aside from the Pentiums (and x86 derivatives from AMD, Cyrix & Centaur) RISC processors like MIPS, SPARC, POWER, Alpha, PA-RISC, Intergraph's Clipper, and maybe more.
Thanks to all the shakedowns in the 2000s, we're now reduced to just the x64, POWER and MIPS. ARM occupies the portable space, but not much above that. Thanks to that hype known as Itanium, Alpha & PA-RISC went under. Also, Microsoft neglecting the RISC versions of NT contributed to the demise of Alpha & decline of MIPS, while IBM failing to do OS/2-PPC ensured that PPC remained an Apple niche, until Apple tired of it.
Anyway, coming to Russia, if they want a processor not subject to any US laws, their choices are essentially ARM, which is quite inadequate for this applicaiton, or they could go w/ OpenRISC. They have the technical expertise to take such a design and run w/ it, and even build their own fabs anywhere in the country. Since they would be building from scratch, they can start w/ the latest foundry equipment and 12" wafers, and make quite an suite of products, not just CPUs. And if they don't want to risk w/ such an unproven architecture, they could license MIPS or POWER (just like Loongson), and build a supercomputer based on that. In fact, make a supercomputer farm somewhere in the Russian Arctic, have an open air circulation so that the ambient temperatures of the area touch those CPUs, which may result in being able to clock them to 5GHz. And build whatever massively parallel architecture they need.
I have an acquaintance who went over to China and worked with their manufacturing sector for several years. He loved the country, thought the people and culture were very nice, but was not impressed *at all* with their engineering prowess.
The problem isn't that the people are incapable of innovating. The problem is they have no culture or institutions to support innovation. They are trying desperately to change this, but China is run as an enormous top-down bureaucracy. Change isn't going to happen even at a modest pace.
Im sure that 100 hackerspaces in Shanghai program is going to help them with that.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Interesting point. I had all but forgotten about the 141, and it seems to never having entered service.
And yes, comparisons do reveal a certain similarity:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Yak-141_3D.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/F-35A_three-view.PNG
The F-35 do have a very different engine design tho.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The impression i have gotten of Japanese corporate life is that it is a modernized bushido.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Learning from the Nazis isn't enough... http://xkcd.com/984/
Military materiel were paid for with taxes and war bonds. Your point would make more sense for Boeing's commercial products (though not completely since even they are partially subsidized). I mean, if the US gets lambasted for a publicly-funded military industrial complex, the least one can do is to give credit where it's due :)
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Who made the first rocket?
China? I do believe America wasn't even around then.
I'll just pick one example of Werner von Braun's influence (and superiority) on launch vehicle design. von Braun's team in Huntsville produced the vehicle (Jupiter C) which launched the first American satellite. The Jupiter C was a derivative of the Redstone IRBM developed by the von Braun team in the US which was itself a direct descendant of the V2. von Braun's team launched the Jupiter C in less than two months days after they were authorized to do so after the failure of the first Vanguard satellite (developed by the US Naval Research Laboratories) launch attempt in Dec 1957. In 1956 von Braun's team had launched a similar vehicle to the Jupiter C to within 7/8ths of orbital velocity and could have shortly gone to orbit thus beating Sputnik 1 by a year but the Eisenhower administration prohibited them from doing so. By the way, it was a Redstone (derivative of the V2) which launched the first two Mercury missions.
As I badly posted in a previous comment it was a direct derivative of the V2 which launched the first American satellite in 1958. V2 -> Redstone IRBM -> Jupiter C launch vehicle, all developed by Werner von Braun's engineering team.
"When you enough steal real best"
Very poor attempt at Russian. =)
I lived in the Soviet Union. My (Russian born) wife has not. Yes, she is young. But she already completed a university degree. That should tell you something about where in history you can place that country. The generation which was born after it has already began graduating from universities.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The key to your sentence is history. Because that is the only place that Soviet Union exists. And learning from history is hardly the same thing as dwelling on it. Over-reacting to the memory of history is how most animosities linger.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
For the record: Japan is under control of an autocratic government that masquerades as democracy but in reality represents the same autocracy it always was, as is culturally proper in the country. Also, Japan's history is not just full, but choke full of autocrats, and their living was far MORE strict that in China.
In fact, the main reason why they could grow so fast after the war is cultural acceptance of autocratic leadership and long culture of strict living. That was opinion of McArthur or one of his aides after war if I remember correctly.
Oddly you're talking about post-WWII, it still took Japan nearly 35 years to do it, with a serious investment from the west to get off the ground no less. And with several other things. The difference between Japan, Russia and China are pretty easy to point out. Especially in the periods. It wasn't until the late 70's and early 80's that they were considered any type of threat at all, that's pushing nearly 45 years in total post-redevelopment.
Om, nomnomnom...
Do you think the Narod have changed much in the past 300 years? From the dictatorship of the Emperor to the dictatorship of the Central Committee to the dictatorship of ex-KGB Officer Putin, there have been mighty few institutional changes in Mother Russia. Compare that to the 800 year evolution of Anglo-American political thought since the issuance of the Magna Carta.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
So ask yourself this. How is that culture going to change when rewards for innovation and creativity go up? In the US back almost to its very beginning as colonies of England, a person who struck it rich could afford a fancier house and ended up having high social standing than the aristocrat or the government bureaucrat.
Even in family-oriented China, I imagine a tacky entrepreneur or other wealthy "rain maker" could still be very good for the family. They might be held at arms length for social purposes, but their creativity and such would be tolerated (which often is the same way creative people are treated by their US families).
You, sir, are a goddamn tease.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
North Korea and South Korea are two countries with the same people. And yet their view on society are entirely different. People are pretty much the same everywhere. Social norms are part of the nurture -- not of the nature -- of human experience.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
To orbit the earth at a height of 206 km would require an orbital velocity of 7 km/s. The highest speed the V-2 attained was less than 2 km/s. And that doesn't even get into the guidance system.
moved much of their knowledge to China, the US gov. should divorce from US tech vendors as well. It is time to realize that the international companies like IBM, GE, Ford, Exon, GM, etc have no interest in US or even Western nations. Instead, they chase the almight dollar, or these days, the yuan.
American gov. needs to start funding local companies that develops and KEEPS tech here.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That would be the worst mistake in the history of the world. Times a thousand.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I'm very comfortable saying that American people are stupid rednecks.
Comfort doesn't have much to do with truth.
If I need to order some kind of cable, for example, I can order it in the US and I have it a couple of days later for $50. If I order it on taobao, I have it the next day for $15. The next day, from China.
The difference is that the US company is selling at a premium to businesses that want the cable without hassle. That business, if it is remotely sane, isn't going to touch Taobao. No point to boasting how cheap the cable was, if it never arrives. Meanwhile the Taobao seller can only deliver same day, if the cable is already in the US near Arkansas. That gives it a 12 or more hour head start on anything coming from China.
Truly comparatively?
Yeah, it went through a lot of bad times, but China didn't experience something akin to the Meiji era. and in most recent history, China's been ruled by a truly horrible autocratic society.
I could be wrong in both my interpretation of history and in my foresight into the future, however, I'm willing to go fifty fifty on a cheap bet on it.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
according to the article you linked to:
"Over 3,000 V-2s were launched as military rockets by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets during the war, mostly London and later Antwerp. The attacks resulted in the death of an estimated 7,250 military personnel and civilians, while 12,000 forced labourers were killed producing the weapons.[9]"
"The German V-weapons (V-1 and V-2) cost $3 billion (wartime dollars) and was more costly than the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb ($1.9 billion)."
V-1 was a little bit more effective, though ...
and if their goal was to orbit rather than bomb London - how long do you think it would take for them to figure out how to do a retro rocket burn?
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
"but the Eisenhower administration prohibited them from doing so" ... damn' politicians, eh ?
"it was a Redstone (derivative of the V2) which launched the first two Mercury missions." ... and the other 10 were, what ... Atlas ... politics again ?
von braun might have been a charismatic and go-getting manager, but he was an expert at hugely expensive systems, too, sinking an enormous amount of resources into mass-producing a flawed rocket, much like the engineers that build the heavy tanks used in the last years of the war. He should get a statue for his personal positive contribution to the Allied victory. The soviets should have built him a statue for delaying the US space program.
If von braun were working in software, he would have convinced Balmer to put all the money in Microsoft Bob v.2, v.3 and v.4, arguing that it almost works and next iteration will get it.
Korolyov worked on rockets since the the late '20s, and his designs had nothing to do with V2 except for the short time he tried to fix the V2 design (the R1 and R2 rockets). Iterations of his rockets still fly. Von Braun's work is buried, and rightly so.
the V1-V2 were so bad you needed a city the size of London as a target to be able to hit anything;
That was more to do with the very primitive inertial and radio guidance of the time, not the rockets, as such. The rockets were very reliable.
Von Braun knew that they were very ineffective weapons for these reasons, and he didn't try very hard to improve those aspects.
Stick Men
Russian copy of the US Space Shuttle .... built on German rocket technology .... built on principles in great part first outlined by Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
99.99% of "progress" is "stealing" ideas from each other and building on them.
so, why did he accept to supervise mass production of useless weapons ? Hated his countrymen, or just did not want to lose his job ?
Also according to the article:
"..... and first known human artifact to enter outer space."
Werner Von Braun was a very special character. Absolutely focused on his goal, and absolutely ruthless in obtaining a way to reach it. He wanted to build something to go into space, no matter who he had to ally himself to, no matter how many people were killed in the process. His goal was never really to built a technical superior and/or more effective "weapon", though, that's just how he sold his project.
The German military wanted a weapon, so he convinced them to finance his program as a weapons project. Then the US wanted weapons, and he convinced them to finance his program. Then the US wanted to counter the Russian "Space Successes" and he again convinced them to finance his program.
He just wanted to build rockets. His line of reasoning was morally dubious though. I'm not sure he was really interested in the Nazis winning the war. I think his idea was that if he kind of went along with it and made these not-very-useful weapons, it would kill fewer people than if he were forced to work on something else.
Yes, I know about the slave labour. I'm not trying to justify what he did or make excuses. I just think that he was far more interested in developing rockets than killing people or Nazi Germany taking over the world.
Stick Men
I'm guessing it's because continuing the program allowed him to get the funding and resources he needed to continue developing his designs. If his goal was to reach space, the effectiveness they had as weapons (where accuracy is the most important factor) would have been unimportant to him.
Don't forget cameras. Only the Swiss and maybe Germans are competition for their prowess in optics. They also make a lot of high-end industrial equipment you'll probably never see.
The remarkable shortage of visionaries in leadership positions handicaps US relative to nearly everyone else. ./ crowd should be working to counter. Much more important than which window manager to use.
Add the effect of the Wall Street/investment shysters and We are scrod.... IMHO, this is the problem the
The Slashdot crowd doesn't have any ability to change these things, so it's pointless to tell them they should. The Wall Street shysters are good buddies with their (paid) friends in Washington, so the politicians will happily do whatever the banksters want. Why should the politicians listen to the Slashdot crowd? Does the Slashdot crowd have lots of "campaign contributions" to outweigh the hefty "donations" from their lobbyists? Of course not. So it's really more productive to argue about window managers than these other issues that we have no power over.
Face it, the US government is totally corrupt, and nothing is going to save it now. It would be like a Roman citizen without any ties to the imperial government trying to effect change from within; they'll either be ignored or painted as a traitor and crucified, shortly before some invaders riding elephants come and sack the city. There probably won't even be a USA in 25 years. The best thing for you to do is figure out how to prepare for the inevitable.
Thanks to that hype known as Itanium, Alpha & PA-RISC went under.
No, it was because Intel bought out Alpha and killed it outright. It wasn't hype, it was a strategic decision by corporate executives. Same with PA-RISC; HP wanted to jump on the Itanic bandwagon with Intel (Itanic was co-developed by HP and Intel, it wasn't an Intel-only project), so they killed PA-RISC and put their engineers to work on Itanic.
Anyway, coming to Russia, if they want a processor not subject to any US laws, their choices are essentially ARM, which is quite inadequate for this applicaiton, or they could go w/ OpenRISC.
Why don't they just copy some other processor, like the Alpha or POWER chips? As long as they're not planning to sell them in the USA, and especially if they're mainly for internal use, they can just change their patent/copyright laws so that these designs are too old to be protected, and it'd be perfectly legal for them to base their designs on them. The USA did very well in its early days by totally ignoring British IP laws and making their own, more permissible laws.
This would be really sad, because other than the MS campus in Redmond, Washington State is a really beautiful and picturesque place with a great climate.
Actually that's a George Santayana quote.
I've worked pretty closely with Chinese people for a while, and I do agree in the sense that deviating from the norm is highly discouraged, even derided. It was extemely difficult to get them to try new things.
That said, the same thing could be said of Japanese culture in the years leading to and following WWII, and for a while they did nothing but copy US and European innovation. But begining in the 1960s, they started to no longer make cheap copies and made their own designs. They are now at the forefront of certain technologies. I don't see why the same thing couldn't happen in China.
Only a redneck would strap a JATO to a car. Hell, Oak Lawn is nothing but rednecks and nuclear physics. Rednecks are perfectly innovative. "Hey Guys, Watch This!" is practically religious scripture among them.
And yes, I know a modern JATO rocket would immediately launch a car into the air, but the early gens were much weaker.
Fascinating thing was that when they cloned CPU designs, the yields on the silicon wafers weren't that good. So instead of just dumping those broken CPU's, they would write code that worked around the broke instructions, replacing them with alternative implementations.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
i'd take that for 1944.. 109 miles achieved and a max of 128 miles (as max on vertical launch) that with a little more work (and again not a world war) they would have easily gotten there.
In the absence of a World War, would the rocket program receive funding? The US and Soviets launched their programs as part of the Cold War.
There were 2 stages in which Intel bought anything related to Alpha. First was when DEC dropped its lawsuit against Intel and sold StrongARM as well as all its fabs to Intel. The second was when Compaq decided to kill the Alpha, and sold all its IP to Intel. Actually, what really killed the Alpha, or any future for it was Compaq & Microsoft dropping support for NT on the platform.
You are right that HP co-developed Itanic - in fact, bulk of Itanic development was HP's, and it was just fabbed by Intel. Which is why it's not been difficult for Intel to underplay it, even though it's meant HP being the sole supplier of Itanic boxes - not much different commercially from PA-RISC. At least, PA-RISC had a much longer legacy of software going for it.
I think the Russians might be better off making an Alpha chip, which would give them a proven architecture, and they could put whatever proprietary OS they wanted on it. Or what they could do - try and buy all rights to the Alpha and OpenVMS from HP/Intel (which those 2 companies may not miss, since they are deprecated) and make a platform in Russia around them. Build their supercomputer around it, and maybe a few that they can sell to Europe, and then, maybe start a company that sells Alphastations within Russia, just like Yeelong (sp?) sells Loongson based Unixstations in China.
and once enough assistants had been trained the German engineers vanished.
and that is the difference between America and Russia. Wernher von Braun lived a happy healthy life with some fame and fortune. What happened to the German engineers in Russia? (Siberian prison? Bullet in the back of the head in the Katyn forest?)
Cheers :)
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Russia manufactures SPARC compatible processors for some time now. One example MCST-R1000.
The interesting thing is that any MIC (as with any other big organization) lead to abuse. Because there is so much power there, it leads to some terrible abuses. But this is true and always has been throughout the history of the world. The US was one of the first countries to expend a huge amount of power for really good purposed and to bring a lot of beneficial technology to the civilian world.
I don't like where it's going now but sometimes it helps to put it into perspective. It's been a really rare example of a powerful country which has used that power for a lot of good. I think it will take a long time before we see that again. The amount of technological innovation that has come out of the US since WW2 won't be matched by any country for a long long time.
You had me right up to where you wrote Folgers. Damn!
The more we do to please the world, the further behind we fall.
It's not about pleasing the world, it's about using a unified system. Maybe the US should invent a new system altogether. The metric is really a base-10 system. That's 'cause there were no computers back then. Let's make a base-2 system to make the programming easier. I've gotta call Apple to find out how to patent that idea.
Well, gotta go, I've only another 101101 minutes to read these posts.
ROTFLMAO!
Russian copy of the US Space Shuttle .... built on German rocket technology .... built on principles in great part first outlined by Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
Don't forget about Goddard.
99.99% of "progress" is "stealing" ideas from each other and building on them.
"Good Artists Copy Great Artists Steal" -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas" -- Steve Jobs
After the fall of the wall, we had East German students working at our DEC facility in Germany who were fairly current in VMS. The East Germans had copied the VAX and VMS exactly and were only a couple of VMS versions behind.
It isn't as if China doesn't have more science & technology patents these days. How many different RISC-based processors have been crushed by Intel's predatory marketing instead of best technology? I count at least 3: Alpha, MIPS, and Sparc. From that lot, they could pick and choose the technology to apply -- they are not necessarily reliant upon an IBM-PC compatible platform, nor a Microsoft operating system. On top of that, what percentage of total semiconductor manufacturing capacity is in China's backyard? Maybe 70%? Some of the USA's most valuable high technology has been shipped overseas, like IP, not just the manufacturing capacity. The biggest exports the USA has these days is war & weapons of war. When other countries possess the core technologies, they will find other systems integrators to replace the over-priced USA versions. The Chinese don't need industrial espionage to acquire our technology -- they're our bankers, and they hold the "mortgage paper" to much of our economy. In other words, why would they steal what they already own?
The saying goes that the reason why the US got to the moon before the Russians was that our German scientists were better than their German scientists.
Sorry, thats what Stalin wanted, but Sergei Korolev, the key man behind USSR's space program was as good than any german enginer, the russians had enough knowledge of rocketry with the Katyusha and their own Jet Propulsion Research Institute. The R-7 and derivatives are clearly different from any german or USA's built rocket.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
he was in charge when billions were spend on mass production of a dummy rocket ... yeah, it could go to space, but it was not useful for anything else ... he was not interesting in developing rockets, he was interested in being in charge
Instead of lionizing him the space-maniacs on Slashdot should consider what was the real price for the propaganda victory of going to the moon: same money could be spent on developing better launch systems, and we would have been closer now to actually having a permanent presence on Luna. You don't mass produce a development design: you get a prototype, test it, then improve that prototype or try another design etc. until you get something that you can actually use without bankrupting yourself ... which is what the soviets did; they went bankrupt in the end, but not because of the space program.
I'm guessing it's because continuing the program allowed him to get the funding and resources he needed to continue developing his designs. If his goal was to reach space, the effectiveness they had as weapons (where accuracy is the most important factor) would have been unimportant to him.
did he continue to develop his designs ? :) ... that is, until he lost his job with the Nazis and had to find another employer and sell another miracle rocket? Korolyov actually had better success in improving von Braun's designs than von Braun did, but he also was smart enough to abandon them when the limit was reached. Sputnik did not get to space on a "von Braun" rocket.
True! And talking about Europe, which I forgot to discuss, they can base their efforts around LEON - the Open SPARC project of the CERN.
but it's infested. I think Russia should take up a collection to fund the ICBM to de-louse the place with a nice clean airburst. the plants will come back
there has in the past been restrictions on availability of advanced chips; Russia doesn't want to have their growth crimped by foreign trade restrictions, military export restrictions, etc.
Hard radiation is not good for plants or native animals. If you have to do such a thing, a human-specific plague would be much more ecological.
Better would be to find some way of conning the MS executives and managers to all take a trip to someplace remote and desolate, say, Death Valley, and for all the politicians in Washington to meet them there at the same time. Then, any WMD you want would be fine. While we're at it, maybe we could get anyone in East Texas who's sat on a jury for an IP/patent trial to go there as well, along with the Apple and GoDaddy execs.
Social norms are part of the nurture -- not of the nature -- of human experience.
Right. And many (most?) cultures have until very recently been non-democratic, non-rule-of-law, non-rights-of-man.
It takes time for such values to seep deeply into society.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The similarity is completely superficial (and you have to squint to even see the superficial similarities).