With 100M worth of capital you do not go against an industry with turnover in excess of 100s of Billions per year. Most networking gear all the way to 10G is Ethernet now and that industry as the chairman of FTC noted can fend for itself. In fact, based on the FTC decision it surely did.
I have observed where they go in Eastern Europe during the first years after the fall of the wall and they usually go to the local mafia. The mafia bribes the health and safety officials to ensure that the sales go unabated and unrestricted and after that they are sold at roughly 70-90% of the price of the local production - just enough to undercut it.
This includes clothes donated to charities including clothes donated to disaster relief. Charities usually do not need clothes. They need money so they ask to their local reps to sell the loot. The reps in turn do it through the usual mafia channel in order not to risk their skin.
Well, one of the first things to do here is to stop aid or at least make sure that only structural aid comes through. Any non-structural aid like "free food, free clothing, etc" should be stopped.
Classic examples are food aid which has all but killed the local farm industry in many African countries along with dumping unused clothing and shoes which has done the same to the local textile and shoe industries. We drive a local tradesman onto the street and make him forever dependant on foreign aid every time one of us gives a piece of clothing to one of those "collectors" which leave a leaflet and a bag every week.
While at it, Billy the Robber is as guilty of killing indiginous industries as anyone. He has made everything in his power to kill local competition everywhere he stepped. We live in a world where there is one or two indiginous word processing products left as final hold-outs in the losing battle against MSOffice. Navision has been doing the same to indiginous accounting packages and so on.
Under most legislations there are limitations to the extent to which you can sign off your labour code rights. In fact, the labour code usually takes precedence over contract law. In addition to that in most legislations if a contract makes you sign off something which is your right the whole contract is null and void, not that particular clause.
So it looks like IBM has made employees sign an illegal contract. No real surprise here. I have yet to see a legal contract from an American company, dunno WTF are they paying their lawyers. The employees sued successfully to have their rights enforced. From there on IBM used the fact that their original contract has been declared null and void and changed the salary offer on the table.
Good Catbert move in a Dilbertian universe. It will be interesting to see how it pans out in the long run.
I suggest you watch "Specifics of the Russian National Fishing" aka "Osobennosti Nacionalnoi Rubalki" on the subject of dynamite and fishing. You will laugh your a*** off...
You missed one point. You also write it off as a tax deductible. If you try to write off $600,000,000,000 as a tax deductible expect black helicopters and men with assault rifles as a responce to your tax return. If a company with a turnover bigger than some nation's GDP does this, it gets an applause in the press for its enormous charitable contribution. Which is a pity - it should get the same treatment (scaled for size - cannons instead of assault rifles).
Cheap PCs suck rotten eggs on cooling. Your drives will go very hot.
One good option is cheap PC and an ICY BOX SATA enclosure. They are 30-50£ for 3-5 drives fit in 2-3 standard 5" slots and keep drives within 5C above ambient with virtually no noise.
Another option are Antec Sonata cases. They have 4 very well cooled hard disk slots. If you chose the right 12cm fans it is once again totally quiet.
As far as the MB, etc they can indeed be as cheap as they get. I am building one right now out of an old P3. It is more than enough to saturate a 100MB NFS. A few important caveats I have noticed (It has been a while since I built a storage box).
1. While there are some very tempting offers for IDE cards on the market they are not real IDE. The market has gone in circle 100%. It used to be people selling IDE cards as RAID, now they sell RAID as IDE. So regardless of how nicely does an offer for classic IDE sound, skip it. You are up for trouble. Go SATA.
2. Same for SATA cards with extra IDE ports. These often do not support IDE drives. Same for some IDE ports on recent cheap motherboards.
3. Some cheap SATA cards do funny things with spin-up, spin-down and flush commands. Either go for well tested stuff like Silicon Image or go for a real hardware RAID like 3ware (this is no longer cheap though).
The similar self-assembled P3 based PC in an Antec case behind my HDTV does not have a DVD drive either. It does not f*** need one. What are all those movies and audio on the server for?
So I do not quite see a problem in watching DVDs without a DVD drive in it.
The advantage of Linux is that you need to spend money on things like storage, memory, etc only once - on one machine in the house.
From there on regardless how many others do you have and what do they do a shuttle PC like this is actually a complete overkill.
RTFA'ed it. It says all relevant safety regulations which in India are "none out of none". No EURONCAP test data, no EU imports permission test data, no US DOT test data, no... And so on. Based on how previous examples of engineering from them have faired in such tests I will not believe that until I have seen it being smashed into the concrete column at the test center.
You cannot. It will not pass basic safety regs and more specifically the standard 35mph crash into a wall test.
It is the same design as the G-Wiz (also Indian by the way). There is a big chunk of weight in the back which will simply collapse the entire frame on top of the passengers in a crash.
There is a reason why the West has abandoned this design. Once upon a time many cars were made like this - Skoda, VW, Citroen, etc all had an engine in the back because you can have a very simple suspension and a very simple transmission. Unfortunately this design behaves very badly in a crash and this is the exact noone makes mass production cars like this any more.
Carriers are learning that the right phone even a pricey one can win customers and bring in revenue - they have known it for a long time. What they have been missing that a POS designed and built by HTC which crashes every time you change a cell is not the right phone despite all the marketing push behind it. Marketing reality distortion cannot compensate for product being crap (which is what the ROKR fiasco proves nicely as well).
Similarly, Nokia has been playing this game all along on this side of the pond though I have to admit - it has never ever been so sadistic in its relationship with the carriers. As far as commercials - jobs is jobs nothing more to be said to this regard. So any changes to this regard in the market are American specific.
Europe has been there, seen it. This also probably explains its lukewarm reception over here. There are plenty of competing devices. They are not as good, but they do the job nicely and most of them are not totally operator bastardized (unless you go for Voda UK or Orange). For example I recently got a new Nokia E65 on O2. It took 3-4 presses of a button to tell the O2 customisation to go fish. 10 minutes later it was running VOIP calls on my home wireless networks, browsing the web and reading emails off my imap server. It may not be as shiny as an iphone, but it does all the jobs it does as well as VOIP and does it well.
As the saying goes artificial intelligence is no replacement for natural stupidity.
My old Advanced CS professor in high school gave an even better explanation to one geek who was trying to use a similar approach to minimise his search field in a classic travelling salesman problem: "Dear, you cannot have your dick in both hands or your soul in paradise, you have to chose: it is either a full enumeration or you can express it as a sorting problem".
If you deal with the original travelling salesman problem, neural net will not help you by any means. If you modify the problem so it can be solved by means different from brute force you might as well solve it properly. In that case it is no longer the classic "travelling salesman" though.
Nothing so anecdotal about it. It is a well known fact that during microsurgery the nerves are reconnected in nearly random order and the brain has to readjust after that which it does amazingly well (so much for the precoception that it is set in stone which is also mentioned in the article).
What I could never understand is why doctors never try similar techniques on spinal injuries. If you perform this type of surgery within the first couple of hours after the accident it should have the same chance of success as reconnecting a finger or even a limb. IIRC An axon in the hand is no different from an axon in the spinal column. If you can reconnect them in the limb what exactly prevents from reconnecting them in the spinal column (besides the complexity of opening it)?
Similarly, what exactly prevents from taking a chunk of nerve from somewhere, reconnecting the ends via microsurgery and implanting it bang in the middle of the broken part of the spinal column again via microsurgery?
How the hell you are supposed to teach students data representation and data architecture in a language which has deliberately removed the possibility to do all low level data manipulation? Pointers in java? Difference between pointer and the data it points to itself in java? And so on.
It is the old story, you may never in your life drive in manual but if you learn on manual you can drive in both manual and automatic. If you learn on automatic you have to go through learning how to handle manual if you have to later on.
Morocco is already negotiating with the European Community on doing this. So even if you are Algeria, Libya or Chad you are too late for the party. It has already started.
Neither Libya, not Chad are in possession of the chunk of land which is the closest to the EU. All it takes to connect the grids of Morocco and Spain is 13km. Compared to that Libya-Italy is several hundreds.
Add to that the fact that Libya is a tribal patchwork whose stability is held by just one man (Chad is a total mess). Kadafi is a figurehead which has shown a truly magnificent talent to balance between the warring tribes interests. Once he is gone it will be very entertaining. So frankly, while trying to get some oil out of Libya or Chad may make sense, investing the amounts needed for solar is not particularly wise. Algeria is only slightly better.
You still have to solve the transmission difficulties. Italian grid is probably in one of the sorriest states in Europe. You have to overhaul it massively just to allow import of electricity from Libya. Exporting is probably out of the question. Still, Italy is already a net electricity importer so the market is there.
Spanish grid is in a much better state, but once again it is not designed to carry effectively electricity all the way from Morocco.
The next country North from both of Italy and Spain is France which is a net energy exporter with a huge nuclear lobby and it has a considerable political influence in guess where - Libya, Chad and Algeria. And so on.
So at this point in time it will probably end up with just Spain and Morocco doing it. While they have a shouting match about the enclaves every few weeks they are most likely to get it done.
And why exactly am I supposed to care about 175 miles long chunk of desert?
In fact it may as well be twice bigger than that.
What is important is that it is not in the middle of agricultural land.
Not a lot have changed. Then the economics were perverted by the prohibition, now the economics are perverted by subsidies. In either case the process does not make sense neither for booze (grapes are better) nor for fuel (oil plants are better).
Err...
They have so far claimed it to be technically true. They just never made the mistake of claiming so in court. No as they have made that mistake in court the cat is out of the bag.
While it is to late to rake them overt the coal for this case it is not late to do so in any of the countersuits.
Of course, rather than just ignore this unanticipated condition, the OS did the right thing for a voting machine and crashed.
That is realtime ebedditis for you. A well known brain rotting disease which affects a specific portion of the programming community which most likely has a bit too much of Klingon blood in their veins. They can program a multitasking system only according to the 17th maxima of Klingon programming. "Klingon multitasking systems do notsupport "time-sharing". When a Klingon program wants to run, it challenges the scheduler in hand-to-hand combat and owns the machine." It looks like in this case they have also followed the other maxima of Klingon programming: "Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak. Bugs are good for building character in the user." and "Perhaps it IS a good day to die! I say we ship it!".
On a more serious note this is someone strictly following the specs. There are systems where it if you encounter an unknown situation your spec says that you crash instead of trying to be original and let the watchdog sort it out. Quite common in embedded systems and standard spec requirement in things like voting terminals and ATM.
Most people I knew to run Linux did not run it for the costs (me including). It is a tool of the trade and my optimal working environment. So 500$ is not going to phase me if it does the job. Windows simply does not.
As far as the article, frankly it is based on the "optimistic" stats. A while ago there was another article on Slashdot which was on Vista vs MacOSX based on browser usage. It had some striking stats. A nearly direct correlation between "all others" and MacOS growth along with no correlation between Windows XP decrease. Essentially looking at those stats it was clearly obvious that the primary source of MacOS growth in the beginning were not Windows converts, but Unix converts:
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, this was a no contest situation.
With 100M worth of capital you do not go against an industry with turnover in excess of 100s of Billions per year. Most networking gear all the way to 10G is Ethernet now and that industry as the chairman of FTC noted can fend for itself. In fact, based on the FTC decision it surely did.
I have observed where they go in Eastern Europe during the first years after the fall of the wall and they usually go to the local mafia. The mafia bribes the health and safety officials to ensure that the sales go unabated and unrestricted and after that they are sold at roughly 70-90% of the price of the local production - just enough to undercut it.
This includes clothes donated to charities including clothes donated to disaster relief. Charities usually do not need clothes. They need money so they ask to their local reps to sell the loot. The reps in turn do it through the usual mafia channel in order not to risk their skin.
Well, one of the first things to do here is to stop aid or at least make sure that only structural aid comes through. Any non-structural aid like "free food, free clothing, etc" should be stopped.
Classic examples are food aid which has all but killed the local farm industry in many African countries along with dumping unused clothing and shoes which has done the same to the local textile and shoe industries. We drive a local tradesman onto the street and make him forever dependant on foreign aid every time one of us gives a piece of clothing to one of those "collectors" which leave a leaflet and a bag every week.
While at it, Billy the Robber is as guilty of killing indiginous industries as anyone. He has made everything in his power to kill local competition everywhere he stepped. We live in a world where there is one or two indiginous word processing products left as final hold-outs in the losing battle against MSOffice. Navision has been doing the same to indiginous accounting packages and so on.
Under most legislations there are limitations to the extent to which you can sign off your labour code rights. In fact, the labour code usually takes precedence over contract law. In addition to that in most legislations if a contract makes you sign off something which is your right the whole contract is null and void, not that particular clause.
So it looks like IBM has made employees sign an illegal contract. No real surprise here. I have yet to see a legal contract from an American company, dunno WTF are they paying their lawyers. The employees sued successfully to have their rights enforced. From there on IBM used the fact that their original contract has been declared null and void and changed the salary offer on the table.
Good Catbert move in a Dilbertian universe. It will be interesting to see how it pans out in the long run.
I suggest you watch "Specifics of the Russian National Fishing" aka "Osobennosti Nacionalnoi Rubalki" on the subject of dynamite and fishing. You will laugh your a*** off...
DBA: DataBase Administrator
DBD: DataBase Designer
DBAP: DataBase Application Programmer
You missed one point. You also write it off as a tax deductible. If you try to write off $600,000,000,000 as a tax deductible expect black helicopters and men with assault rifles as a responce to your tax return. If a company with a turnover bigger than some nation's GDP does this, it gets an applause in the press for its enormous charitable contribution. Which is a pity - it should get the same treatment (scaled for size - cannons instead of assault rifles).
Makes quite a lot of sense. It will require rewiring most homes though.
Not quite. There are a lot of caveats.
Cheap PCs suck rotten eggs on cooling. Your drives will go very hot.
One good option is cheap PC and an ICY BOX SATA enclosure. They are 30-50£ for 3-5 drives fit in 2-3 standard 5" slots and keep drives within 5C above ambient with virtually no noise.
Another option are Antec Sonata cases. They have 4 very well cooled hard disk slots. If you chose the right 12cm fans it is once again totally quiet.
As far as the MB, etc they can indeed be as cheap as they get. I am building one right now out of an old P3. It is more than enough to saturate a 100MB NFS. A few important caveats I have noticed (It has been a while since I built a storage box).
1. While there are some very tempting offers for IDE cards on the market they are not real IDE. The market has gone in circle 100%. It used to be people selling IDE cards as RAID, now they sell RAID as IDE. So regardless of how nicely does an offer for classic IDE sound, skip it. You are up for trouble. Go SATA.
2. Same for SATA cards with extra IDE ports. These often do not support IDE drives. Same for some IDE ports on recent cheap motherboards.
3. Some cheap SATA cards do funny things with spin-up, spin-down and flush commands. Either go for well tested stuff like Silicon Image or go for a real hardware RAID like 3ware (this is no longer cheap though).
The similar self-assembled P3 based PC in an Antec case behind my HDTV does not have a DVD drive either. It does not f*** need one. What are all those movies and audio on the server for?
So I do not quite see a problem in watching DVDs without a DVD drive in it.
The advantage of Linux is that you need to spend money on things like storage, memory, etc only once - on one machine in the house.
From there on regardless how many others do you have and what do they do a shuttle PC like this is actually a complete overkill.
If you do not want to play games and all you need is office, mail, some MP3-ed music and watching an odd DVD that is more than enough.
RTFA'ed it. It says all relevant safety regulations which in India are "none out of none". No EURONCAP test data, no EU imports permission test data, no US DOT test data, no... And so on. Based on how previous examples of engineering from them have faired in such tests I will not believe that until I have seen it being smashed into the concrete column at the test center.
You cannot. It will not pass basic safety regs and more specifically the standard 35mph crash into a wall test.
It is the same design as the G-Wiz (also Indian by the way). There is a big chunk of weight in the back which will simply collapse the entire frame on top of the passengers in a crash.
There is a reason why the West has abandoned this design. Once upon a time many cars were made like this - Skoda, VW, Citroen, etc all had an engine in the back because you can have a very simple suspension and a very simple transmission. Unfortunately this design behaves very badly in a crash and this is the exact noone makes mass production cars like this any more.
Carriers are learning that the right phone even a pricey one can win customers and bring in revenue - they have known it for a long time. What they have been missing that a POS designed and built by HTC which crashes every time you change a cell is not the right phone despite all the marketing push behind it. Marketing reality distortion cannot compensate for product being crap (which is what the ROKR fiasco proves nicely as well).
Similarly, Nokia has been playing this game all along on this side of the pond though I have to admit - it has never ever been so sadistic in its relationship with the carriers. As far as commercials - jobs is jobs nothing more to be said to this regard. So any changes to this regard in the market are American specific.
Europe has been there, seen it. This also probably explains its lukewarm reception over here. There are plenty of competing devices. They are not as good, but they do the job nicely and most of them are not totally operator bastardized (unless you go for Voda UK or Orange). For example I recently got a new Nokia E65 on O2. It took 3-4 presses of a button to tell the O2 customisation to go fish. 10 minutes later it was running VOIP calls on my home wireless networks, browsing the web and reading emails off my imap server. It may not be as shiny as an iphone, but it does all the jobs it does as well as VOIP and does it well.
As the saying goes artificial intelligence is no replacement for natural stupidity.
My old Advanced CS professor in high school gave an even better explanation to one geek who was trying to use a similar approach to minimise his search field in a classic travelling salesman problem: "Dear, you cannot have your dick in both hands or your soul in paradise, you have to chose: it is either a full enumeration or you can express it as a sorting problem".
If you deal with the original travelling salesman problem, neural net will not help you by any means. If you modify the problem so it can be solved by means different from brute force you might as well solve it properly. In that case it is no longer the classic "travelling salesman" though.
Nothing so anecdotal about it. It is a well known fact that during microsurgery the nerves are reconnected in nearly random order and the brain has to readjust after that which it does amazingly well (so much for the precoception that it is set in stone which is also mentioned in the article).
What I could never understand is why doctors never try similar techniques on spinal injuries. If you perform this type of surgery within the first couple of hours after the accident it should have the same chance of success as reconnecting a finger or even a limb. IIRC An axon in the hand is no different from an axon in the spinal column. If you can reconnect them in the limb what exactly prevents from reconnecting them in the spinal column (besides the complexity of opening it)?
Similarly, what exactly prevents from taking a chunk of nerve from somewhere, reconnecting the ends via microsurgery and implanting it bang in the middle of the broken part of the spinal column again via microsurgery?
Well, well, well
You should not use the Dijkstra name in vain.
How the hell you are supposed to teach students data representation and data architecture in a language which has deliberately removed the possibility to do all low level data manipulation? Pointers in java? Difference between pointer and the data it points to itself in java? And so on.
It is the old story, you may never in your life drive in manual but if you learn on manual you can drive in both manual and automatic. If you learn on automatic you have to go through learning how to handle manual if you have to later on.
Morocco is already negotiating with the European Community on doing this. So even if you are Algeria, Libya or Chad you are too late for the party. It has already started.
Neither Libya, not Chad are in possession of the chunk of land which is the closest to the EU. All it takes to connect the grids of Morocco and Spain is 13km. Compared to that Libya-Italy is several hundreds.
Add to that the fact that Libya is a tribal patchwork whose stability is held by just one man (Chad is a total mess). Kadafi is a figurehead which has shown a truly magnificent talent to balance between the warring tribes interests. Once he is gone it will be very entertaining. So frankly, while trying to get some oil out of Libya or Chad may make sense, investing the amounts needed for solar is not particularly wise. Algeria is only slightly better.
You still have to solve the transmission difficulties. Italian grid is probably in one of the sorriest states in Europe. You have to overhaul it massively just to allow import of electricity from Libya. Exporting is probably out of the question. Still, Italy is already a net electricity importer so the market is there.
Spanish grid is in a much better state, but once again it is not designed to carry effectively electricity all the way from Morocco.
The next country North from both of Italy and Spain is France which is a net energy exporter with a huge nuclear lobby and it has a considerable political influence in guess where - Libya, Chad and Algeria. And so on.
So at this point in time it will probably end up with just Spain and Morocco doing it. While they have a shouting match about the enclaves every few weeks they are most likely to get it done.
And why exactly am I supposed to care about 175 miles long chunk of desert? In fact it may as well be twice bigger than that. What is important is that it is not in the middle of agricultural land.
Neither.
I am referring to the massive subsidies received by the corn farmers in the USA and the sugar beet farmers in Europe.
Not a lot have changed. Then the economics were perverted by the prohibition, now the economics are perverted by subsidies. In either case the process does not make sense neither for booze (grapes are better) nor for fuel (oil plants are better).
Err... They have so far claimed it to be technically true. They just never made the mistake of claiming so in court. No as they have made that mistake in court the cat is out of the bag. While it is to late to rake them overt the coal for this case it is not late to do so in any of the countersuits.
That is realtime ebedditis for you. A well known brain rotting disease which affects a specific portion of the programming community which most likely has a bit too much of Klingon blood in their veins. They can program a multitasking system only according to the 17th maxima of Klingon programming. "Klingon multitasking systems do notsupport "time-sharing". When a Klingon program wants to run, it challenges the scheduler in hand-to-hand combat and owns the machine." It looks like in this case they have also followed the other maxima of Klingon programming: "Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak. Bugs are good for building character in the user." and "Perhaps it IS a good day to die! I say we ship it!".
On a more serious note this is someone strictly following the specs. There are systems where it if you encounter an unknown situation your spec says that you crash instead of trying to be original and let the watchdog sort it out. Quite common in embedded systems and standard spec requirement in things like voting terminals and ATM.
Well, this means your company will be paying for it. That's all.
Most people I knew to run Linux did not run it for the costs (me including). It is a tool of the trade and my optimal working environment. So 500$ is not going to phase me if it does the job. Windows simply does not.
As far as the article, frankly it is based on the "optimistic" stats. A while ago there was another article on Slashdot which was on Vista vs MacOSX based on browser usage. It had some striking stats. A nearly direct correlation between "all others" and MacOS growth along with no correlation between Windows XP decrease. Essentially looking at those stats it was clearly obvious that the primary source of MacOS growth in the beginning were not Windows converts, but Unix converts:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=5