And the only thing a person who wants to distribute malware neeeds to do is some minimal robots.txt manipulation. The pages with the "bait" content can still be "crawlable" by google while the malware may sit in areas which have been made non-crawlable.
Yet another stupid idea. Almost as stupid as the.bank domain. Or windows asking you to reboot just because the program you run was called "install" or had an MSI extension.
There is a term to this and it is "constructive dismissal". Second highest payback category in an employment tribunal after discrimination cases and usually more successful as it is considerably easier to prove.
If dell will be supplying some level of support it should be. In fact that is possibly the best commercial decision done by any Vendor to ever try shipping Linux. Further to this the experience of the few colocation providers which support Debian and Ubuntu has shown this as the best way to keep things under control.
One step away? He is just a different manifestation of the same problem.
And so spoke Lazarus: It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics
Psychic or Shaman same rule apply: Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent.
Have you tried driving the A2? I tried, got off and bought something else. It is horrid. People who buy small cars buy them for city driving where visibility is one of the key purchase decision factors. My wife got in, looked around, said "I can't see sh** here" and got out refusing to even turn the engine on to the dismay of the salesdroid. It has A pillars so thick that you can miss a cyclist at a roundabout. The rear view glass is curved to a point where any car behind you looks like a Toyota Yaris Verso. The perception of distance is completely distorted. Add to that the fact that it does not have a rare window wiper so once you drop to city driving speeds you see nothing in the rare view mirror. There is a reason why its sales are so low and it is that it ze very bad dezign. By the way, the wife got out of the Audi, got into a Sirion and nearly beat up the next salesman because she could not drive it home straight off the forecourt: "What do you mean, I cannot buy it now. I am paying you cash, why are you telling me that I cannot carry?".
Smart FourTwo is an oddball and it is mostly Swatch design anyway. Swiss, not German origin. The Roadster is no longer manufactured. FourFour is actually a Mitsubishi design and reuses the chassis of the new Colt. So does the new A-Class and neither one of them is small in the sense of C1/Aygo/107/Cuore/Modus small. Same for BMW1, A3. They are small family cars by class, not superminis.
AFAIK, Ford Fiasco is not a German design, neither is the Ka. Both of them have the same footprint as a new Yaris or an old Sirion and show "how an idiot afraid to cannibalize his large car sales can bastardize an otherwise good idea". They offer 70% or less of the internal and luggage space compared to a Japanese or French car in the same category.
That leaves only the Corsa and the Opel clones of Suzuki designs. One bird spring does not make so I will stand by my statement - Germans do not design anything competitive in the small car sector. Because zey can't. Ze car has to look like ze Panzer...
That is also true. But overall across the entire EU/Japan car industry you can see a launch of a whole set of smaller cars which are actually smaller than the smallest car prior to them in the same class. C1, new 107, 1007, Aygo, Cuore, Modus, etc. It is only ze Germans who have the misunderstanding zat small means cheap and have abandoned that sector (yep right, why Renault is rumoured to have the best margin on the Modus). Only German car competing there is Lupo which is a 7+ year old design and cannot get anywhere close to the new arrivals.
As far as getting you home. So will a VW Golf 4motion, Daihatsu Sirion 4track, Skoda Octavia 4x4 not to mention Subaru and plenty of other vehicles by other manufacturers. 4x4 is not an exclusive feature of an SUV and most SUVs have worse 4x4 implementation than some normal cars.
IIRC, 4-5 years ago Top Gear (or 5th Gear, forgot, one of the UK TV car shows) did a test comparing the following: Landrover Freelander (typical POS SUV), Skoda Octavia 4x4 (VW group estate with a 4x4 gearbox), Renault Scenic 4x4 (Medium family MPV with 4x4 gearbox). All in roughly the same weight and engine class. I recall some of the results:
Motorway Handling - dodging a cardboard box dropped from a lorry in front:
Worst - Freelander. It nearly flipped over when doing the exercise. Screaming passengers, Flying luggage. Typical SUV style.
Scenic - tolerable, considerably better than the FreeLander.
Best - Skoda. Stayed glued to the road.
Towing a trailer on wet grass field :
Worst - Freelander. All show, no substance. SUV all the way.
Skoda - close second to the Scenic overtaking the FreeLander by far.
Best - Scenic.
And so on. Overall the "classic" SUV fared worst even in the dirt tasks they advertise it for, while the two 4x4 family cars more or less tied the first place (with Renault winning by a small margin).
Your observation is absolutely correct as far as German cars are concerned. They are evolving into tanks. If you line up Golf 1,2,3,4,5 next to each other you get a strong deja vu feeling. You have seen that before. Panzer 1,2,3, and Tiger 4,5. Building ze better tank. Other VW models are not any different. Same for Mercedes and to a lesser extent BMW.
Other manufacturers are actually going smaller on their small end or more or less maintaining size. Toyota, Daihatsu, Suzuki, Citroen, Peugeout, Renault, Skoda have all launched either models which are roughly the same size as their predecessor over the last 3 years or have launched new small cars along with bumping up the size on the existing lines.
I would read the background in the links with a grain of salt. The author of the top one missed the well known industry fact of "Noone in his sane mind sues Level3 on VOIP IP". I bet a lot of people had the itch, but AFAIK noone ever did.
The reason is that Level3 once upon a time bought one of the first softswitch developers. AFAIK it ever tried to use it in production, but it can still use it as a great defensive legal weapon.
If Verizon tries to sue Level3 it will be presented with code which does what is described in some of their patents and is dated at least several years prior to that. So while I agree that Vonage is an obvious "soft target" the conclusion that there are "other" targets is fairly off the mark.
And a Lazarus answer to you is:Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth..
As far as the original topic is concerned Lazarus also has to say:
Exact description of the event:
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.
A description of the underlying problem:
History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.
And a good summary of the correct approach: Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent.
While as a hack he is second rate, as a religious inventor he has demonstrated us his prowess. The idea to use a DIY lie detector as a primary religious object is awesome. No wonder it is the religion with the least number of defectors.
In the coffee shop analogy you could have ordered a new coffee and got it right away. In the real world you could have gone out, outsourced your IT and payed the outsourcing contractor to do the same job on a per-item basis.
Really - it is your choice. In a non-outsourced environment the sysadmin time is usually doublebooked and person is overworked to the point of total stupor. In many cases it takes some understanding and appreciation to get your job done right here, right now ahead of the queue. The alternative is you pay per item done.
As I said - your choice. Organisations especially as they grow bigger prefer the predictability of per-item work. What do you preferer as an individual is entirely up to you.
Disclaimer - after 12 years of sysadminning (sometimes more, sometimes less) I no longer do sysadmin work as a primary day job. And I no longer do any work that involves end users. So my opinion may be a bit biased.
Haha, they seem to be relatives. The Spanish is in fact a commercialisation of Solar Dos.
Anyway, that is a plant which I do not mind having in my own town.
Everything else aside it is damn pretty. Looks like a cathedral. In fact it will not look that much out of place next to Sagrada Familia or any other post-modernist cathedral.
Thanks, lots of really good links. The Kramer Junction has miles and miles of pipework with associated heat losses to transport across it. It is impressive, but IMO it is a detour into a dead end as far as reducing costs of solar energy is concerned. What sets the Spanish project apart is as you pointed out the heliostat design. Cheap, cheerfull and very simple to build with modern technology. Compared to Kramer junction these can be built by the dozen in nearly no time at all. In fact it can be done with simple flat mirrors to reduce costs. So much for the Archimedes mirror being useless and unable to heat up anything (as per Mythbusters).
The math with current photovoltaics will not come out in favour until the fossil fuel rises by a factor of at least 10 times. Does not matter what, how, who, where. They are simply too expensive to provide a reasonable ROI. They also have a very high environmental cost to produce so people who buy them are not doing a lot of good to the environment. Photovoltaics are a gimmick, similar to the hybrid cars which allow metrosexuals and hollywood stars to show off some fake green credentials.
The only working nowdays solar tech for electricity is this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6616651.stm. The tech is originally french (they have been running a pilot plant like this near Marseiles since the mid-70es). For the numbers quoted in the article the performance is quite impressive. 22MW is a small plant, most of them have per-KW cost higher than the normal electricity cost anyway. It is also first of a kind, so cost is inevitably higher like for any new tech. If this is industrialised it should be able to produce electricity at nearly normal costs in any place where you have sun and water to use as a coolant. Plenty of empty land near the coasts around the world to use for this.
I will be very cautious with this analysis.
While some of their economic growth can be attributed to the tax system a large portion lies elsewhere:
Primary weapons dealer in dumping unused weapons from the part of ex-Warsaw pact to become NATO into conflict zones around Russia border. By various accounts the Estonians supplied Dudaev with more than a 100+ trainer aicraft. Various makes (Chech, Polish, etc) roughly equivalent to the UK Hawk. It is not a well known fact, but the pictures of trainer aircraft converted into battlefield bombers at Hankala were the final straw that made Eltcin convinced in starting the first Chechen war. That is just one example. Plenty of others where it provided supply chain management for the local conflicts around the ex-Soviet Union.
Primary jumppoint for drug traffic from Russia into Europe, especially Scandinavia with involvement all the way to the government. The scandinavian governments deliberately disallowed to confirm or deny the rumour that the Estonia ferry sank while trying to dump overboard a couple of lorries with Russian heroin. So we will never know. But that is by no means the not only example.
While I do not recall if Estonia specifically has a legalised form of apartheid and has "Purity of the Nation" laws (some other baltic states do) it wealth relies on a lowly payed labour of a minority which is denied its civil rights and is never allowed to become cittizens.
So with all due respect, I will have my doubts about the Estonian economic miracle. The Estonian taxation miracle reminds me of a "miracle" agricultural community I saw in Bulgaria 20 years ago. A small village, newly paved roads, all houses freshly painted. Picture perfect. Official source of income - raspberries and plums. Real source of income (70%+) - a small workshop producing tail fins and other mortar bomb components for the Sopot armoury (man BG military weapon producer). Using vietnamese labourers.
As well as a chance of posting an arcane method of database transition involving MySQL to start an ACID war.
As well as on the original subject of the article - the best way to migrate an application is to load all of the data from one datasource and dump it into another datasource. If the application fails this trivial test its database access libraries are broken. If the app sticks strictly to dynamic SQL, high level DBI functions and does no manual escaping - it just works. The escaping portion of the SQL libs take care of it and ensure it is mapped correctly both ways. If the app tries to escape by hand, sticks data into teh SQL statement itself, etc - it fails. Same for utf/latin transitions and the like.
Why?
This is a service provided by a telco for its own customers across its own infrastructure:
They know your IP. If it is a DSL they can check it all the way to your local tail and have the same level of reliably identifying an emergency caller as for a normal phone call. All of this is in systems somewhere on the way. In addition to that it has to be checked only once - when the phone signs onto the system for service so the resource used is not that great. Same for cable - the MAC of your cable modem and the "location" of your MAC behind it can be polled straight away from the CMTS.
In either case we are talking 400-500 lines of code which does not need to function in real time in the call loop. All you need is to assign a phone to a call routing class to the correct emergency center some time after it has signed in and update the directory which supplies address data to the emergency services. This is done for the normal phones already anyway. If the main directory is static, VOIP and "follow me home" services can be passed to a secondary for referral. If there is a legal requirement for the phone to have emergency services from the moment of sign in, simply deny outgoing calls until registration is complete (first 5-10 minutes phone comes in on a new IP address). Plenty of ways to do all this. All are utterly technically trivial.
The only reason for this is a marketing/legal step somewhere. Most likely some ATT is taking the aim at Skype or Vonage. Clearly this, has nothing to do with technical impossibility of emergency services. Everything else aside, I cannot believe that ATT does not have a single person which can write this. All it takes are a couple of man weeks for a good OSS engineer. No rocket science in it.
Cambodja has working trade unions and working labour law. So does Turkey and so to a lesser extent does Bangladesh. While, their working hours and norms may sound excessive by Western Europe or US standards they are considerably lower than the rest of East Asia and especially China. As a result their textile products cost 10-20% more on average, but the difference in quality is staggering. When "field tested" on my unruly junior pair of Chinese shorts falls apart at the seams or is ripped to shreds on a bramble in 3 months or less. Shoes - 2 months or less. Jackets - one season or less. And so on. Compared to that the production of any of these countries (as well as the production of Eastern Europe which also has silly labour costs) lasts several times longer - roughly to the point where he outgrows them. So no surprise that we ended up operating a strict "no-Chinese" policy regarding any clothing and shoeware. It ends up being more expensive once depreciation is taken into effect. Same as with most other Chinese light industry products.
One of the reason why the Chinese light industry succeeds is the perversion of the free market by branding. They are the primary producer of counterfeit clothing and shoeware in the world. And the only reason it sells is because people like showing off with a label. And this is all silently covered up by the state as it is usually run by local state officials. Same as the Disneyland in the original story. If this is revoked as well as the unfair advantage of running the environment into the ground and they have to compete on quality alone they fail straight away.
But I have been to plenty of places with similar labour costs. In fact, I have lived in one for a while.
While what you are telling is correct for a painting, textiles and other "light industry", labour is only a minor part of the BOM for an heavy industrial product like a car, bicycle or modern toys. Environmental control on the other side is. It may account for 40%+ of the costs of plastics, 30%+ of the costs of metals (those pesky sulfur emissions controls, water quality control, cleanup of land destroyed by open mining, etc), 70%+ for some paints and coatings, 100%+ for some electronic components and so on.
Let's apply that to a pedal cycle - you have around 1 hour labour costs during initial assembly (everything including tires and all components), rest is BOM. The BOM difference between Chinese plastics, metal, tires, etc and _fully_ western Europe makes due to environmental regulations and mandatory acceptance for recycling for a bicycle can be close to 100 pounds (200$) at the moment. Compared to that the labour cost difference is negligible. If we look at any other product that makes heavy use of metal or plastics we get roughly the same proportions.
Further to this, if we look back at "light industry" like clothing the difference in quality between sweatshop labour and labour working in better conditions is also quite apparent. Compare a shirt made in China with one done in Bangladesh, Cambodja or Turkey. The quality difference is striking and these can nowdays often compete on quality alone (if the market is not perverted by "branding").
If China is left to compete on price of labour alone with the BOM costs equalized by mandatory environmental controls it will lose straight away to everyone else on quality alone.
You cannot hoodwink them. They have seen a better margin and a better chance of exploitation. The only thing that can stop a publically listed business from following the scent trail of higher profit in the name of an abstract concept is nuking the stock market. After all it is what drives this in the first place.
The reasons for Chinese imports being cheap are twofold - complete lack of environmental control and use of slave labour. Both can be dealt with by putting the relevant legal frameworks in place.
The framework for the environmental is very similar to the one established for food imports. All it requires is application to all goods. No exemptions. Licensing of importers and mandatory certification. Same as for food.
The labour is actually a comparatively minor addition compared to the rest as far as modern manufacturing is concerned. Badly payed and badly treated labour delivers bad quality product (if that was not the case we would have still be owning slaves like the ancient egyptians).
Once the primary cost factor which is the environment is put on equal footing you can compete with Chinese on quality, efficiency and innovation. Just look at the Wiki page of the same Cheery motors. They do not have any of their own R&D. If it was not for European R&D (and to lesser extent american R&D) they would be dead straight away. Add to that mandatory environmental control to which European (and American) businesses are subjected on a day to day basis and they will fade into their internal market for the next century.
Slashdot Mirror
They would.
.bank domain. Or windows asking you to reboot just because the program you run was called "install" or had an MSI extension.
And the only thing a person who wants to distribute malware neeeds to do is some minimal robots.txt manipulation. The pages with the "bait" content can still be "crawlable" by google while the malware may sit in areas which have been made non-crawlable.
Yet another stupid idea. Almost as stupid as the
There is a term to this and it is "constructive dismissal". Second highest payback category in an employment tribunal after discrimination cases and usually more successful as it is considerably easier to prove.
If dell will be supplying some level of support it should be. In fact that is possibly the best commercial decision done by any Vendor to ever try shipping Linux. Further to this the experience of the few colocation providers which support Debian and Ubuntu has shown this as the best way to keep things under control.
His next job should be NASA PR or a Scientific Advisor. Seems to be well qualified for that.
And so spoke Lazarus: It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics
Psychic or Shaman same rule apply: Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent.
Have you tried driving the A2? I tried, got off and bought something else. It is horrid. People who buy small cars buy them for city driving where visibility is one of the key purchase decision factors. My wife got in, looked around, said "I can't see sh** here" and got out refusing to even turn the engine on to the dismay of the salesdroid. It has A pillars so thick that you can miss a cyclist at a roundabout. The rear view glass is curved to a point where any car behind you looks like a Toyota Yaris Verso. The perception of distance is completely distorted. Add to that the fact that it does not have a rare window wiper so once you drop to city driving speeds you see nothing in the rare view mirror. There is a reason why its sales are so low and it is that it ze very bad dezign. By the way, the wife got out of the Audi, got into a Sirion and nearly beat up the next salesman because she could not drive it home straight off the forecourt: "What do you mean, I cannot buy it now. I am paying you cash, why are you telling me that I cannot carry?".
Smart FourTwo is an oddball and it is mostly Swatch design anyway. Swiss, not German origin. The Roadster is no longer manufactured. FourFour is actually a Mitsubishi design and reuses the chassis of the new Colt. So does the new A-Class and neither one of them is small in the sense of C1/Aygo/107/Cuore/Modus small. Same for BMW1, A3. They are small family cars by class, not superminis.
AFAIK, Ford Fiasco is not a German design, neither is the Ka. Both of them have the same footprint as a new Yaris or an old Sirion and show "how an idiot afraid to cannibalize his large car sales can bastardize an otherwise good idea". They offer 70% or less of the internal and luggage space compared to a Japanese or French car in the same category.
That leaves only the Corsa and the Opel clones of Suzuki designs. One bird spring does not make so I will stand by my statement - Germans do not design anything competitive in the small car sector. Because zey can't. Ze car has to look like ze Panzer...
That is also true. But overall across the entire EU/Japan car industry you can see a launch of a whole set of smaller cars which are actually smaller than the smallest car prior to them in the same class. C1, new 107, 1007, Aygo, Cuore, Modus, etc. It is only ze Germans who have the misunderstanding zat small means cheap and have abandoned that sector (yep right, why Renault is rumoured to have the best margin on the Modus). Only German car competing there is Lupo which is a 7+ year old design and cannot get anywhere close to the new arrivals.
IIRC, 4-5 years ago Top Gear (or 5th Gear, forgot, one of the UK TV car shows) did a test comparing the following: Landrover Freelander (typical POS SUV), Skoda Octavia 4x4 (VW group estate with a 4x4 gearbox), Renault Scenic 4x4 (Medium family MPV with 4x4 gearbox). All in roughly the same weight and engine class. I recall some of the results:
Motorway Handling - dodging a cardboard box dropped from a lorry in front:
- Worst - Freelander. It nearly flipped over when doing the exercise. Screaming passengers, Flying luggage. Typical SUV style.
- Scenic - tolerable, considerably better than the FreeLander.
- Best - Skoda. Stayed glued to the road.
Towing a trailer on wet grass field :- Worst - Freelander. All show, no substance. SUV all the way.
- Skoda - close second to the Scenic overtaking the FreeLander by far.
- Best - Scenic.
And so on. Overall the "classic" SUV fared worst even in the dirt tasks they advertise it for, while the two 4x4 family cars more or less tied the first place (with Renault winning by a small margin).Not necessarily.
Your observation is absolutely correct as far as German cars are concerned. They are evolving into tanks. If you line up Golf 1,2,3,4,5 next to each other you get a strong deja vu feeling. You have seen that before. Panzer 1,2,3, and Tiger 4,5. Building ze better tank. Other VW models are not any different. Same for Mercedes and to a lesser extent BMW.
Other manufacturers are actually going smaller on their small end or more or less maintaining size. Toyota, Daihatsu, Suzuki, Citroen, Peugeout, Renault, Skoda have all launched either models which are roughly the same size as their predecessor over the last 3 years or have launched new small cars along with bumping up the size on the existing lines.
Not quite so. There was a commercial product implementing the function. So as a matter of fact the disclosure has occurred.
I would read the background in the links with a grain of salt. The author of the top one missed the well known industry fact of "Noone in his sane mind sues Level3 on VOIP IP". I bet a lot of people had the itch, but AFAIK noone ever did.
The reason is that Level3 once upon a time bought one of the first softswitch developers. AFAIK it ever tried to use it in production, but it can still use it as a great defensive legal weapon.
If Verizon tries to sue Level3 it will be presented with code which does what is described in some of their patents and is dated at least several years prior to that. So while I agree that Vonage is an obvious "soft target" the conclusion that there are "other" targets is fairly off the mark.
As far as the original topic is concerned Lazarus also has to say:
While as a hack he is second rate, as a religious inventor he has demonstrated us his prowess. The idea to use a DIY lie detector as a primary religious object is awesome. No wonder it is the religion with the least number of defectors.
Lazarus Long as usually has the answer: One Man's Religion as Another Man's Belly Laugh
Well...
As a matter of fact there is a point here.
In the coffee shop analogy you could have ordered a new coffee and got it right away. In the real world you could have gone out, outsourced your IT and payed the outsourcing contractor to do the same job on a per-item basis.
Really - it is your choice. In a non-outsourced environment the sysadmin time is usually doublebooked and person is overworked to the point of total stupor. In many cases it takes some understanding and appreciation to get your job done right here, right now ahead of the queue. The alternative is you pay per item done.
As I said - your choice. Organisations especially as they grow bigger prefer the predictability of per-item work. What do you preferer as an individual is entirely up to you.
Disclaimer - after 12 years of sysadminning (sometimes more, sometimes less) I no longer do sysadmin work as a primary day job. And I no longer do any work that involves end users. So my opinion may be a bit biased.
Haha, they seem to be relatives. The Spanish is in fact a commercialisation of Solar Dos.
Anyway, that is a plant which I do not mind having in my own town.
Everything else aside it is damn pretty. Looks like a cathedral. In fact it will not look that much out of place next to Sagrada Familia or any other post-modernist cathedral.
Thanks, lots of really good links. The Kramer Junction has miles and miles of pipework with associated heat losses to transport across it. It is impressive, but IMO it is a detour into a dead end as far as reducing costs of solar energy is concerned.
What sets the Spanish project apart is as you pointed out the heliostat design. Cheap, cheerfull and very simple to build with modern technology. Compared to Kramer junction these can be built by the dozen in nearly no time at all. In fact it can be done with simple flat mirrors to reduce costs. So much for the Archimedes mirror being useless and unable to heat up anything (as per Mythbusters).
The math with current photovoltaics will not come out in favour until the fossil fuel rises by a factor of at least 10 times. Does not matter what, how, who, where. They are simply too expensive to provide a reasonable ROI. They also have a very high environmental cost to produce so people who buy them are not doing a lot of good to the environment. Photovoltaics are a gimmick, similar to the hybrid cars which allow metrosexuals and hollywood stars to show off some fake green credentials.
The only working nowdays solar tech for electricity is this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6616651.stm. The tech is originally french (they have been running a pilot plant like this near Marseiles since the mid-70es). For the numbers quoted in the article the performance is quite impressive. 22MW is a small plant, most of them have per-KW cost higher than the normal electricity cost anyway. It is also first of a kind, so cost is inevitably higher like for any new tech. If this is industrialised it should be able to produce electricity at nearly normal costs in any place where you have sun and water to use as a coolant. Plenty of empty land near the coasts around the world to use for this.
- Primary weapons dealer in dumping unused weapons from the part of ex-Warsaw pact to become NATO into conflict zones around Russia border. By various accounts the Estonians supplied Dudaev with more than a 100+ trainer aicraft. Various makes (Chech, Polish, etc) roughly equivalent to the UK Hawk. It is not a well known fact, but the pictures of trainer aircraft converted into battlefield bombers at Hankala were the final straw that made Eltcin convinced in starting the first Chechen war. That is just one example. Plenty of others where it provided supply chain management for the local conflicts around the ex-Soviet Union.
- Primary jumppoint for drug traffic from Russia into Europe, especially Scandinavia with involvement all the way to the government. The scandinavian governments deliberately disallowed to confirm or deny the rumour that the Estonia ferry sank while trying to dump overboard a couple of lorries with Russian heroin. So we will never know. But that is by no means the not only example.
- While I do not recall if Estonia specifically has a legalised form of apartheid and has "Purity of the Nation" laws (some other baltic states do) it wealth relies on a lowly payed labour of a minority which is denied its civil rights and is never allowed to become cittizens.
So with all due respect, I will have my doubts about the Estonian economic miracle. The Estonian taxation miracle reminds me of a "miracle" agricultural community I saw in Bulgaria 20 years ago. A small village, newly paved roads, all houses freshly painted. Picture perfect. Official source of income - raspberries and plums. Real source of income (70%+) - a small workshop producing tail fins and other mortar bomb components for the Sopot armoury (man BG military weapon producer). Using vietnamese labourers.True.
As well as a chance of posting an arcane method of database transition involving MySQL to start an ACID war.
As well as on the original subject of the article - the best way to migrate an application is to load all of the data from one datasource and dump it into another datasource. If the application fails this trivial test its database access libraries are broken. If the app sticks strictly to dynamic SQL, high level DBI functions and does no manual escaping - it just works. The escaping portion of the SQL libs take care of it and ensure it is mapped correctly both ways. If the app tries to escape by hand, sticks data into teh SQL statement itself, etc - it fails. Same for utf/latin transitions and the like.
They know your IP. If it is a DSL they can check it all the way to your local tail and have the same level of reliably identifying an emergency caller as for a normal phone call. All of this is in systems somewhere on the way. In addition to that it has to be checked only once - when the phone signs onto the system for service so the resource used is not that great. Same for cable - the MAC of your cable modem and the "location" of your MAC behind it can be polled straight away from the CMTS.
In either case we are talking 400-500 lines of code which does not need to function in real time in the call loop. All you need is to assign a phone to a call routing class to the correct emergency center some time after it has signed in and update the directory which supplies address data to the emergency services. This is done for the normal phones already anyway. If the main directory is static, VOIP and "follow me home" services can be passed to a secondary for referral. If there is a legal requirement for the phone to have emergency services from the moment of sign in, simply deny outgoing calls until registration is complete (first 5-10 minutes phone comes in on a new IP address). Plenty of ways to do all this. All are utterly technically trivial.
The only reason for this is a marketing/legal step somewhere. Most likely some ATT is taking the aim at Skype or Vonage. Clearly this, has nothing to do with technical impossibility of emergency services. Everything else aside, I cannot believe that ATT does not have a single person which can write this. All it takes are a couple of man weeks for a good OSS engineer. No rocket science in it.
Cambodja has working trade unions and working labour law. So does Turkey and so to a lesser extent does Bangladesh.
While, their working hours and norms may sound excessive by Western Europe or US standards they are considerably lower than the rest of East Asia and especially China.
As a result their textile products cost 10-20% more on average, but the difference in quality is staggering. When "field tested" on my unruly junior pair of Chinese shorts falls apart at the seams or is ripped to shreds on a bramble in 3 months or less. Shoes - 2 months or less. Jackets - one season or less. And so on.
Compared to that the production of any of these countries (as well as the production of Eastern Europe which also has silly labour costs) lasts several times longer - roughly to the point where he outgrows them.
So no surprise that we ended up operating a strict "no-Chinese" policy regarding any clothing and shoeware. It ends up being more expensive once depreciation is taken into effect. Same as with most other Chinese light industry products.
One of the reason why the Chinese light industry succeeds is the perversion of the free market by branding. They are the primary producer of counterfeit clothing and shoeware in the world. And the only reason it sells is because people like showing off with a label. And this is all silently covered up by the state as it is usually run by local state officials. Same as the Disneyland in the original story. If this is revoked as well as the unfair advantage of running the environment into the ground and they have to compete on quality alone they fail straight away.
No.
But I have been to plenty of places with similar labour costs. In fact, I have lived in one for a while.
While what you are telling is correct for a painting, textiles and other "light industry", labour is only a minor part of the BOM for an heavy industrial product like a car, bicycle or modern toys. Environmental control on the other side is. It may account for 40%+ of the costs of plastics, 30%+ of the costs of metals (those pesky sulfur emissions controls, water quality control, cleanup of land destroyed by open mining, etc), 70%+ for some paints and coatings, 100%+ for some electronic components and so on.
Let's apply that to a pedal cycle - you have around 1 hour labour costs during initial assembly (everything including tires and all components), rest is BOM. The BOM difference between Chinese plastics, metal, tires, etc and _fully_ western Europe makes due to environmental regulations and mandatory acceptance for recycling for a bicycle can be close to 100 pounds (200$) at the moment. Compared to that the labour cost difference is negligible. If we look at any other product that makes heavy use of metal or plastics we get roughly the same proportions.
Further to this, if we look back at "light industry" like clothing the difference in quality between sweatshop labour and labour working in better conditions is also quite apparent. Compare a shirt made in China with one done in Bangladesh, Cambodja or Turkey. The quality difference is striking and these can nowdays often compete on quality alone (if the market is not perverted by "branding").
If China is left to compete on price of labour alone with the BOM costs equalized by mandatory environmental controls it will lose straight away to everyone else on quality alone.
You cannot hoodwink them. They have seen a better margin and a better chance of exploitation. The only thing that can stop a publically listed business from following the scent trail of higher profit in the name of an abstract concept is nuking the stock market. After all it is what drives this in the first place.
The reasons for Chinese imports being cheap are twofold - complete lack of environmental control and use of slave labour. Both can be dealt with by putting the relevant legal frameworks in place.
The framework for the environmental is very similar to the one established for food imports. All it requires is application to all goods. No exemptions. Licensing of importers and mandatory certification. Same as for food.
The labour is actually a comparatively minor addition compared to the rest as far as modern manufacturing is concerned. Badly payed and badly treated labour delivers bad quality product (if that was not the case we would have still be owning slaves like the ancient egyptians).
Once the primary cost factor which is the environment is put on equal footing you can compete with Chinese on quality, efficiency and innovation. Just look at the Wiki page of the same Cheery motors. They do not have any of their own R&D. If it was not for European R&D (and to lesser extent american R&D) they would be dead straight away. Add to that mandatory environmental control to which European (and American) businesses are subjected on a day to day basis and they will fade into their internal market for the next century.
Arrow? Ya gotta be kidding, if it is in the name of the mouse it will more likely end up being an ICBM.