That should actually be the Russian taxpayer (primary life support is provided by the Zvezda module). And I do not particularly recall any historical period when the rulers of Russia gave a flying fuck about their cittizen's thoughts on governmental spending. In fact, modern Russian state is founded on government diverting taxation money from where it is supposed to go. That what Ivan Kalita (the Wallet) did to start the second Russian state and the tradition has carried on from there onwards.
I wish I had some moderation points to mod you funny. As I do not, I will comment.
The problem with the US (and to a lesser extent other countries) government supply chain is the fear of the unfamiliar. The rule of the game is that if you supply something familiar which brings out that warm cosy feeling in the congresscritter you succeed. The Humvee is nothing, but a life sizes copy of a badly designed glorified monstertruck toy which American kids have imprinted in their psyche over the first 10 years of their life. It brings out warm fuzzy feeling in the congresscritter and he is reluctant to approve an unfamiliar weird looking design for mass purchase. The same is happening in the UK which keeps buying Landrovers instead of proper vehicles, despite the govt being lambasted into bits by the press. After all the Landy is something which in the UK (if you are past that certain age) you are supposed to love and cherish regardless of how badly does it suck. Russia is no different with Sukhoi scraping money off other projects to work on the Berkut just because it looks weird and keeps not getting the funding it deserves.
The situation is similar in large corporations. Presenting something new and revolutionary to the board is usually a career death. In fact there is a whole niche for highly payed professionals in the R&D of large corps that specialises in presenting the unfamiliar in a familiar way.
And here is where IMO the crucial difference between the US (and UK for that matter) and Scandinavian countries is. The scandinavian countries are currently benefiting from breaking the familiarity circle in their corporation boards and government. By either threatening to put or putting in place mandatory equality legislation and quotas on women in corporate boards and elected assemblies they created a temporary condition where you can present something less familiar to the board (or the parliamentcritters) and survive. This advantage is temporary and will decrease over time. It will never fade fully as do we like it or not we are not create equal and women like different things from men. But it will not be anywhere near what it is now in 10 years time.
So coming back to your rant - if you want that changed you should vote Clinton.
But as an ex-chemist I would like to chip in my 0.02E. Liquid sodium is a nasty substance which can corrode nearly anything over a long term. It changes the properties of ceramics, metals, you name it. It will take a lot to convince me that a liquid sodium design is safe.
Also, IIRC, Russians did similar experiment with liquid Bismuth. No idea how they relate to these designs, but as far as corrosion of the equipment it is possibly a better choice.
Well... If this becomes the policy, any country which is allowed to produce nuclear energy will automatically be capable of producing proper nuclear arms (not U235 firecrackers like the one North Koreans did recently). The regime to handle this politically is simply not in place at the moment.
In every single one of them you will wait for 7 hours before being admitted and after that receive letters from the local health authority which ask "are you dead, and if you are not yet have you sorted yourself out so we can stop bothering".
I got so pissed off from these that I have answered "No, despite your best efforts, I am not dead yet, and I have not sorted myself out, so you can forget the idea of removing me off that waiting list". Got an letter boiling of righteous indignation in return and had an appointment made for me next month.
The consultant looked at me, ticked me off the list off so El Presidente Antonio Bliar-US-Arseholus can claim the shortening the waiting lists for the last elections and showed me the door. Fake examination for sake of waiting list reduction only. The problem is still there.
Welcome to the NHS, the best showcase that it is possible to make a health system more expensive than US while delivering lower quality care than a third world country.
Yep. And than the user comes and complains under warranty that the laptop halts for "no reason".
My wife laptop (HP NC4000) did that when I bought it. I also had to deal with the same random halt issue on every single IBM laptop model I have tried to run Linux on made between 2003 and 2006 in my previous job (10 or so different models). The laptop warms up and halts. No message, no warning, nothing. In the middle of doing something.
The same laptops with kernel on-demand P4 frequency scaling or centrino frequency scaling (whichever applicable) enabled can work 24x7 on non-computational loads (if you try to run Seti on them you are going to kill them due to lack of thermal feedback into the scaling). The downscaling of frequency while waiting for IO under normal load is sufficient to keep it alive. It is still not as good as windows thermally, but quite acceptable. By the way, Microsoft should not get any credit for that one, it is solely Intel's handywork with some participation from other vendors.
By the way, once I got that done with laptops, in my previous job I went and got the same level of power management working on all workstations and servers. The difference was staggering. Just enabling that on one Intel OEM dual P4 Xeon was enough to bring the server room from thermal red alarm into airconditioning norm. With no loss of performance. According to the UPS console its power consumption in idle went down by 200+ W. Similar effects on P4 workstations. With the difference that there Linux rules as Microsoft does not use (and possibly has no right to use) the Intel power management code on non-portables. Which is quite silly as it should just work out of the box (the support is mostly at CPU level).
I am ready to bet a case of beer that these also have the CPU heatpipe extends to the under-the-keyboard plate and heat dissipates from there in passive cooling mode.
This is a very good design as it provides the biggest guaranteed to be non-covered area in a laptop for passive cooling. There is nothing particularly wrong with provided that the CPU is correctly managed thermally and/or it is assisted sufficiently by fans.
This in modern systems is usually done by software. While it is possible for it to be done solely in hardware (as many servers do) the hardware solutions do not provide good enough power savings when idle for a laptop (at the moment). Further to this, there are no components available that do that in hardware for laptops.
It is obvious that you have not disassembled a laptop if you are asking this question.
On nearly all laptops (inclduing all HPs I have disassembled so far) the CPU cooler extends into a big heatplate that goes under most of the keyboard. The keyboard is two layers of plastic with contacts on them. These layers can be fried to a charcoal state if the CPU is not cooled properly.
Under windows the laptop drivers take care of that. Under linux as installed by major distributions nothing takes care of that if the user does not take care of it himself.
More specifically, you have to enable CPU frequency scaling to get the CPU cool enough on most P4 laptops (and to a lesser extent Core and Pentium M). In addition to that under Windows thermal management hooks up into the CPU frequency scaling and limits the upper frequency if the heat situation becomes particularly bad. Under linux there is no such thing (unless the user hacks it somehow using events).
I am a person who has run a Windows free house for the last 10+ years and I currently have three HP laptops in the house. One is a piece of scrap usable only as a XTerm, another is my wife's personal and one belongs to the company I work for. All of which are running Debian (in various configs). Even so, I cannot blame HP for that one. Unfortunately, they are right. This is a case where one thing too many has been entrusted to software and by changing the software you have effectively voided this specific part of your warranty. In fact HP is not alone in this one. Vaios are the same and I have personally had to scrap 5 vaios in my last job which failed under WINDOWS for this same reason - CPU overheating and frying the keyboard.
I hope you realize that Siberia is not a frozen wasteland...but it also covers more temperate climates....
Most of Siberia is defined in climate terms as temperate continental. In fact the "most continental" temperate on the face of the earth. Which means that it can get above 30C in mid summer in the same place where you have -30C in mid-winter. So you still need good airconditioning for any high tech industry facility.
As far as talent, I bet that there is a considerable talent left in Russia for any antrepeneur which is capable of herding a pack of mad cats (the best comparison which comes to mind).
Based on my (now very out of date) recollections of Russian schools they put considerably lower emphasis on the social side of education compared to US and UK. They do not force education on children as a "social activity", in fact you must do most of your work on your own. As a result their educational system tends to naturally favour people who are capable of achieving a lot on their own, but will not fit in well as a standardised Dilbertian "team player". Add to that the fact that their understanding of what constitutes a team player is also very different so when a westerner tells them that (thinking of a Dilbert style player) they get seriously insulted. And so on. And so on.
Overall, this put a relatively high barrier in front of their highest academic achievers in technology related fields and there are quite likely to be a lot of them left there. Add to that the grey and shadow economy of all sorts and all in all there is likely to be a viable job market for someone brave enough to tap into it.
Well... They already have half of Macedonia on it. There is an individual named Milan Ivanovic. That is almost like adding John Doe or John Smith to it.
The ergonomics on the recent crop of Samsung (quick look at the article shows that this is valid for this one as well) is absolute crap.
To the point - the side buttons which allow it to be narrower and smaller than a comparable phone by other manufacturers make it impossible to fit the phone in a car holder without pressing at least one of them. Further to this, while it is possible to disable them when the phone is inactive they get activated when you answer or call. As a result you end up with your phone being "friendly" and rejecting a call, adjusting the volume or doing something else wonderfull in call for you if you are answering using a handsfree in a car.
No thanks.
I would rather have a slightly bigger and less buggy phone, which I can fit in a proper car holder. Even if Samsung has actually provided a proper headphone socket this time which I bet it did not so you are stuck with the original crappy headphones.
I have done similar math and the results for a small company with 300-350 systems half/n/half Windows+Linux were as follows:
Zero baseline - Everything that can run on Via does run on custom built Via, workstations are P4s with Debian sarge with an upgraded kernel and cpu_freq ondemand governor, servers are again Debian based opterons with power management to the max and all 2U+ servers are recycled multiple times till complete death relegating them to less CPU intensive duties in the process (and using the lowest power consumption parts available on each refurbishment). Average desktop lifetime 4+ years under linux, 2+ years under winhoze. Average server lifetime 3+ years for non-1U linux boxes, 2 years for Winhoze or 1U linux boxes.
First vendor interfacing buzzword compliance stage - migration to RHEL, no Via, HP only shop, no software RAID, hardware RAID only on factory supplied hardware only. That came up to 6000£ extra in electricity per year using UK standard rates (combined power consumption + airconditioning requirement costs). I estimated the average desktop lifetime for linux in this one to decrease to 3 years or less due to RHEL release cycle.
Second vendor interfacing buzzword compliance stage - migration of everything but testing systems to Winhoze on P4, with mandatory on-access AV checking on all (and the CPU requirements brought by this), removal of Linux servers from all duties. This came up to 12000£ extra in electricity per year (combined power consumption + airconditioning requirement costs). In this one desktop lifetime goes down to 2 years.
I have never bothered trying to compute a third milestone for a windows only shop (the company shipped a linux based product at the time so that was pointless). I would not be surprised if the total aircon + power extra requirement was all the way into the 18K on top of the existing gear. So 600 million across all parasitic institutions (even assuming that they deploy only buzzword compliant kit) is actually believable. If you add to that the hardware lifetime requirements the numbers may come up even more.
Seconded - the thermal footprint of an average P3 after replacing the disks with modern ones is in the sub-50W range. The CPU depending on the model consumes 18-27W at max utilisation, disks are at most 10W each and peripherals rack up 10W or so on top of that. This is comparable to the thermal footprint of a 1GHz+ mini-ITX which is about as low as you can get with modern x86 hardware.
Compared to that a modern gaming capable system runs happily into the 400W+ territory. Even with all the advances in power saving modes on the peripherals and the CPU you are likely to find running an old P3 for router/firewall/P2P/file server/etc considerably more efficient compared to allocating these resources on your "main" box.
The only problem is the scarcity of CPU fans for P3s. There are none on the market. Athlon heatsinks/coolers for the older socket format often need cutting bits off and are also getting rare, so finding a suitable set to refurbish an old box may prove extremely challenging.
I am not saying "no". You misread my post. I am saying "not enough compared to the availability". There are considerably more qualified coders then jobs. Same elsewhere in the ex-Eastern block.
With a relatively small local software market as well as relatively small outsourcing market Russia (and to lesser extent Bulgaria and Romania) are ripe for the picking by the mafia. Most of the qualified software engineers who do this kind of work will very happily work on an outsourcing contract instead. Further to this, they are likely to deliver considerably better quality code than most Indian outsourcing shops (I have seen code and projects from both so this statement is based on actual experience and reading the actual code produced).
But for a variety of reasons starting they do not get any work like that and as a result they work for the mafia.
For the reference. I always write documentation. Idiot friendly. With pictures (even live ones straight off the network management systems). And it still does not help as documentation is written for at least a minimal qualification level. If the qualification level of the reader is "utter incompetence" combined with inability and refusal to learn anything besides executing instructions there is nothing that can be done.
Example of utter incompetence from real life: an "IT professional" with an IT related degree from a UK college hired besides other things due to "experience with VOIP telephony systems" in front of my very eyes told a user to allocate himself any static IP address above x.x.x.256 as "these are not used and we have plenty of those".
At that competence level (and at that hiring competence level) there is nothing you can do (besides turning around and walking away slowly).
Re:Putting out fires vs "improving the network"
on
Dungeons & Dragons and IT
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Problem elsewhere.
A simple network that is very prone to fuckup can be managed by morons. Managing it is simple procedural activity governed by work experience. By just sitting there and extinguishing fires according to instructions you gain experience which allows you to be hired elsewhere to extinguish the same fires. This is a concept UK bosses understand and cherish as 95%+ they hire solely based on experience, not skills.
If you design a network that can take a serious beating and still function after, managing it requires qualified people with skills. It requires people who are capable and willing to understand how the system works to be able to fix it on the rear occasions where it goes wrong. These are in very short supply (and getting shorter) so you always end up facing your boss in a silly conversation along the lines of "How can we simplify this". Not surprising as he does not see "experience items" which he can hire on. He is accustomed to hiring based on "you have worked with this in Company C", you should be OK working with this here". He does not know how select the correct skills and how to hire as he is most likely a failed techie or a humanities person with an MBA and he is not willing to delegate the evaluation to techies. Further to this, he is very happy to override any technical opinion on this in the name of nepotism and politics.
So no wander that 95% extinguish fires instead of building fireproof networks.
Besides the troubadours and proper orchestra for the rich there were also the gipsies for the poor. At least in Continental Europe. It took pennies to hire some and no gathering of any sort was performed without music. Marriages, burrials, christenings and every community gathering for the last 1000 years or so since they appeared in Europe. Add to that folk song and music. While in Britain due to a peculiar set of historical sircumstances (the conquest) it has not been particularly prominent, that has never been the case in the rest of Europe. Italy, Germany, Hungary, Slavic countries, Scandinavia have a very large variety of folk instruments, dance and music tradition. None of it has been a court thing (at least through most historic periods).
Well...
Net neutrality is really a 7+ years old gripe.
A vastly different gripe.
In fact it is 9+ year old gripe.
Prior to the dot bomb boom providers commonly charged and offered different rates/SLAs/etc based on traffic source/destination especially outside the US. Essentially the Net was NOT neutral. In fact it still is not neutral in many places outside the US. The dot bomb replaced this mostly realistic economic model with a whole lot rabid dreams. The differential charging, usage charging and per-destination SLA concepts went away due to marketing pressures to be replaced by various versions of "All you can eat". As a result providers currently operate on a cost and charging model which is not anchored in reality.
Traffic is not created equal and it does not cost the same amount of money to deliver it to next door, to a node in the same geographical area and to a node across the globe. From there there will be a strong economical pressure for the net return to its initial non-neutral state. It was not created neutral in the first place, it is not neutral in most of the world and it will not be neutral even in the US sooner or later.
Brits have noticed the concept of a dentist, but just the concept. The implementation of said concept is proving elusive as there are none of them around (at least on NHS) so people nowdays end up going to Budapest for trivial dental operations.
Add to that that in the UK they keep the children stuffed with a pacifier up to the age of 3 as a rule. As a result large portion of the juvenile population have jaw deformities and teeth problems. Just counting the number of teenagers wearing jaw braces for bite correction vs the ones that have a correctly developed scull can give anyone from outside the UK some serious jitters.
And as with many other things low level of activated vitamin D exaggerate the overall jaw development problems.
As far as the grand parent comment on stats, well - I have tried to ask two British GPs if they check for any of these symptoms at all. They did not understand the concept. Compared to that on the continent it is an obligation of the health visitors and GPs to check for all of these and immediately take preventive measures if need be. Further to this, one of the most common symptoms of rachitis in early childhood is hair loss. On the continent they immediately run blood tests in such cases. In the UK they recommend you to go to the pharmacy and buy a "baby cap" shampoo. I can continue for very long, but as far as the UK GPs are concerned the problem does not exist. This is not surprising, because anyone acknowledging the problem will immediately have to face an onslaught of Cancer research UK and similar outfits. They have tried to suppress and rubbish every study showing the link between Vitamin D and lower cancer, heart disease, obesity, etc rates in the last 10 years. Just do a google and compare the articles for the relevant studies (most of them covered by hard numerical data going back up to 30+ years for some) and the Cancer Research UK page on the subject.
Not correct for the subject in hand. The subject is UK schools.
This morning I dropped of junior at school and I noticed a big sign: No play in the playground allowed, dangerous BIG holes in the playground. There were two holes, both 1-2 inch wide, 1 inch deep. For the reference the school is Queens Edith Primary in Cambridge UK.
The way UK schools (based on observations from the same school) understand physical education is - you put kids in class, tell one to do an exercise, the rest watch. There is a variation on this when you show the exercise and they do it. There is no warmup whatsoever. If a child decides to warm up by doing a run around for 5 minutes he is penalized and chastized as a troublemaker. Compared to that on the continent they make them all run for at least 200m in the under 10 age group, going to 600+ for the older ones at the beginning of the lesson. As a result the exercise value in the UK is minimal and it is actually hazardous from a health and safety perspective as the children have had no warmup.
In addition to that in the UK all other obesity related factors are obscured by one other - vitamin D defficiency past the nursery age. 95% of the kids show bone deformations characteristic for that - X legs, rachitic skull, the lot. The primary reason for this is the anti-sun + suncream obscession which leads to most kids getting less than the essential doze of sun for activating vitamin D to the required degree (30min daily average unhindered summer sun at UK lattittude for an average white caucasian, going up to 1h+ in spring, autumn and winter, with the numbers for darker skin colour being bigger than that). Add to that the fact that kids are ferried around in buggies restrained with minimal movement till the age of 4 and the picture is mostly complete (mine refused to get into it from the age of 2 and I agreed with him).
From there on kids are bound to be obese. Until these factors are eliminated any study in the UK will be bogus as a large sample of the juvenile population is already highly susceptible to obesity and no physical education or sport can help them in that. Nothing to see people, move along. Another study which concentrates on everything but the two root causes for UK:
The rabid propaganda by the UK cancer research soscieties about skin cancer will kill by an order of magnitude more people from vitamin D defficiency related causes like bone problems and obesityt, than it will save.
The UK pram obscession is the other main reason for obesity. Get the kids out, they are not a damn toy doll to ferry around.
Stating either of these is too unpopular so people do studies on everything but these.
Slashdot Mirror
That should actually be the Russian taxpayer (primary life support is provided by the Zvezda module). And I do not particularly recall any historical period when the rulers of Russia gave a flying fuck about their cittizen's thoughts on governmental spending. In fact, modern Russian state is founded on government diverting taxation money from where it is supposed to go. That what Ivan Kalita (the Wallet) did to start the second Russian state and the tradition has carried on from there onwards.
And when exactly did the US taxpayers pay for the environmental control module and its shipment to orbit?
Hint - it is one of the non-US components.
I wish I had some moderation points to mod you funny. As I do not, I will comment.
The problem with the US (and to a lesser extent other countries) government supply chain is the fear of the unfamiliar. The rule of the game is that if you supply something familiar which brings out that warm cosy feeling in the congresscritter you succeed. The Humvee is nothing, but a life sizes copy of a badly designed glorified monstertruck toy which American kids have imprinted in their psyche over the first 10 years of their life. It brings out warm fuzzy feeling in the congresscritter and he is reluctant to approve an unfamiliar weird looking design for mass purchase. The same is happening in the UK which keeps buying Landrovers instead of proper vehicles, despite the govt being lambasted into bits by the press. After all the Landy is something which in the UK (if you are past that certain age) you are supposed to love and cherish regardless of how badly does it suck. Russia is no different with Sukhoi scraping money off other projects to work on the Berkut just because it looks weird and keeps not getting the funding it deserves.
The situation is similar in large corporations. Presenting something new and revolutionary to the board is usually a career death. In fact there is a whole niche for highly payed professionals in the R&D of large corps that specialises in presenting the unfamiliar in a familiar way.
And here is where IMO the crucial difference between the US (and UK for that matter) and Scandinavian countries is. The scandinavian countries are currently benefiting from breaking the familiarity circle in their corporation boards and government. By either threatening to put or putting in place mandatory equality legislation and quotas on women in corporate boards and elected assemblies they created a temporary condition where you can present something less familiar to the board (or the parliamentcritters) and survive. This advantage is temporary and will decrease over time. It will never fade fully as do we like it or not we are not create equal and women like different things from men. But it will not be anywhere near what it is now in 10 years time.
So coming back to your rant - if you want that changed you should vote Clinton.
Cheers,
IANNE (I am not a nuclear engineer).
But as an ex-chemist I would like to chip in my 0.02E. Liquid sodium is a nasty substance which can corrode nearly anything over a long term. It changes the properties of ceramics, metals, you name it. It will take a lot to convince me that a liquid sodium design is safe.
Also, IIRC, Russians did similar experiment with liquid Bismuth. No idea how they relate to these designs, but as far as corrosion of the equipment it is possibly a better choice.
Well... If this becomes the policy, any country which is allowed to produce nuclear energy will automatically be capable of producing proper nuclear arms (not U235 firecrackers like the one North Koreans did recently). The regime to handle this politically is simply not in place at the moment.
Welcome to the world of ASBO.
The current system allows it to be slapped on you just for pissing the govt off and this is a classic case where they can slap it on you.
In every single one of them you will wait for 7 hours before being admitted and after that receive letters from the local health authority which ask "are you dead, and if you are not yet have you sorted yourself out so we can stop bothering".
I got so pissed off from these that I have answered "No, despite your best efforts, I am not dead yet, and I have not sorted myself out, so you can forget the idea of removing me off that waiting list". Got an letter boiling of righteous indignation in return and had an appointment made for me next month.
The consultant looked at me, ticked me off the list off so El Presidente Antonio Bliar-US-Arseholus can claim the shortening the waiting lists for the last elections and showed me the door. Fake examination for sake of waiting list reduction only. The problem is still there.
Welcome to the NHS, the best showcase that it is possible to make a health system more expensive than US while delivering lower quality care than a third world country.
Yep. And than the user comes and complains under warranty that the laptop halts for "no reason".
My wife laptop (HP NC4000) did that when I bought it. I also had to deal with the same random halt issue on every single IBM laptop model I have tried to run Linux on made between 2003 and 2006 in my previous job (10 or so different models). The laptop warms up and halts. No message, no warning, nothing. In the middle of doing something.
The same laptops with kernel on-demand P4 frequency scaling or centrino frequency scaling (whichever applicable) enabled can work 24x7 on non-computational loads (if you try to run Seti on them you are going to kill them due to lack of thermal feedback into the scaling). The downscaling of frequency while waiting for IO under normal load is sufficient to keep it alive. It is still not as good as windows thermally, but quite acceptable. By the way, Microsoft should not get any credit for that one, it is solely Intel's handywork with some participation from other vendors.
By the way, once I got that done with laptops, in my previous job I went and got the same level of power management working on all workstations and servers. The difference was staggering. Just enabling that on one Intel OEM dual P4 Xeon was enough to bring the server room from thermal red alarm into airconditioning norm. With no loss of performance. According to the UPS console its power consumption in idle went down by 200+ W. Similar effects on P4 workstations. With the difference that there Linux rules as Microsoft does not use (and possibly has no right to use) the Intel power management code on non-portables. Which is quite silly as it should just work out of the box (the support is mostly at CPU level).
I am ready to bet a case of beer that these also have the CPU heatpipe extends to the under-the-keyboard plate and heat dissipates from there in passive cooling mode.
This is a very good design as it provides the biggest guaranteed to be non-covered area in a laptop for passive cooling. There is nothing particularly wrong with provided that the CPU is correctly managed thermally and/or it is assisted sufficiently by fans.
This in modern systems is usually done by software. While it is possible for it to be done solely in hardware (as many servers do) the hardware solutions do not provide good enough power savings when idle for a laptop (at the moment). Further to this, there are no components available that do that in hardware for laptops.
It is obvious that you have not disassembled a laptop if you are asking this question.
On nearly all laptops (inclduing all HPs I have disassembled so far) the CPU cooler extends into a big heatplate that goes under most of the keyboard. The keyboard is two layers of plastic with contacts on them. These layers can be fried to a charcoal state if the CPU is not cooled properly.
Under windows the laptop drivers take care of that. Under linux as installed by major distributions nothing takes care of that if the user does not take care of it himself.
More specifically, you have to enable CPU frequency scaling to get the CPU cool enough on most P4 laptops (and to a lesser extent Core and Pentium M). In addition to that under Windows thermal management hooks up into the CPU frequency scaling and limits the upper frequency if the heat situation becomes particularly bad. Under linux there is no such thing (unless the user hacks it somehow using events).
I am a person who has run a Windows free house for the last 10+ years and I currently have three HP laptops in the house. One is a piece of scrap usable only as a XTerm, another is my wife's personal and one belongs to the company I work for. All of which are running Debian (in various configs). Even so, I cannot blame HP for that one. Unfortunately, they are right. This is a case where one thing too many has been entrusted to software and by changing the software you have effectively voided this specific part of your warranty. In fact HP is not alone in this one. Vaios are the same and I have personally had to scrap 5 vaios in my last job which failed under WINDOWS for this same reason - CPU overheating and frying the keyboard.
Most of Siberia is defined in climate terms as temperate continental. In fact the "most continental" temperate on the face of the earth. Which means that it can get above 30C in mid summer in the same place where you have -30C in mid-winter. So you still need good airconditioning for any high tech industry facility.
As far as talent, I bet that there is a considerable talent left in Russia for any antrepeneur which is capable of herding a pack of mad cats (the best comparison which comes to mind).
Based on my (now very out of date) recollections of Russian schools they put considerably lower emphasis on the social side of education compared to US and UK. They do not force education on children as a "social activity", in fact you must do most of your work on your own. As a result their educational system tends to naturally favour people who are capable of achieving a lot on their own, but will not fit in well as a standardised Dilbertian "team player". Add to that the fact that their understanding of what constitutes a team player is also very different so when a westerner tells them that (thinking of a Dilbert style player) they get seriously insulted. And so on. And so on.
Overall, this put a relatively high barrier in front of their highest academic achievers in technology related fields and there are quite likely to be a lot of them left there. Add to that the grey and shadow economy of all sorts and all in all there is likely to be a viable job market for someone brave enough to tap into it.
Well...
They already have half of Macedonia on it. There is an individual named Milan Ivanovic. That is almost like adding John Doe or John Smith to it.
The ergonomics on the recent crop of Samsung (quick look at the article shows that this is valid for this one as well) is absolute crap.
To the point - the side buttons which allow it to be narrower and smaller than a comparable phone by other manufacturers make it impossible to fit the phone in a car holder without pressing at least one of them. Further to this, while it is possible to disable them when the phone is inactive they get activated when you answer or call. As a result you end up with your phone being "friendly" and rejecting a call, adjusting the volume or doing something else wonderfull in call for you if you are answering using a handsfree in a car.
No thanks.
I would rather have a slightly bigger and less buggy phone, which I can fit in a proper car holder. Even if Samsung has actually provided a proper headphone socket this time which I bet it did not so you are stuck with the original crappy headphones.
Quite likely actually.
I have done similar math and the results for a small company with 300-350 systems half/n/half Windows+Linux were as follows:
Zero baseline - Everything that can run on Via does run on custom built Via, workstations are P4s with Debian sarge with an upgraded kernel and cpu_freq ondemand governor, servers are again Debian based opterons with power management to the max and all 2U+ servers are recycled multiple times till complete death relegating them to less CPU intensive duties in the process (and using the lowest power consumption parts available on each refurbishment). Average desktop lifetime 4+ years under linux, 2+ years under winhoze. Average server lifetime 3+ years for non-1U linux boxes, 2 years for Winhoze or 1U linux boxes.
First vendor interfacing buzzword compliance stage - migration to RHEL, no Via, HP only shop, no software RAID, hardware RAID only on factory supplied hardware only. That came up to 6000£ extra in electricity per year using UK standard rates (combined power consumption + airconditioning requirement costs). I estimated the average desktop lifetime for linux in this one to decrease to 3 years or less due to RHEL release cycle.
Second vendor interfacing buzzword compliance stage - migration of everything but testing systems to Winhoze on P4, with mandatory on-access AV checking on all (and the CPU requirements brought by this), removal of Linux servers from all duties. This came up to 12000£ extra in electricity per year (combined power consumption + airconditioning requirement costs). In this one desktop lifetime goes down to 2 years.
I have never bothered trying to compute a third milestone for a windows only shop (the company shipped a linux based product at the time so that was pointless). I would not be surprised if the total aircon + power extra requirement was all the way into the 18K on top of the existing gear. So 600 million across all parasitic institutions (even assuming that they deploy only buzzword compliant kit) is actually believable. If you add to that the hardware lifetime requirements the numbers may come up even more.
Seconded - the thermal footprint of an average P3 after replacing the disks with modern ones is in the sub-50W range. The CPU depending on the model consumes 18-27W at max utilisation, disks are at most 10W each and peripherals rack up 10W or so on top of that. This is comparable to the thermal footprint of a 1GHz+ mini-ITX which is about as low as you can get with modern x86 hardware.
Compared to that a modern gaming capable system runs happily into the 400W+ territory. Even with all the advances in power saving modes on the peripherals and the CPU you are likely to find running an old P3 for router/firewall/P2P/file server/etc considerably more efficient compared to allocating these resources on your "main" box.
The only problem is the scarcity of CPU fans for P3s. There are none on the market. Athlon heatsinks/coolers for the older socket format often need cutting bits off and are also getting rare, so finding a suitable set to refurbish an old box may prove extremely challenging.
I am not saying "no". You misread my post. I am saying "not enough compared to the availability". There are considerably more qualified coders then jobs. Same elsewhere in the ex-Eastern block.
Or maybe having kids to feed.
With a relatively small local software market as well as relatively small outsourcing market Russia (and to lesser extent Bulgaria and Romania) are ripe for the picking by the mafia. Most of the qualified software engineers who do this kind of work will very happily work on an outsourcing contract instead. Further to this, they are likely to deliver considerably better quality code than most Indian outsourcing shops (I have seen code and projects from both so this statement is based on actual experience and reading the actual code produced).
But for a variety of reasons starting they do not get any work like that and as a result they work for the mafia.
C'est la vie.
For the reference. I always write documentation. Idiot friendly. With pictures (even live ones straight off the network management systems). And it still does not help as documentation is written for at least a minimal qualification level. If the qualification level of the reader is "utter incompetence" combined with inability and refusal to learn anything besides executing instructions there is nothing that can be done.
Example of utter incompetence from real life: an "IT professional" with an IT related degree from a UK college hired besides other things due to "experience with VOIP telephony systems" in front of my very eyes told a user to allocate himself any static IP address above x.x.x.256 as "these are not used and we have plenty of those".
At that competence level (and at that hiring competence level) there is nothing you can do (besides turning around and walking away slowly).
Problem elsewhere.
A simple network that is very prone to fuckup can be managed by morons. Managing it is simple procedural activity governed by work experience. By just sitting there and extinguishing fires according to instructions you gain experience which allows you to be hired elsewhere to extinguish the same fires. This is a concept UK bosses understand and cherish as 95%+ they hire solely based on experience, not skills.
If you design a network that can take a serious beating and still function after, managing it requires qualified people with skills. It requires people who are capable and willing to understand how the system works to be able to fix it on the rear occasions where it goes wrong. These are in very short supply (and getting shorter) so you always end up facing your boss in a silly conversation along the lines of "How can we simplify this". Not surprising as he does not see "experience items" which he can hire on. He is accustomed to hiring based on "you have worked with this in Company C", you should be OK working with this here". He does not know how select the correct skills and how to hire as he is most likely a failed techie or a humanities person with an MBA and he is not willing to delegate the evaluation to techies. Further to this, he is very happy to override any technical opinion on this in the name of nepotism and politics.
So no wander that 95% extinguish fires instead of building fireproof networks.
You are obviously working with the Asian countries. Switch to Eastern Europe for outsourcing will solve your problem.
There, you can get both stunning blonds and werewolves in IT. Whichever you prefer.
Besides the troubadours and proper orchestra for the rich there were also the gipsies for the poor. At least in Continental Europe. It took pennies to hire some and no gathering of any sort was performed without music. Marriages, burrials, christenings and every community gathering for the last 1000 years or so since they appeared in Europe. Add to that folk song and music. While in Britain due to a peculiar set of historical sircumstances (the conquest) it has not been particularly prominent, that has never been the case in the rest of Europe. Italy, Germany, Hungary, Slavic countries, Scandinavia have a very large variety of folk instruments, dance and music tradition. None of it has been a court thing (at least through most historic periods).
Net neutrality is really a 7+ years old gripe.
A vastly different gripe.
In fact it is 9+ year old gripe.
Prior to the dot bomb boom providers commonly charged and offered different rates/SLAs/etc based on traffic source/destination especially outside the US. Essentially the Net was NOT neutral. In fact it still is not neutral in many places outside the US. The dot bomb replaced this mostly realistic economic model with a whole lot rabid dreams. The differential charging, usage charging and per-destination SLA concepts went away due to marketing pressures to be replaced by various versions of "All you can eat". As a result providers currently operate on a cost and charging model which is not anchored in reality.
Traffic is not created equal and it does not cost the same amount of money to deliver it to next door, to a node in the same geographical area and to a node across the globe. From there there will be a strong economical pressure for the net return to its initial non-neutral state. It was not created neutral in the first place, it is not neutral in most of the world and it will not be neutral even in the US sooner or later.
O2 already has something similar using streetmap and imode for the UK. Never tried it though so cannot venture an opinion.
Err... You are slightly mistaken.
Brits have noticed the concept of a dentist, but just the concept. The implementation of said concept is proving elusive as there are none of them around (at least on NHS) so people nowdays end up going to Budapest for trivial dental operations.
Add to that that in the UK they keep the children stuffed with a pacifier up to the age of 3 as a rule. As a result large portion of the juvenile population have jaw deformities and teeth problems. Just counting the number of teenagers wearing jaw braces for bite correction vs the ones that have a correctly developed scull can give anyone from outside the UK some serious jitters.
And as with many other things low level of activated vitamin D exaggerate the overall jaw development problems.
As far as the grand parent comment on stats, well - I have tried to ask two British GPs if they check for any of these symptoms at all. They did not understand the concept. Compared to that on the continent it is an obligation of the health visitors and GPs to check for all of these and immediately take preventive measures if need be. Further to this, one of the most common symptoms of rachitis in early childhood is hair loss. On the continent they immediately run blood tests in such cases. In the UK they recommend you to go to the pharmacy and buy a "baby cap" shampoo. I can continue for very long, but as far as the UK GPs are concerned the problem does not exist. This is not surprising, because anyone acknowledging the problem will immediately have to face an onslaught of Cancer research UK and similar outfits. They have tried to suppress and rubbish every study showing the link between Vitamin D and lower cancer, heart disease, obesity, etc rates in the last 10 years. Just do a google and compare the articles for the relevant studies (most of them covered by hard numerical data going back up to 30+ years for some) and the Cancer Research UK page on the subject.
Not correct for the subject in hand. The subject is UK schools .
This morning I dropped of junior at school and I noticed a big sign: No play in the playground allowed, dangerous BIG holes in the playground. There were two holes, both 1-2 inch wide, 1 inch deep. For the reference the school is Queens Edith Primary in Cambridge UK.
The way UK schools (based on observations from the same school) understand physical education is - you put kids in class, tell one to do an exercise, the rest watch. There is a variation on this when you show the exercise and they do it. There is no warmup whatsoever. If a child decides to warm up by doing a run around for 5 minutes he is penalized and chastized as a troublemaker. Compared to that on the continent they make them all run for at least 200m in the under 10 age group, going to 600+ for the older ones at the beginning of the lesson. As a result the exercise value in the UK is minimal and it is actually hazardous from a health and safety perspective as the children have had no warmup.
In addition to that in the UK all other obesity related factors are obscured by one other - vitamin D defficiency past the nursery age. 95% of the kids show bone deformations characteristic for that - X legs, rachitic skull, the lot. The primary reason for this is the anti-sun + suncream obscession which leads to most kids getting less than the essential doze of sun for activating vitamin D to the required degree (30min daily average unhindered summer sun at UK lattittude for an average white caucasian, going up to 1h+ in spring, autumn and winter, with the numbers for darker skin colour being bigger than that). Add to that the fact that kids are ferried around in buggies restrained with minimal movement till the age of 4 and the picture is mostly complete (mine refused to get into it from the age of 2 and I agreed with him).
From there on kids are bound to be obese. Until these factors are eliminated any study in the UK will be bogus as a large sample of the juvenile population is already highly susceptible to obesity and no physical education or sport can help them in that. Nothing to see people, move along. Another study which concentrates on everything but the two root causes for UK:
- The rabid propaganda by the UK cancer research soscieties about skin cancer will kill by an order of magnitude more people from vitamin D defficiency related causes like bone problems and obesityt, than it will save.
- The UK pram obscession is the other main reason for obesity. Get the kids out, they are not a damn toy doll to ferry around.
Stating either of these is too unpopular so people do studies on everything but these.