That would have been true if half of the consultants did not suffer from CrackBerry addiction. That would have been also true if trusts did not consider putting in DAS or picocells. That would have also been true...
So on so fourth.
The liability reasoning may have held some ground in US and may hold some ground as far as Tetra emergency radios are concerned (these can transmit way over what GSM does). It definitely does not hold as far as GSM. The only reason for the GSM ban is the monopoly on patient communication which a private company appointed by NHS holds now. 3000% profit margin is something to hold and to cherish especially if the only way to achieve it is by holding a monopoly.
There are some places (close to the equipment) where a cellphone can severely fsck up measurements.
There are. No doubt. Around 0.1% of a hospital territory. And definitely not the hospital toilets or the non-intensive wards where there is no kit whatsoever. There it is entirely a matter of money. If it wasn't a matter of money, NHS would not have investigated the possibility of putting distributed antenna systems and/or picocells in the hospitals. Which they did. Multiple times over the years.
The only reason it is not in is the inability to keep the 100% control of captive audience they have now.
In addition to that if that was such a danger why did some hospital trusts (Addenbrookes, Oxford, etc) hand out Blackberries to all A&E personnel and why there is no limitation on where they can be turned on and off? Do they work by magic wand? Or by actually using GPRS and transmitting and receiving more than an idle GSM phone? The latter seems more likely.
Old wives and British Regulations to be most exact.
In the UK:
You are not allowed to your phone at a petrol station because it may spark and risk a fire. That is the most phantasmagorical bull one could ever think of. Real reason is that some of the older reed contact based counters could miscount and you could deprieve Gordon Brown of some of his "hard earned" pennies.
Anywhere on the territory of a hospital so that you do not interfere with sensitive medical equipment. Another phantasmagorical bull. All of it is screened to a much more stringent requirements than domestic equipment. Real reason is that if the patients were allowed to use mobile phones the "patient services" company could not longer charge them 90p per minute for calls to and from their (death)bed. And the trusts get a kickback from that same as from parking services.
So on so fourth...
Last time I looked (which was pretty recent) their stuff was supported only on RedHat WS.
It will run perfectly fine on Debian and derivatives. I suspect that it will run fine on Suse/Novel, but it is "not supported". Main reason is that their primary business objective is delivering cosy feelings to telco vendor midlevel PHBs which look for buzzwords like "carrier grade bollocks" instead of a real product. As such they do very carefully not to mention any such pinko comy distros like Debian and god forbid European stuff like Suse. Anatema. It all has to be "carrier grade" and "enterprise level" tools.
Windriver is virtually the same.
This makes them a royal pain in the arse because you have to roll out a working RedHat desktop environment. Anybody who has had to do that for 5-100 developers knows that this is an oxymoron. There has always been something broken in RedHat regarding network client usage in an enterprise environment. In RH8.0-9.0 it was the automounter which blue up magestically with a kernel hang. In WS4.0 it looks to be the combined automount + smbfs mount/umount races and a few other gems. So you either end up patching RHEL to death or bite the bullet and run it on an unsupported platform in first place.
In either case it is a lot of work and a lot of explanation to be given to PHBs which cannot grasp the idea that "we will not run it on the supposedly supported platform because the supposedly supported platform is shite as a developer workstation".
There is a tremendous waste of space all over the place, not just class thos few class As you mention.
As an example: In one well known red brick UK university you have to have a public IP address and you are not allowed to put kit behind a NAT even if that kit OS something esoteric and obsolete like the Silicon Graphics or AS1 that drives Bruker NMRs. As a result you have the choice to leave it unconnected which is a major annoyance as it is designed for network connectivity or to leave it at the mercy of the elements. This is done so that the "usage is not reduced" so that the overall university allocation is still justified.
While at it, IIRC the aforementioned Bruker as a class B which is not used for anything but to give semi-unique addresses to different components of Lab machinery which sit on internal networks worldwide. Classic abuse of public address space for what amounts to textbook RFC 1918.
IBM is holding 9.0.0.0/8 which it practically does not use, There is a huge block in the high/8 area which is unused and reserved for edu.
The only place where there is some IPv4 address shortage are the APNIC blocks. RIPE and especially ARIN still have plenty of address space to go around even without going and starting to ask people like IBM if they actually use those class As.
In order for this hack to work it essential for the wireless driver to handle at least some MAC and encryption functions in software. In that case it is available for a hit simply by the fact of being active, regardless of the connection status. Most modern cards are like this (if not all). Atheros also definitely fits the bill. In fact it is more likely to fit the bill because more bits are implemented in software compared to Centrino. So do a few others.
As far as Centrino you are to some extent right that it is the most likely candidate. The reason for this is that it has "feature" called preassociation. It will search and connect to the strongest AP in the area even if you have set the connection inactive. It is enough to load the driver and not have the antenna off.
That is Lee Yakoka Pinto Arithmetic(TM). Also known as "Where exactly safety is mentioned in the design specification?" (that is actually rumoured to be a quote).
It works only if you control the media which was generally valid in his days at Ford. That is definitely not the case as far as laptops and computer equipment safety is concerned nowdays. The news get out fast and get out quickly.
I bought the first for our first office 5 years back. We kept buying more across two moves. Over the years it has grown to 4 safes. 2 IT ones for data, 1 mixed for exec stuff and documents and one for finance. This is in a company of approx 50 employees which does not deal with confidential customer data.
why are there so many great minds produced in Western European and American universities
That depends on the scientific discipline. Just ask anyone involved with the theory behind technology about Russians and math. Or Russians and physics for that matter. That was the case least from the time when I was in an University which was pre-1995 and in many areas is still the case now.
As far as test scores reigning supreme with all due respect you are slightly misguided.
I have studied in both an American and an Eastern European University so I can tell you that based on first hand experience.
In an Eastern European University the test scores reign supreme at admission. After that studying in the university itself is relatively mellow and serene. You get two a test session at the end of a semester (for some subjects even at the end of a year) with a whole month for study and review so you can actually assimilate the material before the exam. There are very few ongoing tests and virtually zero graded homework in most courses.
American Universities are completely different to this. The one I was I had to run through a non-stop weekly, bi-weekly, monthly and semestrial test meatgrinder. An average of 4-6 tests per subject per semester. Every single one of them counted towards your grade and there was no way to relax for even a bit and assimilate what you are studying. That was topped by a 7 days exam session with one day of review time. Essentially you were being converted into an curriculum compliant automaton with virtually zero capability to stand back from the problem and say "Stop, WTF am I doing, there got to be a different way to solve this".
So based on first hand experience with both systems, it is America which is obsessed with scores and tests (at least up to BSc level), not Eastern Europe. As far as the results of this I have enough idea of math and physics to beg to differ from your opinion.
The truth about ex-soc countries education is that it has been always a subject to vicious selection for any of the places that were moderately worth it. Ratios of 500:1 at Moscow state were quite common for some science majors and thousands to 1 were normal for humanities because these offered a route into the state administration. And you do not want to even have an idea about the selection ratio at whatever the name of the institute was that specialised in economics.
Other ex-soc countries were not far behind. My wife's class in biotech at Sofia State had a selection ratio in the 250:1+ and my own chemistry class at Sofia state had a selection ration of 35:1. That is once again with a limit of 2 maximum applications within a year. That is after graduating from high schools which themselves had a selection ratio of 30:1 in her case and 200:1 in my case. Once again with similar application limits and specialisation at that time. By the way this was the norm, not a deviation across the ex-soviet block.
In addition to that the exams were per-university (not countrywide like in the west) with a limit on how many universities you can apply to (used to be 2 in most countries). So this ratio of 500:1 or higher was after the voluntary selection performed by people estimating their chances and sending applications only to 2 universities. So the overall selection ratio was actually much much higher.
I know that I am going to evoke some morbid egalitarian screams from the Slashdot community, but I do not see anything wrong in this. Good education implies selection.
Would you care to name some? I mean, you always have China, but we have some issues with them. Again, it all ends up as a comparison of numbers between options.
Europe between the ex-iron curtain and CIS border. Chech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, Bulgaria, parts of Romania (not all of it). If you are brave enough to deal with Russian business the bigger Russian cities are also not bad infrastructurally. Definitely better then India. You get to chose from the whole spectrum of salaries and infrastructure costs and balance them according to the task at hand.
There is a caveat though. All of these countries have fairly strict labour code and benefits packages which an American will have a fit about. I have seen it myself. A representative of a well known US bank screaming: "What da ya mean, that ya give 6 months payed maternity leave? It is the cow's fault. She should go on state aid". This has not prevented people exporting work to there though. Just ask Cisco where was their SS7 stack written or Canada where did they get their election software from.
Really, no offense but you are woefully ignorant of the status of "alternative energy".
I do not doubt it works. For different applications. Not for this one. You misunderstand the application.
The application is to supply power to office space + datacenters + labs instead of the grid connection during blackouts and brownouts for 20%+ a day (that is the current situation) regardless of sun, monsoon wind, etc. 365 days a year. The reason for having the system is that the grid is failing in the first place. So you cannot fall back to the grid the way all green systems do when the weather is adverse (no sun, no wind, strong wind, etc).
While some augmentation with solar or wind is feasible, end of the day it ends up being a generator and big banks of batteries which provide power until it warms up. There is no other way unless you own your own accumulating hydroelectric to store the "green" energy until it is needed. AFAIK none of the tech companies in India does. In fact even if they had the money I am not sure that they could do it for regulatory reasons. For all its globalisation, key parts of Indian economy are still strictly regulated and competition is inexistent.
Absolutely agree. I would also add to that a few typical items:
Add the costs of replicating every development and test platform in at least two instances - one on site and one for the contractors themselves.
Add to that the costs of extra security for each of those.
Add to that the costs of extra on-call allowance for support staff which deals with systems that govern data replication between the sites. India is 4-5 hours ahead of most of EU and 10h ahead of the US. Alternatively extra hardware has to be thrown at this.
Add to that the costs of extra collaboration software to compensate for the fact that you cannot just talk to the person at the watercooler.
Add to that the costs of various moderately illegal (according to the Indian regulators) VOIP backdoors to bypass their telco and get a working voice.
Add to that the costs of extra elements in revision control systems to deal with multisite issues.
Add to that costs of creating data sets that comply with data export/data protection laws. In some cases this means paying for extra software to create these.
Add... Add... Add...
Overall, especially as the costs of doing work there grow the overall balance of outsourcing work to there will become less and less feasible. If the current tendencies continue, withing the next 2-3 years the costs will become so high that companies will go back to importing people instead of exporting work. This of course will happen if the entire thing is governed by economic realities which I am suspicious that it is not. As you have noted it does smack of an overgrown Monopoly game.
As far as generation the "hug the trees alternative energy" stuff is very nice for villages with minimal consumption in the middle of nowhere.
It is not suitable for the real stuff. All big outsourcing shops in India are forced to have UPS capacity sufficient to handle all of their computer systems including desktops and not just portions of the datacenter like in the US or Europe. This amounts to be a parallel power grid. In most cases this hits the worst sour spot of power generation - mid-size from cold. That is phenomenally ineffective and costs a fortune, but they have no choice. All those hired hands have to keep on typing.
As far as wireless networks are concerned they are once again utterly irrelevant to the outsourcing cost.
The problem with outsourcing cost is network capacity into India which is oversubscribed and is only getting worse by the day. There is no way to alleviate this with "next gen wireless". The only thing to help here is new fiber around the gulf which noone is even thinking about putting in the ocean floor now.
The cost of living and the wage are only one factor of the cost of an ousourced worker.
You have to add the cost of duplicating power infrastructure because too many companies have moved in and the utility grid cannot cope. Current brownout+blackout rate is 20%+ during daytime and growing.
You have to add the exorbitant communication costs which will only grow up due to basic supply and demand laws. The fiber under the Gulf is still the same, there is no new coming up and demand has grown several times a year. The Eastern route is not looking any better because there India competes with the growing demand from China and other countries. 256Kbit there will buy you several E1s in the UK or the US (at the same contention ratio).
You have to add.. add.. add...
At the end of the adding all the numbers a worker in India will come up to less then US or EU costs in terms of salary and considerably more as far as infrastructure is concerned. From there on the overall numbers depend on how the work is organised, but I am not surprised at a company pulling out from India. There are plenty of other places around the world with comparable salary rates and considerably better infrastructure.
I admire your optimism regarding the availability of SNMP and its capabilities. The reality is considerably bleaker.
First of all, as far as hosts are concerned only a small fraction of people writing an application bother to define a MIB and register OIDs. The fraction that has bothered to read the proxy agent specs and plug themselves correctly into the SNMP agent is even smaller. Even really trivial things like RAID status are simply not present on most OS-es. Plenty of things in the MIB are still 32 bit counters while the OS-es have moved on to 64 bit internally. SNMP on a Unix (or Winhoze for that matter) platform is a disaster area.
Second, SNMP is too inflexible for large network applications like modern access boxes and high end routers. These nowdays discard most of SNMP functionality and replace it with proprietary protocols or XML. Cisco HFR and the ex-Uniphase (now Juniper) boxes are prime examples.
Third SNMP has never been the favourite due to its inflexibility for applications related to deep telco nuts and bolts like element management, mobile comms systems, etc. The reasons are too long for a slashdot rant, but they are there and they are real. This is mostly corba territory with some web services sprinkled in a few places. SNMP does not play there.
Overall, SNMP is used only in places where minimal surface level monitoring is required and the requirement for reliable transfer of alarms and data is not present. It is either discarded or supplemented by custom agents in nearly all cases where people need to look into the guts of the system.
They are pathological about it. Worse than the East Germans of old.
They are the only non-communist country to have a state subsidized Institute of sport which has no other goal but to "make our guys win". And they are doing a bloody good job at it across the board.
They make winning a matter of science in all sports. They run full hydrodynamic analysis on their swimmer performance using an approach not dissimilar to the one used to analyse results from a wind tunnel. They use thermal imaging, P-NMR on muscles during load to optimise pre-even training, etc. They have something like 200+ PhDs a year in sports related biochemistry, medicine, physiology and a few other related fields all working in that sports institute (sorry forgot the name).
Taken along with their other efforts software for pattern analysis on a football field does not strike me as odd. In fact, it would have been surprising if they did not do it.
One of the great advantages of how the LINX was set up is precisely that they can't.
We are talking about different cattle of fish. You meant Linx or AMSIX. I meant PacketExchange or the like. The former cannot be bought. The latter can and have a product that can be easily grafted onto the USA network topology and mentatlity to shift it away from its current degeneration back into ATT.
Take that, add some money where its mouth is at SIX and other surviving American IX-es where Google, Yahoo and Akamai are already members along with seed-funding a few LINX-style peering points around the US and this will be more than enough to alter the net flows in a manner which will neuter the emerging maBell.
Alternatively, the reincarnated maBell will have fun they way it used to. Dunno why, but I keep thinking of "The Wall" here:-).
I looked into working on BIG and real stuff in my "free" time a few years back and after balancing the pros and cons I decided not to. If I did take one of the offers I had a few years ago to "code this in my free time" I may have been considerably better off then now financially. Which would have mattered only if I was sane, alive and healthy. There is a limit on what a human brain can endure per day and this limit drops as the years go by.
There is simply no way in hell I am going to look at a BIG project with a deadline in my free time now. I would rather read a book or spend some time with the family.
Now, recreational coding is a different matter. Fixing bugs, polishing rough edges on stuff, writing documentation and articles are something BIG OSS projects always fail on. That is what I do when I feel like coding in my free time. It is an activity that you can do once in a while when the weather sucks so bad that it is not worth it to go to the park with the kid(s). It keeps your brain in shape, it is enjoyable and most importantly it is not stressful.
Most of us get enough shit at work to get additional stress at home after that. Even if you can take it now in 5 years you will not and everyone will still expect from you those 15+ hours of work per day. Worst of all your finances will expect that too.
I said in my original post that "I used to be a network architect in a Tier 1 telco". It's been 5 years since. I am no longer in this part of the industry so many thanks for the updated numbers and the corrections.
I agree with you that US and EU have diverged a lot over the years. It started at least as far back as 8 years ago if not earlier. 7 years ago we had seagulls coming across the pond and screaming at us that "public peering is crap, we need to switch to private". That has not changed. The majority of americans do not dig the idea of public peering. There are some public peering points still alive around the west coast, but they are nowhere near the prominence of the European ones.
As far as your opinion about Google and Yahoo not knowing how to run a decent IX I will not hold my breath about that. They have enough money to buy one of the companies involved in peering-like activities in the EU in a cash and carry fashion. Alternatively they can pick a team of engineering and architecture from the job market in Europe. Provided that you have the money it would take around 5 weeks to assemble an engineering core team who has been there, done that and "got the teeshirts". Google, Yahoo and the like already have ops and infrastructure so engineering, design and money is all it takes.
So it is a matter for Google or Yahoo to take their head out of their arse and put their money where their mouth is. For the time being they prefer moaning to congresskrtitters instead.
You mean the SIX, which is located in that building.
True, thanks for the correction, it is still twitching. I usually forget about it because it has always been considerably smaller than the MAEs.
Considering the donation list - not suprising. This is peanuts compared to what Linx or DGIX gets per year. Quite a funny doc actually - they have even mentioned the 50 quid they got from Randy Bush last year.
As I said, the resources it will take to bring that and a few others to a proper functioning state (or to establish its own) are peanuts for the like of Google. It is cheaper then grafting congresskritters to support net neutrality.
Slashdot Mirror
That would have been true if half of the consultants did not suffer from CrackBerry addiction. That would have been also true if trusts did not consider putting in DAS or picocells. That would have also been true...
So on so fourth.
The liability reasoning may have held some ground in US and may hold some ground as far as Tetra emergency radios are concerned (these can transmit way over what GSM does). It definitely does not hold as far as GSM. The only reason for the GSM ban is the monopoly on patient communication which a private company appointed by NHS holds now. 3000% profit margin is something to hold and to cherish especially if the only way to achieve it is by holding a monopoly.
There are. No doubt. Around 0.1% of a hospital territory. And definitely not the hospital toilets or the non-intensive wards where there is no kit whatsoever. There it is entirely a matter of money. If it wasn't a matter of money, NHS would not have investigated the possibility of putting distributed antenna systems and/or picocells in the hospitals. Which they did. Multiple times over the years.
The only reason it is not in is the inability to keep the 100% control of captive audience they have now.
In addition to that if that was such a danger why did some hospital trusts (Addenbrookes, Oxford, etc) hand out Blackberries to all A&E personnel and why there is no limitation on where they can be turned on and off? Do they work by magic wand? Or by actually using GPRS and transmitting and receiving more than an idle GSM phone? The latter seems more likely.
Exactly.
Classic case.
And Why the F*** do they need to be on a public address in such case?
Same with IBM's internal use of 9.0.0.0/8
You are not allowed to your phone at a petrol station because it may spark and risk a fire. That is the most phantasmagorical bull one could ever think of. Real reason is that some of the older reed contact based counters could miscount and you could deprieve Gordon Brown of some of his "hard earned" pennies.
Anywhere on the territory of a hospital so that you do not interfere with sensitive medical equipment. Another phantasmagorical bull. All of it is screened to a much more stringent requirements than domestic equipment. Real reason is that if the patients were allowed to use mobile phones the "patient services" company could not longer charge them 90p per minute for calls to and from their (death)bed. And the trusts get a kickback from that same as from parking services. So on so fourth...
No, it does not.
Last time I looked (which was pretty recent) their stuff was supported only on RedHat WS.
It will run perfectly fine on Debian and derivatives. I suspect that it will run fine on Suse/Novel, but it is "not supported". Main reason is that their primary business objective is delivering cosy feelings to telco vendor midlevel PHBs which look for buzzwords like "carrier grade bollocks" instead of a real product. As such they do very carefully not to mention any such pinko comy distros like Debian and god forbid European stuff like Suse. Anatema. It all has to be "carrier grade" and "enterprise level" tools.
Windriver is virtually the same.
This makes them a royal pain in the arse because you have to roll out a working RedHat desktop environment. Anybody who has had to do that for 5-100 developers knows that this is an oxymoron. There has always been something broken in RedHat regarding network client usage in an enterprise environment. In RH8.0-9.0 it was the automounter which blue up magestically with a kernel hang. In WS4.0 it looks to be the combined automount + smbfs mount/umount races and a few other gems. So you either end up patching RHEL to death or bite the bullet and run it on an unsupported platform in first place.
In either case it is a lot of work and a lot of explanation to be given to PHBs which cannot grasp the idea that "we will not run it on the supposedly supported platform because the supposedly supported platform is shite as a developer workstation".
There is a tremendous waste of space all over the place, not just class thos few class As you mention.
/8 area which is unused and reserved for edu.
As an example: In one well known red brick UK university you have to have a public IP address and you are not allowed to put kit behind a NAT even if that kit OS something esoteric and obsolete like the Silicon Graphics or AS1 that drives Bruker NMRs. As a result you have the choice to leave it unconnected which is a major annoyance as it is designed for network connectivity or to leave it at the mercy of the elements. This is done so that the "usage is not reduced" so that the overall university allocation is still justified.
While at it, IIRC the aforementioned Bruker as a class B which is not used for anything but to give semi-unique addresses to different components of Lab machinery which sit on internal networks worldwide. Classic abuse of public address space for what amounts to textbook RFC 1918.
IBM is holding 9.0.0.0/8 which it practically does not use, There is a huge block in the high
The only place where there is some IPv4 address shortage are the APNIC blocks. RIPE and especially ARIN still have plenty of address space to go around even without going and starting to ask people like IBM if they actually use those class As.
Not necessarily.
In order for this hack to work it essential for the wireless driver to handle at least some MAC and encryption functions in software. In that case it is available for a hit simply by the fact of being active, regardless of the connection status. Most modern cards are like this (if not all). Atheros also definitely fits the bill. In fact it is more likely to fit the bill because more bits are implemented in software compared to Centrino. So do a few others.
As far as Centrino you are to some extent right that it is the most likely candidate. The reason for this is that it has "feature" called preassociation. It will search and connect to the strongest AP in the area even if you have set the connection inactive. It is enough to load the driver and not have the antenna off.
That is Lee Yakoka Pinto Arithmetic(TM). Also known as "Where exactly safety is mentioned in the design specification?" (that is actually rumoured to be a quote).
It works only if you control the media which was generally valid in his days at Ford. That is definitely not the case as far as laptops and computer equipment safety is concerned nowdays. The news get out fast and get out quickly.
Why are you insulting the innocent amphibians?
It should be "Because we are Larry Ellison clones".
Yesterday (I am not in the office yet).
I bought the first for our first office 5 years back. We kept buying more across two moves. Over the years it has grown to 4 safes. 2 IT ones for data, 1 mixed for exec stuff and documents and one for finance. This is in a company of approx 50 employees which does not deal with confidential customer data.
This is besides secure offsite storage of course.
That depends on the scientific discipline. Just ask anyone involved with the theory behind technology about Russians and math. Or Russians and physics for that matter. That was the case least from the time when I was in an University which was pre-1995 and in many areas is still the case now.
As far as test scores reigning supreme with all due respect you are slightly misguided.
I have studied in both an American and an Eastern European University so I can tell you that based on first hand experience.
In an Eastern European University the test scores reign supreme at admission. After that studying in the university itself is relatively mellow and serene. You get two a test session at the end of a semester (for some subjects even at the end of a year) with a whole month for study and review so you can actually assimilate the material before the exam. There are very few ongoing tests and virtually zero graded homework in most courses.
American Universities are completely different to this. The one I was I had to run through a non-stop weekly, bi-weekly, monthly and semestrial test meatgrinder. An average of 4-6 tests per subject per semester. Every single one of them counted towards your grade and there was no way to relax for even a bit and assimilate what you are studying. That was topped by a 7 days exam session with one day of review time. Essentially you were being converted into an curriculum compliant automaton with virtually zero capability to stand back from the problem and say "Stop, WTF am I doing, there got to be a different way to solve this".
So based on first hand experience with both systems, it is America which is obsessed with scores and tests (at least up to BSc level), not Eastern Europe. As far as the results of this I have enough idea of math and physics to beg to differ from your opinion.
Welcome to the real world. Congratulations.
The truth about ex-soc countries education is that it has been always a subject to vicious selection for any of the places that were moderately worth it. Ratios of 500:1 at Moscow state were quite common for some science majors and thousands to 1 were normal for humanities because these offered a route into the state administration. And you do not want to even have an idea about the selection ratio at whatever the name of the institute was that specialised in economics.
Other ex-soc countries were not far behind. My wife's class in biotech at Sofia State had a selection ratio in the 250:1+ and my own chemistry class at Sofia state had a selection ration of 35:1. That is once again with a limit of 2 maximum applications within a year. That is after graduating from high schools which themselves had a selection ratio of 30:1 in her case and 200:1 in my case. Once again with similar application limits and specialisation at that time. By the way this was the norm, not a deviation across the ex-soviet block.
In addition to that the exams were per-university (not countrywide like in the west) with a limit on how many universities you can apply to (used to be 2 in most countries). So this ratio of 500:1 or higher was after the voluntary selection performed by people estimating their chances and sending applications only to 2 universities. So the overall selection ratio was actually much much higher.
I know that I am going to evoke some morbid egalitarian screams from the Slashdot community, but I do not see anything wrong in this. Good education implies selection.
Europe between the ex-iron curtain and CIS border. Chech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, Bulgaria, parts of Romania (not all of it). If you are brave enough to deal with Russian business the bigger Russian cities are also not bad infrastructurally. Definitely better then India. You get to chose from the whole spectrum of salaries and infrastructure costs and balance them according to the task at hand.
There is a caveat though. All of these countries have fairly strict labour code and benefits packages which an American will have a fit about. I have seen it myself. A representative of a well known US bank screaming: "What da ya mean, that ya give 6 months payed maternity leave? It is the cow's fault. She should go on state aid". This has not prevented people exporting work to there though. Just ask Cisco where was their SS7 stack written or Canada where did they get their election software from.
I do not doubt it works. For different applications. Not for this one. You misunderstand the application.
The application is to supply power to office space + datacenters + labs instead of the grid connection during blackouts and brownouts for 20%+ a day (that is the current situation) regardless of sun, monsoon wind, etc. 365 days a year. The reason for having the system is that the grid is failing in the first place. So you cannot fall back to the grid the way all green systems do when the weather is adverse (no sun, no wind, strong wind, etc).
While some augmentation with solar or wind is feasible, end of the day it ends up being a generator and big banks of batteries which provide power until it warms up. There is no other way unless you own your own accumulating hydroelectric to store the "green" energy until it is needed. AFAIK none of the tech companies in India does. In fact even if they had the money I am not sure that they could do it for regulatory reasons. For all its globalisation, key parts of Indian economy are still strictly regulated and competition is inexistent.
- Add the costs of replicating every development and test platform in at least two instances - one on site and one for the contractors themselves.
- Add to that the costs of extra security for each of those.
- Add to that the costs of extra on-call allowance for support staff which deals with systems that govern data replication between the sites. India is 4-5 hours ahead of most of EU and 10h ahead of the US. Alternatively extra hardware has to be thrown at this.
- Add to that the costs of extra collaboration software to compensate for the fact that you cannot just talk to the person at the watercooler.
- Add to that the costs of various moderately illegal (according to the Indian regulators) VOIP backdoors to bypass their telco and get a working voice.
- Add to that the costs of extra elements in revision control systems to deal with multisite issues.
- Add to that costs of creating data sets that comply with data export/data protection laws. In some cases this means paying for extra software to create these.
- Add... Add... Add...
Overall, especially as the costs of doing work there grow the overall balance of outsourcing work to there will become less and less feasible. If the current tendencies continue, withing the next 2-3 years the costs will become so high that companies will go back to importing people instead of exporting work. This of course will happen if the entire thing is governed by economic realities which I am suspicious that it is not. As you have noted it does smack of an overgrown Monopoly game.As far as generation the "hug the trees alternative energy" stuff is very nice for villages with minimal consumption in the middle of nowhere.
It is not suitable for the real stuff. All big outsourcing shops in India are forced to have UPS capacity sufficient to handle all of their computer systems including desktops and not just portions of the datacenter like in the US or Europe. This amounts to be a parallel power grid. In most cases this hits the worst sour spot of power generation - mid-size from cold. That is phenomenally ineffective and costs a fortune, but they have no choice. All those hired hands have to keep on typing.
As far as wireless networks are concerned they are once again utterly irrelevant to the outsourcing cost.
The problem with outsourcing cost is network capacity into India which is oversubscribed and is only getting worse by the day. There is no way to alleviate this with "next gen wireless". The only thing to help here is new fiber around the gulf which noone is even thinking about putting in the ocean floor now.
The cost of living and the wage are only one factor of the cost of an ousourced worker.
You have to add the cost of duplicating power infrastructure because too many companies have moved in and the utility grid cannot cope. Current brownout+blackout rate is 20%+ during daytime and growing.
You have to add the exorbitant communication costs which will only grow up due to basic supply and demand laws. The fiber under the Gulf is still the same, there is no new coming up and demand has grown several times a year. The Eastern route is not looking any better because there India competes with the growing demand from China and other countries. 256Kbit there will buy you several E1s in the UK or the US (at the same contention ratio).
You have to add.. add.. add...
At the end of the adding all the numbers a worker in India will come up to less then US or EU costs in terms of salary and considerably more as far as infrastructure is concerned. From there on the overall numbers depend on how the work is organised, but I am not surprised at a company pulling out from India. There are plenty of other places around the world with comparable salary rates and considerably better infrastructure.
I admire your optimism regarding the availability of SNMP and its capabilities. The reality is considerably bleaker.
First of all, as far as hosts are concerned only a small fraction of people writing an application bother to define a MIB and register OIDs. The fraction that has bothered to read the proxy agent specs and plug themselves correctly into the SNMP agent is even smaller. Even really trivial things like RAID status are simply not present on most OS-es. Plenty of things in the MIB are still 32 bit counters while the OS-es have moved on to 64 bit internally. SNMP on a Unix (or Winhoze for that matter) platform is a disaster area.
Second, SNMP is too inflexible for large network applications like modern access boxes and high end routers. These nowdays discard most of SNMP functionality and replace it with proprietary protocols or XML. Cisco HFR and the ex-Uniphase (now Juniper) boxes are prime examples.
Third SNMP has never been the favourite due to its inflexibility for applications related to deep telco nuts and bolts like element management, mobile comms systems, etc. The reasons are too long for a slashdot rant, but they are there and they are real. This is mostly corba territory with some web services sprinkled in a few places. SNMP does not play there.
Overall, SNMP is used only in places where minimal surface level monitoring is required and the requirement for reliable transfer of alarms and data is not present. It is either discarded or supplemented by custom agents in nearly all cases where people need to look into the guts of the system.
They are pathological about it. Worse than the East Germans of old.
They are the only non-communist country to have a state subsidized Institute of sport which has no other goal but to "make our guys win". And they are doing a bloody good job at it across the board.
They make winning a matter of science in all sports. They run full hydrodynamic analysis on their swimmer performance using an approach not dissimilar to the one used to analyse results from a wind tunnel. They use thermal imaging, P-NMR on muscles during load to optimise pre-even training, etc. They have something like 200+ PhDs a year in sports related biochemistry, medicine, physiology and a few other related fields all working in that sports institute (sorry forgot the name).
Taken along with their other efforts software for pattern analysis on a football field does not strike me as odd. In fact, it would have been surprising if they did not do it.
This is headquarters hailing Blue Thunder, Blue Thunder respond please...
You mean "used to be available". Have you tried to order these after 9/11?
We are talking about different cattle of fish. You meant Linx or AMSIX. I meant PacketExchange or the like. The former cannot be bought. The latter can and have a product that can be easily grafted onto the USA network topology and mentatlity to shift it away from its current degeneration back into ATT.
Take that, add some money where its mouth is at SIX and other surviving American IX-es where Google, Yahoo and Akamai are already members along with seed-funding a few LINX-style peering points around the US and this will be more than enough to alter the net flows in a manner which will neuter the emerging maBell.
Alternatively, the reincarnated maBell will have fun they way it used to. Dunno why, but I keep thinking of "The Wall" here :-).
The healthy balance is somewhere in between.
I looked into working on BIG and real stuff in my "free" time a few years back and after balancing the pros and cons I decided not to. If I did take one of the offers I had a few years ago to "code this in my free time" I may have been considerably better off then now financially. Which would have mattered only if I was sane, alive and healthy. There is a limit on what a human brain can endure per day and this limit drops as the years go by.
There is simply no way in hell I am going to look at a BIG project with a deadline in my free time now. I would rather read a book or spend some time with the family.
Now, recreational coding is a different matter. Fixing bugs, polishing rough edges on stuff, writing documentation and articles are something BIG OSS projects always fail on. That is what I do when I feel like coding in my free time. It is an activity that you can do once in a while when the weather sucks so bad that it is not worth it to go to the park with the kid(s). It keeps your brain in shape, it is enjoyable and most importantly it is not stressful.
Most of us get enough shit at work to get additional stress at home after that. Even if you can take it now in 5 years you will not and everyone will still expect from you those 15+ hours of work per day. Worst of all your finances will expect that too.
It is not worth it.
I said in my original post that "I used to be a network architect in a Tier 1 telco". It's been 5 years since. I am no longer in this part of the industry so many thanks for the updated numbers and the corrections.
I agree with you that US and EU have diverged a lot over the years. It started at least as far back as 8 years ago if not earlier. 7 years ago we had seagulls coming across the pond and screaming at us that "public peering is crap, we need to switch to private". That has not changed. The majority of americans do not dig the idea of public peering. There are some public peering points still alive around the west coast, but they are nowhere near the prominence of the European ones.
As far as your opinion about Google and Yahoo not knowing how to run a decent IX I will not hold my breath about that. They have enough money to buy one of the companies involved in peering-like activities in the EU in a cash and carry fashion. Alternatively they can pick a team of engineering and architecture from the job market in Europe. Provided that you have the money it would take around 5 weeks to assemble an engineering core team who has been there, done that and "got the teeshirts". Google, Yahoo and the like already have ops and infrastructure so engineering, design and money is all it takes.
So it is a matter for Google or Yahoo to take their head out of their arse and put their money where their mouth is. For the time being they prefer moaning to congresskrtitters instead.
Err...
You mean the SIX, which is located in that building.
True, thanks for the correction, it is still twitching. I usually forget about it because it has always been considerably smaller than the MAEs.
Considering the donation list - not suprising. This is peanuts compared to what Linx or DGIX gets per year. Quite a funny doc actually - they have even mentioned the 50 quid they got from Randy Bush last year.
As I said, the resources it will take to bring that and a few others to a proper functioning state (or to establish its own) are peanuts for the like of Google. It is cheaper then grafting congresskritters to support net neutrality.