Some BBC reporters are very good, but typically the best stuff is either on domestic radio (say John Humphrys on Radio 4) or BBC World. Listening to Humphrys doing an interview is really like hearing a maestro at work, dissecting politicians of all sides for breakfast but sympathetically talking with a disaster victim. Domestic BBC TV seemed not so good on my last visit there (even Jeremy Paxton who handles the late-night news), and actually there seemed to be better coverage of issues in drama than on the news proper.
As for Al Jazeera, they received a lot of assistance from the BBC in the early days and some staff moved across. Al Jazeerah, may be broadly pro-Arab, but it prides itself on not being too close to any particular regime.
This is for aircraft maintenance not airport maintenance. The difference being that you are working on plane either on a ramp or in the hangar and don't particularly want to carry the entire maintenance handbook library around with you. Note that getting specialised tools through is less of an issue when you use the airport's 'backdoors' for staff as long as you have id to go airside. As a passenger, I would admit that it is another issue.
I had access to VMS source code as well as original Starlet design documentation. I have not seen the source of NT, but I am familiar with the various public books. There are similarities, but essentially Cutler seems to have reinvented the wheel. He used knowledge but didn't copy. Also, some people may have gone to Microsoft but many stayed including Andy Goldstein. Actually that was probably one of the main causes of weakness in that without Mr Files-11, they lost a lot - no logical names, no search lists, no versioning and so on.
Alpha was another issue. The chip was poorly priced and marketed. Yes, Intel copied aspects but even that they screwed up on and Itanium ended up a total mess and however much they tried to improve their implementation of X86, it stayed cursed with a poor architecture.
Irkutsk is quite a major city in Siberia even though it is only some half a mil inhabitants. You must remember that Siberia has a somewhat intellectual tradition due to the number of people who thought for themselves under the Tsar and then the Soviets being shipped there. There are several universities there but the city is concerned as the educated people tend to leave for cities such as Moscow or St. Petersburg where the living is easier. MS may bring some staff over for training but I guess they will have no problems finding locals to run things, all they lack is the experience of running major server farms.
There have been temperatures in Sib towns down to about -57C. This makes Minnesota winters look quite balmy by comparison. The big problem tends to be the dry air, all humidity has been frozen out so if you heat without humidifying, it is hell for electronics because of the static build-up.
You must remember that the dollar has lost about 33% of its value over the lifetime of the OLPC project and it is based on parts priced in dollars but sourced outside the US. The big advantage of the XO was the lack of software licensing fees, which Microsoft seeks to undermine by dumping their code at $3 a pop. However, the XO has features that are simply not found on other systems at that price range. It is rugged (try finding another rugged notebook PC for under $1k). It boasts a screen readable in direct sunlight, very important when classes are often taught outside under a bit of shade.
Actually mud huts are extremely practical. We used to call them "Wattle and Daub" and there are many fine old farm houses made of the stuff still standing in Europe. You cannot afford to build, let alone maintain a modern house but the older techniques hold well and having visited one in Africa, I preferred it to the corrugated iron constructions also seen there.
When Cutler moved from Digital to Microsoft, I have no doubt he took ideas with him but he took no code, nor did he take any designs. There are some similarities between the two kernels but that is it. VMS was mostly written in assembler (although the VAX instruction set was very high-level) with a little written in BLISS, which was indirectly, a precursor to C. VMS was very much designed to use the VAX architecture while NT at least started as a hardware independent O/S. Ironically VMS made a transition to two different RISC architectures (first Alpha, and later, unfortunately, Itanium) while Microsoft consolidated NT from 4 onwards on the x86 architecture.
In most countries, even parts of Eastern Europe, you can complain to the PC that someone is attempting to interfere with your computer from a particular ISP. The police will take it up with the ISP as there is plenty of legislation about interfering with people's IT systems. The problem is quite simple, if I'm sitting, say in Estonia, a well connected country and am attacked by a DOS from the US, the US will cooperate, but the work for the Estonian police to officially request cooperation from the US is just too much. Even if the attack came from Germany, the effort would be too much unless major extortion was involved.
Countries tend to reciprocate their entry clearance procedures unless they are desperate for tourists. Only diplomats tend to have any immunity from entry clearance procedures (heads of state generally end up with diplomatic passports). If the Nigerians are faced with a high entry barrier to the US, then expect them to do the same for US citizens. Nigeria is one of the wealthiest countries in Africa due to oil. The country may suffer from endemic corruption that dissipates their oil revenue, but the government still sees no need of tourist dollars.
Looks nice but you need a friendly NAT/Firewall for SIP. Home NATs are fairly easy to STUN your way through but often when you are travelling, you can often get stuck behind an unfriendly one and VOIP either becomes outbound only or totally non-functional. Skype is very good at doing this.
When the big deal about your product is the high quality standards, producing in China just doesn't make sense.
Not strictly sure about that one. It is more a case that if I buy a car made in Germany, whether VW or Mercedes, I can make certain assumptions about quality. The Germans actually find it difficult to do low quality/low cost manufacturing, it is against their nature (and most importantly, work culture).
If I buy from China, I cannot make those assumptions so I can cushion myself by buying something with a western label and hoping to god they have implemented a quality management process for their supplier. The Chinese can do quality work, but you must have it in the contract as well as the test procedures they are expected to do. You then have to implement your own quality layer to sample the output and assess the level of compliance as the quality may not be consistent (polite name for easing off on quality once the contract is in the bag).
I absolutely agree with down-town/public-areas. Remember that you can have a sign-on page which could feature some (very) local ads. It may not be much, but if it help finance the infrastructure, then fine.
Yes, city-wide is a bit rich in many senses. The US has a lot of places with low urban density compared with say, Europe. However coverage of some public spaces may help your own staff as well as the public. I can think of many places where a couple of nodes can cover a public space, encouraging people to be out.
No, this is different. It is one thing to point to member of a household that made its money in medieval times doing medieval things. It is quite something else when that person may have been making their money in medieval ways in modern times directly. I have no direct information about Usmanov's alleged complicity but he does seem rather well placed with the Uzbek government, one that believes apparently in boiling people alive.
Murray was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. After having the regular low-key meetings with dissidents, there were several incidents where they and their relatives faced problems up to and including being tortured to death. MI6 sanctioned this because they thought that the information coming from torture may be useful. Murray disagreed with treatment of his visitors by the Uzbek government and also by the implicit support of the FCO on the basis of information received. Craig Murray was well thought of by my friends there - courageous and principled, which is why he lost his job. Murray has a bit of a bone to pick with some of the Uzbek mafia (who are the government) hence his comments about Usmanov.
In the case of Usmanov, it should be possible to enquire where he got his money from. I think anyone with some experience in central asia to point out there is no legal way that he could have made his money, and by the way, aren't his lawyers also supposed to look at where the money comes from?
Not quite correct. You will find that the British magazine Private Eye has this down to a fine art. Yes, they have lost some actions, but on the whole, they have managed quite well.
It sounds like a wonderful system when it works and a maintenance disaster waiting to happen in the field. It is very difficult to produce something for the army, navy and the airforce. I suspect it will work probably at fixed installations but remain somewhat tricky elsewhere.
True, which is why the PRC is very friendly with Russia at the moment. Unfortunately, even if the Russians want to, it takes a long time to build new pipelines, so Russia's gas exports continue to go west. It is more flexible for the Russians to export raw materials to China, which is why thousands of railway wagons full of nickel and so on end up going there every day. It still isn't enough though.
How many Chinese parts will the US attempt use this time?
How many US parts will the Chinese attempt use?
The sad ting is that with the offshoring of the manufacturing base, whoever gets to the moon will be doing so with US technology such as microchips but manufactured in China.
RT11 was fairly clean and was widely used in environments varying from labs through to control systems without problems. It was fairly easy for user code to bring the system down (the MMU usage was basic at best). However it was rather primitive compared with another system, RSX-11M which was implemented using a separate user space. Such systems tended to just carry on working, I have seen them running steel mills down to traffic lights as well as the enroute ATC system for the North Atlantic. OTOH, I've seen an NMR machine using RT11. All perfectly stable.
Slashdot Mirror
Some BBC reporters are very good, but typically the best stuff is either on domestic radio (say John Humphrys on Radio 4) or BBC World. Listening to Humphrys doing an interview is really like hearing a maestro at work, dissecting politicians of all sides for breakfast but sympathetically talking with a disaster victim. Domestic BBC TV seemed not so good on my last visit there (even Jeremy Paxton who handles the late-night news), and actually there seemed to be better coverage of issues in drama than on the news proper.
As for Al Jazeera, they received a lot of assistance from the BBC in the early days and some staff moved across. Al Jazeerah, may be broadly pro-Arab, but it prides itself on not being too close to any particular regime.
Nah, no need. They can just put it up on the piratebay
This is for aircraft maintenance not airport maintenance. The difference being that you are working on plane either on a ramp or in the hangar and don't particularly want to carry the entire maintenance handbook library around with you. Note that getting specialised tools through is less of an issue when you use the airport's 'backdoors' for staff as long as you have id to go airside. As a passenger, I would admit that it is another issue.
I had access to VMS source code as well as original Starlet design documentation. I have not seen the source of NT, but I am familiar with the various public books. There are similarities, but essentially Cutler seems to have reinvented the wheel. He used knowledge but didn't copy. Also, some people may have gone to Microsoft but many stayed including Andy Goldstein. Actually that was probably one of the main causes of weakness in that without Mr Files-11, they lost a lot - no logical names, no search lists, no versioning and so on.
Alpha was another issue. The chip was poorly priced and marketed. Yes, Intel copied aspects but even that they screwed up on and Itanium ended up a total mess and however much they tried to improve their implementation of X86, it stayed cursed with a poor architecture.
The -57 was from a couple of years back in Pyatigorsk. Apparently they recently had it in Irkutsk as well but I don't know when.
Irkutsk is quite a major city in Siberia even though it is only some half a mil inhabitants. You must remember that Siberia has a somewhat intellectual tradition due to the number of people who thought for themselves under the Tsar and then the Soviets being shipped there. There are several universities there but the city is concerned as the educated people tend to leave for cities such as Moscow or St. Petersburg where the living is easier. MS may bring some staff over for training but I guess they will have no problems finding locals to run things, all they lack is the experience of running major server farms.
There have been temperatures in Sib towns down to about -57C. This makes Minnesota winters look quite balmy by comparison. The big problem tends to be the dry air, all humidity has been frozen out so if you heat without humidifying, it is hell for electronics because of the static build-up.
You must remember that the dollar has lost about 33% of its value over the lifetime of the OLPC project and it is based on parts priced in dollars but sourced outside the US. The big advantage of the XO was the lack of software licensing fees, which Microsoft seeks to undermine by dumping their code at $3 a pop. However, the XO has features that are simply not found on other systems at that price range. It is rugged (try finding another rugged notebook PC for under $1k). It boasts a screen readable in direct sunlight, very important when classes are often taught outside under a bit of shade.
Actually mud huts are extremely practical. We used to call them "Wattle and Daub" and there are many fine old farm houses made of the stuff still standing in Europe. You cannot afford to build, let alone maintain a modern house but the older techniques hold well and having visited one in Africa, I preferred it to the corrugated iron constructions also seen there.
When Cutler moved from Digital to Microsoft, I have no doubt he took ideas with him but he took no code, nor did he take any designs. There are some similarities between the two kernels but that is it. VMS was mostly written in assembler (although the VAX instruction set was very high-level) with a little written in BLISS, which was indirectly, a precursor to C. VMS was very much designed to use the VAX architecture while NT at least started as a hardware independent O/S. Ironically VMS made a transition to two different RISC architectures (first Alpha, and later, unfortunately, Itanium) while Microsoft consolidated NT from 4 onwards on the x86 architecture.
In most countries, even parts of Eastern Europe, you can complain to the PC that someone is attempting to interfere with your computer from a particular ISP. The police will take it up with the ISP as there is plenty of legislation about interfering with people's IT systems. The problem is quite simple, if I'm sitting, say in Estonia, a well connected country and am attacked by a DOS from the US, the US will cooperate, but the work for the Estonian police to officially request cooperation from the US is just too much. Even if the attack came from Germany, the effort would be too much unless major extortion was involved.
Countries tend to reciprocate their entry clearance procedures unless they are desperate for tourists. Only diplomats tend to have any immunity from entry clearance procedures (heads of state generally end up with diplomatic passports). If the Nigerians are faced with a high entry barrier to the US, then expect them to do the same for US citizens. Nigeria is one of the wealthiest countries in Africa due to oil. The country may suffer from endemic corruption that dissipates their oil revenue, but the government still sees no need of tourist dollars.
Looks nice but you need a friendly NAT/Firewall for SIP. Home NATs are fairly easy to STUN your way through but often when you are travelling, you can often get stuck behind an unfriendly one and VOIP either becomes outbound only or totally non-functional. Skype is very good at doing this.
t is very competitive when calling internationally. I often travel interntaionally for work and it has saved me a bundle.
Not strictly sure about that one. It is more a case that if I buy a car made in Germany, whether VW or Mercedes, I can make certain assumptions about quality. The Germans actually find it difficult to do low quality/low cost manufacturing, it is against their nature (and most importantly, work culture).
If I buy from China, I cannot make those assumptions so I can cushion myself by buying something with a western label and hoping to god they have implemented a quality management process for their supplier. The Chinese can do quality work, but you must have it in the contract as well as the test procedures they are expected to do. You then have to implement your own quality layer to sample the output and assess the level of compliance as the quality may not be consistent (polite name for easing off on quality once the contract is in the bag).
I absolutely agree with down-town/public-areas. Remember that you can have a sign-on page which could feature some (very) local ads. It may not be much, but if it help finance the infrastructure, then fine.
Yes, city-wide is a bit rich in many senses. The US has a lot of places with low urban density compared with say, Europe. However coverage of some public spaces may help your own staff as well as the public. I can think of many places where a couple of nodes can cover a public space, encouraging people to be out.
No, this is different. It is one thing to point to member of a household that made its money in medieval times doing medieval things. It is quite something else when that person may have been making their money in medieval ways in modern times directly. I have no direct information about Usmanov's alleged complicity but he does seem rather well placed with the Uzbek government, one that believes apparently in boiling people alive.
Murray was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. After having the regular low-key meetings with dissidents, there were several incidents where they and their relatives faced problems up to and including being tortured to death. MI6 sanctioned this because they thought that the information coming from torture may be useful. Murray disagreed with treatment of his visitors by the Uzbek government and also by the implicit support of the FCO on the basis of information received. Craig Murray was well thought of by my friends there - courageous and principled, which is why he lost his job. Murray has a bit of a bone to pick with some of the Uzbek mafia (who are the government) hence his comments about Usmanov.
In the case of Usmanov, it should be possible to enquire where he got his money from. I think anyone with some experience in central asia to point out there is no legal way that he could have made his money, and by the way, aren't his lawyers also supposed to look at where the money comes from?
Not quite correct. You will find that the British magazine Private Eye has this down to a fine art. Yes, they have lost some actions, but on the whole, they have managed quite well.
It sounds like a wonderful system when it works and a maintenance disaster waiting to happen in the field. It is very difficult to produce something for the army, navy and the airforce. I suspect it will work probably at fixed installations but remain somewhat tricky elsewhere.
True, which is why the PRC is very friendly with Russia at the moment. Unfortunately, even if the Russians want to, it takes a long time to build new pipelines, so Russia's gas exports continue to go west. It is more flexible for the Russians to export raw materials to China, which is why thousands of railway wagons full of nickel and so on end up going there every day. It still isn't enough though.
- How many Chinese parts will the US attempt use this time?
- How many US parts will the Chinese attempt use?
The sad ting is that with the offshoring of the manufacturing base, whoever gets to the moon will be doing so with US technology such as microchips but manufactured in China.RT11 was fairly clean and was widely used in environments varying from labs through to control systems without problems. It was fairly easy for user code to bring the system down (the MMU usage was basic at best). However it was rather primitive compared with another system, RSX-11M which was implemented using a separate user space. Such systems tended to just carry on working, I have seen them running steel mills down to traffic lights as well as the enroute ATC system for the North Atlantic. OTOH, I've seen an NMR machine using RT11. All perfectly stable.