Not necessarily, the list of consortiums and companies, they screwed over is endless.
Netscape, Stac, Mosaic (yes the one the IE code is based upon), the OpenGL consortium, the W3C, the Corba consortium, IBM, etc...
(probably a lot of others which are rather unknown, I have head several stories from the car software manufacturers as well)
No, bit service pack2 did not give any new real functionality at all.
All it did was to fix thousands of holes and bugs and turn on the integrated firewall per default (WinXP had that already in, way before SP2)
and add a lot of nag screens.
Comparing SP2 to the Tiger upgrade basically was a typical propaganda ploy, even the upgrade from Win2k to XP was less substantial than the one from Panther to Tiger.
Actually core image (I saw the developers presentation on the net) probably will even give older macs a huge speed boost.
First, the developers said, they were going the altivec route (simd) wherever they were sure, that the graphics processor was not suitable for the task, secondly even some of the older macs which have radeon 9100-9200 cards in it, as well as the mini already have first gen shader extensions in it. The first benchmarks posted on the net, seem to give my assumptions a solid base, even on the older macs the biggest speed boosts seemed to be in the graphical departement of things.
Actually the speed increase core video hopefully (and according to the benchmarks my guessing is right) will give to the UI is alone a major upgrade.
Just because Apple did not overhaul the UI totally like Microsoft does with every release, does not mean it is not a significant upgrade.
Compare that to Windows2000->WinXP, all you got there was just a revamped gui, which was worse than its predecessor.
There was not even too much very new under the hood, all just was more colorful, because apple back then had released Aqua, and Microsoft tried to clone that with its dreadful Luna look.
Automator is definitely an end user feature, basically scripting done so that an end user can see it at the first look, how this stuff works.
I would not call core video end user stuff, but the gui acceleration it will give is, and also the myriad of applications which will benefit from it in the long run.
Face it this guy is a Microsoft whore and you can read it at every second line, that he loves this and that, but Microsoft has something more advanced in the line (which in case of WinFS for instance is totally bull**** they simply cannot get stuff up and running Be had already 10 years ago, Apple now has and Gnome soon will have with beagle). They simply tried to opt for the not invented here approach instead of going the route on how others already made it and now they repeat the mistakes Be did back in 1990.
Even comparing service pack2 to a really substantial upgrade, like Tiger in fact really is, just makes me laugh about how hard this guy tries to justify not to try to like this stuff, after all he is paid to praise Microsoft.
And even comparing OS/2 to the dreck Win95 really was just makes me puke. OS/2 in its Warp incarnations was blazingly fast and rock solid, while the whole dos based Win95-ME line just was a pure bug ridden crash fest.
totally idiotic. This guy compares the tiger upgrade to service pack 2, while writing that dashboard is less extensive than what Microsoft is planning in Longhorn.
Then mentioning only two new features and then giving about 10 examples of what he found to be new.
First to the more extensive Longhorn stuff, technically spoken, Microsoft basically tries the same Apple does with Dashboard, Gnome does with beagle and BeOS had 10 years ago already, putting a half intelligent search on meta data. The more extensive argument came from early Microsoft Marketing papers which said they were going to build a filesystem on the SQL server. They already rowed back, because like Be Systems and others, that approach simply is to slow to be working, so Microsoft does exactly the same what others have done before.
Second, service pack2 which you can get for free, is just a bugfix release, with no real new functionality not even under the hood, what Microsoft did, was to fix lots of holes and bugs, and add nice guis to already existing stuff (the integrated firewall), turn this stuff on per default and then add a lot of nag screens.
Tiger has for the user at least, dashboard, the new mail app, the so called confabulator clone (which is not really a clone, there were similar things way before confabulator even in NeXTStep), XCode2 which adds some interesting stuff, the automator which seems to be the first really viable graphical automation solution, which even the end user might be able to handle. H264 which offers a lot for video buffs and myriads of other things.
For me from a developers point of view other things are much more interesting, basically what apple, did was to give the graphics a huge boost, add better compilers, add some CASE stuff to XCode, add lots of stuff which handles application data handling etc... the list is pretty long, especially in the graphics area. From a technical point core video is especially interesting because Apple managed to push some of the rendering into the domain of the SIMD extensions of the processor and into the shader engine of the graphics processor, which nobody ever has done before in an OS, to my knowledge. I expecte a major speed boost from that and probably even more in the long run.
I am not even sure if Microsoft had plans for such stuff in Longhorn, because most of this shading accleration stuff is enabled transparently and automatically.
Overall after reading this article, I had the feeling this guy is a Microsoft whore who started to basically flame Tiger into the ground and saw a solid quality work, yet he had to find arguments just to make the usual Microsoft advertisement his publisher pays him for.
So he tried to find a middle ground by using half lies and idiotic arguments.
And this has been heavily overlooked, Microsoft basically will try push stateful guys with xaml in Longhorn, Firefox has had that for years with Xul, in fact the whole old Mozilla guy just was a set of Xul scripts and templates.
The main difference is, Xul is an official W3c spec, while Xaml again will be Windows only and patent plastered (while heavily borrowed from Xul anyway).
Given the current really awful and sad state of affairs, where you have to try to make complex GUIs with a limited set of elements which break on the market leader most of the times anyway, a move towards a real platform independend solution instead of splitting again the html standards even more than they already are, is heavens sent for all of us who have base applications upon that "dreck" which is the current state of affairs.
The stuff is glamourous, but face it without ubuntu the debian people would have to port x.org themselves, now there is the whole infrastructure in place for good storage device mounting in user space which is absolutely necessary for desktop distros, they ported that stuff to kde (tried the latest kubuntu and it finally works yiehaa)
they worked with the gnome project to get this stuff working and now they have started on the first maintainence tools.
Nothing server side here (that is not ubuntus focus), but some very important components to get a pleasent desktop experience in the long run.
(which is ubuntus domain)
Most server side stuff I have seen has a release cycle of 18 months. That is Solaris, Java and many other programs which mostly run on the server side.
I think 18 months is a good compromise between having enough time to iron bugs out and having more or less actual packages.
For desktop a quarterly release cycle would be ideal given the update frequency of the core desktop packages.
A half a year release cycle also is very ok (although I personally usually end up to switch to unstable after 3-4 months, because usually there are a handful of packages I need instantly, and no apt pinning is worse than to switch to unstable once you have to get more than one program from the unstable stream)
I agree, Sarge already is one year behind, and then?
The main problem is the release cycle and the heavy focus on server only.
The better thing for Debian would be to have a different release cycle model.
Keep unstable, fork a quarterly desktop (half a year is somewhat to long for my taste) release from unstable or testing which concentrates on only some platform (and for heavens sake drop the 386 codebase for that one and move it to 586 or 686) and also kick out some obscure architectures.
Keep the architecture diversity for stable but keep a release cycle of 18 months (which sort of is industry standard for server stuff). If that does not work out, move some of the more obscure architectures in a "could break" domain.
My guess is, that many release cycle problems will be fixed anway as soon as Debian has moved towards x.org and x.org has become more modular (one thing which is worked upon currently)
The main problem with XFree always was, that the Debian people had to split the codebase into modules and once they were done, they were 5 revisions behind and had to backport lots of fixes for testing and stable. (one of the reasons why Debian is still in XFree and not in X.org like everyone else)
I dont see Murdochs critic that much in place, Ubuntu already helped the Debian project a lot.
They ported x.org already to debian (you can nail x.org over a plain deb), they finally gave debian a working mechanism for user space device mounting, added that stuff to gnome and now to kde, polished up lots of packages and sent them upstream.
All stuff which probably would never happened within the next year in core Debian.
If Debian one day would become a good desktop distro (face it it is not) than the Debian project has to thank Ubuntu.
Given Debians current structure and release problems as well as the problems of not being able to move to newer versions of some core packages but instead backporting patches left and right which even delays more the release cycle, the Debian project does not have to wonder, why people who look for a good desktop distro move in masses to something Debianish, which just delivers that.
Correct me if I am wrong, but due to the system of party donations you can get a voice as soon as you give enough money (aka bribe) the parties, sure there are other ways to get your voice heard. But the current state of affairs is once you have enough money you can buy yourself any law. (Same here in Europe on EU level), sure it is not the classical description of plutocraticsm because there are other means the average people still can get their voice heard, but no system ever was to 100% pushed through. Even classical soviet communism still had money and you could run your own business to a small degree.
The US is the closest thing to a plutocracy which currently is in existence on this planet, and it is unfortunately already very close to the definition.
No the us is currently a plutocratic country in the perfect sense of selling everything to a few who have enough money to even be able to buy the government.
This is neither socialistic nor capitalistic, the correct term is plutocracy.
one of the problems still with mini ITX is, that the processors still are not fast enough for mpeg2 and mpeg4 in the processor, via has to rely on a coproc. That works for mpeg2 and mpeg4, but what happens if you go, divx, xvid, ogg theora, wmv9 and other formats.
The mini definitely shines here, the processor is fast enough for every currently available video format and is in the same league as via from a power consumption standpoint, but with a much better driver coverage in linux.
How about the mini is about 5x as fast as a via you can get for the same price. Dont get me wrong, I have been looking into the via stuff for years now, and every time I was close to buying one, once I dug deeper I stayed away from it.
One time it was the lousy performance, the other time, that there were reported problems with exploding elcos (which most cheap pc boards have), then there was the fact that installing linux on one of those things is hard as hell, due to a driver mess which has been sort of resolved only recently, and then apple came, with a know processor 4-5 times as fast as a similar clocked via, a solid vendor behind it (via screwed me over with their KT113a) and well known components.
So the question afterwards was very clear for me, Apple got the money, Via did not!
Not quite true, while some apps run, the ports are often very old and lack severely behind the actual linux/bsd versions. Some really important ones are not ported yet at all (pgAdmin3 comes to my mind, KDE is a very old version, runnind half stable under fink)
The situation os good as soon as you can get the program up and running then it runs natively but it is far worse thank Cygwin under windows because many packages fail to run at all.
There is currently no real opendarwin debian which probably would be needed to have the stuff up and running in time (fink and others lack momentum)
There always has been, since IBM sells PowerPC Linux stuff as well, you simply cannot get it from Sun, but you have to download it from IBM.
Bit I admit, there is no JDK 1.5/5.0 by now, but neither is there one for OSX.
Not that but, one thing I learned in the past is, that you if you have a good intellect, you have another set of cards at your hand, the one of being able to, lets say it that way, if you are really opting for that, can achieve, what I would call, the art of lovemaking (and I am not talking about the act here, but everything around)
You can make an unforgettable evening, just by having intelligence and using it in the right direction, the joe bloke who also happens to be rich does not. In the end you end up with women who really love you, with unforgettable evenings on both sides(for you and your woman), rich joe bloke ends up with a woman wo loves his "best" his money while you end up with a woman who dearly loves you and would even stay on your side if you want bankrupt and got evicted.
Are you talking about the USA?
And with the criminal organization I dont mean the cosa nostra, which at the current state of affairs is more harmless than some others which are more legitimate:-(
Well, my comment went for the older generation of russian techies, those in my age (mid thirties) who still had to live under the communist yoke. I am sure the younger ones are not that good anymore. Given the fact that russian education shifted strongly towards economics as well, and they basically have access to the same stuff we have and dont get down to the core of things anymore.
I have not worked with too many of those people in the recent past, but all of them, from my generation were excellent, while westerners at the same range of knowledge normally just were arrogant.
Well... the US college mathematics are basically what we learn when we are 15 in the typical western middle european schools.
(usually we learn calculus basicas with 15 and with 16 we are able to solve differential equations if you really bother to learn that stuff and not weasel yourself through)
With 18 you should at least once have heard about fourier transformation.
To bad the average business which follows the US scheme of getting rich quick, never follows any ethics, the russians just learned well from the west.
The problem is that the average people there are just as honest as the average people in the west, but as in the west, it is the 10% who use strongarm tactics who ruin everything.
Capitalism the current style will fail soon, as communism did, because both are ideologies where the main protagonists have forgotten the basic thing which glues society together, ethics.
Actually no, that was how things seemed to be, but face it human nature grew in that system as well.
You just pointed out the positive sides, but the problem was, and George Orwell pointed that out in animal farm.
That very soon after the russian revolution new fractions rose above the others (mainly the government people, kgb and military) and those once the system broke down were the ones who basically ran the system even more down with corruption. It is not in the mentality of the russian people to screw each other over, but they always had this 10% of the people who screw everybody else over and no matter what system, they could survive. Being it the KGB, being it the Mafia which came straight out of the KGB. So not having the possiblity of not having friends is not true, in fact those things probably were as rampant in the west.
But you could not get away with being the cool jock and dumb as hell and then being celebrated as a hero like the west constantly does.
Because the only way to be celebrated was, either, that you went into sports, that you became a scientist, a politician, or you were a war hero who was shot. (Well as polician you also had the likelyhood of being shot)
Not to many career options for the average western dumbass who weasels its way up into CEO position and then runs the company into the ground and getting the golden handshake afterwards, while being celebrated as a hero by other dumbasses in the media.
Most of these people simply did not forgoe a real we want to become mighty career, but basically went into the secret services or other government organisation, where they could live their lust for power in combination with their obviously lacking intelligence and lacking sense for decency And those also were the seeding ground for the rampant going business Mafia in russia, after the system broke down (or way even before, the KGB was/is known to have become the seeding ground for the russian mafia once they salaries went to a level people could not make a living anymore of)
It is also, how the society in soviet russia treated people in mathematics.
I wanna give you an example, there is a reason why 90% of the best chess players come from russia. It is not that those people generally are smarter, but over here, if a kid loves math, chess or generally science, it is branded as a nerd or freak and subject to the heavy beating by the other kids. It either drops out of the field and becomes something mediocre (fill in the average lawyer, business crook in here) or follows the path and now faces the situation of getting constant beating by the management in a company which sees their researchers not as assets anymore but more as a cost reduction point which has to be outsourced to another country. It does not matter in the end that the company will run out of new products a few years later, because the management gets the golden handshake.
Not a good idea to follow this career path, even if you have an enourmous talent.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily, the list of consortiums and companies, they screwed over is endless. Netscape, Stac, Mosaic (yes the one the IE code is based upon), the OpenGL consortium, the W3C, the Corba consortium, IBM, etc... (probably a lot of others which are rather unknown, I have head several stories from the car software manufacturers as well)
No, bit service pack2 did not give any new real functionality at all. All it did was to fix thousands of holes and bugs and turn on the integrated firewall per default (WinXP had that already in, way before SP2) and add a lot of nag screens.
Comparing SP2 to the Tiger upgrade basically was a typical propaganda ploy, even the upgrade from Win2k to XP was less substantial than the one from Panther to Tiger.
Actually core image (I saw the developers presentation on the net) probably will even give older macs a huge speed boost. First, the developers said, they were going the altivec route (simd) wherever they were sure, that the graphics processor was not suitable for the task, secondly even some of the older macs which have radeon 9100-9200 cards in it, as well as the mini already have first gen shader extensions in it. The first benchmarks posted on the net, seem to give my assumptions a solid base, even on the older macs the biggest speed boosts seemed to be in the graphical departement of things.
Actually the speed increase core video hopefully (and according to the benchmarks my guessing is right) will give to the UI is alone a major upgrade.
Just because Apple did not overhaul the UI totally like Microsoft does with every release, does not mean it is not a significant upgrade.
Compare that to Windows2000->WinXP, all you got there was just a revamped gui, which was worse than its predecessor. There was not even too much very new under the hood, all just was more colorful, because apple back then had released Aqua, and Microsoft tried to clone that with its dreadful Luna look.
Automator is definitely an end user feature, basically scripting done so that an end user can see it at the first look, how this stuff works. I would not call core video end user stuff, but the gui acceleration it will give is, and also the myriad of applications which will benefit from it in the long run.
Face it this guy is a Microsoft whore and you can read it at every second line, that he loves this and that, but Microsoft has something more advanced in the line (which in case of WinFS for instance is totally bull**** they simply cannot get stuff up and running Be had already 10 years ago, Apple now has and Gnome soon will have with beagle). They simply tried to opt for the not invented here approach instead of going the route on how others already made it and now they repeat the mistakes Be did back in 1990.
Even comparing service pack2 to a really substantial upgrade, like Tiger in fact really is, just makes me laugh about how hard this guy tries to justify not to try to like this stuff, after all he is paid to praise Microsoft. And even comparing OS/2 to the dreck Win95 really was just makes me puke. OS/2 in its Warp incarnations was blazingly fast and rock solid, while the whole dos based Win95-ME line just was a pure bug ridden crash fest.
XForms is which is based upon XUL...
totally idiotic. This guy compares the tiger upgrade to service pack 2, while writing that dashboard is less extensive than what Microsoft is planning in Longhorn.
Then mentioning only two new features and then giving about 10 examples of what he found to be new.
First to the more extensive Longhorn stuff, technically spoken, Microsoft basically tries the same Apple does with Dashboard, Gnome does with beagle and BeOS had 10 years ago already, putting a half intelligent search on meta data. The more extensive argument came from early Microsoft Marketing papers which said they were going to build a filesystem on the SQL server. They already rowed back, because like Be Systems and others, that approach simply is to slow to be working, so Microsoft does exactly the same what others have done before. Second, service pack2 which you can get for free, is just a bugfix release, with no real new functionality not even under the hood, what Microsoft did, was to fix lots of holes and bugs, and add nice guis to already existing stuff (the integrated firewall), turn this stuff on per default and then add a lot of nag screens. Tiger has for the user at least, dashboard, the new mail app, the so called confabulator clone (which is not really a clone, there were similar things way before confabulator even in NeXTStep), XCode2 which adds some interesting stuff, the automator which seems to be the first really viable graphical automation solution, which even the end user might be able to handle. H264 which offers a lot for video buffs and myriads of other things.
For me from a developers point of view other things are much more interesting, basically what apple, did was to give the graphics a huge boost, add better compilers, add some CASE stuff to XCode, add lots of stuff which handles application data handling etc... the list is pretty long, especially in the graphics area. From a technical point core video is especially interesting because Apple managed to push some of the rendering into the domain of the SIMD extensions of the processor and into the shader engine of the graphics processor, which nobody ever has done before in an OS, to my knowledge. I expecte a major speed boost from that and probably even more in the long run. I am not even sure if Microsoft had plans for such stuff in Longhorn, because most of this shading accleration stuff is enabled transparently and automatically.
Overall after reading this article, I had the feeling this guy is a Microsoft whore who started to basically flame Tiger into the ground and saw a solid quality work, yet he had to find arguments just to make the usual Microsoft advertisement his publisher pays him for. So he tried to find a middle ground by using half lies and idiotic arguments.
Why dont you apply for a job at Apple? The use KHtml als core for Safari.
And this has been heavily overlooked, Microsoft basically will try push stateful guys with xaml in Longhorn, Firefox has had that for years with Xul, in fact the whole old Mozilla guy just was a set of Xul scripts and templates.
The main difference is, Xul is an official W3c spec, while Xaml again will be Windows only and patent plastered (while heavily borrowed from Xul anyway).
Given the current really awful and sad state of affairs, where you have to try to make complex GUIs with a limited set of elements which break on the market leader most of the times anyway, a move towards a real platform independend solution instead of splitting again the html standards even more than they already are, is heavens sent for all of us who have base applications upon that "dreck" which is the current state of affairs.
The stuff is glamourous, but face it without ubuntu the debian people would have to port x.org themselves, now there is the whole infrastructure in place for good storage device mounting in user space which is absolutely necessary for desktop distros, they ported that stuff to kde (tried the latest kubuntu and it finally works yiehaa) they worked with the gnome project to get this stuff working and now they have started on the first maintainence tools. Nothing server side here (that is not ubuntus focus), but some very important components to get a pleasent desktop experience in the long run. (which is ubuntus domain)
Most server side stuff I have seen has a release cycle of 18 months. That is Solaris, Java and many other programs which mostly run on the server side. I think 18 months is a good compromise between having enough time to iron bugs out and having more or less actual packages. For desktop a quarterly release cycle would be ideal given the update frequency of the core desktop packages. A half a year release cycle also is very ok (although I personally usually end up to switch to unstable after 3-4 months, because usually there are a handful of packages I need instantly, and no apt pinning is worse than to switch to unstable once you have to get more than one program from the unstable stream)
I agree, Sarge already is one year behind, and then?
The main problem is the release cycle and the heavy focus on server only. The better thing for Debian would be to have a different release cycle model. Keep unstable, fork a quarterly desktop (half a year is somewhat to long for my taste) release from unstable or testing which concentrates on only some platform (and for heavens sake drop the 386 codebase for that one and move it to 586 or 686) and also kick out some obscure architectures. Keep the architecture diversity for stable but keep a release cycle of 18 months (which sort of is industry standard for server stuff). If that does not work out, move some of the more obscure architectures in a "could break" domain.
My guess is, that many release cycle problems will be fixed anway as soon as Debian has moved towards x.org and x.org has become more modular (one thing which is worked upon currently) The main problem with XFree always was, that the Debian people had to split the codebase into modules and once they were done, they were 5 revisions behind and had to backport lots of fixes for testing and stable. (one of the reasons why Debian is still in XFree and not in X.org like everyone else)
I dont see Murdochs critic that much in place, Ubuntu already helped the Debian project a lot. They ported x.org already to debian (you can nail x.org over a plain deb), they finally gave debian a working mechanism for user space device mounting, added that stuff to gnome and now to kde, polished up lots of packages and sent them upstream.
All stuff which probably would never happened within the next year in core Debian. If Debian one day would become a good desktop distro (face it it is not) than the Debian project has to thank Ubuntu.
Given Debians current structure and release problems as well as the problems of not being able to move to newer versions of some core packages but instead backporting patches left and right which even delays more the release cycle, the Debian project does not have to wonder, why people who look for a good desktop distro move in masses to something Debianish, which just delivers that.
Correct me if I am wrong, but due to the system of party donations you can get a voice as soon as you give enough money (aka bribe) the parties, sure there are other ways to get your voice heard. But the current state of affairs is once you have enough money you can buy yourself any law. (Same here in Europe on EU level), sure it is not the classical description of plutocraticsm because there are other means the average people still can get their voice heard, but no system ever was to 100% pushed through. Even classical soviet communism still had money and you could run your own business to a small degree.
The US is the closest thing to a plutocracy which currently is in existence on this planet, and it is unfortunately already very close to the definition.
No the us is currently a plutocratic country in the perfect sense of selling everything to a few who have enough money to even be able to buy the government. This is neither socialistic nor capitalistic, the correct term is plutocracy.
one of the problems still with mini ITX is, that the processors still are not fast enough for mpeg2 and mpeg4 in the processor, via has to rely on a coproc. That works for mpeg2 and mpeg4, but what happens if you go, divx, xvid, ogg theora, wmv9 and other formats. The mini definitely shines here, the processor is fast enough for every currently available video format and is in the same league as via from a power consumption standpoint, but with a much better driver coverage in linux.
How about the mini is about 5x as fast as a via you can get for the same price. Dont get me wrong, I have been looking into the via stuff for years now, and every time I was close to buying one, once I dug deeper I stayed away from it. One time it was the lousy performance, the other time, that there were reported problems with exploding elcos (which most cheap pc boards have), then there was the fact that installing linux on one of those things is hard as hell, due to a driver mess which has been sort of resolved only recently, and then apple came, with a know processor 4-5 times as fast as a similar clocked via, a solid vendor behind it (via screwed me over with their KT113a) and well known components. So the question afterwards was very clear for me, Apple got the money, Via did not!
Not quite true, while some apps run, the ports are often very old and lack severely behind the actual linux/bsd versions. Some really important ones are not ported yet at all (pgAdmin3 comes to my mind, KDE is a very old version, runnind half stable under fink) The situation os good as soon as you can get the program up and running then it runs natively but it is far worse thank Cygwin under windows because many packages fail to run at all. There is currently no real opendarwin debian which probably would be needed to have the stuff up and running in time (fink and others lack momentum)
There always has been, since IBM sells PowerPC Linux stuff as well, you simply cannot get it from Sun, but you have to download it from IBM. Bit I admit, there is no JDK 1.5/5.0 by now, but neither is there one for OSX.
Not that but, one thing I learned in the past is, that you if you have a good intellect, you have another set of cards at your hand, the one of being able to, lets say it that way, if you are really opting for that, can achieve, what I would call, the art of lovemaking (and I am not talking about the act here, but everything around)
You can make an unforgettable evening, just by having intelligence and using it in the right direction, the joe bloke who also happens to be rich does not. In the end you end up with women who really love you, with unforgettable evenings on both sides(for you and your woman), rich joe bloke ends up with a woman wo loves his "best" his money while you end up with a woman who dearly loves you and would even stay on your side if you want bankrupt and got evicted.
Are you talking about the USA? And with the criminal organization I dont mean the cosa nostra, which at the current state of affairs is more harmless than some others which are more legitimate :-(
Well, my comment went for the older generation of russian techies, those in my age (mid thirties) who still had to live under the communist yoke. I am sure the younger ones are not that good anymore. Given the fact that russian education shifted strongly towards economics as well, and they basically have access to the same stuff we have and dont get down to the core of things anymore.
I have not worked with too many of those people in the recent past, but all of them, from my generation were excellent, while westerners at the same range of knowledge normally just were arrogant.
Well... the US college mathematics are basically what we learn when we are 15 in the typical western middle european schools. (usually we learn calculus basicas with 15 and with 16 we are able to solve differential equations if you really bother to learn that stuff and not weasel yourself through) With 18 you should at least once have heard about fourier transformation.
To bad the average business which follows the US scheme of getting rich quick, never follows any ethics, the russians just learned well from the west.
The problem is that the average people there are just as honest as the average people in the west, but as in the west, it is the 10% who use strongarm tactics who ruin everything.
Capitalism the current style will fail soon, as communism did, because both are ideologies where the main protagonists have forgotten the basic thing which glues society together, ethics.
Actually no, that was how things seemed to be, but face it human nature grew in that system as well. You just pointed out the positive sides, but the problem was, and George Orwell pointed that out in animal farm.
That very soon after the russian revolution new fractions rose above the others (mainly the government people, kgb and military) and those once the system broke down were the ones who basically ran the system even more down with corruption. It is not in the mentality of the russian people to screw each other over, but they always had this 10% of the people who screw everybody else over and no matter what system, they could survive. Being it the KGB, being it the Mafia which came straight out of the KGB. So not having the possiblity of not having friends is not true, in fact those things probably were as rampant in the west.
But you could not get away with being the cool jock and dumb as hell and then being celebrated as a hero like the west constantly does.
Because the only way to be celebrated was, either, that you went into sports, that you became a scientist, a politician, or you were a war hero who was shot. (Well as polician you also had the likelyhood of being shot)
Not to many career options for the average western dumbass who weasels its way up into CEO position and then runs the company into the ground and getting the golden handshake afterwards, while being celebrated as a hero by other dumbasses in the media.
Most of these people simply did not forgoe a real we want to become mighty career, but basically went into the secret services or other government organisation, where they could live their lust for power in combination with their obviously lacking intelligence and lacking sense for decency And those also were the seeding ground for the rampant going business Mafia in russia, after the system broke down (or way even before, the KGB was/is known to have become the seeding ground for the russian mafia once they salaries went to a level people could not make a living anymore of)
It is also, how the society in soviet russia treated people in mathematics.
I wanna give you an example, there is a reason why 90% of the best chess players come from russia. It is not that those people generally are smarter, but over here, if a kid loves math, chess or generally science, it is branded as a nerd or freak and subject to the heavy beating by the other kids. It either drops out of the field and becomes something mediocre (fill in the average lawyer, business crook in here) or follows the path and now faces the situation of getting constant beating by the management in a company which sees their researchers not as assets anymore but more as a cost reduction point which has to be outsourced to another country. It does not matter in the end that the company will run out of new products a few years later, because the management gets the golden handshake.
Not a good idea to follow this career path, even if you have an enourmous talent.