Russia, Europe Seek Divorce From U.S. Tech Vendors 201
dcblogs writes "The Russians are building a 10-petaflop supercomputer as part of a goal to build an exascale system by 2018-20, in the same timeframe as the US. The Russians, as well as Europe and China, want to reduce reliance on U.S. tech vendors and believe that exascale system development will lead to breakthroughs that could seed new tech industries. 'Exascale computing is a challenge, and indeed an opportunity for Europe to become a global HPC leader,' said Leonardo Flores Anover, who is the European Commission's project officer for the European Exascale Software Initiative. 'The goal is to foster the development of a European industrial capability,' he said. Think what Europe accomplished with Airbus. For Russia: 'You can expect to see Russia holding its own in the exascale race with little or no dependence on foreign manufacturers,' said Mike Bernhardt, who writes The Exascale Report. For now, Russia is relying on Intel and Nvidia."
By 2018 (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll probably have Petaflop computers on our desks, if not in our laps. Apparently so we can manage the bloat of operating systems (which will no longer be popping up balloons, but nagging you with voice and expecting voice back) and gigabyte webpages, which tell you nothing you can't see now, but are built layer upon layer of cruft.
Re:By 2018 (Score:4, Funny)
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By 2018 every company in the US is so busy suing other company's about complete trivial software patents, that innovation has crashed and stopped about 5 years before. Nobody can develop anything any more, because the tiniest things are patented and development is becoming too expensive. The only ones making money around then are the lawyers. This situation is developing at this moment already, and is not going to stop.
And in the mean time the rest of the world is going forward...
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The day I need to communicate with my desktop using voice is the day I reprogram it with my chainsaw.
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The remarkable shortage of visionaries in leadership positions handicaps US relative to nearly everyone else. ./ crowd should be working to counter. Much more important than which window manager to use.
Add the effect of the Wall Street/investment shysters and We are scrod.... IMHO, this is the problem the
The Slashdot crowd doesn't have any ability to change these things, so it's pointless to tell them they should. The Wall Street shysters are good buddies with their (paid) friends in Washington, so the pol
I look forward to the day... (Score:3)
we once more have a broad set of different processors and architectures to choose from. Competition will stimulate more creative designs and solutions.
Re:I look forward to the day... (Score:5, Insightful)
Russia's non-US alternatives - ARM, OpenRISC or... (Score:2)
we once more have a broad set of different processors and architectures to choose from. Competition will stimulate more creative designs and solutions.
We did! At one point, we had, aside from the Pentiums (and x86 derivatives from AMD, Cyrix & Centaur) RISC processors like MIPS, SPARC, POWER, Alpha, PA-RISC, Intergraph's Clipper, and maybe more.
Thanks to all the shakedowns in the 2000s, we're now reduced to just the x64, POWER and MIPS. ARM occupies the portable space, but not much above that. Thanks to that hype known as Itanium, Alpha & PA-RISC went under. Also, Microsoft neglecting the RISC versions of NT contributed to the demise of Alp
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Thanks to that hype known as Itanium, Alpha & PA-RISC went under.
No, it was because Intel bought out Alpha and killed it outright. It wasn't hype, it was a strategic decision by corporate executives. Same with PA-RISC; HP wanted to jump on the Itanic bandwagon with Intel (Itanic was co-developed by HP and Intel, it wasn't an Intel-only project), so they killed PA-RISC and put their engineers to work on Itanic.
Anyway, coming to Russia, if they want a processor not subject to any US laws, their choices
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Just as long as they're all x86-32/64 compatible. I, for one, would hate a situation where I'm forced to choose between programs A or B not working.
pretty sure he uses that line on all occasions (Score:2)
"[Technology segment] is a challenge, and indeed an opportunity for Europe to become a global [segment] leader", said [person], who is the European Commission's project officer for [some thing].
Re:pretty sure he uses that line on all occasions (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of my favorite generic speech template:
"I wish to speak to you all on the important subject of _____. As you all know, much has been done in this area, but there are still a great many things left to do. But knowing this is not enough, it will take real effort and dedication. What we need now is progress. I need progress, I request progress, I demand progress! I am certain, though, that with focus and teamwork, we can continue to make the changes that will allow for a better future. Thank you all for your time."
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Wish I had mod-points for you, kind sir!
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I wish to speak to you all on the important subject of mod-points. As you all know, much has been done in this area, but there are still a great many things left to do. But knowing this is not enough, it will take real effort and dedication. What we need now is progress. I need progress, I request progress, I demand progress! I am certain, though, that with focus and teamwork, we can continue to make the changes that will allow for a better future. Thank you all for your time.
Where is the infrastructure? (Score:3, Interesting)
Russia doesn't have the silicon crystal production facilities, they'll be stuck using the same European, American and Japanese lithography tools everyone else does, no fabs, no economies of scales for production like Samsung, Intel, AMD, Toshiba, etc have.
Re:Where is the infrastructure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Russia doesn't have the silicon crystal production facilities
If Russia decides some products, like silicon wafers for example, are strategically important and American or other external producers can not be trusted (for security, military or simply business reasons), price becomes a secondary consideration and economies of scale will not matter. Russia can afford to buy the most up to date tools, or they can build their own (maybe not as cheap as others, but that, as I said, wouldn't matter). And I think the Russian leadership still has the courage and political capability to start and finance long term strategic research and development programs, which, unfortunately, the USA leadership seems to have lost lately.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I wouldn't sell Russia short. Unlike the USA, they even managed to hold on to manned space travel when their economy imploded.
We are riding bitch with Ivan son.
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Russia doesn't have any microchip factories or tools to design it (the foreign ones are used). But at least it has means for designing and producing circuit boards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR), so it's not hopeless.
How are supercomputers relevant? (Score:2)
Way back in the beginning you could see them as single computers but nowadays a supercomputer looks more like a local network of computers or a local cloud/cluster. Where does the computer start and stop?
Science centers certainly need the computing power but I can't see how relevant it is to think of these specialized clusters as a single computer or how one rates against another. These clusters are constantly being upgraded and expanded. The interconnects and topology is the only interesting thing but you
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If one look at how certain buses and such are set up, the distinction between computer and network becomes very blurred. The largest distinction will be the latency between a local and remote component.
The Soviets once reverse engineered our chips (Score:3)
But that got harder when we shrunk our processes. That had the result of forcing them to learn how to design their own chips, thereby boosting their economy.
My cousin speaks fluent Russian. There is no room to stand let alone sit in his apartment because of all the giant stacks of books. I know enough Russian that I could tell what the books were about. All of them were advanced physics and electrical engineering texts.
The Russians are no fools. Their educational system is excellent. It had to be under the soviets to have any hope of them surviving the cold war.
education is only 1/2 the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the big things that improves the speed of innovation is the ability to fail. This is still one of the big problems that needs to be conquered. You need lots of groups trying different avenues to ferret out the key innovations that push the state of the art forward. One of the problems with the command-style-economies is that although they could build up industries efficiently, they are simultaneously captive to those industries by continued government funding resuting in economic inefficiency (in the best case), or a military/industrial complex (in the worst case). From what I can tell, basically you need lots of serial entrepenuers, copy-cat followers and venture capital to push tech forward.
Not to say that the USA has this problem licked (see the defense spending culture or wall street as examples), but there are no clear signs yet that china, europe or russia has a sustainable approach to this problem that the USA seems to have. If they get better at figuring out how to fund innovation and defund obsolete industries, they will probably have both the ingredients needed to create a sustainable tech revolution that could wean itself from the USA tech industry.
From what it appears, right now china and europe are in focus-on-money mode trying to attract multi-national corporate investment which gets lots of progress quickly, but doesn't seem that sustainable as the government is still picking the winners and losers (e.g. who gets the tax breaks and who gets the operating licences). I honestly don't follow the situation in russia very closely for tech, but my understand is that big investment is still mostly in traditional industries rather than tech (natural resource expliotation). If this is true, the result of this is a problem of not enough native customers for native tech companies (another problem for sustainable growth).
Not to say they won't get there, but at least it seems to me that the evidence isn't there that they are on the cusp of anything... Remember, the leaders/founders of Intel and Nvidia didn't just graduate from school and start billion dollar companies. They worked for other multi-million dollar companies before starting those companies. And not all of those people that worked for those same multi-million dollar companies and left to start companies went on to found billion dollar companies either. And it wasn't just about Intel and Nvidia either, if Applied Materials didn't exist, you probably wouldn't have Intel fabs (or TSMC fabs) and so-on and so-forth. A whole ecosystem of companies need to exist. And for each of them, there needed to be some losers for there to be winners and some people willing to take a chance to lose some money to make some money.
Education was only 1/2 the problem. Ironically, education is perhaps the easiest 1/2 to solve (in the USA, apparently we just import people to educate and to do the education).
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But the question for me is: do they date back from USSR, and does current Russia manage to educate more of them.
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I'd say, rather 50%. Nowadays technology is so complex you can't start by being intelligent and thinking structured, you have to get a head start by learning also the existing inventions. And also, those too lazy / incapable to do the learning from books will not succeed because of their laziness.
I work in Germany and have some Russian colleagues and interviewed some applicants, and most Russians I met are eager and capable to learn. For them, learning is a very valid way to become something, while some peo
Uses for exascale machines? (Score:2, Interesting)
As a scientific user of large HPC machines like Franklin, Hopper, HECToR etc., this race for exascale machines seems like the tail wagging the dog. There are currently very very few codes which can actually use an exascale supercomputer, due to the extreme parallelism needed. If you have to make use of several hundred thousand cores, anything beyond embarrassingly parallel montecarlo problems have problems moving data around. Something like Intel's Knight's Corner chip might help OpenMP-MPI hybrid codes, bu
Re:Uses for exascale machines? (Score:5, Interesting)
Really large tightly coupled clusters are usually offered in a time-sharing arrangement. One Exa-scale system could normally support hundreds to thousands of concurrent users, each with a temporary slice of the machine. Truly large-scale jobs would be run only at specific times.
At that point you can offer the facility to a much wider range of users, and be much less selective about what kind of jobs are worthy of getting time on the machine. That easy availability is arguably more important than the peak performance, but is of course not headline-grabbing in the same way.
Considering that US tech companies have (Score:2)
American gov. needs to start funding local companies that develops and KEEPS tech here.
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:5, Informative)
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"Our"?
Unless you own Boeing stock, the correct word is "their".
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Military materiel were paid for with taxes and war bonds. Your point would make more sense for Boeing's commercial products (though not completely since even they are partially subsidized). I mean, if the US gets lambasted for a publicly-funded military industrial complex, the least one can do is to give credit where it's due :)
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Well how about that. A reason to continue using Imperial units.
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Fuck the world. The more we do to please the world, the further behind we fall. I don't care that a quart of milk causes your granny to have apoplexy when she tries to convert it. Just fuck the world. We don't WANT to be like you - half the world is beating a path to our front door (back door in the case of Mexicans) because they want to be like us!
Besides which, your metrics are no less arbitrary than the length of a king's foot, or the first joint of his thumb, or any other damned unit we use.
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:4, Funny)
No cappuccino, thank you. I take my caffeine American style, drip brewed with Folger's coffee. And, since the subject is units of measurement, why does Mr. Coffee think that a cup is only six ounces? WTF? I brew twelve cups of java, drink 4 (12 oz) cups, and the coffee is down to those nasty looking dregs. Seems to me that a 12 cup coffee pot should hold just about 96 ounces, which should mean that I get 6 of my (12 oz) cups of coffee, before there are nasty solids visible in the bottom.
It's probably a freaking FRENCH conspiracy!
Let us not forget that "stealing" went both ways. (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance, F-35 JSF started its life as a carbon copy of Yak-141, blueprints for which Locheed Martin blatantly stole from Russians by first forming and then dissolving a "partnership" with the Yakovlev bureau all in the span of about a year. Don't believe me? Check out the videos below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23ohOKthO18 [youtube.com] - Yak 141, circa 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki86x1WKPmE [youtube.com] - F-35, 2011
See other videos of Yak-141, and see it from the rear in particular. F-35 is a blatant copy, just with today's electronics and stealth.
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Interesting point. I had all but forgotten about the 141, and it seems to never having entered service.
And yes, comparisons do reveal a certain similarity:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Yak-141_3D.png [wikimedia.org]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/F-35A_three-view.PNG [wikimedia.org]
The F-35 do have a very different engine design tho.
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But the Tu-4 weighed more than the B-29, they couldn't build the tires and had to buy them on the US Military Surplus market post-war.
Due to limitations on resources rather than limitations on engineering expertise.
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:5, Funny)
The Russians have these abilities, and will be able to develop their own ideas where the Chinese can only copy.
Like they "innovated" during the Communist Era?
VAX: When you care enough to steal [fsu.edu] the very best.
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Thank you for that. I was just getting ready to post that but you beat me to it. Slow trigger finger tonight. ;)
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:4, Insightful)
What did they copy to make the first space satellite? First man in space? Hmmmm...
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:5, Informative)
They used their captured German rocket engineers to develop their rocketry. That said, the US had their own German rocket engineers too, most notably Wernher von Braun, who led its rocket development up to the Saturn V.
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:5, Informative)
It's amusing that your attempt to disparage the USSR and patrioticly beat your breast is a lot more complimentary than the very scary reality.
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the V1-V2 were so bad you needed a city the size of London as a target to be able to hit anything;
That was more to do with the very primitive inertial and radio guidance of the time, not the rockets, as such. The rockets were very reliable.
Von Braun knew that they were very ineffective weapons for these reasons, and he didn't try very hard to improve those aspects.
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He just wanted to build rockets. His line of reasoning was morally dubious though. I'm not sure he was really interested in the Nazis winning the war. I think his idea was that if he kind of went along with it and made these not-very-useful weapons, it would kill fewer people than if he were forced to work on something else.
Yes, I know about the slave labour. I'm not trying to justify what he did or make excuses. I just think that he was far more interested in developing rockets than killing people or Nazi
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I'm guessing it's because continuing the program allowed him to get the funding and resources he needed to continue developing his designs. If his goal was to reach space, the effectiveness they had as weapons (where accuracy is the most important factor) would have been unimportant to him.
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Nazi Germany's V-2, so did the U.S.
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No, the German scientists did most of the heavy lifting. The Soviet rocket program was pretty much non-existent post WWII. The politicization of the science and engineering fields, as well as the Pogroms and purges that got rid of a lot of their leading scientists set them back decades.
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2 [wikipedia.org]
according to the first paragraph .. it was the "first known human artifact to enter outer space" (with a citation too).
also for fun..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fieseler_Fi_103R_(Reichenberg) [wikipedia.org]
So the V2's did make it to space - not a full orbit.. and there was a version of the V1 designed to carry a person.. had they not been in the middle of a world war - and given a few years.. yea i bet they would have had bot down just fine..
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I was aware of that. According to The Rocket and the Reich by Michael Neufeld, A V-2 reached an altitude of 176 km (109 mi) on a vertical launch. That's not going to give you much of an orbit.
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To orbit the earth at a height of 206 km would require an orbital velocity of 7 km/s. The highest speed the V-2 attained was less than 2 km/s. And that doesn't even get into the guidance system.
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and if their goal was to orbit rather than bomb London - how long do you think it would take for them to figure out how to do a retro rocket burn?
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They copied the Germans (who based a large part of their program on the work of Robert Goddard).
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The funny thing is, the USSR has not used any VAX designs.
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Because they weren't competent enough. The East Germans were, though.
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Some people have very short memories. In fact, there is a quote for them: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Sir Winston Churchill
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Do you think the Narod have changed much in the past 300 years? From the dictatorship of the Emperor to the dictatorship of the Central Committee to the dictatorship of ex-KGB Officer Putin, there have been mighty few institutional changes in Mother Russia. Compare that to the 800 year evolution of Anglo-American political thought since the issuance of the Magna Carta.
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Actually that's a George Santayana [wikiquote.org] quote.
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Actual translation (Score:2)
"When you enough steal real best"
Very poor attempt at Russian. =)
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a lack of free-thinking that the Chinese are experiencing; it's merely a strategy.
The Chinese are playing catch up to Japan / America / Europe / possibly Russia. At this point in the game, it costs less to copy everyone, than to innovate. Once they've caught up, they'll switch to innovating, as copying will not pay as well in comparison. The same thing has happened before with the United States, Britain, etc.
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Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well the Chinese only have another 50 years to catch up, the Russians another 20 or so. Murdering your free thinkers, has a tendency of driving you back into the dark ages. Especially in the name of "progress".
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:5, Interesting)
I lived there for a while, went to Uni there, am married to a Chinese person and have many Chinese friends, both here and in China. I'm very comfortable saying that Chinese people do not innovate very well. In general, creativity and innovation are not traits that are encouraged in Chinese society. The culture encourages conformity and the like. In school, they study very, VERY hard but it's route memorization not creativity. They are much better at copying others' ideas than coming up with their own. That's not US marketing speaking, that's my own observations.
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Even in family-oriented China, I imagine a tacky entrepreneur or other wealthy "rain maker" could still be very good for the family. They might be held at arms length for social purposes
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Stupid rednecks are very innovative people! You should see the things they can do with beer cans alone.
In all seriousness, even if Chinese culture/education doesn't promote creativity or thinking outside of the box, with 1.3 billion people there are bound to be enough 'innovative' engineers for the Chinese to compete with whomever they choose.
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I'm very comfortable saying that American people are stupid rednecks.
Comfort doesn't have much to do with truth.
If I need to order some kind of cable, for example, I can order it in the US and I have it a couple of days later for $50. If I order it on taobao, I have it the next day for $15. The next day, from China.
The difference is that the US company is selling at a premium to businesses that want the cable without hassle. That business, if it is remotely sane, isn't going to touch Taobao. No point to boasting how cheap the cable was, if it never arrives. Meanwhile the Taobao seller can only deliver same day, if the cable is already in the US near Arkansas. That gives it a 12 or more hour head start on anything coming from China.
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have an acquaintance who went over to China and worked with their manufacturing sector for several years. He loved the country, thought the people and culture were very nice, but was not impressed *at all* with their engineering prowess.
The problem isn't that the people are incapable of innovating. The problem is they have no culture or institutions to support innovation. They are trying desperately to change this, but China is run as an enormous top-down bureaucracy. Change isn't going to happen even at a modest pace.
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I have an acquaintance who went over to China and worked with their manufacturing sector for several years. He loved the country, thought the people and culture were very nice, but was not impressed *at all* with their engineering prowess.
The problem isn't that the people are incapable of innovating. The problem is they have no culture or institutions to support innovation. They are trying desperately to change this, but China is run as an enormous top-down bureaucracy. Change isn't going to happen even at a modest pace.
Im sure that 100 hackerspaces in Shanghai program is going to help them with that.
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:5, Insightful)
They said exactly the same thing about the Japanese, 40-50years ago.
Even when Japan started making superior products at lower prices.
Then Japan took over most high-end manufacturing for a while.
Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the difference between then and now is pure xenophobia versus some xenophobia mixed in with some real observations.
History is not inevitable. It may have even been true that the Japanese did ape American and European designs, but what will differentiate the Japanese design renaissance and a Chinese one is that Japan wasn't under the control of an autocratic government like China is, nor is their history full of autocrats and strict living.
Some? sure, and it's enough for us in the west to see it as restrictive.
A lot? not enough to stifle innovation and progress. Nissan's able to make a AWD car that is faster around the Nurburgring than Porsche's flagship model that costs twice as much. Sony, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Yamaha, et al are doing similar work. In Korea? LG, Samsung and so forth are also in the same boat.
Will a Chinese firm do the same? Only time will tell; but I'm willing to bet no. And only 10 bucks because it's possible I could be very wrong.
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The impression i have gotten of Japanese corporate life is that it is a modernized bushido.
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Truly comparatively?
Yeah, it went through a lot of bad times, but China didn't experience something akin to the Meiji era. and in most recent history, China's been ruled by a truly horrible autocratic society.
I could be wrong in both my interpretation of history and in my foresight into the future, however, I'm willing to go fifty fifty on a cheap bet on it.
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Oddly you're talking about post-WWII, it still took Japan nearly 35 years to do it, with a serious investment from the west to get off the ground no less. And with several other things. The difference between Japan, Russia and China are pretty easy to point out. Especially in the periods. It wasn't until the late 70's and early 80's that they were considered any type of threat at all, that's pushing nearly 45 years in total post-redevelopment.
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Don't forget cameras. Only the Swiss and maybe Germans are competition for their prowess in optics. They also make a lot of high-end industrial equipment you'll probably never see.
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China has a tremendous skill-set that while works very well for reverse engineering and building things, does not work so well where free-thinking innovation are needed to make advances.
It's a big mistake to underestimate their abilities... Just 3 days ago we read that China surpassed the USA as top patent filer [financialpost.com].
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Patent filing has nothing to do with legitimate abilities.
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Re:Industrial Espionage. (Score:4, Informative)
The russians already tried to design an all-purpose CPU : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_2000
(the Elbrus Team and it's IP has been bought by Intel. Surprise...NOT.)
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that's the same lies they used to say about USSR (Score:5, Insightful)
look i grew up my whole life during the cold war, my dad worked on bombers, my uncles were in the navy / air force.
it was the same shit day after day : "The Russians dont know how to invent everything, they copy from us"
now the cold war ends. what do we find out?
The Soviets did quite a shitload of innovative, amazing stuff. They built a lunar rover, that i never was taught about in school. Their rocket program was amazing. Korolev was amazing. Sakharov invented a different way to do Hydrogen bombs - and then he became a dissident. The Soviet computers had some interesting features - there is a video of a physics-simulated cat on a BSEM6. Solzhenytsin's book The First Circle is about scientists working in a prison research institute... what were they working on? Voice print recognition. Sure, it was horrible, and in service of an evil state... but technologically they didn't copy anything from anyone. Then there are the late model SU and MiG jets. Not to mention the Mig 15 which killed our boys in Korea.
now people are saying all this shit about China. well, its bullshit. China will be 'non creative' until they invent some invisible airplane or something. They are people, and people are creative. Human beings are creative.
What about all those patents? (Score:2)
Seems to me that China is well out their way to out innovate the US.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/21/us-china-patents-idUSTRE7BK0LQ20111221 [reuters.com]
Re:Microsoft, bitches! (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft forever, faggots, and there isn't a goddamned thing you can do about it.
I'm pretty sure the Russians could still hit Redmond with an ICBM.
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You, sir, are a goddamn tease.
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This would be really sad, because other than the MS campus in Redmond, Washington State is a really beautiful and picturesque place with a great climate.
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Talking about leading edge computing...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#November_2011 [wikipedia.org]
Top ten are all running Linux...
Re:If not China or Russia... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's already someone else. Intel, etc aren't American. They are a multinational. They barely pay American taxes. Most of their employees are in other countries.
This is all a farce.
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Oh so very much this. Corporations are less and less aligned with a specific nation. I just wonder how long before one or more of them try to declare their properties as sovereign territory, styled on the legal framework of embassies.
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That would be fine. The real countries then get to treat them like real countries, complete with trade laws, tax agreements, geopolitical responsibilities, etc. And if they happen to piss off a real country enough to start a war, my guess is it will end badly for the company.
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I have to say I don't feel too sorry for the rest of the world if they're getting screwed over by MS and Adobe. While designing CPUs competitive with the latest x86-64 designs from Intel and AMD is not a trivial task, and building a fab capable of mass-producing such CPUs is even more daunting (though you could get TSMC to build something close, although I don't think they have quite the process technology Intel has), these other two only make software. We already have totally free open-source software to