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Comment They've still got supply issues in the UK (Score 1) 120

Ordered two from RS early October, along with peripherals. Other parts arrived with back order notice saying they would ship 26th November. Still hadn't arrived today so phoned RS who said shipping date was now 22nd December (a Saturday?). I'm sure the Raspberry Pi folk are a very nice group of people but honestly they just come over as a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs when it comes to global fulfillment.

Comment But what about all the Garbage? (Score 5, Interesting) 161

Used to do this kind of stuff when I was with IBM about 10 years ago, we had a group in XSeries Manufacturing who specialised in quick turnaround configuration of HPC rack systems just like this. Funnily enough, one of the major logistical elements was dunnage, ie the empty cardboard/foam and plastic that all the option parts arrive in. When running full out we used to have 1-2 guys per shift just to move the rubbish out to the big compactors out back. You wouldn't believe just how much packaging even a comparatively small cluster like that can generate.

Comment We did Computing without Computers (Score 1) 632

In Scotland in the mid/late 70's you could do computing as part of a maths course, so we all signed up as "Computers Were The Future".... Got taught Fortran by the simple expedient of handwriting code on gridded paper. These were then gathered up and posted once a week to the county computing centre where they were transferred to punch cards, the job ran, and the program listing and output printed and mailed back to us. Whole process took 2-3 weeks and if you missed a quote mark or comma and the job bombed, you had to rewrite the offending page, resubmit the following week and so on. One time I was about 8 weeks trying to get the one 20 line program to run.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Africa Is The New China, Says Anders Borg 2

jones_supa writes: Sometimes perceived as the insightful finance minister of Sweden, Anders Borg predicts good times for Africa (English translation). We can already see how seven of the ten fastest growing economies are in Africa and, the IMF forecasts that sub-Saharan Africa will have a GDP growth of 5.5 percent this year. Zambia and Uganda had 6 per cent GDP growth last year. 'Africa is the new China. Within ten years, Africa will have more inhabitants than China about 1.5 billion people and many are young, under 25. These countries have an enormous potential,' says Borg. He suggests that Europe should work with Africa just as they have been working with China and other Asian countries.

Submission + - Restoring Long-Lost Tom Lehrer Videos

An anonymous reader writes: An archive of early video recordings Tom Lehrer has been discovered and restored, but despite the objections of purists, only the colorized version will soon be released to the general public. Opponents to colorization have pointed out that the digital colorization process is fraught with glitches, defeats the intent of the original filmmaker, serves only to extend the life of the copyright another 75 years, and occasionally results in output with historically-inaccurate levels of color saturation. Previews of the first volume have been leaked to YouTube, and feature Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, The Elements, I Got It From Agnes,
National Brotherhood Week, and in honor of the colorization process, That's Mathematics. (The Masochism Tango has been left as an exercise for some other online community.)

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