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Beijing Snubs Microsoft For Municipal PCs' Software
jsse points to this Gartner article which says "that on 28 December 2001, the Beijing municipal government selected among seven vendors to provide operating system (OS), office automation (OA) and antivirus software for government PCs. Beijing selected six bidders, including Red Flag, but rejected the seventh bidder, Microsoft -- the only one that was not selected. Gartner listed several reasons why Microsoft lost the bid, but missed out the famous rumor that Microsoft has built a bad relationship with China since the first Chinese Windows 95, which was written by Taiwan programmers, contains Easter eggs carrying anti-communist messages."
That's a pretty funny rumor, whether it be true or not is of course another story....
The article points out that China can greatly benefit by not having a powerhouse like Microsoft established in China. Chinese companies will have a much better opportunity to gain a foothold in China now.
Electron Pulse...indie rock/jazz/blues
because I too reject Microsoft Software products.
I remember the DrSkwid version of Midtown Madness had "eid tsum diwkSrD" in the binary but I thoughtTTP/t was Majestic!!
.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That Linux is an operating system in convergence with the communistic ideals? I dont think so, rather it would be a question of stability.
Just my $0.02
/Mike Lawders
Along the same lines as the Chinese Government adopting Linux, wouldn't it be a nice Microsoft remedy to see Linux adopted within the US Government as well.
It appears that the Chinese understand the importance of a domestic software industry in the 21st century and are taking steps to improve their own. Choosing Linux immediately gives them a worldwide devloper network that rivals any private corporation, including Microsoft. If we gaze into the crystal ball to 10-15 years from now, the sheer savings in licensing alone will catapult them into the world arena. They have a captive market of 1.2 billion users that rivals North America, Western Europe and the Pac-Rim. Granted, it may take 20-30 years for the network infrastructure and standard of living to rise to a 50% market penetration of PCs but I don't see this as a good thing for M$.
This is all fine and good, in theory, and the Open Source movement has garnered a vast following from across the untamed corners of the internet. In this essay, I will explore how Mr. Stallman came to embrace this movement.
RMS was born in Modesto, California and attended Berkeley University [berkeley.edu]. This shouldn't surprise anyone, since Berkeley is the Liberal Hive [russia.ru] of America and RMS is an admitted [stallman.org] communist [www.jkl.fi]. RMS began his bizarre lifestyle while attending Berkeley, where he occupied the attic of a clock tower. This eccentricity continues today and RMS will not travel without a grandfather clock and a spitoon [warmann.org].
RMS' penchant for thievery was evident from the very beginning. His attic "apartment" was filled with equipment stolen from the Berkeley computer labs. This was quite an achievement in the early '70s, when any computer equipment was the size of a refrigerator.
RMS and his hacker friends cut class regularly, opting to spend their time and parent's money constructing illegal electronics devices designed to covertly access phone lines. The group of pirates would hack into the phone company, and charge enormous phone bills to unsuspecting Republican professors.
It was during this period that Stallman met Steve Jobs. RMS' technical savvy was far exceeded by that of Jobs and, never one to like being second-best, this caused him to pursue software hacking. RMS' hacking ability was innate and he and Jobs formed an alliance which would later result in the birth of Apple Computer.
Jobs' technical accumen was matched only by his ability to sell. He designed the internal electronics and outer package design of the first Apple, which was financed by Nolan Bushnell. He set RMS on to the task of developing the computer's "operating system" - a sequence of low-level MS-DOS commands which tell the computer how to decode program codes.
Though a gifted "coder", Stallman was quite lazy and didn't fare so well with the new operating system. His sloppy design and bloated codes were barely useable on the first microcomputer. Jobs dumped Stallman and hired John Wozniack to rewrite the internal operating system codes for the Apple I.
This situation didn't sit too well with RMS. Though he effectively dropped out of college, through non-attendance, he remained in the clock tower, unbeknownst to the faculty and administration of Berekely. His bizarre reclusiveness and tendency to "hack" only in the night kept him invisible to everyone, though rumors did circulate around campus about the "haunted clock-tower" and the deformed ghost that would occasionally appear, transluscent white, on top of the tower playing a magical flute [stallman.org].
Stallman grew sullen and withdrew into his own world in the clock tower. He watched as the joint Apple/Microsoft empire grew to become the computer industry and he vowed to topple it by undermining the livelyhood of his arch-rival Steve Jobs (and, by extension, Bill Gates) with his illegal offerings.
Stallman conspired with Linux Torvaledse, another Berkeley student, to create a hacker operating system which could be used to leverage the internet and wreak havoc on corporations everywhere. RMS even went so far as to use Microsoft's innovative GUI (Graphical User Implementation) which he had stolen from Microsoft's mainframe computer and given the hacker alias "X-Windows". Unfortunately, RMS was not able to acquire the latest Microsoft GUI codes and was thus forced to settle for an inferior version.
RMS' continued interest in communism provided him some insight as to how to spread his hacker tool across the internet. By stressing the free nature of the software, he would appeal to the welfare nature of the public.
This marketing scheme worked spectacularly. RMS' hacker tool is now installed on countless computers, hidden away in the dark bedrooms of LSD-using hacker teens [etext.org].
But Stallman didn't foresee the desire of the consuming public for Quality software, as opposed to his lean, second-rate offerings. Not even a price of 0.00 could turn the general public to installing this unwieldy hacker tool known as "Red Hat Linux".
Today, RMS and his following, consisting mostly of unpopular teens who gravitate toward the cult-like group of pirate hackers, continue to sing the praises of their "operating system". Neglecting to mention that it violates current DMCA legislation. This "operating system" is primarily used to trade illegal hacker "warez" and music videos.
Popular music stars like Metallica have called RMS and his hacker tool, "the single greatest threat to artistic expression in the history of man." And Bill Gates has noted, "They are all thieves. They spend their time stealing instead of innovating."
My hope is that this short essay has opened your eyes to the illegal Open Source movement and will give you pause when you may be enticed into downloading it, virus-like, into your unsuspecting computer.
"All Your Base Belong To Us!" would probably be a really bad thing for trying to get on their good side...
We have seen several different governmental organizations move to Linux over the past year, if the trend continues, does this increase the chance of Linux becoming the major OS in schools? Apple made a strong push to introduce the Macintosh to the education market, and as a result, they are still the primary computers at many elementary, middle and highshools in America. This could be a great way to introduce Linux to the general population.
The Microsoft XBox, as popular as it may become, also will not be sold in China. As you may know, Microsoft looses money on each XBox they sell. With the realization that piracy is highly rampant in China and they will not sell much software, the console will not be sold there.
0
Go here if you want to read up a little more on it... http://www.lik-sang.com/catalog/news.php?artc=238
The bit that got me was:
So far, Linux holds only a slight market share compared with Microsoft's offerings and represents a sensible deployment platform only in certain environments, such as entry-level and edge-of-network server implementations. For mission-critical functions, Linux still needs to catch up...
I guess the Beijing government gets it and Gartner doesn't.
The sad thing about this is that on the whole, it is actually true.
We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system
You tipped your hand a bit too much at this point. Otherwise, a nicely written troll.
First, let me state that I am a capitalist and firmly believe in the rights of companies and organizations to develop closed-source software and charge money for it. Many of my most frequently used programs (all for Linux) are closed-source and cost me a pretty penny to acquire. I believe in paying for software when I provides me with the services I need.
However, I also use open source software from time to time. Although many teenage Slashdotters seem to think that open source is necessarily good and commericial software is automatically evil, I believe the two paradigms can continue to exist side by side ad infinitum.
My contributing code for free to an open source project does not diminish my standing as a capitalist. Open source software is great. However, just because software is available for free (as in beer) does not make it a communist product.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
It looks like the Chinese understand the importance of software in the 21st century and are taking careful steps to position themselves accordingly. Think about what their savings in licensing will be in the next decade alone. They have a captive market of 1.2 billion users. I'd like to have a 50% penetration into that market.
Berkeley has Republican professors? Get out of here. No way in hell.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I can already imagine all the posts going offtopic about how China does this and does that. I really don't see how the human rights issue is related to Microsoft being dumped on. As for being on topic, the reason might include the fact M$ has a very nasty history of leaving severe security-breaching bugs in their OS. Just search slashdot for 'Microsoft' and 'security' and you'll get a host of past articles describing them.
What does this article have to do with the "anti-communist messages" that were found in Win 95? There is a one sentence blurb in this article. And after searching google all I came up with was a couple of board postings that were from an e-mail that was from a guy who has a dog....
Sorry for the cynicisism, but if there is any truth to this there is little credibility behind it.
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
Microsoft has a history of doing what it thinks will make more money in the short term, even if what the company does is strongly against the interests of its customers. For example, the registry in MS operating systems is implemented in such a way that it provides copy protection, and also in such a way as to be a massive single point of failure.
Basically, when you pay money to Microsoft, you are paying money to someone who may decide to be your enemy. It is not surprising that a large organization would try to avoid that.
Also, there is the concern that the amazing number of security bugs in Microsoft software may be due to a deliberate intention of the U.S. government to provide points of entry for government spy software like the FBI's Carnivore.
I've gathered more than 600 pages of links from major news sources showing the U.S. government's interest in control: What should be the Response to Violence? It it any wonder that a foreign government would want to avoid being involved in this? The only downside is that the office tools are less capable. But the Chinese government's decision is support for closing the gap.
Bush's education improvements were
Isn't it bad enough that politicians fight over this nonsense.
...to provide operating system (OS), office automation (OA) and antivirus software for government PCs.
And I thought Microsoft would have a been a shoo-in because they're the only ones that can provide (or seem to need) anti-virus software.
funny... in a not-so-funny, painfully-ironic way... how americans love to shake our finger a the chinese, yet we have had our own 1989-style tienemen square...
may 4th 1970 - kent state university
this summer i hear the drumming... four dead in o-hi-o...
First there was a story about the NSA key in the registry. Then the source code supposedly was stolen by hackers last year. And the law is that before you sell any crypto software overseas it has to get a license from the NSA.
Why would the Chineese want to open their systems to the US Government?
What comes around, goes around! Newt-dog
My Doctor prescribed daily nasal saline irrigation, hehe
Careful reading will reveal that these contracts essentially effect only Beijing, not the rest of China. Shanghai, for instance, recently negotiated a contract with Microsoft for Win2000. What remains to be seen, however, is how the seriously the Chinese government will crack down on pirating (the major reason for Windows' prevelence in China, as is the case for much of the world outside of the USA and Western Europe) and whether this will prompt a widespread movement toward Free Software. Sure, China is oggling free trade, but will it (or can it?) curb pirating?
:Peter
I aplaud the Chinesse on this. They told a corporation that was bad mouthing them to go fly a kite. The whole reason that China is known as a haven of piracy is work done by Microsoft and it's goons at the BSA. The fact that China had some piracy, mainly due to the fact that it could not legally import much of the software, was touted several years ago as a reason that they should not be allowed into the world market. The company leading this charge? Microsoft.
Microsoft figured they would leverage their way in by calling them pirates and then simply saying you can become legal by pay as a large license fee for all of the stuff you are using. The Chinesse understood what this was. Microsoft wanted a bribe to allow China into the world markets. China told them to go f**k themselves, and rightly so.
Hopefully this will make Microsoft look twice now at how their fanning the flames of piracy histeria hurts them more than it helps them. Missing out on a multi-billion dollar market tends to do that to a company.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
from the chipcenter.com article:
There are also persistent rumors that the official Chinese version of Windows 95, which was written in Taiwan, not Beijing, contained hidden text (easter eggs) such as "Communist Bandits," and "take back the mainland."
Finnish, British, French and German governments are planning to switch to Linux and some of them have already partially done it (France & Germany) and keep on doing it. These kinda news is yesterday's news. Governments don't dig Micro$hit - let's face it. BTW, there was an interesting article on USA TODAY yesterday - Micro$hit declares war against open-source.
Die, capitalist swine!
Many people have referred to open source at being communist. Well, I don't think it is, but the communists seem to like it a lot. Sure, it may just be because of the easter eggs in chinese win95. However, China being communist and all, doesn't have as many extremely wealthy people, as the US. What it does have is a billion not extremely rich people. The government of these people have most likely chosen *nix as their operating system of choice. The os of choice in china will most likely be linux in the coming years. Someone has to put out a good chinese linux distribution, and write linux software in chinese, etc. We need more people to use linux and not windows. Well, here is a billion of them.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
So what's the problem with communist mentality? The mentality is great in my opinion. It's just that the implementations so far have been total crap.
0x or or snor perron?!
I will not admit to working in VB.
There are many applications where VB is totally inappropriate. Consider any real-time embedded system where all you have is bare metal and a compiler. I know you won't believe it but, such applications do exist. Most of the black-boxes on a modern aircraft would qualify.
Your enthusiastic lack of experience only makes me feel sorry for your clients. They are the ones getting the short end of the stick. Your difficulties configuring a few Linux machines highlights your inexperience.
It's probably a good thing you posted as an AC. Regardless, I can guarentee that you wouldn't have gotten hired on ANY team that I've ever worked with. You don't have the expertise or mind-set required (even in those cases where the team needed VB experience).
For another (earlier by > 24 hrs) take on this same story, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23548.html.
Nice troll!
The second-to-last sentence in the ChipCenter article explains a lot:
One of the many things that distinguish Americans from the rest of the world--and particularly from Asians--is the American social construct of "just business." I hope you understand, the tycoon says to his beloved, I had to destroy your father's empire and bankrupt all your siblings--but it was 'just business.' This is central to the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movie, "You've Got Mail"--Hanks's character is a big-block bookstore tycoon who wipes the small businesswoman (Ryan) off the map--but she falls in love with him anyway. It is practically impossible to explain to most Americans how oddly this strikes practically anybody in the rest of the world. Particularly in Asia.
Nothing, in China, is "just business." You cannot trash-talk a country for their laxity in intellectual property rights and then expect to sell them software licenses. But you also cannot even begin to think that the son of the Chinese President is to be treated as just another vendor. The presence of Red Flag in the bidding guaranteed that Red Flag would win the bidding. That's how business is done in China.
What's instructive in this, however, is that six other vendors also "won" in the bidding--it might be very interesting to see what they offered (such as what OS and what word processors). It might not be particularly surprising to discover that one or more is a Microsoft reseller. One can spank a disrespectful suitor (Microsoft) by pointedly excluding them from the vendor list--but offer Microsoft an opportunity to regain favor by including a reseller (or perhaps more than one) on the list.
Microsoft got stiffed; the president's son won the biggest chunk of the business. Anybody in China could have told you that would happen. The real story is whether there are any Microsoft-OS suppliers on this vendor list, or if the Beijing government has embraced Linux exclusively.
First, remember that RMS was able to wreak havoc on the computing world only because he is in league with the aliens who abducted Elvis and assassinated JFK.
He is also a known cattle mutilator and evil character.
Do us all a favor. If you're gonna troll, at least do it with some taste. Spell names correctly. Try to make the troll have at least some sort of acquaintance with actual history. And for the love of God, don't quote Metallica in a discussion about technology.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The U.S. Federal government is by far Microsoft's largest customer, and I believe that the assorted state governments as a group are 2nd, with 3rd place way behind. (Can anyone contradict that, or provide more concrete evidence?)
:)
Every time tax dollars go to buy a piece of Microsoft software, the money is funneled into software development / improvement for life on earth only in a certain limited way (because MS then can pay more programmers, hire researchers to make their SW better, do more QA, etc). In other words, sure, abstractly there's an eventual benefit, sort of, at least to MS customers, (and even more abstractly, there's benefit to competition that future MS software inspires). On the other hand, the more tax-dollar stewards (local school systems, say, or your local Department of Extortion) put the same money they normally would put toward MS software instead into non-secret-source* software, the results are instantly free for public consumption and improvement. That sounds to me like "promoting the general welfare." The government (remember, your government is spending your money) should never use a proprietary product when a freely available product can fill the same needs.
timothy
* Skipping Free vs. Open Source this time
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
It's always funny to read on how people mistake communism (which is an utopian ideal) with countries which claim to be communists (such as China) while they are but totalitarian state capitalists. I really think that, as far as adopting Linux is concerned, it's much more a matter of nationalistic pride (since they've developed their own "flavour" of Linux) than communist idealism...
:-)
Similarly, it's also quite a treat to see all these people saying that they're "capitalists" while they are nothing but employees of corporations. A capitalist is someone who has capital and uses that capital to invest in or create corporations, i.e. making money with money, without actual production-related labor. They should rather say that they wish they were capitalists!
In any case, the whole open-source approach is an interesting take on the traditional business model, but then again software is not a traditional good, being just a string of commands, values, expression, i.e. an immaterial commodity.
Reminder: find a new sig
I don't understand why they're rejecting Microsoft software. I mean it's cheap enough...they just have to head down to their local flea market or to Wing's Software Emporium and they can buy Microsoft's complete product line for 50 bucks!
You're using her as bait, Master!
under communism your choice of OS is forced upon you by some huge faceless bureaucracy that tracks your every move and relentlessly encroaches upon every single right you have.
conversely, in the west you -- oh, right.
WTO ultimately means enforcing the values of the rich corporate US -- which is not the majority of the US -- onto the rest of the world. If other countries don't subscribe to the US-corporate view of intellectual property, they can't join the WTO. Furthermore, aside from not being able to join the WTO, they also get sanctioned as if they were despot nations like Iraq (i.e., Ukraine being sanctioned for not enforcing intellectual property). China has enough bad despotic laws of its own -- it doesn't need any of the US' information-owning laws on top of its own bad laws.
Really, what we need to do is take the fight against intellectual property beyond the US. Because the biggest intellectual property war is the war between the US-owned WTO and nations that are not WTO members. We need to take the fight against intellectual property to nations that have the most to gain from ignoring IP, and the most to lose from enforcing it -- Russua, China, India, Eastern European nations, and even Western European nations. Russia and the Eastern European states are the best place...that's where most warez comes from, and those nations have the loosest IP laws.
So, how do we do this? Well, for one thing, you start writing more software that they can use -- i.e., file-sharing, ripping, encoding, decrypting, encrypting programs written in Russian, Chinese, and Indian. For another, we can look to nations like Russia for a quazi-model of an intellectual property system -- though even those nations have IP laws which are too strict. Furthermore, Russia presents a practical example of where intellectual property clearly harms people. If intellectual property laws were strict and enforced in Russia, their economy would be even worse, because they'd have to be paying US-based corporations.
Intellectual property is really just a way to suck even more money away from the already-poor (or at least not rich) -- be it foreign nations, or US-citizens -- to the already rich.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Well, read this:
i cr osoft.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/money/tech/2002-01-04-m
Friends of mine have, and they say not only software, but EVERYTHING is fake in china. Windows XP was selling for $1. $2's for nike shirts and the like. Imitation everything they said. He came back with an imitation $450 north face jacket that got us started on the whole conversation, I wanted to visit just for the deals. The problem is VERY VERY large. Cheap labor plus demand, go figure, it runs rampant.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Isn't the fact that communists are the ones liking linux saying something?
I have read a couple articles in the past about China, Linux and Microsoft.
.Net or decipher CAL licensing? Use Linux. Don't want your expensive office software to suddenly become obsolete every two years at Microsofts whim? Use Linux.
I am of the opinion the key issue here is about control. Microsoft as we all know, basically dictates to the world at large, OK this is the how it is going to be done, so do what we say and everyone will be happy. Planned obsolescence, hidden APIs, "embrace and extinguish", along with shoddy documentation has historically meant that Microsoft always retained the upper hand.
What Linux has done, which before now your only choices were expensive Macs, and a fragmented Unix market, gave people a viable option, and in control of their own computing destiny.
Dont want a browser icon on your desktop? Use Linux. Installing a SQL Server that doesn't require a web browser? Use Linux. Don't want to subscribe to
These are the real reasons that China doesn't like MS. Microsoft and China are like two control freaks trying to establish a relationship.
This is interesting in terms of OS share figures. One of the obvious things that statistics on OS shares frequently totally ignore is market penetration, especially in terms of saturation. The US (and European) markets are far closer to saturation that, say, the Chinese market, and it is these markets which stand to grow the most that are of most interest in terms of potential future share. Since these sorts of stories may well become fairly frequent, it seems that in the markets which have least been decided already, Linux, and otehr alternative OSes, stand to gain the most.
...which is good!
Yeah!! *BSD, Linux and OS-X=COMMUNIST COWBOY OSs!! I'm getting rid of this lame FreeBSD - I don't wanna be a communist.
What are you, retarded? This was the worst troll I've read in months! Christ, it's even worse than the stuff they post on Adequacy.
So is this about a legitimate choice in operating software, or is it about nepotism?
I think, before we look to any altruistic reasoning on the part of Beijing on choosing "Linux" over "Microsoft" we need to look closer to home ... to their homes.
Grep through the linux source on your box and see how many times "NSA" comes up,
... ... its a secret)
Grep for NSAKey (the name that was in ms code) in the linux SOURCE code and it doesnt come up once.
If MS would let us look at their source code that would quickly settle this dispute. (but ohhh nooo, you cant do that becasue..
The point is why would any company (let alone and entire country) trust a program if they cant even look at the source code.
"There are plenty of reasons to dislike and not use MS products. You shouldn't have to invent fake ones to suit your narrow arguments."
The ones mentioned all look like perfectly justifiable reasons to stay away form the MS trap.
While I don't believe Tiananmen could be justified, I don't think this could be either. Politics? Sure, land disputes are political, right? Darn that Andrew Jackson!
You can not compare the organized slaughter at Tiananmen Square to the actions of a few frightened National Guardsmen at Kent State.
How do you know those Chinese soldiers weren't frightened? I'd be frightened if I was outnumbered by screaming protesters too. Or are you taking the liberty to imply those farmboys in the PLA are conditioned murderers?
The Federal Government didn't order the attack at Kent State. The Chinese Government ordered the attacks.
I submit exhibit A and exhibit B. Right, different eras and different context.
Students at Kent State were not put in prison for thier actions, while protesters at Tiananmen Square were thrown in prison.
There's different reasons you can get thrown in prison. 1. Arrest 2. Detainment
The National Guard at Kent State didn't send in Armored units to put down the protests, like the Chinese did at Tiananmen Square. Read the text of Deng Xiaoping's speech to the Martial Law Units from June 9th, 1989. http://tsquare.tv/chronology/Deng.html
From what I read (no, not published by the PRC), they had officers try to put down the protests, but when the students refused to move, Deng and company got nervous seeing how the country's inability to put down a protest would influence the world's opinion (trail by television). I wouldn't trust a .tv domain even if it spouted stuff I agreed w/.
Those things, coupled with the Chinese oppression of the Fal Lun Gong, Chirstians, Tibet and the 20-40 million that died because of the Great Leap Foreward, give the rest of the world the right to shake our fingers at the Chinese.
Nice, picking out the choice topics. I'm do the same to justify my desire to shake my fingers at people I don't like either. Just like blaming the government for Hurricane Andrew. OTOH, I'd do my own research about said topics before pointing to them. But it's really easy to ignore that, and imply I did, right? btw, don't forget you can create friends and foes lists on slashdot now.
Well, fuck you!! You're only a USA fuck up!! What do you exactly know about China?? Nothing, I guess. We are using FreeBSD, Linux, HP-UX and other *nixes widely here in China! And you call us communists?
I'm glad I was good enough for Yale. Berkeley Communist Society was too lame for me.
If software in China today is mostly pirated,
how can an indigenous software industry survive
and grow?
(Not ment to be a troll or flamebait, just to point out something i noticed.)
Why do we jump to conclusions with Linux?
It is entirely possible that a BSD could be used, as most BSDs are free as well.
I've got moderator access right now, and I wish I could moderate this up to +6, because it appears to me that most people have missed what really happened. A lot of people are saying, "Serves Microsoft right," or that Microsoft got their just desserts or something. That's not what's going on.
This is not about Microsoft.
The PRC doesn't give a rat's ass about what Microsoft said about them.
What's going on here is exactly what the article has said. China is a shoddy business opportunity -- very much unlike the USA. Here, we have 300 million eager consumers, and the government is usually more than willing to let whoever wants to sell whatever they want to try to do so.
China's different. Corporations drool over the nearly 2 billion "consumers," but this is not (yet) a free market economy. And few companies that try to move into China to take advantage of the market ever make money, because the Chinese government is determined to make more money.
This is then made doubly difficult by the fact that in China, the state is religion, and the system is really an imperial system, just like the one Mao supposedly overthrew and every dynasty before it. And in systems like this, success is based solely on who you know. It's not like here in the United States where people value you on your ability to work hard and benefit the company.
People piss on "corporatists" on this board all the time. But that corporate system, with a few exceptions, is what allows immigrants to come to this country with nothing but what they could fit in a pair of suitcases and become the CEOs of their own corporations. It's what allows the children of blue-collar workers the ability to become wealthy and respected white-collar workers. I've met immigrants from China, Vietnam, Egypt, Iran, and all over the place, and they love the fact that in this country, if they work hard, they CAN make a good living.
In China, and most of the rest of the world, you are not valued for the quality of your product or for how hard you work. You're valued for "who you are" -- the son of a famous general, the brother of a diplomat, the cousin of the President.
This is not about Microsoft. This is about China. Only Western arrogance would assume otherwise.
Now that Microsoft is out, we just need to wake
the Chinese up to the fact that BSD is more
stable and robust than Linux 2.5 and push BSD
all the way.
... find the choice of Red Flag Linux to be ironically appropriate? ;-)
BSD is not more stable - it's just that you're too dumb to get it. Perhaps you should study how the kernel works, no offense.
I don't know in detail but I very much doubt that PRC taken as a whole has anywhere near the degree of investment in MS as US or european economies.
And as Chinese by some predictions will be the predominant language on the 'Net in a decade or less, it makes sense that china can choose a Linux-centric path today, in a way that would be more difficult for western orgainizations.
Who knows, perhaps this may be the dynamic that finaly puts linux into the desktop in meaningful numbers.
I believe I remember the Easter Egg story from back in the '95 days, between that and Gates' long-standing whining about piracy (again, other posts have covered this well) - It's not hard to see PRC snubbing MS <chuckle>.
I have nothing at all against closed-source. It exists, and for many applications it's the more sensible economic model. There will always be a degree of piracy, and there will be ways to manage that. Neither writing angry letters to 'the community', nor pushing this agenda the way MS likes to today is my idea of the best way to manage the problem but then I don't make policy at MS.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
Remember the Q33NYC wingdings code?
*BSD is for COMMUNIST COWBOYS!!! Switch to Debian/HURD -hehe! Another *LAME* piece of software. When do you dumbasses get it?
Fuck you, move to China if you love it so much
If Linux takes such a foothold in china, and chine creates a nice cis or cs program for it's people...
Linux would far surpass microsoft in servers and desktops by the end of this decade.
think about it... what percentage of the population does china have? if all of them use linux then Microsoft loses in a really big way.
and think about this.. add 50,000 chinese programmers onto the linux factor. (and 50,000 is a very moderate number)
I cant wait for 2010 to arrive!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
How do you consider FRANCE,GERMANY,GREAT BRITAIN AND FINLAND??!! They are *CAPITALISTIC* countries and they have decided to switch to Linux.
Gartner Group is a company that claims to provide forward seeing information to companies. You would think that a requirement for this would be an unbiased evaluation of alternatives.
I am not sure how they can say things like the following and still claim to have a clear view of what is happening let alone what will happen.
"So far, Linux holds only a slight market share compared with Microsoft's offerings and represents a sensible deployment platform only in certain environments, such as entry-level and edge-of-network server implementations. For mission-critical functions, Linux still needs to catch up..."
At my work and a number of places I am aware of, mission critical applications run on Linux and typically work so well they get little visibility.
The commoditization of software built using the open source model is a large threat to Microsoft's and other closed source software companies business models. I suspect that Microsoft buys a large number of reports from Gartner Group and they are careful to say things that sound good to their customers.
*BSD Sucks. Hehe, maybe you should learn about the kernel before you come over here to recommend *BSD. You are just another dumbass who doesn't know anything about the OS.
You're thinking of "totalitarianism" here. Communism is an economic system.
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
RFL (backed, one of the linked articles says, by the son of the president) provides Linux in Chinese. (At least, it allegedly does ;) -- I've never seen anything besides a product shot of the box, and don't speak or read Chinese). Turbo Linux is supposedly very good in its Asian language support, too.
Do any of the BSDs have good Asian language support? Not saying they don't, I'm just not familiar with it if they do.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
there was a call to the Governor of Ohio by John Mitchell the night before the murders at Kent State. Some say this call was to urge the Gov to take whatever steps needed to stop the protests. Within days other students were killed in Agusta, but they were black and nobody cared.
There were no students within 90 yards of the Guardsmen. Seven of the Eleven were shot either in the back or the side. The leaders of the protest were singled out for liquidation.
JFK, ML King, Bobby Kennedy, George Wallace, all seen as threats by Nixon. All targetted by assassins who left a diary that implicated them in the murders. Wallace survived, but his chances of deciding the election that year were dashed. He would have siphoned off enough conservative votes to keep Nixon out of office for his second term.
The guardsmen were not out of control, they were acting under orders. If you look at the picture you can see the officers directing them, and in one shot you can see one with his sidearm taking aim.
photosMy Photostream
I don't know why everyone is down on communism. In and of itself, is a very good system. The problem is greedy and power hungry people that screw it up. And actually, the opensource community closely resembles a communist system.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Only a punch-drunk leftist with the ethical standards of Mao is incapable of discerning the evil of communism. Your tired (and feeble) attempts to make the US into as big and bad a thug as the PRC are a waste of our time and your energy. Save it for your meetings of Sandinistas Anonymous, okay?
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That the communist Chinese are doing a better job at creating a competitive market than the monopoly-friendly U.S.
And as for "rumors" of Chinese Windows 95, don't post a link to more rumor, post a link to FACT. You're all such great hackers I'm sure in an hours time you can post the real proof determined by yourself.
Communism and Fascism are identical and they are both far-left. Communism seeks equality between the classes (the classes is smth communists made up) Fascism seeks equality between race. Communism wants the state to own and control all means of production in a planned economy. Fascism allows private citizen to own the means of production but the state is to plan their production in a planned economy.
Your link was very funny with twisted questions such as:
Many personal fortunes are made by people who simply manipulate money and contribute nothing to their society.
Communists and Socialists always try to make up these fairytales that money or value is somehow produced by everyone for everyone. And that the dishonest capitalists oppresses "everyone" to get "everyones" by-being-born deserved handout. So tell me is Bill Gates the richest man in the world because he stole the sourcecode to Windows and Office from poor children in Africa?
Assuming this is true, it wouldn't necessarily surprise me. However, when you run a company, you don't piss off your customers. You don't mock them, you don't ridicule them behind their back. They're the ones sending you money. You can choose to not do business with them, thats fine. But if you want to do business with them, you treat them with respect, no matter who they are, no matter what they represent.
I doubt the company itself endorsed such activity, but it reflects badly on them in any case. And doesn't Microsoft have enough problems as it is?
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
good things can come out of inferior motives. The Chinese, in an effort to avoid that evil Western propaganda, have chosen not to wed itself to that bloated monstrosity that is M$ Window$.
would they invent the most successful operating system on the face of this planet then claim they hate it and its a disaster plus no-one should ever use it !, even though the support demands alone keeps 90% of them who are in computer related jobs in work !!!!!
go figure
Only a slobbering high-blood-pressured Limbaughnazi with the intelligence of a ball of naval lint is incapable of differentiating between Communism and the totalitarian regimes that resulted from flawed attempts at its implementation. What's most ironic about it is that most of Communism's most active enemies are also devoted followers of Jesus Christ, who is arguably the father of Communism. Of course, if you point this out to them, their lower lips begin to tremble in rage and they threaten to shoot you with assault rifles. Love your neighbor, indeed. The Bible is not an excuse for the sort of conservative hatred we are subjected to these days. Sorry.
Because all the settings necessary to run a program are in the registry, it is not possible to just copy the program's files onto another computer, and run the program.
Most users are not able to edit the registry, even if they new what the registry keys meant and how to change them to work on a new computer.
Bush's education improvements were
..And then one day, WE'LL FUCK THE USA!! We don't have JUNKIES and DRUNKEN BUMS lying on every street corner, we don't have 1000 rapes & 10000 armed robberies / day. Stick that HEROINE UP IN YOUR ASSes you american dumbasses.
And with communism you get such a wonderful economy you won't have to worry about your OS or PC since you won't be able to buy one or sometimes even enough food.
*BSD is a lame piece of software. They could not possibly use it because of that fact.
Given Beijing's position as capital of the country, your point was...?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Ignorant fool. Tell me, where are the hardware of your computers made? Chances are the majority of the hardware inside your computer at some point went through the Asian production line.
Secondly, why would any foreign government trust any software that is currently being produced in the US. The FBI has openly acknowledged that they are using Magic Lantern and Carnivore. Who knows what the CIA is using. And a number of antivirus companies have agreed [then backtracked] on "overlooking" the FBI key sniffing applications. If you were a foreign nation installing MS Windows on a top secret site, would you be worried that the CIA had secretly asked MS to create a backdoor allowing the US to access their top secret systems? Would you be willing to allow the FBI to use an OS that was produced in Iraq? Maybe Iraq is a little far-fetched of an example, let's say France?
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
This is a small peice of what I posted in the other China newsbit.
You guys are -way- too easy on China on this site. When did China stop being the evil, ruthless country that they are? How many tiannamen square massacres, Tibets and Falun Gong witchhunts (where the chinese government hired people to hack American servers that contained Falun Gong information!) do you guys need before you start taking a critical stance against China's government?
The reason that China cares about software development is probably because they're trying to stop getting their web pages hacked by human rights advocates, or they're building some more Falun Gong firewalls or something.
This isn't just some bland racism, or an overboarding sense of "patriotism", China is a brutal, dangerous country, and a testament to the powers of corruption.
Oh, and speaking on the specific topic, I do recall the president of China's son having some connections with Red Flag Linux (their communist-toted linux -copy-), so I'm sure that Red Flag is going to win in the end. I'd rather have linux be chosen for it's technical quality, and not for it's connections with a bunch of sleazy corrupt politicians. God help us all.
It's always funny how time and time again people set out to implement ``true Communism'' and every single time it fails to happen, they get despotism of one form or another instead.
Perhaps the entire concept is broken, and instead of trying to fix the system, we should be giving the people involved room and resources to fix themselves? With an earnest, altruistic population, almost any system of government will work well.
You won't get people like that out of Atheism, nor will you get it out of ``organised'' (read: politicised) religion.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Nazi is short for ``Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiter-Partei'' which translates into english as ``National Socialist German Workers' Party''. Yes, the Nazis had a lot to do with the development of socialism, since they were some of the most successful socialists of all history.
Crushed the country's worker movement? He placed it in total control of the nation, with himself as leader.
They feel in the love with the man. All they could think of was if the same thing could be done in their own nations ...
Fell in love with the man? All the other governments in europe feared the same thing happening to their own nations.
Best Slashdot comment ever
Criticism of the corporate system is usually based on the ethics of that system. Ethics based on the idea that almost any action is justifiable by its value to the bottom line. In short, "its just business."
Its true that the corporate business environment provides a lot of oportunity. But it also exacts an increasing cost as leaders within that system take less and less personal, and generally ethical, responsibility for their actions as part of that system.
The bennifits do not invalidate the criticisms.
...and of propagating Nimda, but let's not dwell on that, because they were actually (so we are told) serving stuff, and that in itself is amazing. (-:
Ooh, what a giveaway! Kernel-level as in acorns? Those things harvested and eaten (and lost) by squirrels?
VB is about as well suited to low-level work as thongs are for total building-site safety gear. (That's why Aussies call them JSB's, y'know, Japanese Safety Boots).
Other than the bogus gcc version: why bother? Mandrake ships with Pentium-optimised binaries, and you're not going to get noticeably better performance except for very CPU-intensive applications such as ray-tracing.
If I had boxes doing that, I'd replace the boxes.
Actually, given that this is Microsoft we're discussing, I think you mean ``full-fledged marketing team.''
I run many SMP Linux systems, and most of them use a stock-standard Linux distribution which ships with a choice of three (3) different journalling filesystems. Memory protection was there from Day One.
If by ``work'' you mean chewing up resources, yes. Otherwise it sounds like you have the system names the wrong way around. (-:
Droll troll, how abut writing some software instead of baiting people?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm glad the Chinese want no part of good old Yankee software. China to this day is a repressive regime that does not deserve your respect or admiration.
In case you didn't know this troll is one of the oldest and most famous on slashdot. I can't believe people still fall for it every single time its posted.
In conclusion: YHBT!!!
It's always funny to hear people still refering to China as being a 'communist country'. China is not a communist country anymore than the US or the UK are. The Chinese government refers to the construct as being 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' - a term first used by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s. Mao is turning in his grave at the abandonment of the communist ideal. Interestingly MS recently agreed to set up two R&D centers in China - one in Shanghai the other in the northwestern city of Xian. Total investment of around US$40 million.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
..as they have many times in the past. The following possibilities exist:
1. When the actual contract is awarded MS may actually win it -- they were not in the running but they have a history of winning anyway -- they learn very, very fast.
2. They may loose this one -- it's only one city -- and come back with a bigger/better effort for the next city. They have a history in this area as well. Remember -- they have the ability to price their product to have it bought (not unlike Oracle who is rumored to sell their software at 75% to 90% discounts to big/important clients). The lesson is if you want to sell your software you have to get them to buy it first. Give some away and then you will be able to sell it later.
3. China finds out how much it really costs them to support Open Source software and begs MS to come in and save them money. After all when they have to hire cities of programmers to make it functional for them they may find out they want to USE software, not develop it.
true.
It's not a rumor but the truth. I think it is very normal. China government should make their own decision. Linux is enough, now.
Fuck you, man. Think of it... That is just a business.
Isn't it interesting how easy it is to make a conspiracy theory? Just take a few circumstantial events, tie them together with a common theme... and ta da!
I hope you don't seriously believe this crap?
"However, if MS is putting in backdoors as you claim, then one should clearly have been found by now. NSAKey was a variable in the registry. Clearly if MS was putting backdoors in Windows they wouldn't put it in plaintext, would they? Of course not."
Could you think of any intellegence agency in the world that wouldnt _want_ to have a backdoor into 95% of the worlds computers ?
C'mon, it would be almost negligent of the US spooks if they didnt at least try and have their way with MS.
Hypothetically if their was a backdoor (or other 'features') in windows then that would vastly improve intelligence gathering capabilities, and it would be also more cost effective than alternatives. It would be a goldmine.
MS could be unwilling partners, but have no choice, or maybe they themselves wouldnt even know about it (insider).
But im just speculating of course.
Some people would say...
> No country would pour money into a project with no financial or social return. Linux development would be that for China.
Assume that China is eventually looking at 10% of its population working in government beauraucracy. That's 125,000,000 people. Assume each of them will eventually get a computer with an OS and an office suite. MS is moving to a software rental model. Let's assume a low figure of $80 per seat per year for a combined Office XP plus Windows XP bundle. That works out to *TEN BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR IN LICENCE FEES* !!!
At this point, it's fully worth their while to hire a bunch of Indian or Chinese programmers at $10,000 per year each to polish up an existing OS like linux, and existing open source office apps.
A large American mega-corp with 10,000 seats would be shelling out $800,000 per year in licence fees. Even they are at the point where hiring a couple of $100,000/year programmers to write bug-fixes, etc looks better than MS rent-ware. And we haven't even begun to factor in the cost of not needing anti-virus software constantly updated.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
In China there is a tradition of fearing business people dominating the society. Nothing much to do with Communism these days now. Bill Gates is so well known in China that you can find lots of unauthorized biographies about him or books about Microsoft in the bookstores in China. But he is just admirable, not respectful. Thanks a lot to the anti-trust law suit perhaps. Look at the foreign companies that are really doing well in China, either they make a great relationship with the top government officials, or they do have great reputation.
And when US companies compete overseas, they are not just competing with other local companies on the quality of products and services, they are also competing with the local traditions and culture. That is the hardest!
maybe the assassination stuff is a stretch, but everything else is fact.
go search around the web already. i already gave you a link. use it.
Try
some time...And you don't have to have a card with a mac address on it to have an IP, (ethernet, TR, etc have them and slip, ppp, etc doesn't)
Still the mac address seems better to use, since so many runs NAT nowadays. The 10/24 and 192.168/16 UUID-namespaces must be getting crowded .
Actually, thinking about it... DCE doesn't require IP, you can run it over Decnet and all kinds of other weirdness, I wonder what happens then?
"An object declared as type _Bool is large enough to store the values 0 and 1." -- 6.1.2.5, C99 standard.
Why on earth when the topic includes the word "China", people have to bitch and moan about some stupid history decades ago or how 1337 capitalism is compared with that L4m3 communism? And most ironically, they get modded +1 insightful... shouldn't they be modded -1 Offtopic or Flamebait???
OK, I know this post is offtopic, but I'm still posting it because I would like to see more ontopic posts instead of history flamewars.
Don't quote me on this.
I can second that, having learned Java and C, C++ in College and taking VB as an additional class, I can tell VB is a broken language and the speed is nowhere comparable to even Java
No, they're the ones with the flashy temples and immense geneaologies, IIRC. You, on the other hand, posted before you thought. Now is the time, if it hasn't happened yet, to do that thinking.
Yes. This world being what it is, real live people will refer to that troll, and the real live people referred to it will read it and note that nobody answered it. Sometimes neither individual is equipped to figure out that it's a troll. In fact, even a reasonably computer-literate reader could, on a bad day or if distracted, fail to actually process the content. It needed at least one sensible answer. Done.
Because it is on SlashDot, it needed at least one rash and ill-thought-out response, and it got those as well. Does being in a majority bring you good feelings? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Isn't it interesting how easy it is to make a conspiracy theory? Just take a few circumstantial events, tie them together with a common theme... and ta da!
It helps to be the government and have the mass media not being too critical of your line. (Combined with not asking officials to explain the big problems with the official version of events.)
We have one going right now. Various bits don't make any sense, there are plenty of holes. But it's good enough to drop huge quantities of high explosive on the poorest country on the planet, whilst failing to actually achieve the aim.
I heard that when Bill Gates was in China back then, he offended a certain high official. Chinese like red tape and formalities and Bill being arrogant then, had had enough and asked his colleague er, subordinant, just how much it would take to buy the official. What Bill did not know was that the official was educated in the States and had a real good grasp of English, even correcting the interpreter when he gave the wrong translation in Chinese. That was before Bill asked how much. Bill at least had the sense not to say that in the presense of the official. Anyway the official kept to the custom of speaking through an interpreter and now Bill has revealed his tail. That was it. For previously, Microsoft was quite welcome. Bill will have learn that Chinese choose to be ahem corrupt when it suits them especially those in the higher rungs of power. Source is from a person who says he was on the scene but he may well be pulling my leg all the way to the moon.
True. Perhaps I needed to express myself more concisely: in the Real World(tm) it generally doesn't happen that way. By far the majority of hospitals etc in third-world countries, and likewise for other useful aid organisations are funded and founded by theistic religions.
Actually, so should the true Christian; and as I understand it both Islam and Judaism in their original forms would tend to be read that way.
While not claiming that theistic religions are free from the same fault (if only!), Atheism usually encounters a problem when trying to agree on a definition of ``goodness.'' Eugenics were an example of one particular set of Atheists' views of goodness, and during the Reign of Terror it seemed good to other parties of Atheists that they should do things like pass babies and children of theists from pike-point to pike-point along the streets to be dumped.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
When RMS wrote the first version of the GPL, it aroused a storm of controversy on gnu.misc.discuss. I was one of many, arguing as "johnston@me.udel.edu", that the GPL was not communistic but rather a peculiar use of the intellectual property and copyright laws of the United States. One that has proved in practice to be sufficiently "iron-clad" in its legal formulation that large corporations like IBM and government agencies like the NSA have followed the GPL to the letter. I bowed out of the Usenet debates in 1991 when Linux took off, because by then it appeared to me that the eventual successful creation of a free replacement for unix - RMS's original goal - had become a fait accompli, the Hurd project notwithstanding.
And so today we hear that the largest nation on earth is choosing Linux over Microsoft. RMS could have told you that would happen 15-odd years ago, after he finished writing the first draft of the GPL. It doesn't matter how long it takes; free software in the RMS sense of the word will eventually win out over the black-box proprietary model. RMS knew it then, and so did Per Abrahamsen, Barry Margolin, Adam Richter, Eric Raymond, HJ Lu, John Gilmore, Larry Wall, Jon "maddog" Hall, and all those who were involved in the free software movement long before Linus Torvalds picked up a copy of Andrew Tannenbaum's book on Minix and decided to try to write his own operating system. The great thing about young people is that they are too young to know that big projects are too hard to try, so they try them anyway. So we thank Linus most of all.
-- Bill Johnston (wdj-netconsult@consultant.com)
That has nothing to do with communism. There's no way why in a communist society you would not be able to choose which OS you want to use.
0x or or snor perron?!
(* Is your hatred of Microsoft so deep that you will instead support a regime that has caused more human suffering than any in history? *)
You mean Native Americans?
(Granted, we cut down over the years)
Table-ized A.I.
The terms capitalism and communism are so loaded they are virtually unusable. Its about time these two terms where given a decent burial. Problem is two people will use the term capitalism and mean something completely different, likewise with communism.
At its essence economics is about resource management. If people don't get this bit right, it does not matter which political system you use. Freedom is a luxury when you are starving. Another core concept is the concept of economic justice, if you have not got economic justice expect the crime rate to rise
Hi,
:)
As I'm currently living in China I'd like to comment on this. As was pointed out a few times allready (and therefor redundant) the decision of the Chinese goverment is not about Microsoft. Its about nationalism. China is always pushing the local economy and therefore all the foreign countries need to suffer. Even if Microsoft would give away their software and it would have been far better than any local then the Beijing goverment would still chose the local companies.
This is (very unfortunatly) true for every industry in China. The foreign companies will always have to pay more tax so that the local product will be more cheap. An foreign apple will cost about 20 times a local apple! Even when joining the WTO this will probably not change much since in China (like US) the goverment tries to control everything.
Also the foreign companies work around this by starting joint ventures. This means that 49% of the foreign company in china will be owned by a local chinese company (which has a CEO which has good relations with the goverment) and 51% will be the foreign company. The sales go to the foreign company (just a little), the goverment (a lot of tax) and for 49% in the pocket of the director of the local company. Thats how it really works in China... true capitalism..even worse than the US.
So now also the decision is made to push the domestic economy and probably a few party members
China economy is very similar with the US. Very corrupt.
(and one of the reasons I said "a certain limited way"), but in truth, I don't begrudge MS or any other company money spent on marketing. Sure, a lot of that money is misspent, but if it *really* is marketing -- taken literally, not just what it's come to mean -- then it's complementary to the other functions of any given company, including Microsoft (and Red Hat, and Kraft, and Exxon, and Whole Foods, and Grucci's Fireworks ... ).
;))
...
MS can't hire smart people to work at MS Research if they don't make money; they can't make money if they don't sell *something* (software, cheap flowers, novelty pens), can't sell their something if they don't market it. In fact, I think in that context, "sell" and "market" are redundant -- all of marketing is sales, really, and all of advertising is marketing. (Professors in the few marketing and business classes I took never really agreed with me on that point, but hey, I think their semantics are outdated and myopic
If MS were a producer of free / Free software (and I think they *could* become one, even if that's an unlikely outcome), they'd perhaps have more of the same world-changing currency that groups like the Debian project do. Debian couldn't afford to "hire" all the smart people who work on Debian software, packaging, etc (and substitute in your favorite free sw project), at least on the terms of source-secret companies. With the incentive of changing the world in certain ways, overlapping with some (justified, IMO) revolutionary fervor, Debian doesn't have to put as large a percentage of the project's total lifeblood into low-content advertising, paying high salaries, etc. People working toward what they consider a greater good (and probably some MS employees consider their brand of software creation genuinely better, but certainly not all) probably work a lot harder per dollar paid, too.
I doubt the arguments for greater programming freedom and other forms of abstract niceness are ever going to open the same kind of doors that arguments emphasizing the stability and practical nature of non-secret code will, though. Government spenders had better be thinking of those practical reasons when they redistribute the loot they've taken from us, so as not to inspire mobs of angry citizens to relocate their jaws.
timothy
sorry for ramble, I have a fever
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Who would imagine that the freedom-loving Chinese government would possibly consider a solution that was not open source?