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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
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$.
"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.
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Go here if you want to read up a little more on it... http://www.lik-sang.com/catalog/news.php?artc=238
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.
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Berkeley has Republican professors? Get out of here. No way in hell.
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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
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?
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
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!
For another (earlier by > 24 hrs) take on this same story, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23548.html.
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
Four dead in Ohio, killed by a few trigger happy National Guardsmen does not compare to the government of a nation crushing a revolt and killing between 200 and 4000 people, and throwing thousands more in prison. There are estimates that more than 240 people are still in Chinese prisons because of thier actions at Tiananmen Square.
e _p ages/declare.html
t ml
/ ch inese.htm
You can not compare the organized slaughter at Tiananmen Square to the actions of a few frightened National Guardsmen at Kent State.
1. The Federal Government didn't order the attack at Kent State. The Chinese Government ordered the attacks.
2. Students at Kent State were not put in prison for thier actions, while protesters at Tiananmen Square were thrown in prison.
3. 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
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.
http://www.intangible.org/Features/t_square/sit
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sdc/tiananmen.h
http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/past
http://tsquare.tv/chronology/Deng.html
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That's still about $100 more than they're worth.
RMN
~~~
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!
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.
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.
Nope, I'm not a Christian.
As for finding the "christian" link, I hit Yahoo for stuff on China and that was one of the six links there.
I almost didn't post the http://www.christusrex.org link because I was afraid that I'd get crap about it because it is a Christian site. Then I thought, "It's Slashdot, they won't stereotype me for a URL."
I was wrong.
As for me bringing democracy and christanity to China, not my job. China would be better off with a Republic or Democratic government, and it will happen in the next 50 years, but I'm not doing anything about it. As for religion, I don't care what they worship or don't worship. It's a Christian link because it had the context I was looking for, photos of the assault on the demonstrators.
I will go further and say that I think every Communist government on Earth will not make it to 2050. Cuba, Vietnam, China or North Korea being the big 4.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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
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
Yes, I'm very aware of this. Problem is, the UN Security Council was created on the basis of countries having nuclear capability. Rediculous, no? Or maybe they think security can be maintained by those who have guns?
Now, on to Scientology and Germany. German courts have ruled that Scientology is not a religon. Yet in Germany Scientologists are not arrested, nor is the worship banned. It is simply not a religon in the view of the state of Germany.
Well, those Christians allowed to practice in China are allowed because their religion was "registered". Not too sure what this means, but I'm supposing you have to have government approval to be recognized. Yes, the Scientologist weren't arrested or banned, but they still called it persecution. What's a country to do? In China's case, I don't know if this or that "Christian" is truely being persecuted because they could simply be stretching the truth, to gain sympathy, using China's terrible reputation to score points. But China's still responsible, in the public eye, if some group were to suddenly commit mass suicide (their choice). Remember the UFO cult from Taiwan that relocated to Texas in 1999? The Taiwanese government sent reps there to make sure the cult didn't plan on committing suicide (would've looked bad seeing how Taiwan "was apathetic" to mass suicide by its citizens). On a related note, when the Solar Temple cult committed mass suicide in California? (or was that the European group, I don't remember clearly), the government got some flack because they couldn't stop it.
Even if the government of China does not want Falun Gong or Christians in the country, because they are a member of the United Nations and the UDHR, they shouldn't be banning a religion.
No, I'm sure they're more worried about incidents like the Taiping Rebellion. I personally know some people who say they practice Falun Gong, and while I can't say they're evil (they're quite nice), looks can be decieving and you don't want Microsoft telling you want comprises excellent software. But, you're right they shouldn't ban religions. Too bad some beliefs are just so unreasonable (read radical Islam).
It's that simple. What goes on in China is documented at Amnesty International. It's not just what I "failed" to mention.
Yes, but "failing" to mention key points could easily cause your argument to be one-sided. One-sided arguments usually lead me to believe the arguer has an agenda to promote. I appologize for sounding rude, but I'm sick of all the same banter about China this and China that. Everyone just seem to use the strawman argument whenever China comes up (geez, I think we need an amend. to Godwin's Law). There's no doubt horrible things are happening there, but I don't think there's a quick fix for all of China's problems, specifically democracy. I'd like to see democracy (yes, in your words Republic or Democratic) there, but it's unrealistic to expect them to suddenly change. There supposedly are democratic elections on the local level there, but news organizations don't like to report on "mundane" topics like that. No, they'd rather talk about "unusual" (our definition, not theirs) topics over there. Heck, there supposedly are elections within the Communist Party, but most people assume it's voting for Happy Jiang or Sad Jiang. It's this cynicism mixed w/ revile that's a cause for concern for me.
Given Beijing's position as capital of the country, your point was...?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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
i go to kent state. i probably know the history of that day more than you would like to position yourself as knowing.
...by the way... 60 shots hardly constitutes much of an "accident" triggered by jittery ohio guardsmen. but that's just my huble opinion. i guess.
furthermore, it was governor james a. rhodes who ordered the men to be sent to kent. last time i checked, the position of a governor is that of a government office.
why were the men armed with real bullets?
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
"they are both far-left"
Huh?
"Fascism seeks equality between race."
Huh?
The best historical example we have of Fascism is Nazi Germany, and the only racial equality they believed in was one race, everybody else is dead.
This philosophy is most frequently found in the far-right wing which disqualifies your first statement I quoted.
Wow. As liberal as I am, comments like this suddenly turn me into a right-wing conservative.
There is no moral equivalency between Kent State and Tienanmen square. If you do not understand the difference, you have lived in the US too long and have too little respect for your freedom.
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?
Oh, I think people do know what happened there.
Kent State marked the beginning of the end of US involvement in Vietnam. Public opinion shifted almost entirely against involvement in the war.
Again, while tragic, it is hardly fair to call them morally equivalent actions as far as the nation as a whole is concerned.
I'm sure that they have those reasons. As to how central they are...
My personal suspicion is that they want to make very sure that their domestic software industry isn't subject to foreign control. Are they building a local cpu fab? We wouldn't necessarily know it if they were, but I'd be surprised if they weren't working on it.
Nobody likes being subject to control by another. This includes countries as well as people. Many countries are trying to make certain that it isn't easy to extort them with the software club. And MS with it's XP licensing schemes has provided every incentive possible to be paranoid about this. I'm paranoid about it, and I don't intend to ever install it.
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
What annoys me about China is that the PRC is a member of the United Nations Security Council and yet it thumbs it's nose at the United Nations Universal Decleration of Human Rights.
The permenent members of the UN security council are USA, UK, France, PRC and Russia. When it comes to thumbing it's nose at the UN the PRC is no match for the USA. Be it refusing to pay its dues or vetoing a resolution against state sponsored terrorism.
Also wern't the people at Waco some kind of Christians...
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.
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).
Only as a possibility. The money could just as well go into a bank account and sit there. Without competition there isn't that must incentive to improve any product.
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."
Maybe you should change the last bit to something like "promoting disemination of science and useful arts"... Then it makes it a bit harder for anyone to call it "Unamerican".
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
I had to try!
I just don't like the debate that Communism must fall so missionaries can file in and covert the masses.
You passed the test!
[if you notice though,Christian are the biggest fighters of Communism, while it's closer to the true belief than other forms of gov't.]
Get your Unix fortune now!
A chair stands on four legs. Knock out one... and the chair begins to wobble.
That is how debate works. You chip away.
Plus I have a general distaste for Christians who go into Afghanistan or the like just to convert peoples. If they are helping, that's great. But you aren't supposed to steal their identity away from them.
Get your Unix fortune now!
The facts:
Christians fight everyday to rip people of their history and identity. Just as Communism does.
Communism doesn't promote atheism. It relies on it's populace to put the state before religion. In a true communist nation religion isn't needed what so ever. The state provides all, not god. You can't have sects in a communist state as that breaks the chain. Communism doesn't teach no god... it teachs state only!
Tibet: Tibet wants to be a religious state on it's own! It's not a matter of religions, it's a question of freedom to believe what they want AND they want to split from China!
Christians will convert anyone. It's a Romanized version of Judaism, what do you expect?
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I think you are confused.
We are talking about China... not the US!
Chinese can do what they want. You on the other hand have no issue.
The people who want to free Mumia Abu-Jamal however are the same people who want to 'free' China.
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