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China Develops Their Own CPU: The "Dragon Chip"
vaxzilla writes "China's People's Daily
Online is reporting in
this article that the Computer Institution of the Chinese Academy of
Science have developed a new CPU, which they're calling the Dragon Chip.
The report isn't clear on the technical details of the chip, though it
does state, somewhat confusingly, that it, `is based on the RISC
structure, a totally another standard. Therefore, it will not fall into
the intellectual property right trap.' They're running Linux on the chip
and have built a server around it, Soaring Dragon. It looks like China is
starting to tell both Microsoft and Intel to take a hike. Interesting
times are ahead."
maybe because they don't like palladium either?
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
I didn't realize chinese people actually made a lot of references towards dragons.. i thought it was like a western misconception or something.. either way, this sounds like an exciting chip.
Now they can run their firewall cheaper and more efficiently, without worrying about getting help from outside sources. They should have a really easy time oppressing their people from here on out.
Are the Chinese going to release their mods to the GPLd code when they distribute their version of Linux? Is there anything anybody over here can do about it if they don't? In particular, will the US government, usually real quick to condemn IP violations and theft when there's money involved, lean on the Chinese government to obey the GPL?
It would be interesting to figure out the CPU details from the code they release...
Infuriate left and right
Cyberpunk, here we come.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
If they look like big gobs of random, evolved circuits, we'd better go looking for fake spaceships in the Taklamakan desert.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Will they be called Double Dragons?
..........FULL STOP.
...or their internal codename, Soaring Middle Finger to the West.
Article here:
This server is not slashdotted...yet.
If I had a sig, this is where it would be.
The new chip is rumored to use the rarely seen iterative data fetch instruction (ANDTHN) to retrieve data from ram (really annoyed memory). In keeping with the RISC philosophy, this is the only instruction the cpu supports when interacting with other entities in the system.
;))
(if you haven't seen "dude, where's my car" this will make no sense. so go watch the movie
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
with the Dragonball chip
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Built a sparc, maybe? If it's running Linux, you'd have to assume that they've cloned a chip linux runs on.
They say the chip won't conflict with IP because it's RISC. Obviously that makes no sense, as CISC instruction sets can't be copywriten either (obviously)
There are a few open source chip designs though, I think sun may have done that with one of their SPARC designs (or perhaps community sourced it). And there may be some free MIPS cores out there.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This being not a for-profit fly-by-night sweatshop, but a research institute, rumour has it that they cloned Alpha.
I hope they did, because there is no microprocessor architecture that holds more promise then the Alpha, and it is a shame on the US supposedly pro-competitive, efficient culture that it has been cancelled due to Digital being inefficient in marketing it and then Intel not wanting the competition.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
China, as far as I know, doesn't have suitable factories to fab highly integrated chips of this kind. On the other hand, Taiwan does, and a lot of them at that. So many, in fact, that Taiwan is eager to find companies that want to outsource their production. For the Chinese companies it would make good sense in many aspects, because of the proximity, the culture and language they have in common with the Chinese from Taiwan.
However, this seems to be a project very dear to the Chinese govt., and I don't suppose they would want to outsource it to Taiwan with whom they could be at war any moment.
What other options would China have? Honk Kong? Russia? Perhaps Malaysia (they have some big fabs, too, although not as advanced as the Taiwanese).
Sigged!
"the Dragon Chip is proved to be very sound in performance, steady and reliable in operation and utterly sufficient to meet the working requirement of the server and website"
'utterly sufficient'? is that like 'majestically plain'?
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
I agree about the Alpha. In fact, nowadays the only decent RISC architectures with some chance for survival are the Power from IBM and SPARC from Sun (with the latter having a bit more chance, because they don't depend on the Wintel world as much as IBM does). HP gave in to Intel as well as Digital.
Too bad because RISC is, in fact, the better technology and it had a formidable start, back in the 80's.
Sigged!
I read an interview with one of the Dragon Chip
project leader (Dr Hu) a few months ago in a magazine. It gives a lot more details if I can
still recall correctly.
The reporter interviewed him after their team booted into Linux successfully with their prototype chip (or I should say FPGA implementation). Follow the common practice, they have written a C simulator for the chip, followed by hardware logic verification with FPGAs. I think the latest news is refering to
the completion of the initial silicon design.
The team focuses on the hardware design. The proposed chip is compatible with the MIPS instruction, IIRC. For the floating point
arithmatic, it follows the IEEE 754 standard. That's why they can boot to Linux to verify their
design quite early on without too much tweaking.
The targeted performance is close to PII. Not too bad for an embedded microprocessor at this moment... But, maybe a bit old when they commerically release it. But, as long as they can find applications into consumer electronics, the chip may get a good life like our good old Z80, HC11... Nevertheless, it is a good achievement consider the fact that the bulk of the team has no previous MCU design experience.
The article states RISC, so I would guess it's fair to say it's not a pentium clone of any type.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
China hasn't been communist for quite a long time; there's plenty of private industry (both local and foreign), and significant disparity in wealth between the rich and the poor. It's essentially a capitalist one-party state. It's still socialist in some ways, though mostly unofficially (a lot of the large private companies are indirectly controlled by people in high places in the government).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"your CPU cycles are belonging to us!!!"....
./'ed ................
Wonder what they think is going on @ People's Daily Online as they get
Julius Caesar - Act I, Scene i: "What mean'st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow!"
The article doesn't make any mention of DRM-enabling technologies like Palladium embedded on the Dragon chip. So if you value freedom, support China, I guess.
I dread the day when Chinese citizens talk amongst themselves about the funny things Americans can't do with their computers.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
Since when has IP ever been an issue in The peoples Republic of China? They don't obey international laws. They have jet fighter pilots who like to fly too close and crash into USA spy planes. They have a thing for stealling software like we could only imagine in the USA. They have the comfort of not having to worry aout IP-cops in China. They distribute pirate copies of MS code like you could not belive. To read this article and see it talk about being worried about Intel's IP on processor technologies, and then be so naive to claim that since they are based on a RISC arch that they are immune. Ha! The fact is that even RISC's are entangled in IP. The only reason they can get away with certain architecture designes is because China doesn't have to obey forign IP rights. Another issue mentioned inthe article is the idea taht China has defence issues to worry about, and the reliance on forgine tech is bad for them. This I belive more than anything else. We, the USA, asked Sony to stop fabricating the Emotion chip in China fabs because it is actually capable of being used in guidance systems for rockets, and capable of being installed in parrallel to form supper computers. So China needs its own processor technologies, and they need to coem true with the notion that they dont' actualyl care about the USA laws, or existing tech in the field of proc fab.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
The Chinese RMB, on the other hand, is worth a lot less. It's worth 1/8 of a dollar, and average people earn only about 1,000 RMB a month, if they even have a job. A halfway decent, probably barely usable computer costs well over 8,000 RMB, making it out of reach for most workers because they spend most of that money on food and housing anyway.
One reason for the high prices is because of the fact that much of the parts are imported, and only assembled in China under the brands Legend, iBuddie, etc... If this archetecture of chip gets popular in China, more of it will be produced within the nation, making it less expensive, then soon after will come cheaper motherboards, the cases are already made in China anyway... This would mean lower prices, making personal computers within the reach of a lot more Chinese. So, this chip, I say, is a Good Thing(TM), and a step in the right direction.
At least one government is pushing forward technology in their country instead of limiting the shit out of it (ala DMCA, DRM, etc).
Oops, I've said too much. Pretty soon they are gonna start rounding up supposed communists again.
The distinction is fading quite a bit. Modern x86 chips have RISC cores, but have additional hardware outside the core to translate the CISC instruction set to the core RISC instruction set. On a true RISC chip, the translation from higher-level constructs to lower-level opcodes happens in software at the compilation stage. The functional and performance difference between the two approaches isn't really that huge anymore, since this CISC->RISC translation doesn't slow things down a whole lot.
Now what does slow things down is the hardware having to deal with parallelizing code in the pipeline and avoiding all the variou ssorts of problems that can cause. Both RISC and CISC chips generally do this in hardware. The Itanium is the first to abandon that approach, and say "it's up to the compiler to make sure stuff doesn't mess up when we pipeline." Speeds things up a lot, but makes writing compilers damn near impossible, and writing hand-coded assembler completely impossible.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Speed is made up of roughly 2 components - clock speed and IPC (instructions per cycle).
Clock speed comes from 2 factors - technology and pipelining. Technology implies high level, extremely expensive fabs. Pipelining is a well that has run dry (today's processors do very little in a pipe stage, and it's simply not worth it to make them do less).
IPC you get from a complex core (you usually add more microarchitectural features to the processor to allow it to retire more instructions per cycle). Complexity however implies longer design and (even more important) longer testing. It's no wonder there are so few players left in the microprocessor area (the costs are huge).
A small retail price, obviously, comes from mass production. China is indeed a huge market, but more in terms of population size, not income. China's GNIPC (gross national income per capita) in 2000, as reported by worldbank, is ~ 750$ per annum.
Allow me to be skeptical :))
(as always
The Raven.
The Raven
Oh, by the way, if you meant Richard Stallman, he is not a communist either. Just ask him. If that isn't enough, examine his beliefs (and while some of them may be similar to communism (as most people have some beliefs similar to communism, otherwise it would never have been popular), many are not).
HP gave in to Intel as well as Digital.
;)
Well not really Digital. They were bought by a company that had already given in to Intel. Well, not actually given in, since the big Q was built on Intel to begin with.
Also, don't forget ARM, not used in "computers" but lots of pda's and whatnot. Unless of course your omission and your statement about "decent RISC architectures" are related
There are over a dozen companies in the U.S. that develop their own CPU's all the time (in the form of Microcontrollers). For example, TI, Motorola, Microchip, MIPS and many others. It's not just Intel, AMD, and VIA that know how to make CPU's.
There is no way that this chip is completly original anyway. All the know-how on developing it probably came from the U.S. or Europe. All you would need is a few textbooks, datasheets, and a few good engineers for development. With enough time/money any company or government could develop their own CPU.
And the total goatse.cx like reaming they have taken over the last few hundred years, you realize that Western Democracy is not exactly perfect either.
Still, it is a valid point that you make.
END COMMUNICATION
China gets the big beautiful dragons and here in the US all we get are the damn Underpants Gnomes.
I think China got the long end of the stick on this one.
If it weren't for the software being made available in source form, this level of adapability would not be possible. If they were forced to use Microsoft, they'd have to create some level of virtual machine in order to run NT or the like.
So let's ponder that open source not only makes the software more available, but also the hardware choice. The source was in front of them. They have all the labor they could want and I'm guessing they pay just as much for the programming expertise as they do for rice field workers (next to nothing). Now we can run anything we like and still get the Linux that the world is just beginning to become comfortable with.
Hardware independance. Software vendor independance. If I didn't know any better, I'd say those were a bunch of damned capitalist pigs taking advantage of the free labor of others to their own advantage. (Did they release the source code of their changes?)
Congratulations to the Chinese -- they aren't the enemy that the Soviets were and the women are hotter too.
Maybe because it's not funny?
Of course with the translation issue and all, the entire article was rather "interesting" (I was imagining a talking head with the English coming out, but with the lips mouthing the original Chinese). But anyway anyone else find this line very curious?
...". Man, talk about double talk.
The Dragon Chip is proved to be very sound in performance, steady and reliable in operation and utterly sufficient to meet the working requirement of the server and website.
"Sound", "steady and reliable", "utterly sufficient". Huh? Sounds like Sparc market speak for "yeah our performance sucks, but it runs lots of software and you don't need that much performance anyway. Oh and just in case you do, you can get the 512 processor version when we ship it next quarter, or maybe the quarter after that
as opposed to the enlightened, freedom-loving united states of america? I don't know what country -you-'re from, but the united states, where I hail from, is responsible for bombing and napalming civilians (including children), toppling democracies when they don't like the elected leader, and engaging in covert acts of terror around the world, while skillfully duping it's populace into giving away it's civil liberties. disinfo.org - guerrillanews.com
Remember, the united states is an exremely oppressive government that uses whatever it can get its hands on to harm people. I hope we fail.
What you just described is the greatest symtom of the free market, while free market does have (Alot) of virtues, free market should never be considered an end all.
Could you elabeorate more on this thought of yours? i.e. what other symptoms are there, what do you exactly mean?
Sigged!
Some of the unique things that this CPU will feature are:
* Automatically reallocates all system devices to have equal priority, bringing your system to a slow crawl.
* Chip will spend all of its spare cycles figuring out how to stop you from using productive applications and networking with other computers.
* Keystroke logging functionality integrated with automatic emailing capabilities to the state police.
* If running linux with sendmail, makes sure that the service runs as an open-relay for spammers
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
....the problem is that an hour later your application still wants more.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Yes, they are related. I have not forgotten ARM, and I ma sure that it will be around for a long time, but I was thinking about the more powerful CPUs.
That said, ARM as a company still has some fire under the quiet ashes, and 170 M under the belt. They have the technical ability to design a powerful new RISC chip - but do they want to risk it (excuse the pun!)?
Sigged!
Well the beauty of RISC is the PII target performance can easily be ramped up to a P4 3G by simple manufacturing upgrades. ...Just like any other chip produced in the past 10 years, or in fact any CISC chip produced within the past 20.
:).
Linewidth scaling makes *any* CPU design faster. CISC was abandoned because it was very hard to pipeline, not because of some magical barrier to linewidth stepping.
Even the pipelining limit is a soft one, because with enough translation stages you can map any CISC set on to a RISC core - which is exactly what every x86 since the Pentium Pro has done.
Sorry if I'm venting, but you were the lucky post that finally made the "uninformed comment" bucket overflow
I believe that this is a very short-sighted and narrow-minded view of what's happenning here. This is not about being able to spy or citizens or having control of citizens' computers. This is about having economic freedom. It's about building an technologically based governmental system and economy built from the ground up in a way which is not regulated by Western governments and corporations. It is similar to the Linux movement and that's why they're getting Linux to run on it.
By building computer systems from the ground up on their own hardware, own chips, own Linux builds with their own applications, they are no longer on the leash represented by terms of service agreements with intel, microsoft, and any other company and have the freedom to do their business their way.
And I greatly admire this sentiment because it represents a 100% swing away from being controlled by anyone and anything.
And don't just think of this in the context of China! The scope of this is much bigger. For example, why do we use Linux? It's because we want to achieve freedom from the requirements, restrictions, fallacies, and roadblocks imposed by using solutions owned by big companies with who knows what code in them. We use Linux because we control it and it represents freedom from the restrictions of some other software maker. China has taken this one step further and has built their own architecture so they can do exactly what they want with no silly restrictions designed to channel money so some exective in a Western office tower. Wouldn't you like to do that?
I give TWO BIG THUMBS UP to China and their initiative in making a non-half-assed attempt to build their system their way. They have the long-term vision to realise that they need true economic freedom from the West to achieve modern-day economic greatness and I admire their initiative. I wish we were all so lucky.
Sorry, but this got under my skin and I had to say something.
g overnment)(Anarcist)],[(corporate crime)(communist)],[(drug laws)(adict)],[(survailence)(criminal)]
...and I'm sure I'm forgetting some.
*tosses on the tinfoil hat yet again*
Please research the following:
DMCA
CBDTPA
Other parts of current IP law and corporate use of them (esp. the media corps.)
Almost all current commercial EULAs
PATRIOT Act
Then there's everyones favorite, groupthink, and the social stigma that if you question (something) you are (something bad) [(religon)(evil)],[(censorship)(pervert)],[(Laws/
The truth? We can search for it as long as it doesn't offend someone in power, kinda like, wait for it, CHINA. I admit China's policy seems more draconian; but keep in mind what we're seeing is from the outside in country where those in power trying to convince us that we aren't really having our rights liquidated out from under us. It makes our lives look good if the lives in another country are portrayed as relativly worse. Considering the majority of the internet is still in control of US & co, its really not that surpising that China stuck something up to keep its own powermongers happy.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I'm kind of wondering what that "Troll" mod was for. Everyone knows that half the software in China is pirated, if not more.
They even had to have American engineers fix their Long March missile, which had a 70% launch pad failure rate. Supposedly that was to help their space program, but now they have cross-Arctic capable nukes.
If only they would pirate the ideas of human rights and some democracy + free speech.
...
So... if these chips suddenly go up brearthing fire and smoke, we'll have the perfect reason why, right?
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
Meanwhile, let's completely ignore the fact that if we can get americans into these chinese RISC chips are any good, we could damage the industry giants that threaten our own freedoms silently like a thief in the night! sounds like a brilliant plan, jerry...
Right, as long as it gives us the slightest advantage, who cares about the rest of the world. You honestly thinking cutting into Intel and AMD's market share is going to do anything?
And if you think the depradations that the Chinese Public Security knobs inflict on the Tibetans (or Uigur or Mongols or just about any non-Han ethnic groups) somehow pales in comparison to those "industry giants" you're just completely off base.
You think the way Beijing is trying to destroy entire cultures, the way they use torture and execution to silence dissidents, or the way they're constantly trying to destabilize the region by threatening Taiwan is somehow of less importance than a vague distrust of big corporations? I think your priorities are a little off.
A reference to an Old English work about a Sweedish hero fighting in Denmark on an American website's story about a Chinese processor.
You've geat mojo.
Let's see $40 billion divided by 17 billion CPUs roughly equals $2.35. I think that AMD and Intel are going to be pretty scared and their stock is going to drop pretty fast when China starts exporting the Dragon CPU.
I don't know if anyone has noticed but Western countries are at the beginning of an economic war with China. I've seen it already happening with tools during the past 2 years. Automotive tools from China are being sold for 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of Western made tools. How can we compete with an economic giant where the average earnings are only $750/yr?
In the early 70s, if you purchased something "made in Japan", it was considered a joke and poor quality. We've seen how that has changed over the past 30 years. Made in Japan now indicates a quality product. I believe we are seeing the same growth cycle happening now with China except that it involves a country of 1 billion people.
I think that Western nations should start to get worried about the future of their industries....
came up with are gunpowder, clocks, noodles, nearly all of our domesticated livestock, nearly all of our decorative flowers and plants, civil government by competitive examination, cotton, silk, Lacquer, the compass, paper, printing, paper money, kites, riding horeses, the horse collar, the plow, the princple of the helicopter, the wheelbarrow, matches, medicine, . . . etc., etc., etc..
Just who is standing on who's shoulders? Why on earth do you think people bothered the risk of the "Silk Road?"
Not to mention the fact that in modern times Chinese researchers have walked off with genuine Nobel Prizes.
Don't mistake China with China's government of the mere last 50 years or so.
KFG
...with being associated with communism in the past. Great, now no "red-blooded, patriot capitalist" is going to take us seriously. :)
Why bother.
I agree with you about research being more conducive in the West due to government structure, but I also disagree with the assessment of the post that I replied to that there probably isn't anything original in the processor based merely on the fact that it comes out of China.
I also did not flame the west in any way. I flamed the parent more than I flamed the west.
Humorless sig goes here.
outside of his job description, he was quite an intellectual. Can you imagine an intellectual as president today? Not just a Bush joke, either. A wave of anti-intellectualism has overtaken this country. It's really sad...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Informative? Should be "Insightful" ;-)
There's not much use in handcoding assembler anymore. Compilers have been good enough for the past ten years or so that it's hard to beat their optimizations by handcoding.
I used to write a lot of performance critical code and often examined the compiler's code--on many different platforms and many different compilers--to see if there was any tweaking I could do or any tricks it had missed and never found anything worth changing. Well, a minor thing here or there, that maybe contribute a percent or two improvement. But by far the largest gains were changes that required domain specific knowledge, which could be accomplished at the source code level.
If there is a lot of character-by-character string processing, for example, much more can be gained--on the order of 20% in some cases--by translating the chars in a string from 8 or 16 bits to the cpu's native integer type, since that's what the processor is optimized for.
Um, the DMCA is a far cry from China. I can sit here and make all the cracks I want about Mr. Bush. I couldn't do that in China. World of difference my friend.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The reality, as you point out, is that the people in China is mainly poor, and don't have the ability to own a computer.
True, but misleading. Factor in China's huge population, and even though most Chinese may fall into the above category, you're still left with a middle class population of a couple of hundred million. There are as many potential customers for these sorts of goods in China as there are, say, in the US or Europe.
(And that's why American companies are so eager to get into Chinese markets.)
-- Alastair
The parent poster is on crack, but please do realize that the US is a far different entity than what the average clueless* citizen believes it to be. It is extremely concerened about maintaining economic superiority over the rest of the world, and a lot of its practices (like the WTO) hurt burgeoning industrial systems in developing nations just so US companies have more people to sell their products to. They do have some very bad policies that kill people just as surely (though more indirectly) as any terrorist attack. However, don't look at this as a US-bash. Every single powerful country in history has had its bad aspects. In the end, I'd say that the US's love of freedom and genuine desire to advance humanity (through technology and whatnot) outweight its bad parts, but those bad parts *are* there, and they are very real.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The astrisk was meant for the following point:
*) No, this isn't an American bash. People all over the world are mostly clueless. In many respects, Americans are better educated then most, though it often doesn't seem that way because American pop culture tends to glorify the "common man" rather than the intellectual as is done in other countries.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Its not just him. Take a look at Clinton. Whether or not you like his ethics or policies, you have to admit that he was genuinely smart. But he downplayed it like anything. Since when did it become bad to be smart? I *want* my president to be smarter than me. I'm not smart enough to run the country, so his ideas better be over my head.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
From the perspective of free software, losing copyright isn't such a disaster. You couldn't compel people to cough up modified source code anymore (causing the GPL to behave more like BSD), but you'd simultaneously gain the right to freely distribute and/or plagiarize anything you wanted-- including proprietary source code that some disgruntled employee posted to usenet.
One of the fundamental reasons to use the GPL vs. straight public domain is to prevent someone from just making a few changes to your free code, then using copyright law to prevent you from using the new work. This is why the GPL was first invented. In a society without copyright, that's not such a concern.
I'm not saying that a world without copyright would be a perfect place, but I certainly don't think it would be a disaster for projects that currently use the GPL. They'd probably be better for it. While Microsoft might be able to plagiarize a little bit of free code, their business model would basically collapse. Linux, on the other hand, would get along at least as well as BSD does now.
The formal name of the dragon chip is Godson. It is not x86 compliant but MIPS III compliant. The specification is very rough, 0.18um CMOS, 8k data cache and 8k instruction cache, 32 bit integral WORD and 64 bit float WORD. According to the news report, it has some unique character such as buffer overflow protection. The stated performance is ambiguious. One artical said at 12.5Mhz, the integral performance is roughly about half of a 486/50, and the float performance is equal to a 486/50. In the news website, they said it is about a PII. But in the formal report issued by the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology, they claimed at 200Mhz, its performance is about a 180Mhz MIPS R5000 (maybe dual cpu)SGI O2. The highest frequency is 266Mhz. After one year preparation, it will be put into production. I suppose it can't be seen in the retail market and the biggest buyer is surely the Chinese government.
The Naval Academy is a real university, and it's better than most.
Jimmy Carter was trained as an engineer probably moreso and better than the average Slashdot reader who self-identifies as "engineer".
Sheesh. "I hoped this has helped a little." Yeah, right.
You're correct only insofar as it's true that the American public doesn't think much of anyone that smacks of intellectualism and rarely do contemporary candidates emphasize their academic credentials. Carter's status as a real engineer, in fact, worked against him as it was used to validate the view that he was a hopelessly naive scientist/engineer type out of his depth in big-time politics. And, honestly, there was probably truth to that at the time.
... what with oppressing Tibet, keeping democracy out and enforcing a 1-child policy via compulsory abortions, I would have thought they'd have their hands tied. I suppose there are a few billion of them.
Seriously though, why don't they overthrow their government? Don't they know?
+1, so true it hurts. I wish I had some mod points. China's human rights record sucks.
Buying Chinese chips to remain free is not that stranger than having to buy tickets into space on Russian rockets.
:v)
Vik
Although I congratulate the Chinese on this excellent decision, I cannot help but feel the dangers involved: If such world powers move to Unix, *and* also save themselves from crippling DRM technologies being cooked up here in the west, by the west's CPU manufacturers, they will end up with an easy technical hegemony. They will have fast, secure, free systems while the west wallows in the proto-fascist and muddy results of "war against {Piracy, Drugs, Terrorism, Anything-not-Christian,...}". Imagine the incredulence of a chinese teenager 10 years from now when (s)he hears that our CPU's refuse to run any software not mandated by the state, and that posessing CPU's not so protected will get one executed without a trial. Imagine that, when that same teenager can run and toy with Linux from a young age, and be creative and innovative with it.
Ring! Ring! A Bell should be ringing in our heads now! Or does it "toll" for us, instead?
...there might be 1,5 billion Linux users in china running red flag linux on dragon chips.
OK, realistic figure would more like 2/3 of the whole population, just one billion users.
RMS is not a Communist; if he were, he would have written a "Manifesto", like Karl Marx did.
He's also not a luddite; if he were, he would have written a "Manifesto", like Theodore "Ted, The Unibomber" Kazinsky did.
Uh... Oh... Er... Wait...
-- Terry
To make an incredibly unpopular comment, I will point out that even at over 1,000,000 people (a gross overestimate by the news media, IMO), nation-wide, in China protesting their government at the time of Tieneman Square, that's a really tiny fraction of the population.
In fact, it's 1/10th of 1% of the population of China, at the time.
The moral equivalent in the U.S. would be if all the people camped out in and around Hayden Lake, Idaho (~250,000 people) demanded that the U.S. Government change to suit them.
Also, FWIW, the U.S. currently has about 6 times that many people in prison -- an an equal number of police officers.
Should we let our own dissidents dictate our form of government "because there's a lot of them"?
The people involved in both cases are tiny minorities of radical dissidents, and aren't representative of the will of the overwhelming majority of the general population.
Yeah,the numbers seem like large numbers, but it's really relative.
-- Terry
No one would make that mistake... the Dragon chip apparently has an MMU.
The Motorolla "DragonBall" CPU (the CPU used in the "Palm Pilot" and similar toys) doesn't have an MMU. Without an MMU, it's useless for running a protected mode OS with virtual memory.
Yeah, there's a couple of kludgy ports to the thing (a kludgy Linux and a kludgy BSD 2.9, last I heard), but they are just as unstable as the PalmOS (or Windows 3.11, for that matter), because of lack of memory protection.
I don't understand why they don't put an MMU into the "Palm Pilot" or other devices. Maybe they *like* having the things crash because one idiot writes one bad program, and stomps on everything else so bad you have to hit the rest buttin with a paper-clip.
Maybe we all need to compare PalmOS to Windows 3.11 more often and more loudly, to shame them into putting in the extra square millimeter of doped silicon into the surface mount plastic case...
-- Terry
When Intel and Microsoft got entrenched in the windows/x86 architecture development of PC almost stopped. Sure we have faster CPU but its in reality ancient and built on very old specs. Microsofts heavy battle against everything crossplattform capable has tied us down on x86 hardware. There are million of ways to make CPU's but we use the oldest one even today.
Fierce competition would have evolved computers long away from x86 if it wasnt for the tie in to x86 and windows. Sure the US has benefitet in short term by the monopoly but when competition stop innovation stops also. Now just about any country with cheap labour can take current development in stasis and run with it.
If you dont believe me take an old 386 DX and compare it to a brand new Intel Pentium, the similaritys are stunning.
HTTP/1.1 400
How could you possibly have inferred from my statement that I was saying communism and democracy are mutually exclusive? The Democratic Republic of the Congo is neither communist (in name or in practice) nor is it a democracy (though it does have that in the name).
The substance of my comment was that claiming that China must be communist because its ruling party calls itself the "Communist Party" makes about as much sense as claiming that the Democratic Republic of the Congo must be democratic because it has the word "Democratic" in its name.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm not worried about any IP rights violations in the beginning, because Intel, AMD, Motorola, TI, or whoever is making similar chips could get Chinese imports blocked from our economy until they get that matter resolved.
Nor am I worried that the Chinese will develop a private version of Linux and not release it under GPL, because as many other posters have pointed out, a private tree would be hard for them to maintain, and would reduce their general compatibility.
What worries me about this is that China isn't exactly known for its pioneering efforts on behalf of minimizing the impact of the technology industry on the environment. I am worried that, in their efforts to introduce this into a world marketplace, they won't follow the minimum environmental requirements that the rest of the industry deals with. I think we should be prepared to ask any company that announces they're looking at using this chip whether they've ensured that those standards will be met, and that we are prepared to hold them accountable for the actions of their suppliers.
I'm all for more chips in the marketplace. I might even buy these if I get in the market and there is an English-language Linux distro (or, better yet, maybe OSX? Wouldn't that be Steve Jobs' best coup, porting that BSD-based OS to it? (Can I say coup when talking about Communist China without being shot?)). But the environmental standards must be followed.
Get off my launchpad!
There are creative people all over the world, including China. The only difference is, the United States provides a far better and free envrionment for those creative people to create.
contributions of einstein and other great german thinkers where the heck would the US be?
Well, Einstein and many of the other scientists might possibly be dead.
It's called freedom, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. The US isn't the best because of it's indigious population, it's the best because in the past we've allowed individuals from different walks of life to live peacefully here.
Sadly, that's been changing, but I'd still rather live here then a country that thinks nothing of relocating my entire town, along with hundreds of thousands of other people from homes their famlies have had for over 1,000 years for a public works project that will be usless in 30 years.
I'd rather live here then in a country that basically forces people to have abortions.
I'd rather live here then in a country that kills you for a minor drug violation.
And people like you who love to bash me as an 'egotistic idiot'... I have nothing against Chinese people. I just don't like the Chinese government, and to that extent, I'm happy for all of the people of Chinese descent who have made it over here.
The Internet is generally stupid
> i ment is it 100% like RISC, that there isn't anything that is jinxed or
There's no standard that defines what 100% RISC is or not. RISC just means "reduced instruction set computer" but that term is often missused. So (marketing) people want you to know that Pentium-whatever or other X86-compatible CPUs have "RISC inside" and other stupid nonsense.
RISC is (was) a design philosophy - no feature.
> partially incompatible to the way other RISC cpus handle sosme thing...
Err - RISC CPUs don't have to be compatible at all (instruction set wise) - a SPARC CPU won't process software written vor ARM CPUs. And how things are handled internally doesn't matter for users and software developers.
Any device, process or method written on any "Patent Application Form" henceforth shall be in breach of this Patent unless a royalty of 50% is paid on the revenue from the device, process or method written on any "Patent Application Form" henceforth forthwith ;-)
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
...so, if honourable East Asian nation of large population nuke loud, brash section of Americas (mostly part between Mexico and Canada), honourable East Asian nation continue to be able to get processor. Also, can nuke without fear of software or hardware backdoor giving tipoff to enemy or interfering with launch, guidance or business afterward.
Which begs the question: what effect would nuking Washington have on the USA's computing ability? Substantial improvement? IMHO, it would be better for the USA to strike first by disbanding microsoft and assigning many of their previous employees to Open Source projects.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Although oddly enough, even though it's called the "Silk Road," what mostly came back from China was tea and laquerware, silk was too expensive, even for royalty, to make much of a trade route.
But the *real* reason for the road east was India and *pepper,* India gave the world most of its spices. The upper classes could live without silk, but it would be damned if it would live without pepper.
KFG
before the US lets go of the past, that's why we're rattling swords to bomb Iraq and won't rest until Afghanistan is a US 'protectorate.'
We're still kinda sore at Mexico too for putting up such a fight at defending 'our' land.
The past created the present, and will create the future, and there's plenty of blame to go around. If everyone wants to shake hands and make friends that'll be ok by me, but you'll have to convince 'them' to go along.
KFG
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
...for imports from China?
To benefit workers in industries in which American companies can't compete due to very expensive regulation (minimum wage; workplace environment standards; disability; collective bargaining; parental leave; health care; etc.), some dumbnut president is bound to suggest that we try to keep foreign goods out with tariffs or quotas.
Witness W.'s protective tariffs for steel.
The natural impulse for government will be to protect special interests (in this case, unionized voters) against the evils of the free market, instead of telling them what they don't want to hear: that they should find a new profession, since the one they're in can't make them the amount of money they are used to making without artificially inflating prices for the rest of the public.
I don't know about you, but I am simply not willing to pay more than I absolutely need to in order to get the goods and services I want, just to subsidize the ability of someone to continue working in a job that would be better sent overseas. If the quality of the Chinese-made goods is the same as or similar to the quality of the USA-made goods, and the price is lower, then I'm going to buy Chinese; done and done.
Free trade increases efficiency and, in the long run, will raise standards of living for all people. Pat Buchanan and the Jurassic-era conservatives are living with leftist union shills in a fantasy world of 50's America. Libertarians and the 80's-90's conservatives are the ones who truly understand what makes America great, and it isn't artificial trade barriers. =)
[ home ]
I don't think you realize what the Chinese are trying to do.
By developing their own CPU and operating system through official government sanction, it gives the government a way to effectively spy on Internet users because the government knows how everything works and will very likely use this knowledge to attempt such control. You are forgetting that mainland China is still in many ways an authoritarian state and the government is more than willing to spy on its own people to stamp out enemies of the state such as the Fulan Gong movement.
Does the book 1984 have any meaning to you? Mainland China is headed in that direction if government control of hardware and software technology has its way.
Let's not forget what happened to memory prices once the asian manufacturers started getting in on the act. In no way will a Chinese manufacturer be disinclined to export these devices once the performance is up to snuff. If they can produce computers that are affordable to a Chinese consumer, what will the US prices be like? Meanwhile, in WinTel land...
> China won't even let its people use Google.
Are you sure?
Yeah, the Chinese government will throw you in jail for cracking a foreign leader!
Oh please...
China hasn't been communist for quite a long time; there's plenty of private industry (both local and foreign), and significant disparity in wealth between the rich and the poor. It's essentially a capitalist one-party state. It's still socialist in some ways, though mostly unofficially (a lot of the large private companies are indirectly controlled by people in high places in the government).
The government owns the big companies; that is the definition of communism (ownership of the means of production by the "proletariat"). Since that hive mind thing has been a little slow in development, the proletariat are, er, represented by the government. But since they don't know what they really want and need, their true desires are implemented by an elite; the Party. They don't need an actual vote, you see.
None of that has changed. Call me when it does.
And Communist contries have always had significant disparities between rich and poor. The Party elite are the rich.
What is this, the eighties again? "They are too just like us! Well, except for that voting thing, and the government owning or controlling all the companies, and the gulag. Um, shut up, you McCarthyite!". Am I going to have to listen to all that tripe again with China?
This is quite a funny development. Our "free" economy is getting monopolized by mergers, innovation has slowed to a crawl, and since our economy is stagnating, the only way we can force our own companies to get back to work, is to support development in foreign countries.
If you think I'm wrong, just try to buy an American TV, or see how many American cars are on the road. Competitive stagnation, and lack of innovation, gave foreign countries the opportunity to completely annhilate American industries, time and time again. That is a big part of the reason that a single-job household cannot support a family. I don't even want to think of what will happen to our economy when computers (perhaps one of the last major American industries) become completely foreign-owned domain as well.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
without the contributions of einstein and other great german thinkers where the heck would the US be?
Lest we forget, Einstein and many other great thinkers had to come to the US to escape from tyrannical governments. The fact is that China has great potential, but their political system has and will prevent them from realizing that potential. Sure, they have a vast population and greatly talented citizens. But they also have a centrally planned economy and a poorly educated citizenry. The percentage of Chinese citizens that can read and write is less than the percentage of Americans that hold postgraduate degrees.
Like other centralized governments I expect that the Chinese will achieve some impressive accomplishments. After all, the Soviet Union was the first to put a man in orbit. But will their society achieve greatness? That is far more doubtful.
I'd rather live here then in a country that basically forces people to have abortions.
Well nobody is going to say that this is a pleasant situation but I really don't think that watching everyone starve because population growth is totaly out of control is a better one.
Would you really rather have it the other way?
This is all fine and good until some big fat corp takes that code, decides they own it or key modifications and blocks you out. China is just another big fat corp, except they get to make their own laws.
We shall see if China's lip service to information freedom is real. It's hard to imagine a country that openly practices censorship as commited to any kind of freedom. Chineese companies are infamous for patent infrigement, so all this railing against the "intelectual property trap" looks like a practical measure based on fear of trade reprisals. Looks and sounds like "Yankee inginuity" of a century ago, when the US ignored European patents. The US kept it up until it had enough "intelectual property" of its own.
The original question was if the US would lean on China for GPL violations. The answer, given the history above, is NO. Nor will they bother to enforce BSD. The US will only bother to limit imports if sufficient loss of royalty income is seen. Software that comes "for free" with a widget? Forget about it. That's going to include computers like the Dragon Whatnot.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
in a beowolf cluster
:-)
Unless some of the other (i.e. non Sino-govt-propoganda site) news sites are getting bogus information, you're going to need one hell of a cluster. These Intel-killers are supposed to run with the blistering power of a 486. Some other people have posted saying that "they don't mind if it's a bit slower, as long as it doesn't have Palladium." Well, here's their chance to put their money where their mouth is.
If the article I linked to is right, China plans to go from 486 to Pentium III level performance in one more year, and then to "the then internationally advanced level in 2005" in 2005.
That some hella good espionage, if they can pull that off. Moore's Law? Hell, the Chinese can set a new standard of their own, they'd be going so much faster.
On the up side, if they can ban (or throw heavy tariffs on) imported chips from Intel/AMD, I suspect Linux use will skyrocket. Why? Well, if you've ever tried using Windows XP on a 486, you might have some idea...
May we never see th
As a resident of Taiwan, I can tell you that you definitely need to get your vision checked.
Pro-China sentiment increasing in Taiwan? Not in this universe, sir. As the old Mainlander population passes on, the Taiwanese are becoming progressively less interested in the Mainland -- except as a business opportunity -- not more. The only reason 70% of Taiwanese favor maintaining the current status quo is because of Beijing's continued military threats. Absent that, I guarantee you pro-independence numbers would easily top 80%. This is not surprising, considering that less than 15 percent of Taiwanese even consider themselves Chinese, and most of those are the old mainlanders who came over with the KMT.
You may have also have overlooked the fact that the ruling political party happens to be the one with the pro-independence platform (while conversely, the only officially pro-unification party, the New Party, has been tottering on the brink of political extinction for at least the last two years); that the last two Taiwanese presidents have openly advocated Taiwanese independence (are are immensely popular); or that in the most recent national elections, the KMT's bid for a return to power was significantly hindered -- not helped -- by accusations of secret collusions with Beijing. Far from increasing, pro-unification sentiment in Taiwan has in fact found itself increasingly politically isolated in recent years.
And your suggestion that pro-unificationists in Taiwan are increasingly pro-PRC is especially entertaining. It is precisely amongst the most strongly pro-unification Taiwanese -- the old Mainlanders -- that anti-PRC sentiment is the highest.
Pro-PRC sentiment increasing.... {chuckle}
Lee Kai Wen
Taiwan, ROC
Ouch. We're bloody awful when we start running countries, aren't we?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I know several of your supposedly 'true engineers' who flunked out of sub nuke school. The people who work with the reactors almost all have eng degrees and have gone through at least 6 months of navy training that puts them at the top of their field. None of them have a problem getting a job when they get out.
Not to mention the training and drills that they go through in dealing with the pressures of saving a ship that is sinking or going through a melt down.
Compare this to the fact that a pretty good percentage of Electrical Engineers work at pretty mediocre jobs or, imagine this, aren't very good engineers.
In a pressure situation I'd put my money on Jimmy Carter any day over someone like Dean Kamen(the segway guy) who for all we know would just wet his pants in a tough situation.
oh, and the people i know who flunked out did so more because they couldn't deal with the pressure than because they couldn't pass technically.
You could install Linux on it.
No DRM on Motorola CPUs (yet), or IBM CPUs (yet).
No need to wait on vapor CPUs to satisfy your need for 'free' CPUs.
GPL Deconstructed
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The article claims that Dr Sun, the big cheese at Taiwanese manufacturer VIA, is the only person able to challenge Intel. Okay, VIA is a successful outfit. And, if you count in their motherboard and other products, maybe they are bigger competition to Intel than AMD? But AMD shouldn't really be ignored.
In her autobiographical book "Red China Blues" Canadian journalist Jan Wong has a brief chapter where she described interviewing Mao Zedong's grandson. He was, IIRC, the only descendant to bear Mao's name. And he was a big loser. Dim-witted. Incredibly spoiled. Someone with no accomplishments of his own. What did he want to do with his life? Well, he thought he would like to go to University in America, where he would study "Mao Zedong thought".
Mao Zedong thought! I would be amazed if there was a single University in the States where you could major in "Mao Zedong thought".
What is my point? One has to wonder whether China is a parochial, insular nation, where many interpret the rest of the world through the distorting lense of widely held prejudices. This article suggests this, as does Wong's anecdote.
If you are interested in China, I am going to recommend Wong's book. Wong is a extremely gifted writer. She is funny too.
Okay, I have read the article twice now, and I still can't feel sure that I know whether or not this chip is an intel clone.
I don't see this as meaningful, because lots of PR types here in the west have wanted to associate their CISC products with the buzz surrounding RISC and claimed that while their chips were CISC, they had "RISC-like elements".
Interesting how this article takes cracks at the oppressive western notion of intellectual property... I thought China offically agreed to respect intellectual property?
At least the USA allows its people to search for the truth. They may try to obscure it by posting what they want you to think is the truth over and over again, but they let you look for it. China won't even let its people use Google.
Then you'll be first to want to perform this experiment. On your homepage, make a hyperlink to www.farc-ep.org. The official web site of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, which the US claims is a terrorist group, and as such it is illegal to aid the communications of a terrorist group.
See if our government's reaction is any different to an unfavored source of information.
The govt is in charge of doing essential but not profitable things like roads, disaster relief, law enforcement, military etc. If the govt feels that access to technology is just as important as access to roads by all means it should provide the infrastucture. By developing and widely distributing subsidized chips and operating systems it enables private enterprise to function smoothly just like providing a nationwide highway system promotes commerce.
Technology changes too fast. My observation from the times I had temp/intern gov jobs is that the government is a bumbling, lumbaring beaurocracy that does not like change. They spend all day in Saftey Meetings and the like.
Private endevours have the risk of bankrupcty and the profit motive to pressure them to not be too political. The gov simply asks for more tax money if they get lame and need a bailout.
Most of the services governments provide don't change very often (even if they should). Who was the last to get rid of punched cards and COBOL?
France once created a gov-managed phone system that had internet-like capabilities. It did provide rather consistent service and did "function", but most are now tossing it for commercial PC's.
Who wants to be stuck in 2003 forever and ever?
I could be surprised, but my observations of how gov works (or doesn't) was not very inspiring. Maybe the OSS model will help China's endevour, but I doubt it.
I am not betting on it, dispite those below who are calling me "idiot".
Table-ized A.I.
Could not agree more. Moderators, please, Insightful +1 for the parent until he gets at least four.
I would add that the basic issue is free market without neither ethics to strive for the better, nor education to be able to choose and attain it. In absence of ethics and education, justice and schooling would do as a second best, but even this is being lost.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
> Oops, I've said too much. Pretty soon they are gonna start rounding up supposed communists again.
Oh please. I can guess you've never lived in a true opressive dictatoriship in the third world. It's one thing to complain about horrible laws like (DMCA), but it's quite another to start stating insipid comments about "how they're going to get me for my opinions". Please. Specially, when in the same post you mention a country like CHINA, where you can't even enjoy basic freedoms like the freedom of the press or the freedom to worship whatever God you want to.
Get some perspective.
- sigs are for wimps.
You make perfect sense, even though I am not sure I agree that this particular form of free market is more suitable for manufacturing environments than for services-oriented. I'll have to think about it a bit, but it doesn't seem that obvious. However, I guess we agree that the alternative is not a communist-style planned economy (the example of which nowadays you can see in cuba and laos) neither a merket-driven dictatorial government like China. I basically think that the free market economy of modern western countries, expecially the american, needs a little bit of tweaking - basically, better laws.
Sigged!
"I believe that sometimes it could be better when a minority group of dissidents are able to dictate a form of government (for instance, to replace tyranny which has been instituted and sustained by a brainwashed majority)."
Aren't all majorities with which you don't personally agree the result of brainwashing?
"Democracy isn't necessarily the ultimate good. Imagine three wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner...."
This analogy works for the first night, if everyone wears their "I am a wolf" or their "I am a sheep" T-shirts, respectively. After the first night, the analogy breaks down.
-- Terry
"Since when did it become bad to be smart?"
You do remember high school, don't you?
An embedded system is not a general purpose computer, on which people can run third party applications.
Your argument is valid for an embedded system, in which you control all software running on the platform, and in which your business model doesn't permit for future expansion into markets where there are application specific software requirements that don't result from consulting or OEM work by the original vendor.
For everything else, though, there's a need for protection domains, to act as a barrier between code you (the product vendor) wrote, and code written by someone else, and hosted on your device.
The Palm Pilot and similar devices don't have that.
You can argue that the Palm people didn't expect to have third party applicaitons which weren't vetted by their own Q.C. department, but if that's even ture, it would be because they overestimated their own ability to provide a "whole product", without third party involvement.
The Palm Pilot and related devices are popular today because the PalmOS platform, which may not have been intended to be any more open than your average game console, is in fact now much more open than, say, a firewall product.
Considering your firewall product, you've placed yourself in the position of having to support all third party applications that require an application layer proxy, by yourself.
This lets you manage the stability of the hardware platform you are using, since it lacks protection, but your cost is that every time Real comes out with a new product, or any time anyone else who doesn't know how to design a protocol comes out with a product that needs to transit your firewall to function, the options are only either the application isn't supported, or your company takes on the grunt work of creating the application layer proxy to support it.
IMO, that's not a sustainable business model. As an example: do you already support streaming media for Microsoft Media and Real Player? What about streaming Ogg Vorbis? How about FTP, which requires a stateful proxy?
For every mainstream protocol you can answer "yes" to, there are dozens of emerging protocols, with no clear winners, and even more protocols that are mainstream, but with little deployment in that model (how do you handle NAT-fanout of H.323 connections, for example?).
This is not to jump down your throat on this; I was a senior software engineer for a company that built a similar product (the Whistle InterJet), that did not permit third party access to the platform. I know from cold, personal experience that preventing platform access by third parties is not a long term success strategy.
-- Terry
Yeah, but I went to a geek highschool, everyone else was as smart or smarter. So yeah, I have some faith left in our society. But middle school bit...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Like him or not, it takes a certain level of intelligence to get into the institutions he did (Georgetown, Yale, Oxford) without a big powerful family to sway the admissions board.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
GNU/Linux is not a private entity, it is a public one, anyways. The only difference between non-profit entities like the GNU project and a regular government is that a government has land boundaries
They are very different. For one, there is much less of a hierarchy in the decision-making process. Second, if you want to add a certain feature, you don't have to fill out a million forms and have a million meetings, you JUST DO IT. If others like it, it stays, otherwise it fades. In gov agencies, such would be called "insubordination".
Table-ized A.I.
*shudder* that's a scary thought -- a bunch of ConRail train drivers at the controls of a nuclear reactor.
The reality has already been said by others -- Sub drivers go through more physics and engineering training than most of us "computer engineers" go through at school.
No joke - when a friend visited some distant relatives of his wife and identified himself as an engineer, they asked him which train company he worked for.
That is true... they seem to mention in the translation that they are worried about products from the USA. The article eluded to the defence sector of China. So maybe.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Who's the narrowminded moron? Did I say "people of Chinese ethnicity can't do anything smart"?
No.
I'm talking about China the country, as opposed to people of slightly different skin tones.
If you're an example of another country's attitude, and someone concerned with equal treatment of different races, you're pretty sorry spokesman for your anonymous country. Why don't we sit down and compare major scientific breakthroughs, human rights, relative wealth, and other interesting statistics country-by-country?
Is it OK for you to speak derisively and with prejudice against me and my country, and then expect me to keep my mouth shut about other countries' problems?
I think I know why people hate America. And the problem isn't within the U.S. borders.
...
Then you know the wrong family. My wife's family also has strong economic connections to the mainland (Shanghai), but there's little favorable sentiment toward the PRC.
The heavy investment of Taiwanese on the PRC is changing political opinions.
Economic ties may be changing opinions toward the mainland (thought not in the way you think), but it is not changing opinions toward the PRC, which is a heavy-handed political regime whose authority has never extended to this island.
which is why the PRC is not about to drop that threat.
It is precisely such barbarism which increased anti-PRC sentiment, not decreased it, and not just in Taiwan, but throughout the regin. Beijing tried a show of force in '96, and Taiwan elected Lee Teng-hui, the most independence-minded candidate, as a result. Beijing rattled its sabers again in 2000, and got Chen Shui-bian for its efforts. Beijing has yet to figure out that its 19th century attitudes are largely responsible for anti-China feelings in Taiwan.
As for young people's attitudes, I'm an educator by profession, who works with young people, and I don't see any of the pro-PRC sentiment you claim is growing amongst the young. Nada. Zip.
The hope of pro-independence groups is that the PRC will self-destruct
The hope of pro-independence groups (i.e., the majority of Taiwanese citizens) is that the PRC will begin to reform politically as it already has economically, and eventually become a government Asia (not just Taiwan) can live with.
And your assessment of the "old mainlanders" is wrong.
Really? Tell me, how many "old mainlanders" do you know?
The New Party is dead, but that's because all of the New Party people figured that the PFP is a better bet.
Ah yes, the PFP -- another rising Taiwanese political star. The PFP would be dead as well, if it weren't continuously propped up by the KMT.
In the most recent national elections the KMT was hindered by accusations with secret collusions with Beijing, but it was not the kiss of death as it would have been ten years ago.
Seems you have a thing or two to learn about Taiwanese politics. Ten years ago there was only the KMT in Taiwanese politics, which therefore got to do precisely what it wanted without concern for political consequences. It is precisely in the last ten years that the DPP -- with its pro-independence plank -- has risen to the top, eclipsing the more unification-minded KMT. It is only since '96 that the KMT has even had to worry about political fallout. Kiss of death? Increasing PRC sentiment? I don't even know any Taiwanese who like the mainland, let alone want to join it. As I said, not in this universe, sir.
Or perhaps you can supply something more than mere anecdotal evidence to support your claims.
Lee Kai Wen
Taiwan, ROC
Some have pointed out that Carter was quite intellectual. I think he's a good example of how being smart isn't enough to guarantee great leadership.
I understand the same Chinese company is developing a mobile-sized chip for PDAs and imbedded apps called the Shrimp Chip.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Yeah, that average american is like the slashdotter who argues about copyright protection with the GPL while stealing music and movies on kazaa and morpheus.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I agree about our "free" economy being monopolized by mergers and innovation slowing to a crawl, but your bit about American cars is just plain wrong. You probably live in southern California, where American cars really are a minority, but everywhere else in the country, American carmakers do have the lead in sales, by a large margin. Check the facts (sorry, I don't have a link to back this up). However, foreign brands still do produce higher quality, longer-lasting cars than American makers, though you'll also pay a premium for it (compare a Toyota Camry's price to any comparable US car, and also consider that American carmakers constantly have sales, rebates, etc. while Japanese makers never do). You'll make back that money when you resell the car though (higher resale values for foreign cars), and in less repairs.
The American auto industry has not been completely annhilated, and in the SUV space is actually quite profitable. But's it's also sorta like Microsoft--their products suck, but sell more for various reasons.
Do you have any idea how fucking complicated a nuclear reactor is. And how fucking important it is that nothing major goes wrong. You need a guy with an engineering degree to run one. It is pretty conceited to say somehow he is any less of an engineer than say the guy who designed your power steering pump in your car.
First, you seem to be making the mistake of equating "pro-unification" with "pro-PRC". The two are quite different, but more on that later.
Based on your assertion that pro-PRC sentiment is growing amongst Taiwanese youth, I conducted a quick survey of my students today. The questions I asked, and the results I obtained are as follows:
1. Should Taiwan and China
A. be one country 8
B. be two countries 72
C. maintain the status quo 14
D. don't know 9
2. If you answered A. to question 1, which should be the government of a united China?
A. the ROC (Taipei) 8
B. the PRC (Beijing) 0
3. If you answered C. to question 1, why?
A. Threat of war 14
B. Other reason 0
4. Do you like
A. the ROC 25
B. the PRC 0
C. both 0
D. neither 0
Things to note are first, of course, this is simply a quick sampling, not a scientific poll. Second, numbers do not always add up both because not every question was asked in every class, and because not every student responded to every question. I surveyed 112 students, ages 15-17, and made every effort to be objective and encourage even students with unpopular opinions to express them. The numbers above are the actual results.
Even on the face of the survey, 64% of my students favor Taiwanese independence, by more than a 5-to-1 margin over second-place status quo sentiment, and nearly a 10-to-1 margin over fourth-place pro-unificationists, who chimed in at 7%.
But scratch a bit deeper, and Beijing's cause worsens: question 2 shows that amongst those favoring unification, all chose Taipei over the PRC as the government of a united China. And question 3 demonstrates that even the status-quo-ers are really just pro-independence votes in disguise, held in check only by threat of violence from Beijing. Removing that threat would push pro-independence sentiment past 75%. (BTW, question 3 was asked open-ended, allowing the students to supply their own answer; they all said the same thing.)
And finally, question 4 speaks for itself.
In short, no matter how I slice the numbers, I am unable to discover literally a single vote in favor of the PRC amongst my students. Even the pro-unificationists are looking for a China united under the ROC, not the PRC. If you're interested, I can continue the survey through the week. By week's end, I could supply you with the opinions of nearly a thousand students; but I doubt the results would vary significantly.
My family is old mainlanders.
Just to be sure we're talking on the same wavelength here. When I refer to "old mainlanders", I mean those who came over with the KMT in '49-51, not just anyone whose parents or grandparents were mainland-born.
In any case, the operative word is "old"; that generation is dying and being replaced by a generation of young Taiwanese whose sympathies are further from Beijing than ever.
Beijing *has* figured out that using too much stick and too little carrot alienates people in Taiwan.
But what Beijing hasn't figured out yet is that an enlightened government doesn't bully, browbeat and terrorize others into doing its will. The problem is that, despite having finally figured out where the world's at economically, geo-politically Beijing is still stuck firmly in the Dark Ages.
Lee Kai Wen
Taiwan, ROC
We'll start with the last comment first. This is where you have precisely misread public opinion. I see absolutely zero support for agreeing to Beijing's preconditions for talks. Indeed, it would be the height of stupidity, as "one China" is precisely the whole point of any talks between China and Taiwan. There is, and always has been, willingness to discuss the "one China" issue; but little enough support for being forced to agree to it beforehand.
Lee Kai Wen
Taiwan, ROC
It looks like China is starting to tell both Microsoft and Intel to take a hike. Interesting times are ahead
There have been numerous alternatives to the x86 architecture outside of China, but most of them have flopped:
* National Semiconductor's 32-bit processors.
* Intel's i860 and i960.
* Motorola's 88000 (not the 68000!).
* The DEC Alpha.
* Stack-based processors from Harris.
* Sun's UltraSparc.
* PowerPC (popular, but is not displacing the x86).
Not terribly significant. Even assuming your claim were true, if significant numbers have defected to the mainland it means they're no longer voting in Taiwan, and thus they're of no political significance. In addition, they're aging rapidly; in another ten to twenty years there will be precious few left, even in Taiwan. So even granting your claim, I don't see that it's of any great relavance.
and it is in the process of getting the soft support among businessmen
First I should ask you to define 'soft support'. If you mean businessmen are increasingly inclined to turn Taiwan over to Beijing, I strongly dispute your claim. If you simply mean, say, a softening of rhetoric for the purpose of fostering business opportunity, then we're in a different ball game.
When I meant youth, I meant people in the 25-35 range.
Three responses: first, I don't at all see a lesser attitude amongst the 25+ crowd than I see amongst my students; I simply have immediately access to a greater number of teenagers, and thought it would make an enlightening excercise.
Second, the 15-17 year-old crowd follows closely on the heels of the 25-35ers, and will themselves begin to vote in the very near future, which means their opinion now will be significant even before the current administration comes up for re-election.
Third, if China is looking 30 years down the road as you claim, it is today's 15-year olds, not 35 year olds, who will be running the show, so in that sense their opinions are actually of greater significance than today's 30-somethings.
Much of this is due to the fact that they now see their economic future as being linked to the PRC.
Politics and economics are hardly the same thing, and recognizing the inevitability of greater economic links cannot be confused with a desire for greater political ties.
Sentimentally, they might be attached to the idea of an independent Taiwan, but economics is overwhelming sentiment.
But I have been unable to locate any data which support this claim. Most of the poll results indicate that not much has changed in the last eight years vis a vis relations between the two countries. For example, look here, or here.
The trouble with that is that the PRC has already enough military power to keep Taiwan from declaring independence now and the United States has made it clear that it will not like Taiwan starting a crisis.
The U.S. has made it equally clear that it will not like the PRC starting a crisis. That is, at least, the point of the Taiwan Defense Pact and the continued arms sales to Taiwan.
And geopolitically Beijing is *not* stuck in the Dark Ages.
Sorry. I should have been more clear. Any country which uses its military muscle to threatan, browbeat and terrorize others is, by definition, stuck in the Dark Ages. The fact that Beijing not only refuses to denounce such tactics but in fact still enthusiastically embraces them indicates it has not yet entered the community of civilized nations.
Beijing is not going to drop the threat of force for the very simple reason that if it did Taiwan would declare independence tomorrow.
Translated, this means Beijing does not respect the right of a sovereign people to self-determination, a right enshrined in the constitution of the United Nations of which Beijing is a member state. My personal opinion is that any government which does not respect my rights does not deserve my allegiance.
so that it can invade Taiwan in 30 years if it has to, not causing an immediate crisis, and to get the support of some sectors of the Taiwanese population. It has the strong support of the old KMT soldiers
I dispute your usage of the adjectives "strong" and "support" here, and would ask you to define your meanings. Do you mean the old KMT soldiers, as a demographic group, are largely of the opinion that Taiwanese sovereignty should be handed over to Beijing? Or do you simply mean that a noticeable number have decided, in their declining years, to return to the homes they were driven from half a century ago, and are willing to tolerate living under PRC rule in order to do so?
Either way, all these old KMT soldiers will be dead in 30 years (most of them much sooner), which makes any political opinions they may or may not have largely irrelevant as well.
Part of the problem of pro-independence on Taiwan is that they are vastly overestimating Beijing's stupidity and vastly underestimating Beijing's ability to change in order to get its objectives.
There are, of course, those of us who think it is impossible to overestimate Beijing's stupidity, but that's a different argument :-).
Nonetheless, if Beijing does institute significant political change, it may well be that eventually the majority of Taiwanese will come to favor unification with the mainland. If Taiwanese freely choose unification, then so be it. That is our right as guaranteed under international charter. And that is the crucial difference: Beijing doesn't give a rat's ass about the rights of the Taiwanese, whereas all the Taiwanese are asking for is the right to make our own decision.
Taiwan has past the point of no return. It hasn't shown up in the opinion polls but it will in a few years.
This is, of course, pure speculation on your part, based on, near as I can tell, nothing more than the anecdotal evidence of your in-laws. This started out as a discussion of the opinions of the Taiwanese population. It's usually hard enough to predict the present; let's not even bother trying to prognosticate on the future.
Lee Kai Wen
Taiwan, ROC
Yah, let the Chinese avoid all those silly things like decent standards of living, not dumping waste everywhere, etc. By buying from a system that supports low standards you are just being a hypocrite who inflicts the problems on someone else. You'd never accept those abuses in your neighborhood but have no problem supporting it in someone else's.
"Free trade increases efficiency and, in the long run, will raise standards of living for all people." That is a cliché, prove it is always the case. The late 1800s in the US were barely regulated and there were no protections of any significance for workers. The only standards of living that got raised significantly were those of the owners of major corporations. Even those who didn't work of those businesses directly had their waste and shoddy products inflicted on them. More soldiers died from food poisoning and disease during the Spanish-American war than from combat. Teddy Roosevelt was so disgusted by the quality of food sold to the public and the army and the patent medicine trade that he pushed the Pure Food and Drug act into effect. You would've opposed it as being a burden on "free trade".
Opposing artificial protections for businesses (corporate welfare) is one thing but to oppose laws designed to protect society in general is another. The market is there to serve the public, not the other way around. However if you believe in some union conspiracy theory (in an age when unions have lost power) then you truly are out of touch.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
It all depends on what you consider an American car. For instance, Chrysler is no longer an American-owned company, but I believe it's still considered to be one. Still, the money does not stay in the country.
Besides that, your comment on the higher quality of foreign cars is precisely what I'm talking about.
Besides, there are plenty of instances where american companies (especially in the SUV field) have simply bought vehicles in part or whole from foreign companies, and sold them as their own.
The car business is very gray, so a plain vanilla statement that American vehicles are going strong is an incredible oversimplification of a complex question.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The assembly is not what I am concerned about. It is the ownership of the product, and the IP. So while Taiwanese workers may be getting their $1 a day to build it, there are tons of workers in the US getting astronomical salaries to develop, and design the electronics. Of course there are tons of others supporting those activities (secretaries, managers, et al.)
Besides that, there is also the profit, which goes to American VCs and stock holds, which will again go into American circulation.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You have a point here. The American carmakers do a fair amount of rebadging, and also part-swapping (like GM buying Honda engines). I have to disagree about Chrysler money not staying in the country, though; the company is partly German, and partly American, and as long as engineering and manufacturing facilities are located here, then the money is staying here and working for our economy. Just because a few executives live in a different country doesn't mean all the money is suddenly disappearing from our economy.
However, I still think that the biggest money-making American vehicles, huge SUVs and pickups, are very much American designed and manufactured (except those made in Mexico and Canada I suppose). Look at the country-of-origin content for vehicles like the Ford Exploder, Lincoln Navigator, Ford Expedition, Ford F-series, and any other similar vehicle, and you'll find that none of them have any Japanese content--the original poster was claiming the Japanese in particular had annihilated the American car industry. I just don't see that at all; it's definitely become more global, with outsourcing of parts and such, and of whole vehicles for things that Americas apparently can't design well (compact and subcompact cars), and they've certainly lost a lot of marketshare since, oh, the 60's, but "annihilated" is definitely not an accurate description of the American car industry.
Actually higher. The figures I've seen bounce around between the low 20s and 30 percent, with a brief surge a few months ago up to 33% in one poll.
The problem is Beijing has a history of heavy-handed government, and most Taiwanese don't think it can be trusted under a "one country, two systems" arrangement to keep its fingers out of Taiwan's affairs. The only model we have is Hong Kong and, frankly, that doesn't seem to be going very well.
Surely you would not have me believe that there is zero support for agreeing to the '92 consensus as a precondition for talks
There isn't even a consensus as to whether there is a "'92 consensus" to be agreed to. All Beijing has produced to document its claims to a 92 consensus is copies of some old faxes between some (relatively) minor Taipei officials and Beijing. Taipei has no records of having agreed to any such thing.
Beijing's preconditions for talks is acknowledgement of some form of the one China principle
No. Beijing's preconditions for talks is agreement to (not "acknowledgement of") Beijing's definition of the "one China" principle. After all, until recently, the KMT still believed in "one China" (albeit with the ROC at its head), yet Beijing refused to sit down at the table anyway.
I could think of many "forms" of "one China" I'm sure Beijing would not accept, such as, say, making Beijing an SAR of Taiwan. But why should Taiwan even want to negotiate while being forced to stare down the barrel of Beijing's gun?
Lee Kai Wen
Taiwan, ROC
This statement is utterly ridiculous. Without US companies moving their jobs overseas, several things will happen: (a) fewer people overseas will have jobs, meaning they will have a lower standard of living; (b) steel workers in the US will continue to keep jobs with artificially high wages instead of moving to fields in which America competes more effectively; (c) the price of steel will remain high, increasing the price of goods and services that use steel anywhere along the line.
[ home ]
> Flat out wrong. Efficiency is defined as doing
> more, for less. Translation: People of existing
> means will be able to do more -- without you.
I believe you are the one who is flat-out wrong. Free trade increases efficiency by moving production of a good or service to the arena in which it costs least. Output/price is the definition of efficiency.
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Okay, here is an article indicating how powerful the Dragon is. Six million transistors, which the article says makes it as powerful as a 486. That may be an underestimate. The original Pentium was about 3.1 million transistors according to sandpile.
6 million transistors is something like a tenth of the a P4, a sixth of the K7, two-sevenths of a VIA cyrix III.
Wait a moment. You say below that until recently the KMT believed in "one China".
I was referring specifically to the '92 consensus, a document allegedly negotiated between and agreed to by Beijing and Taipei. That the KMT believed in the general idea of "one China" is indisputable. That a joint statement was negotiated is not.
If Taiwan were to return to the situation before Lee's declaration of two states, it's likely that Beijing would return to the talks
But Taiwan has no interest in returning to that state. Why should we? If those are the only conditions under which Beijing is willing to negotiate, then I'm afraid the PRC blew its window of opportunity. Taiwan is no longer willing to think of itself as a second-class state just to please Beijing.
Those talks were broken off....
By Beijing, not Taipei. It is Beijing who is unwilling to negotiate. Taipei is still waiting. Why must Taipei agree to "one China"?
I could think of many "forms" ... Beijing would not accept...
But if Taiwan were to put them on the table, then would allow talks to begin.
Taipei has repeatedly said everything -- including "one China" -- is on the table. Yet Beijing still refuses to sit down. It is not Taipei which is placing pre-conditions or demands on talks.
Because without normalized trade relations with the Mainland, Taiwan's economy is likely to get worse and worse over time.
Perhaps. No one can predict the future. However, being as a member of the WTO, China is already required to provide Taiwan with much of those normalized relations; regulations of which Beijing is already in violation.
Lee Kaiwen
Taiwan, ROC
Communism and democracy are not mutually exclusive, Communism/Socialism requires democracy, in all Communist nations that I know of voting was required by law.
Democracy seems to work very well in small New England towns and tribal circles, but it doesn't scale well; remember Hittler, and Stalin were democraticaly elected at a cost of 31 Million lives.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds