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Chinese "Dragon" Chip On Sale
mrseigen writes "The processor that Chinese firms have been working on as a response to foreign equipment and software is now available for pre-order. The Inquirer did an article here, and the company website is here. The chip will supposedly ship with Midori Linux."
Is Midori Linux available in English?
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
It may not be a good idea to overclock these chips, as the dragons will most likely be hot enough as is...
Yeah but an hour after you install it, you want to order another one.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Man, I can think of about 100 products or companies that are all named "Midori". Either people really like melon liqueur, or the rampant fanboyism really has to stop.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Why would they ship with a linux distro that hasn't been updated in two years?
Oh man! It's gonna say "Enter the Dragon" isn't it!!!
but only if the money is used to torture political dissidents
[/joke-notice-for-the-humorless]
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
And will be an enormous economic force in years to come.
/.ers are really happy about that.
If they reduce their reliance on foreign IP (or non-free foreign IP) as well as foreign hardware, this can only be good for China, and only be bad for us (Less money flow into the IT industry) unless they produce a higher quality product (thus improving the industry).
However, in the short term, you know, MS won't make as much money, neither will Intel, and I'm sure a lot of
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
I have heard that this is actually a rebranded Elbrus E2K. Clock for clock, it is unbeatable. If they are able to increase the frequency and the chip is properly scalable, the Power5 may have a worthy competitor!
...a Dragon chip in the Year of the Ram? Dragon chips are so 4698. (Year 2000 for Gregorian Calendar fanatics out there)
I'd rather buy a Ram chip - at least that way I know I'm being current.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
The only problem is that these "dragon chips" are about equivilent to your average pentium 2, they can't hold a candle to anything coming out of the united states. This chip may work for webstation-type things, but it will be useless for any real computing.
a copy of Windows XP would take the average paddy field worker six months to earn
Who gives a turkey? (1) unfortunately, paddy field workers don't buy XP because they would need another year to buy the computer equipment, and (2) how much do you bet rich chinese people who can afford computers copy XP right and left, laughing their ass off when they see the SPA and BSA gesticulate beyond the PRC's borders ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Is turnaround still fairplay?
Why use a Japanese word for a Chinese chip? How can they sell chips without a slick marketing campaign? Why not name it after a bunch of Chinese rivers like that other firm... y'know the ones that made the Blue Man Group famous for nothing?
SoftBank Haiku: The bandwidth broadens; Users sign up in millions. Where are the profits?
So is this what happened to Midori? It offered a tremendous amount of promise, but it just never got updated (circa 2001) - egh! Does anyone know of a Midori equivalent that's actually recent (and not LFS)?
It looks like Midori shut their mouth for one reason or another after Transmeta took over.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Commencing countdown to first occurrence of lame "Double Dragon"(TM) joke in reference to SMP setups.
my
If any of you really knew about economics of the world today you would know that the CHINESE are experts at taking others tech and copying it. Another point is that the reason most companies leave for China is because of the SLAVE labore wages. Do you really believe this chip will compete against the big FABs of the U.S. ? I will believe when i see it.
This is actually pretty significant...and kudos to the Chinese for making it happen.
:-)
About the only mainstream chip that I can think of off the top-of-my-head that's not U.S. bred is the ARM (which is British in origin). (I'm sure there are others, but you get my point).
And for all of you who say "this chip has lame performance", think back 5-10 years. If you had something like this 10 years ago, you'd pee your pants. This is like going from 0-100Kmh for the Chinese....many don't have any computing resources....chips like these will start to make things accessible for many (although not all).
Also remember back in 1986 when your relative who had a computer did all his accounts on an IBM XT? You don't need gobs of computing power to do basic business functions...and remember the majority of businesses *anywhere* are small businesses with less than 10 employees.
Technology is also quite often culturally imbred....ever looked at how many consumer electronics devices are HUGE in Japan, but don't take off in the U.S.? It's that embedded cultural technology difference....and maybe with China having some homegrown options, they can develop systems that better meet the needs of their population.
Anyhoo, just my two cents.
-psy
This nation has never before manufactured a computer processor of this power before, and even though processors from the US could easily beat it, its still a good bargain for the users and a good start for the country. Moreover, not everybody is a gamer, and sometimes, older processors do fine for everyday work tasks. For example, I have seen a lot of server boxes that still use Pentium II class processors and work fine. I still sometimes use my P II desktop, which uses SuSE Linux 7.3, and I think that its just about as fast as my Athlon 1700 when it comes to word processing and simple GUI tasks.
I spent a good deal of time in China a couple of years back. All I have to say is, the many people whom I met all over the country were honest and worked very hard, and I think that they deserve better living conditions than they currently have.
Their government is slowly but surely making progress towards a more reasonable form, and I hope that news technology developments like this are harbingers of improvement in their economy and the lives of the Chinese people in general.
WTF!?
STFU Spammer!! >:(
[Dexter]You Are Stuuupid! You are STUUUUPID!![/Dexter]
They will undoubtedly be stamped MADE IN USA on the underside of the chip...its cheaper for them, cuz the US owns all of the sweatshops in china
Linux is to the internet as Duct Tape is to the Universe.
You, sir, are an idiot.
Looks like there'll be an alternative when all Intel and AMD are producing are Palladium chipsets and you'd rather not be "trusted" by Big Corps...
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
...but I don't see anyone basing an economy off of her. Unless you count McDonalds.
they wrote an article about you...
http://maddox.xmission.com/anime_nerd.html
In James Kirk Voice,"Site too slow, loosing interest, will by from Intel instead. Spock, I love you."
is it fast enough to write a letter and surf the web? Will it mean fewer sales in China and the other Asian countries? Yup. Will it hurt AMD or Intel? Don't know, but I'm sure we'll all find out with time.
"Another point is that the reason most companies leave for China is because of the SLAVE labore wages."
;)
That sounds like a reason for most companies to flock to China, not leave it.
Of course, the workers should be fleeing, but they very well can't now, can they?
(from the Company Overview -> History portion of their website)
It seems that in 1975 "The Comic of "Little Rogues" was renamed as "Dragon and Tiger Heroes" and became the best sales of fighting comics in Hong Kong. "
I never knew.
Please drink a bottle of bleach ...
OK, I did. But now I don't feel so good. I hope you didn't trick me!
If the Chinese government can go around propping up Chinese industries until American businesses get torched and American workers get laid off, then why do it?
I mean, what's the point of being the only nation in town that believes in free trade when everyone else, including American importers, are using it to crush Americans at home.
F---- free trade.
This is my sig.
Reminds me of the line: "If you had let the government come up with the cure to Polio, you'd have the best iron lung in the world but you'd be no closer to a vaccine."
Schnapple
The Dragon site is real slow, and there aren't even a hundred posts in this topic yet.
I hope that isn't representative of the technology.
The 1 GB limit on memory kind of worried me. Is that a system limit (i.e. motherboard) or is it that the chip has only 30 bit addressing? Seems kind of odd.
Also, is this a system that will be affordable for the average worker in mainland China? Does anyone know?
Consider the following.
In other words, we Americans should blame ourselves. Why? American companies, especially those in Silicon Valley, employ hordes of Chinese from Taiwan. When they are given lucrative opportunities in mainland China, they will seize those opportunities. Some of those opportunities involve giving sensitive American technology to Beijing. We did this to ourselves; we made it easy for the Taiwanese to give American technology to Beijing.
This hemorrhaging of technology will continue until we in the United States of America (USA) wake up. We should treat Taiwan as a province of China. When we slap punitive sanctions against China, we should also apply those sanctions against Taiwan. If we do not want to give sensitive technology to China, then we should not give sensitive technology to Taiwan. Period.
Several companies in Silicon Valley prohibit Chinese nationals from working on technologies deemed sensitive by the American government. Yet, those very same companies readily employ Taiwanese nationals to work on the same sensitive technologies. Folks, let's wake up before the fire-breathing dragon burns us Americans along with the Tibetans.
a copy of Windows XP would take the average paddy field worker six months to earn
I seem to recall that Microsoft dumps Windows in countries like Thailand and China at a tiny fraction of the US cost, to discurage Linux and piracy...
Dragon Tank Ready It's Hot In Here...
V-Dragon is an embedded chip, it has an integrated memory controller (supporting 1GB of SDRAM), USB controller, 10/100Mbps Ethernet and PCI controller. Since everything you need is integrated on the CPU, it makes motherboards very simple.
It won't be very fast, but it should be more than enoug for web-browsing and text-editing.
I want to see real benchmarks before i rag on it but i can tell you that making chips is not like making HOTWHEELS. The big FABS in the U.S. are on more even ground since this isn't about dirt cheap labor that makes a product.
But does it run Windows?
Ben
Work Safe Porn
you do realise that slashdotting a chinese national website is a capital crime in mainland china, don't you?
I am curious because I would love to see tha alpha live. Its the best chip in the world and would remain the fastest if Intel/HP would not care more about the sunken costs of this engineering disaster of Itanium. Not to sound like a troll but it was due in 97 and is 2 billion over budget. No wonder HP/Intel canceled the next generation of the Alpha.
http://saveie6.com/
But they aren't.
I've been hearing about the benefits about free trade since I voted for Reagan, twice, and I'm still waiting, as first manufacturing moved over seas, then simple services, and now more complex services. What's left in the US?
This is my sig.
I for one would like to welcome our new Chinese overlords...
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
...will it run my Dragon32 code?
being that you dont know very much about chips :)
This is part of a trend. Everybody thought China would be this wide open market. All these people were salivating at the prospect of a billion customers. They all forgot that China is so big that they are likely to muster the ability to do it themselves. The same thing has already happened with cell phones.
This also reminds me of a conversation I had in the early 90s with a room-mate who was an avid Free Trader. Me: "Why are we compromising our principles with China. We don't need them". Him: "We don't need them? They don't need us!". Me: "That's loser talk!". Him: "You're hopelessly backward and provincial...".
In retrospect, we were probably both right; at least on the first exchange. We don't need China. They don't need us. Sheesh! Why is Slashdot such a dog lately. It won't let me preview posts...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
EETimes has an article on this. They note:
Culturecom Holdings Ltd., a publisher of Chinese language "fighting" comics that migrated into information technology in the 1990s, has begun selling its V-Dragon microprocessor for use in Chinese PCs.
That's almost like vivendi-universal going from a water utility to a multimedia giant! Is there some new business strategy for totally changing industries that I should be aware of?
They also note:
The V-Dragon CPU incorporates support for Chinese-language characters, according to the company.
Wow, I wonder what that means... optimized U16 support? Or is it marketing-speak?
EEtimes also notes that 300,000 chips have already been sold or have letters of intent to be sold.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
On the other hand, it is free of the IP that SCO claims IBM stole and contributed.
In this way Chinese programmers can spend more time coding instead of cursing McBride.
Did anybody else here read the article?
Did this line send shivers down your spine?
While I applaud the effort to give cheap computing to the underpriviliged masses in China, this may be cause for concern
The fact that a government that still seems to be fairly interested in tramping on all forms of dissidence is involved enough with the OS and hardware so that it falls "in line with the Chinese government's IT policy", makes me a little nervous.
This isn't unusual, MS has always tailored their products so that they fit in with the IT policies of western nations. But from what I have read, China has a somewhat different IT policy to many Western nations.
An IT policy which drives everything underground, away from the policing ears.
China is a ruthless communist dictatorship. They don't believe in bilateral trade. They are a parasitic trading country like alot of the ASIAN nations. They lure stupid American companies in the belief that with the lure of dirt cheap labor they will hit the gold mine. They forget that China is making moves to conquer another asian country . Also know that most of Chinese wealth can be attributed to allowing the brutal dictatorship free access to American markets while doing very little reciprical trade with the U.S. Why do we free trade with CHina and not Cuba or North Korea since they are all alike ?
"China has a somewhat different IT policy to many Western nations."
Yes, China don't build a worldwide system to spy on their and foreign citizens (Echelon).
I just don't get it. We can criticize American nationals for what they do. We can critize just about any Western national for what she does.
But heaven help us if you say anything negative about Chinese nationals.
inetnum: 213.45.12.0 - 213.45.15.255
netname: TIN
descr: Telecom Italia S.p.A
descr: E@sy.ip ADSL service OSPF Area 01
descr: Wholesale service for ISP
country: IT
I think you were looking for CHINA. You're in the wrong part of the world, I'm afraid.
How much did you pay for your last pair of Jeans?(television, ram chip, etc.)
Think of the entire world as one big company. In the current climate, you have China, Mexico, Indonesia, etc. This is the manufacturing department. The specs are transmitted from the Research and Development department (the United States/Industrialized world) The average worker in R&D gets paid much more than those in china, this is true. This is because they are doing the things that haven't been done before. They are more educated, and thus, demand a higher salary, as they bring more than a set of hands and eyeballs to the job. (let alone issues like a high minimum wage). It would be stupid to have the R&D department also fabricate, manufacture and ship their new widget. Instead, R&D works on the more cost-effective task of creating the next revision of the widget, or a new widget altogether, while others do the heavy lifting.
Economics, like politics, is harsh. Noone likes to see those jobs leak overseas, or to watch a foreign country copycat what's already been done. But the alternative is paying 2000 dollars for a P3, strictly because it was manufactured in the R&D department. Tell me, if that was the situation, how much fewer would be the number of computers in use in the US? And following that, how many fewer jobs would be available for educated people to service, and maintain those computers stateside?
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
There seems a constant rush to dump current consumer chips and move on to something faster (like Moore's Law needs to be held up). This does not represent the needs of mass consumers - it represents the interests of corporations who want cash to keep winding the cycle upwards for greater and continued profit.
There is nothing wrong with a chip that does not compete with the latest specs. So many people believe that they need stellar specs - they need reliable, cost-effective chips that do their math.
It's a nice looking chip for embedded work from the details of it.
but the freedom thing is good for everyone (particularily outside the US) as the US is threating all kinds of nasty protectionist tactics. Hard to trust these days.
No I'm not in the US.
how good does that badboy overclock?
People don't need much, we use office / openoffice because everyone else does. In China they can do their own thing with less bloated simple tools. Like a spruced up xedit. Such a system wont need more than a 10gb harddisk if even that.
Will be interesting to see what they pick as a browser and email client.
Ballpark guess at cost would be between $125 and $175 (w/o monitor). Depending on memory, drives, multimedia, etc.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
It's been well known for years that you can easily get V-D in China, but untill now its never been a good thing.
This processor will most certainly weed out all those CS majors that thought that assembler was as easy as apple pie ;-)
Excellent post!
Wonder if Intel and AMD are so keen to build DRM into their processors now?
Am I the only one who thinks that the Chineese are obsessed with red, fire, Dragons, and Gold stars? I mean c'mon! They limit their names to basically those four themes! WHERE'S THE CREATIVITY?! Here in the states, we have a variety of names such as Itanium, Winblows, Linux, and Yodigidy (ok, fine... that last one was to prove a point), but hey! WHERE IS THE CREATIVITY AND VARIETY, CHINA?!
You are completely missing the point. The Chinese are not trying to make an Intell/AMD Killer. They are making a CPU with enough horsepower to run Linux and let people do office tasks - email, word processing, spreadsheets, etc... and other normal computing tasks. They are also making a CPU in-house, which means they don't need to worry about how Intel or AMD feels about them or even if the US government doesn't want them buying powerful chips.
This isan't about playing DOOM3 or Half-Life2. This is about China having an IT sector that is not subject to the whims of non-Chinese companies or governments.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
As I am interested in CPU architecture, I tried to find some technical info on the chip. I didn't found much, except a large powerpoint file which I failed to download. Slashdot effect? I wonder if they can read/produce such .ppt files under their Midori Linux ;-)
;-)
However, there is much more talk about their embedded character generator! This sounded very funny to me. A character generator in a CPU??!?!
After browsing around, I found that the vice president of Culturecom has been working 20 years with chinese character encodings. I guess the board of directors has a lot to say about what the chip real estate should be used for
I also found this link explaining somewhat more. (Is it normal practice for UCLA to comment on market opportunities for Chinese companies in scientific papers?)
Anyway, Culturecom seems to have invented an encoding for chinese characters that encodes brush strokes. This seems to be a good idea, and is likely superior to the outline encoding used in TrueType. It is probably a nice algorithm. But they don't seem to want to publish this algorithm. The idea is to "embed" it in a chip, and sell the chips instead. ($25) Maybe this makes sense in china where patents and copyrights are routinely violated, but I personally think that the chip real estate could probably have a better use.
Speaking of copyright violations; their web site says that they are selling Midori Linux for only $50. I wonder if that includes source code and a GPL license?
)9TSS
Hi, palladium was always supposed to be able to be disabled on every machine. When disabled you can't use anything that requires palladium like a broadband movie download site or whatever the applications are in the future.
Your not getting anything but a slower chip with the dragon as you will still not be able to access palladium required content.
Hmmm... Pie...
What I want to know is, when will a development board be available, and will it be affordable? Large corporations like intel can sell their development boards for one to two thousand dollars (US) are a matter of course; even transmeta's is a grand. Embedded boards typically are cheaper, running in the US$100-500 range. (For instance, lots of motorola 68k dev kits were $100, then later $250. Coldfire seems to run about $500.)
It would be logical to assume that if they are going to be appealing to the low cost embedded market, tht they will make the dev board be cheap, but that doesn't mean they will. Anyone have any information on a development system? There is a picture of the system and a few specifications (nontrivial to make a direct link to) which include a four port USB 1.1 controller, 10/100 ethernet, eight analog inputs, two 16550+ compatible UARTs... They say it has a character generator, but no other word on the graphics capabilities. It appears to have 66MHz 32 bit PCI, that's kind of keen I guess.
So, how much is the damn thing going to cost in the US?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If I changes the wording a bit here, would it still make sense?
the flagrant abuses of some South American countries that US has perpetrated since the 1950s are inexcusable. The fact that US is even allowed NEAR the United Nations is a gross mockery of justice.
I know I'm evangelizing here, but people need to know that the wealthiset nation in the world is consider by many as more brutal and inhuman than Saddam Hussein's.
Otaku no Microprocessor, neh?
what I want to know is where can I get free sample motherboards/chips...
I mean, if there's one country we can count on to resist pressure to place their population's property under a system enforcing centralized control, it's China!
I'm serious. Most business users usually buy the most affordable hardware they can find that does what they need it to do. And they keep the hardware until it dies. The business trend in purchasing "bigger, faster, more" computers is the result of marketing, except for those business users who have a business need for bigger, faster, more. This may not be enough to drive technological improvement.
But that's not all. The Chinese aren't any different from the rest of us. If they can afford it, they want to be able to play the latest first-person shooters and other games. Many people in the technological west spend more time on the Internet than they do watching television. Recreational uses of the Internet and computer gaming are becomming a very significant portion of the economy, take the second Laura Croft movie for example. The Chinese are going to want this, the say way that we want to play the latest Japanese PS2 games not yet ported into English.
The problem with the Dragon is that it's a step away from the rest of the world. I certainly understand why the Chinese government is doing this - to help their own economy and to maintain control of their own population. But that won't stop the simple desire of Chinese home computer users to join the rest of the world playing Evercrack or any other game de jour.
My prediction - the Dragon processer will be a successful business product in China, which is certainly not signficant. But it won't be more than that.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
I could cite same reasons not to buy from, say, Intel or Dell. The US record on crimes against Humankind is very decidedly NOT GOOD. You could also say ``I'll only buy <insert-US-based-corp> only if the profit is used to torture `terrorists' in Camp-X (Guantanamo, US-occupied Cuba)''.
And, in fact, since the US-led rape of Iraq, a lot of people around the planet are doing just that, boycotting US products.
Oh, BTW: FREE IRAQ!
``L'imagination au povoir.''
The Chinese nor other Asian nations believe in bilateral free trade. They put up walls on all Foreign-American products. If we made those Toys and textiles here in this country they might be more expensive but homemade product would be of better quality and flowing dollars to war like disruptive power would be stopped.
Where does this put the US when we pass tax cuts 80% for the rich in times of economic distress while sacking the middle class later (hey, the money has to come from somewhere sometime, poor people don't have enough, rich people can buy...I mean persuade politicans to their cause...) and doing little to raise the lower class standard of living? :P
more telemarketer jobs . There are no jobs left. Sorry if it sounds funny but it's true !
Trade with Europe works.
The title says it all. Any real info about what's the architecture (as in, is it x86, MIPS, SPARC, POWER, E2K?...), and how will it be marketed (clones vs proprietary, embedded vs general purpose, etc)?
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
You people that buy into the benefits of free trade are so gullible. Do any of you wonder why there are so many telemarketer jobs and no manufacturing jobs in this country anymore ?
The Chinese are one step ahead of the self absorbed academic intellectuals that think shifting jobs for dirt cheap labor is good for the U.S.
How many of you would like to see all CAR manufacturing moved to China ? or Hollywood movie production or biotech ?
If you're planning to design stuff, why bother with an off the shelf CPU? Get into FPGA and customize your next project.
Some of the FPGA board for customize your own project are starting to appear
http://snaplogix.tripod.com
Your 100% correct. They should stop building their PI-PII class microprocessors and stick to buying 10 Teraflop Supercomputers from the USA. That'll keep them from exercising their preffered IT policies!
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
Tibet is pretty, and it has many movie stars. So people worry about Tibet.
30 MILLION people died in China during the "great leap forward" and "cultural revolution" because of politically motivated starvation and executions. That's more than the population of Tibet. In fact, it ranks as one of the great tradgedies of human history, with the black plague, AIDs, WWI, and WWII.
Tiannenmen. And friends like North Korea, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
The author of the above post makes some well-reasoned points. Those modding him down are not doing so because his post is a troll, but rather because they have agendas of their own. Unfortunately they chose the coward's method of combating an idea, rather than the method of tackling it head on with well-reasoned posts of their own.
Frankly, as for the author's points, China is a totalitarian, aggresive, expansionist, military power. Technology leakage to China through Taiwan is a very real problem for the US and its allies. It's not a racist thing. It's realism. We don't, for example, worry so much about technology in the hands of the peaceful democratic country of South Korea.
I have to say I made a boo-boo. The article in question actually tells that the processor is available for direct order, not pre-order as I had let on. Not like it stopped anyone who cared.
(First submission! w00t!)
Did this line send shivers down your spine?
Also this line:
"The chip will supposedly ship with Midori Linux"
Midori Linux is probably a descendant of the operating system "Linux", an infamous communist OS.
but what have they done lately? ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Take this with a grain of salt. I have inside info, but can't say too much.
The chip has two iterations. The first one was fabbed and meant for eBook types of appliances. It is SOC (system on a chip) with Intel x86 core licensed from Fujitsu I believe as well as UARTS and an LCD controller. The custom character technology is very real, but has no OS support yet and would be a challenge to integrate into an OS.
The second version is announced, but not produced as far as I know. It proposes to use a PowerRisc core and maintain similar character and IO capabilities.
Bottom line is that the cores are licensed - this is not innovation or even local development. The key features are in the character generator - they are super efficient in encoding thousands of chinese characters to a rendering unit.
Did anyone else at first glance read the homepage as cultureclub.com as in "Boy George and the Culture Club"?
Total 80's flashback there for a second.
Now I'm stuck with music in my head of a bad asian karaoke version of "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" Damn it.
I don't count the NEC, Fujitsu and Sony stuff that is mentioned below because as you say, they were developed in the US and cloned or modified elsewhere.
Hitachi H8/Super H (SH) is the most significant processor I can think of that didn't originate in the US. Many Japanese (and some Taiwanese, Chinese or Korean) companies prefer to use it because it is "homegrown". Thus it is used in many CD/DVD drives.
It's technically feasable for the government to insert distributed spyware in their version of linux. A system like this would be technologically capable of monitoring keystrokes for trigger keywords, and reporting them to the government. It could use idle time to examine local files, sniff the local net, or join a distributed computing cluster cracking dissidents' crypto.
Since the government also controls the hardware, they can make it harder to replace the OS. They could make the processor only execute government signed kernels.
I don't know if the current Chinese government would do these things. But I believe they have the technical ability to do them.
What would you have the chinese buy, pringles? a big mac? Something they can afford?
BIG HEAVY ROCKS!
my favorite article: China to become centre of everything
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=1475
"Don't look at me. We're talking about dragons. So you take Thom out to the set while I burn and verify these... the dragons."
But the real kicker with this CPU is the possibility for cheap dual and quad motherboards. If you can get 4 of these running under Linux or NetBSD the performance of one CPU don't mather that much. With a cost per CPU probably between $20-30* I would be all over tis offer.
From a customers wiewpoint competition in the Quad-motherboard is appreciated as these MB's today cost insane amounts of money.
All this depends on wheter they have added propper SMP support which is propably difficalt as they try to stay away of "IP" issues.
*Wild guess of course, but they just can't cost above $30 if they expect them to sell in China.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Only because China can't build their own -- not enough money and technical talent.
Since the government also controls the hardware, they can make it harder to replace the OS. They could make the processor only execute government signed kernels.
And one of the most time-honored traditions of modern hacker culture is that there's a way around every such system. No algorithm to prove your platform, etc.
And if not... where do I sign to become Chinese?
I recently just finished reading All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer and I must say it's been quite an eye-opener. Basically, the Brits lost their oil in Iran because a democratic leader realized that it was his own country's oil, not someone else. So GB had the US use the CIA to incite a coup and remove a democratically appointed, economically minded, leader to get their oil supply back. In his place, we put in a fundamentalist islamic leader who has become a model for other islamic groups (read: Taliban). That was the first of several "regime replacements" -- some might argue that the recent war against Iraq was not much more than this...
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
The self righteous crowd got let out of its cage today. Lets address some concerns:
Humanitarianism:
The computer you're typing youre typing on was most likely made in a place you would describe as a horrible sweatshop if you would ever get to see it. Same goes for all sorts of computer related goods.
Lots of goods in general are clearly marked Made in China yet its this chip some people seem so focused on.
Also, please take into account the US and its own allies record on human rights before entering the morally ambigious grounds of "Bad country vs. Good country."
Propping up the industry
All countries do this. Corporate welfare, sweetheart deals, tariffs, etc. Look in your own backyard before you accuse the neighbors of being a nuscience.
"Its only a pentium II"
Lets see the PII burns very little energy, had almost 10 million transistors and 64 gigabytes of addressable memory. Not a bad chip to be compared to. I used to run Mandrake on a PII-350 and it would play Divx movies without a frame skip. We're not talking a 8086 chip here.
I'm not even going to go into how no one really needs a P4 at 2ghz to run Office and all the energy that wastes.
"Tibet!"
Whatever your thoughts on Tibet buying not not buying a Dragon chip will make no difference. Its like people refusing to drink French wine because of their position regarding Iraq. The French will not notice or care.
Also, Tibet was a theocratic slave state with no concept of civil rights either. Pot meet Kettle.
"China Bad, must punish."
Maybe not. By entering into normal trade relations we make their economy dependent on the world economy, i.e. it becomes a political check, do bad things, watch your economy collapse through sanctions. I'm no lassieze-faire globalisation nutcase, but this certainly beats isolationism by a wide margin. Business doesnt exist in a vacuum, there have been cultural exchanges for quite some time and I would rather see a positive bend on westernism than trans-atlantic namecalling and useless boycotts.
I'm an idealist too, but I know that I have bigger problems domestically and if I want to impose my view of the world onto other countries I'd rather be able to point to my backyard and say "this is how its done" as opposed to "you are bad, go away."
You ass. Pringles suck! No one eats that shit.
For a country that is as backward as mainland China, possessing the ability to make a high-performance 32-bit pipelined microprocessor is a tad surprising.
Hardly. You don't think that the Chinese know everything about the workings of CPU and RAM foundries in Taiwan? You realize that Taiwan is where much of our computer gear is manufactured.
Whether you agree with the policies of the Chinese government, you must realize that China is one of the oldest civilizations in the whole world. America doesn't have exclusive rights to computing you know. Maybe they are tired of watching American companies flop around like beached salmon and want sustainable computing for themselves.
Besides, the chip implements technology published as a standard. How could you call this stealing?
it doesn't matter. as long as the US insists on deciding for political reasons what technology may be exported, any country that depends on technology will try to get in a position where they don't have to rely on US imports. with time they'll get enough experience that your prediction will be nothing but a fond reminiscence
Actually, you misread his misspelling... he meant to say:
"...which was killing millions of Americans through puberty"
It's a hard stage in life, but regardly of Bush's policies we all have to pass through it. Some may not live to gain from it, but I believe puberty only makes us a stronger country.
IANAL, but I play one on
While I do find the idea fascinating in your typical geek "it's not intel and it's not AMD" fashion, I find myself wary of anything coming from a country known for it's great Walls, both internet and physical. Not that I trust the US government, but I like to think the chinese government has more of a hand in things, and they may be putting stuff in their chips to exert control. Possible some special op code to turn off memory protection, on the simple end, or microcode to somehow allow control over the machine on the more expensive end. Thoughts?
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
"Also how much horsepower do you really think you need to for basic email, web, word processing and accounts use? "
In China? Not much, since the web is heavily censored and controlled.
History will record the abuses of the chinese and hold us (The United States) accountable because we didn't speak out so as to not offend a business partner.
I didn't read the story. So shoot me. Afterwards, anyone care to share the expected price for a CPU? What about the price of a motherboard?
One can only hope that a new trend emerges in the microprocessor market: that the chips start to get faster and better with time.
What a fortuitous name! It'd be fun to port DragonFlyBSD to the Chinese Dragon chip.
Argh! Our own trade policy is very good at sinking the country even deeper into debt.
Every time about how American workers can't compete, I have to ask myself how BMW manages to build the ultimate driving machine in that socialist realm of Germany, or how the supposedly stagnant French are able to launch satellites more reliably than Lockheed, and how on earth did Boeing lose its lead to Airbus!
Really, it's not about the American worker, it's that American CEOs and middle managers are all idiots.
This is my sig.
Oops, er, before anyone else says WTF?
In fact Nehru thought that India and China had a lot in common and was quite shocked when Mao took some strategic hills from India a few years after China conquered India.
I meant, of course, after China conquered Tibet.
FreeSpeech.org
The Americans didn't put Khomeini in place, he just volunteered for the position when a power void presented itself after Iranian students gave the boot to the American dictator.
the poster who pointed out midori = green could have been a skinny Japanese girl wearing a t-shirt with English phrases, but for some crazy reason you assume the complete opposite!
it is the oldest trick in the book. and you know, it works like a charm every damn time. slight-of-hand. we're easily distracted animals.
OOOH PRETTY COLORS
wait, what was I talking about?
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
assuming the parent is true (I don't know), this is worse than Hussein, cause that is more people than live in Iraq.
Even if Hussein had wiped the entire country out, he could not have matched china.
Or in the case of MS/Intel math screw it up!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
People! Think a bit!
It takes two to tango doesn't it?
It also takes two to trade!!! (duh! you knew that!)
can it be free trade if only one side is trading freely? no.
Does the USA trade non-freely on some things? sure - everybody does.
China trades unfairly on ALL things imports and exports.
Because of their currency peg, they effectively give ALL EXPORTS (from china) a 20-50% advantage, and all imports a coresponding disadvantage. Most of the rest of Asia has the same policy (they kind of have too or china would kill them . . . )
You wonder why jobs of all types are going overseas? this is the primary reason.
Just for fun, I thought I would run their privacy policy through babelfish. It didn't work, but I did get a nice sampling of semi-random words.
Here's an excerpt:
the Shanghai little girl shakes chokes the stamp counter
3. Tau infants spear piecE prize gallbladder snow sister-in-law Yao luxurious knee Wei A tau
4. last of the ten Heavenly Stems Tau infants the spear embarrassed Tau Fujian Province spear piece ya offers a sacrifice to peacefully repeatedly makes Egypt
But the Fritz chip that Intel is about to unleash with MS doesn't? The US is one small step away from an information monopoly, you guys just won't admit it. Yes China is bad however what is happening to Americans is just as bad. The RIAA will be at door soon, then it will be Microsofts turn! MS is delighted that the Chinese now will not be pirating Office. However if we keep being so stupid about our High Tech sector they may just eat our lunch the same way MS ate IBMs.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Looking at the specs of this chip for the moment, and not the politics of east asia, this little board looks pretty sweet.
First of all the processor - isn't it kinda like a SPARC? I'm pretty sure it is. I guess we'll see.
Secondly, the board looks cool too. Eight analog inputs, built-in character generation (!) of 32,000 chinese characters, extensible to 50,000 +, and built-in 10/100 ethernet.
You raise some valid points, but you need to come off your high horse. Back in the time when the USA was, what you call, a backward country, the US was all so pleased to get Fermi, Einstein fleeing totalitarian regimes in Europe (to name just a few). They did not come to their theories and research in isolation, but were a product of their environment and education in those countries. But they started or helped a developing industry and research in the US.
Later, the US even incited top leading researchers to go to the States, well in many cases, they had little choice, but it was better than being deported by the USSR.
In short, this has happened before (and was done by those that had little to protect or complain about, but are now the first to be scorned), and is happening again. Nothing new here, move along.
In times of world Economy, I am still dazzled to see that ppl seem to find reasons to protect their little countries (in fact, the country they are in can do anything they want, but everyone else should be good, unfair competition anyone?). I am just glad to see another alternative processor and in the long term, it can only benefit us with lower prices and better performance.
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Remember: this is a communist processor. As a result all the Dragon processors in the world can only run as fast as the slowest processor.
*rimshot*
the pun is mightier than the sword
The Swedish furniture giant IKEA has decided to release its own home computer. To begin with, it will only be for sale in the German market. Read more here.
They did buy MiGs from Russia, worth $3.5 billion (hey, why not, the people is just starving, but if they voice their opinion or don't follow the policy set by the government entire villages are, in fact, wiped out). They pulled in another contract at approx. $3 billion earlier, but the contents of it escapes my memory. Anyway, these Su-27 fighters' secret fire control and system integration were duplicated by Zhu Rong Gong, officially admitted in June 2002. This enables them to make their own modern fighter jets. Taiwan is under a direct threat, and so is everybody within reach of China. That is simply how it is. China is much worse than you'd expect.
"So unmerciful is life, that everything afterwards is too late."
All I could make out was a bunch of guys in funny hats running up and down lines of bars moving what looked like round wooden balls. Looked funny as the groups of balls then were counted by an old man in a RedHat, who sent the results to output, after he checked the results against the government blocking code base.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Look, over there --it's a pinko!
My Dear Lord. Well, I understand, I have a paranoid schizophrenic aunt. I'm not against you people. Nobody is. That's the whole point. It's all in your head. Really, just try to relax. Nobody is going to hurt you as long as you don't get violent. But please refrain from making a food of yourself in public.
I got the impression that the whole distro is loaded into RAMDisk from a flash.
This really caught my eye because just recently on the Knoppix boards, a script has come out to load a whole Knoppix distro directly into RAMDisk.
I bet this is how it works and I think it's an awesome way to go. I want to try and load Morphix into 300 Megs of RAM using the script over at Knoppix. You could try it too! They say it's freakin' fast once you load everything into RAM.
I think it's interesting that the other popular desktops, MS and Apple, really don't have any incentive to go this way since it could potentially stall high end hardware sales and that's not really in their business interests.
After all, why do you need a bunch of hard drives if your OS is in RAM and you have cheap optical media for storage. And why do you need fast CPUs if your OS is already snappy as hell on an older --or newer, but slower, cheaper and less power hungry-- machines.
I think this is huge news. I knew it was coming, but I thought it would be awhile. I think the immersion lithography deal made it pointless to put things off anymore. The tech transfer is complete and it had jack to do with Taiwan. The Taiwanese are far too greedy. This was home grown all the way. I have no doubt.
You can buy them for real cheap... will be more compatible with current software and will probably as fast as the dragon for years to come.
Hmmm... Pie...
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1902 59357X/qid=1059555523/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-889851 7-1671955?v=glance&s=books
As far as I know China has not bought a Mig fighter design since the Mig-17 the Migs 19 and 21 they reverse engineered from pattern aircraft provided sans drawings from the USSR shortly before the schism between the two countries in the 60's. They did however purchase the Su-27 and Su-30 after the fall of the USSR. China is years away from building anything like the Su 27 or the Su 30 from ground up. They can reverse engineer it and manufacture it themselves the way they did with the Mig-21 (J/F-7) but they are incapable of actually designing a modern fighter 100% on their own from the ground up. Even the J-10 fighter which is so highly hyped up the US-senate's military budget debates (although it is usually labelled as complete junk by the USAF outside those gatherings) is probably based Israeli Lavi fighter programme which was sold to China by the Israelis to piss of the US when the US refused to fund it with even more millions of US tax dollars than they had already poured into it by then. Of course the Chinese will eventually become able to design their own, 100% Chinese built and designed, combat aircraft that can hope to compete with US/EU/Russian Bleeding edge fighters but the timeframe is probably on the order of 20-30 years or so.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
1. The simple act of being kicked out of Europe does not give you the right to take over the New World from the Natives.. BUT YOU DID!! and forced them into reservations for their own protection... =) (I'm not saying that is wrong either.. its a basic law of science by some dude they call darwin.. survival of the fittest or some crud)
2. If you go back 5000 years, what is now known as China was actually many separate kingdoms, bout 8 or 9 and yes today's Tibet belonged to one of those kingdoms and the land of Tibet over the last 5000 years have been off and on, in and out of "China's" control. Some uprising here and there changes possession of control throughout the years. Look at the greeks, romans, normans, franks, etc.. they all did the same shit, so why is it that when China does it, China is the evil empire and when the europeans does it, its A-OK.
China's autocratic regime does have its drawbacks, but then again it does have its usefulness. Many critics of the system based their assessment on the assumptions of their own environment and did not take into account the cultural, economical, educational differences.
There are some ideas which we deem extremely previous which runs counters against other cultures and we think people who do not adopt what we deem precious is EVIL...(pinky to the lips!). Democracy is a system that can only work when education, cultural, and economic standards are of a level that can sustain a democratic system. Every other country that has tried to implement a democractic system that has not achieve a certain threshold in these categories have failed miserably. Taiwan, Russia, Japan, Indonesia, etc.. list goes on and on.
3. The US government isn't good at fooling their own people with bold faced lies? Please google Bushism, it provides a good read to counter your arguments =). Not to mention that we are known for buying political, military and economical favors with our "AID" packages. recent examples.. turkey, pakistan, et al. let us use your land as base for our iraq campaign and we promise give you X billion (in fine print but we will have to get congressional approval in addition to the presidential promise, so the AID package MIGHT not be there). So we just package our lies a little better but what's the difference?
4. Regarding vietnam, my understanding was due to political and social reasons, the government never commited enough military support to make the war winnable, all the hippie protests (really just an excuse to say FUCK over a PA system a lot, get alot of people in one place to have free casual sex and complain at the government imo), the morale issue of the soldiers there where it seems that most of them don't know why the fuck are they doing in the jungles of vietnam. The US finally left because it became too economically, and politically unsustainable for them to continue in vietnam. Thus vietnam became the only war in modern history that the US technically lost, now if the US actually focused the entire might of its military powers in vietnam, there won't be tributes to uncle ho in vietnam right now. There'll be an american flag there instead.
5. Based on what I have read of ancient and modern historical text (last 4500 years) Other than wars within the area in what is known as China today, the "Chinese" has never actually invaded another country. (Parts of North Korea was actually part of China off and on over history). The japanese and korean kingdoms also deferred to the decisions of the chinese emperors and used the chinese emperors as leverage politically in their own kingdoms. You can find references to that in many of the historical accounts.
China has also never engaged in colonialism even though they had more than enough power militarily to do so in the past. In the Ming dynasty, a fleet that contained over 100 ships set sail under the command of Admiral Cheng Ho. He visited many places and iirc went all the way to Africa. Whenever he arrived at a new place, instead of setting up colonies, he did a PR camp
Midori-1.0.0-beta3 test.test.com 2.4 #10 SMP Sun Feb 24 15:58:36 CET 2002 i386
Check my site: http://pixel.pagina.nl
And so it begins...
China has made a few things clear with respect to its rise as a new super power:
1) We will show the world what can be done and take the lead as a nation in engineering, space exploration, and computer science.
They started with the largest engineering project ever concieved..the largest hydro electric power project EVER.
No western nation could duplicate such a project even if we wanted to because of the sheer size, and the use of cheap labor by the Chinese.
China will have clean, cheap energy for 25% of the nations total needs for the next 100 years from this project.
2) It has been rumored, recently in a M5 visit to China, that space exploration plans include a moon base within 15 years of thier first successful manned orbital launch.
It was also made in not so many words, that once they complete this base, we are NOT welcome.
3) China, doesn't want Western IT technology. Especially Windows, or Intel's chip technology in any sort of influence on its internal consumer markets.
It was made clear that Intel's Chip ID technology and the CIA's insistence that back doors be placed into foreign copies of Windows, was not acceptable.
It is forbidden in China to attach any Intel processor based system to the internet with Chip ID technology of anykind.
This new processor was a "call your bluff".
After all, HOW DARE YOU compete with Western technology, you can't possible build anything near as well as we can, so you must accept our processors if you want to do business with us.
It is this direct response to Intel's Digital Rights, chip ID technology as well, that this processor now has been born.
It won't take China long to ramp this processor up to Pentium 4 Xeon quality (3 years at most), using Tainwanese acquired fabrication planets and technologists.
In my view, China can sustain its economic growth internally, due to its population size for the next 50 years, and tell the rest of the world to kiss its ass.
I believe greed, our very own Intellectual Property Rights Laws, and this obsession with Digital Rights Management has locked us out of the only market that will provide long term economic security to the United States.
What is more, I believe China is using these laws against our very own interests in doing business over there.
Coupled with thier own version of RedFlag Linux, once China has its own PC, and own Operating System, THEY WILL DICTATE TERMS 50 years from now to the Western world.
Our business leaders are fools in this country, and while China builds the biggest terrestrial project ever concieved, builds its own Moon Base 20 years from now, the world will do everything it can not to make the Dragon DISPLEASED.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Unless you're trading steel, and your own steel production industry is so crap you can't compete. Then its America First again.
The problem I think is one of exchange rates.
If US and Europe do not foster IP, then wages will collapse as all production will move to lowest bidding countries and eventually the world will wind up as corporate serfs.
On the other hand, IP screws not only developing nations, it also undermines consumers and competitors at home. Wonder what the world would be like without IP? If Free Trade makes everything more productive, then, wouldn't free IP make everything more so?
This is my sig.
You forgot Von Braun :)
Was he not politically correct enough for this discussion ?
I hadn't realized Microsoft and Intel were flopping around....Oh that's right this is slashdot............
The 1982 Dragon 32 was substantially cheaper than that. Though it did have MS Basic.
Couple 20 of these things with a good Linux server and some flat LCD monitors and you can equip an office with super-fast terminals and a terminal server for less than the price of deploying one Windows 2003 server with 20 user licenses.
I cant wait to buy a couple to play with...
I just wonder what kind of inport restrictions the US govt is going to hammer on these things cince they upset tow of the largest Lobbiests...
Microsoft and Intel will be mighty pissed about these things.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Cool,
g ua ge+course
Now they can have an opcode that will very quickly load the string "Long Live Chineese Socialist Party" in the video memory.
http://www.google.com/search?q=free+chinese+lan
But the real kicker with this CPU is the possibility for cheap dual and quad motherboards. If you can get 4 of these running under Linux or NetBSD the performance of one CPU don't mather that much.
Actually, the problem with SMP is getting the memory bandwidth. If you have 4 processors ready to chew on data, but they can't get any data/program to run from the main system memory, it won't do any good. L1 and L2 caches help, but if they solved the problem, we wouldn't need the main system memory.
There have been lots of good attempts to solve this problem -- message passing (ala a Beowulf running an MPI application), or some of the NUMA architectures are good at solving particular types of problems. But, none of these techniques will help you run OpenOffice or Quake faster.
tibet was a province of china until 1911.
According to whom?
Imperial China's claims on Tibet stem from a curious incident when the barbarous pre-buddhist conversion Tibetans forced China to pay tribute. Part of the tribute was that the Tibetan king would get a Chinese imperial princess as a second wife.
Subsequently, China claimed Tibet as a province, but never effectively had territorial control over Tibet. Tibetans have, until the twentieth century, essentially governed themselves. At times during the Ching dynasty, China has exercised hegemony over Tibet, but this followed nineteenth century theories of geopolitics. Tibet is resource and agriculturally poor, and therefore of no interest to anyone other than geopoliticians. This control never really reached the point of actual direct rule, and collapsed by the end of the nineteenth century.
tibet was, in fact, an oligarchical theocracy before the invasion. over 90% of the population were "landless serfs" which basically means "plantation slave".
Well, you're kind of putting an inaccurate modern spin on what was a pre-medieval society by western standards. Most tibetans were nomads, herding yaks and other cattle being the only form of agriculture that is viable on any scale there. They were "landless" in the sense that they lived in a vast commons. They were not serfs in that they did not belong to anyone; nor did they have much contact during their lives with the aristocracy.
They did not have the modern institutions of democracy and private property; on the other hand most people's day to day lives were completely unencumbered by any form of government at all. So were they "not free" because they lacked these institutions in a society that did not need them?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
nope, he in with the top leading researchers link
- you appear to know what you're talking about
- It's been about 15 years since I studied Mandarin seriously.
I seem to remeber an input method from long ago based on bomopofo (remembering correctly?) Has that disappeared?Put identity in the browser.
Such a system wont need more than a 10gb harddisk if even that.
I just installed RedHat 9 on my wife's computer. (Gentoo on mine, don't give me crap) Obviously I didn't do an 'everything' install, but a simple 'workstation' install with KDE selected also came out to 2 gigs. That gives her 7-8 gigs of space to mess with for web/office/email type things. (10 gig drive)
Only reason I said that is because 10 gigs is really enough for the casual computer user.
As far as her downloading things (music files, etc), I have a fileserver with a raided disk array, so no need to worry about clientside disk space =) But that's only a worry if she starts downloading a buttload of ISO images or something.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Well, at least this is a semi-original troll... that's the number for the 700 Club...
This is not part of my post. It's my signature. I bet you're disappointed.
All I have to say to this is...go China!
So China is trying to become more high tech. WTF is wrong with that? Do you want the earth's most populous nation to consist mostly of peasants forever? Your entire xenophobic post fails to explain why this is such a bad thing.
Physics is good
Recent (now suppressed) *Chinese government* studies have shown that over 80 million people died in "The Great Leap Forward" and "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution". To date, no real admissions have been made. The recent 'improvements' have been superficial. China still runs huge prison camps with millions of slave laborers, many incarcerated without trial, (and trials in China are often shams) and keeps millions of its citizens in a second-class citizenship internal-exile 'peasant' status, and these people are prohibited from moving or getting good jobs..and if they do try to move to cities, they have no legal rights..
Plus, China sends tens of thousands of starving North Korean refugees back to North Korea (often to be summarily executed for the 'treason' of trying to flee Kim Jong Il's 'paradise'.) in violation of international law..
Birds of a feather, flock together... (North Korea is, by far, the WORST human rights situation on Earth)
And they also execute thousands of people a year, more than any other country, (except for North Korea) and sell their organs.. Often, they do a tissue match first, and execute the prisoners with the best match.. Isn't that creepy?
Whoever says China is not a country with barbaric human rights practices.. man, that is some serious denial going on...
You're probably right. All tyrants have strong similarities.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You can check my sig if you want some more info, but the executive summary is:
MS has dropped the price of MS Windows to an insanely low price in Thailand, but only for computers under the governments new low-cost computer initiative, which come with a localized version of Linux. One can only assume that this is not to combat piracy, but to reduce the number of these one million machines that will reach home with LinuxTLE still on them.
Put identity in the browser.
We are only talking about the product plan of a commerical company in Hong Kong! What the hell does it have to do with Tibet or People's Liberation Army!!! Next time when Intel or AMD develop a new CPU, does we have to discuss about everything from Ku Klux Klan to Hiroshima to the peril of Palestinian to the bloodshed in Iraq? Why do we have all these reflexive responses about Tibet whenever China is mentioned?
Take your political discussion to the appropiate forum. As far as this article is concerned, this is OFFTOPIC.
In general I find Linux has taken great care of internationalization. I can use my Redhat to display both traditional and simplified Chinese. What else does Midori offers? Maybe it actually translate all messages into Chinese?
Hong Kong is part of China. The Chinese have developed a processor that will be the backbone of its information-technology infrastructure. It is an issue for the USA, economically and militarily.
The Chinese government, via "China People's Daily", have several employees who post messages in American discussion boards whenever the topic of China arises. It is a concerted attempt at propaganda.
I suggest that the moderators of Slashdot contact the former moderators of the old CNN message boards and the moderators of the current message boards at "The New York Times". Whenever a message that criticizes China appears in either of those message boards, the message boards suddenly become inundated with mysterious messages that viciously attack the parent message.
A similar game is being played here, on SlashDot, by pro-China posters. They deliberately try to sway the moderators to mod down messages criticizing China. Several of the pro-China posters are affiliated with the Chinese government.
At least you can bet they will get their math right!
I am almost willing to bet that they will come out with a dirt cheap 64 bit bus on a board first! IBM, MS and INTEL have all deliberately held this back.
Tiny alien math profs like Intels Pentiums because they make them laugh.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
On one hand it is great to have another processor go mainstream in the PC market. This helps keep the prices low, increases the variety of hardware and software development, provides yet another area for hacking (the hobbyist type not the 5cr1p7 k1ddy type), and helps move technology into areas previously limited by economic or political factors.
On the other hand, as much as I like to explore new toys rarely do I have the resources to gamble on new unproven technologies (both time and money, sigh). So it is unlikely that I would consider buying such a system instead of an Intel or AMD box (in fact although I own an older AMD box, if I bought today I would probably lean towards Intel slightly just to reduce any "apparent" or "preceived" risk). Since statistically speaking I am not alone in this opinion new technologies like the Dragon probably have a long battle in front of them to gain any market share in countries with established "mainstream" technologies.
[end ontopic]
This has to be said... ./. Not only to I get a reasonable sample of targetted news stories that appeal to my interests, more importantly, I get a variety of views and opinions from people on both sides of many issues. To often I find that following only local (read as: local to North America in my case) media that I hear only snippets , single sides, or limited scopes of many international issues. Many times I do not even hear of some issues that are happening globally that for various reasons are not carried by local media. Reading the posted comments from a variety of people all over the world (and listening to late night CBC radio; news from other countries) gives me insight and knowledge of a more "worldly nature" rather then the limited scope presented by local media.
The various comments made in this story is a classic example of one of the reasons I read
Most importantly the comments are by "real people" as opposed to executive summaries presented by media which may be following personal agenda's. Sure you can say "you give weight to the *insert whatever derogatory adjective* posted by the select group of *insert whatever derogatory adjective* people?!", but even taking that into account I still gain a variety of good information on many topics I would otherwise not have. Examples included but not limited to are:
- the thread on China in this story
- the many comments on/from persons living in Quebec Canada in previous
/. stories (even the news in my own Country does not always reflect what the "little person" thinks)
- the various discussion on the War with Iraq from non-North Americans
and the list could go on and on.Yes, /. have its share of trolls, useless arguments, and cannon fodder type posting but it has its share of "interesting" and "insightful" posts also (otherwise you would not be reading this :) ).
In a nutshell, thank you readers of /. for broadening my horizons and giving me a wealth of consice information that I would otherwise not have had (due to lack of time to research and lack of awareness of the entire issue).
Merlin. P.S. and hey, even though this post may not show it, I am actually improving in both grammer and spelling thanks to a select group of /. readers :-)
More like security implications for the US republic, considering we're going to be using almost exclusively the Chinese chip, not the other way around.
> If they reduce their reliance on foreign IP (or non-free foreign IP) [...]
"Intellectual Property" is a contradiction in terms.
the intellect deals with ideas and ideas cannot be anyone's property.
Unless you meant this IP.
> One other thing, 100 years ago, America was practically 3rd world in terms of labor conditions. There were labor riots, slave labor conditions, factories that burned down with the workers inside (fire escapes doors locked to prevent the workers from sneaking off), etc. etc.
Don't worry, your corporations are doing everything within their power to bring back that golden age.
*nt*
"Tibet has been an independent country (even an empire at times) in Central Asia since about 1000 BCE." That's -873 by the Tibetan Calendar. (http://mypage.direct.ca/w/wattj/Western.htm) (2130 -3003= -873)).
t m.htm).
I really, really, really dislike the "Before Common Era" CRAP that has become vogue of late.
It's Anno Domini guys. You may not believe in the Christian God. You may not believe in God at all.
BUT the civilized world accepts the AD dating system. Period. People don't go around with 36 or 48 hour days, though it is possible. Saying "1000 BCE" means about the same as "4492 by the Coptic Calendar". However with BCE, because you're still dating from the birth of Jesus Christ, you're only putting a Politically Correct name to it.
If you want to make a break, do METRIC TIME. At least that's a standard the rest of the world acknowledges for measurement. (Check out http://www.indwes.edu/Faculty/bcupp/things/metric
>Soapbox$:/off
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
So, um how well do they work compared to say Intel or IBM 68000 chips? Will they be competively priced? How long before one turns up in defence dept. mainframe?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
is silly. I'm quite happy to have my Taiwanese girlfriend here. And many Taiwanese want nothing to do with the current regime in Beijing.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
You contradict yourself. The point is precisely to keep technology out of the hands of totalitarian governments. See, people want to run from them but they their govs keep them by force. So other methods to obtain security should be sought. Exactly the original poster point - that you so mightily confused.
hint: it's a green tea from Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina
You forgot southern Brazil :-)
``L'imagination au povoir.''
Wow... +5 Interesting...
Mods really have no brains otherwise they would realise this is the troll it is (and author has experience of anit-China trolls).
I actually want to learn more about PAM. As weird as PAM sounds, we need something better than political intelligence. Can we ever get objective intelligence from self-serving political organizations? Any system that might address this would be welcome, even if it some evil free-market dead pool.