iPad fans will remark all day long that Android is a failure because there are no truly successful 10" tablets that compare to iPads. 7" tablets are casually dismissed as not being useful. This will all change of course once Apple releases a smaller form factor tablet at which time all the Apple fans will declare that finally a true 7" tablet has been released.
I lived in Beijing for 4 years and to be honest it's not going to be super easy to land an IT job as there are plenty of qualified local chinese engineers for most any task and they are going to be cheaper than you. That being said if you are somewhat lucky you might find a good gig.
Look for IT listings on the websites of the local monthly english language magazines:
"Mao Zedong encouraged population growth and China's population almost doubled from around 550 to over 900 million during the period of his leadership."
I lived in China for several years and it's common knowledge that the one child policy is in part a reaction to the earlier policies that encouraged population growth under Mao's reign.
You're absolutely right there are major inefficiencies in China's economy. I live in Beijing and as the original poster said business come and go with alarming frequency usually due to not having any idea at all what kind of business is likely to succeed in a given place. The other very common mistake is to cluster businesses in one area. While it might be nice for the consumer to have the choice between 5 cafes in one apartment complex / street block, it makes no sense for the business owners to have to face 4 direct competitors rather than zero.
Once China's 'catch-up' growth starts to slow -and it most certainly will at some point- then you will see a lot of people start to realize just how much the typical business owner has to learn about business...
While what you describe is true regarding dialects and the large variety of local and regional cultures in China, it should be mentioned that most all of these regions are still populated by the dominant ethnic group in China, the Han. Tibetans are not Han and if you visit China (where I live now) you can very easily tell the difference between a Tibetan and a Han. The same is true for the Uyghur people who are the primary ethnic group in Xinjiang - another region of China that was annexed by China and has had its local people slowly pushed out by an influx of Han Chinese.
"My point is that if you are trying to convince a Chinese person that Tibet deserve to be separated, and used their distinct culture and language as the reason, then by that reason many more parts of China also deserve to be separated. I think most people does not know how diverse in culture and language China is."
The difference here is a question of time. Most Han dominated regions of China have been a part of China during its various dynasties so despite having different dialects and local customs, these people and regions were still nominally part of a greater China. Tibet on the other hand has existed as an independent region for the bulk of the long history of the Chinese dynasties. If I live in Zhejiang province and have lived under Chinese society - in whatever form that society was in a particular dynasty - for 2000 years, I am going to share a lot more with someone from Hunan province than with a Tibetan who lived in their own country and culture up to the early 1950s...
I currently live in Beijing where I am the IT manager for a 60+ person company. A couple of things should be mentioned about the hardware and software market here...
First off, it's been possible to buy machines without Windows and even bundled with Linux long before Dell started shipping with Ubuntu in the US. In fact when we bought a laptop from Dell we went with the Linux option which was Red Flag Linux in the form of an install CD and docs. This was a truly naked PC. In the ads for one of the two major computer hardware markets about 10% of the desktop PC ads list Linux as an install option.
Secondly, people here see Windows and office and many other typical apps as totally and completely free items. Now I don't mean that they are unaware that these things typically cost money and sometimes a lot of it, I mean that Windows is pirated ALWAYS and by EVERYONE. Part of this can be chalked up to the general lack of seriousness about IP but even more so due to price. The real full price of Windows the way MS would like it just won't fly here. Even if they do price at the equivalent of $3 per install people will not pay when it can be so readily available for $0.
The computer markets here are clustered in two main spots where you can one or more buildings full of hundreds of small companies all selling more or less the same sets of hardware and software. If one vendor starts charging for Windows they will lose business IMMEDIATELY to the guy next to him.
Just the other day I went to one of the markets and perused one of the marketing flyers. While it is possible to buy legit Windows, the prices are completely disconnected with reality here. For legit Windows Vista Home Premium the price was 2,200RMB and for Office 2007 5,150RMB. The put that in perspective that is about $280 and $660 respectively. The average person here in Beijing makes around 2,000 to 5,000RMB per month. Are they expected to save up for months and months (after paying for housing, food, transportation) to pay full western prices for Windows? Of course they will not and piracy continues unabated.
While I think that MS is making some small strides in starting to bank revenue here, it's going to be a long long long time before they can capture the revenue per user that they are used to in the West.
I can't answer your websphere or tivoli questions but at my company we've been running several dozen servers running debian with the DB2 client with no problems for several years now. It's not terribly difficult to get up and running. In lieu of using alien to convert the RPM to DEB, I've just rolled my own debian package with the DB2 client contents.
actually, you just specify an include path(s) that is outside of the document tree of the webserver. PHP itself takes care of including the files it needs and the enduser isn't able to directly access them. This is basic PHP stuff here folks....
Uh, can you point me to the HTML spec that describes the way to set a background image in a tag? I couldn't find it. I can however locate the CSS property 'background-image' which is supported quite nicely in Mozilla and IE. Show me IE-specific HTML tags that do not have equivalent functionality in CSS 1 or 2....
We were early adopters of then PacBell's DSL service. There were many problems in the beginning but for the last 1.5 years or so it has been smooth sailing.
Point in fact, California recently surpassed France
in annual GDP, making it the fifth largest economy
in the world.
I have lived in california now for twelve years and I can safely say two things:
1) Most cultural comments about california ring true with the exception of parts of northern california where you have a real multicultural, open-minded culture where the concept of 'normal' people does not have to mean a narrow, middle america whitebread idea of normal.
2) Only in the last couple of years has there been a massive influx of people from all over the rest of the country chasing dreams of easy money. This is what has led to out of control rents and impossible dreams to own a home. Locals have been just as guilty at times of greed, but i know many people who were okay before the boom and are doing just fine thank you after the boom. What they didn't do was think that the whole world had changed economically and rush out and buy up everything in sight.
That being said, I think considering moving to other parts of the country to seek better opportunities is fine, but you will find less people who were in california already that will be willing to do that because we remember how it was and how it can be.....
I have been using daily builds off and on for
about six months. For the last two months I have
used mozilla on a daily basis and find it to
be quite responsive and relatively crashfree
compared to NN4.x Other than some problems
with poorly written javascript code, I have
not had many pages fail to render correctly.
As for platforms, I have used with varying
levels of success:
Amd K6-200 - slow startup, slow response but
not too much worse than NN4.x
Amd K6-2 350 - Only marginally faster than
200 mhz machine
Amd Athlon 750 - other than startup time,
very fast and stable.
Amd Duron 650 - Fast and responsive.
These machines had between 96MB and 256MB of
memory so that obviously has some impact.
You can add lines to your/etc/apt/sources.list
to pick up packages from other sources. For the
latest KDE stuff, add these:
deb http://kde.tdyc.com/ potato kde kde2 contrib
deb http://kde.tdyc.com/ woody kde kde2 contrib
As always, those that are first to criticize
are last to research and try stuff out
About a month ago, I went to hear a talk from
one of folks at iCast, formally of icecast. The
guy informed me that they are in fact working on
an open-source video format. It is not based
on mpeg4. I came away impressed with their
committment to open source and their dedication
to freeing users from the potential bonds of
the mp3 format.
Separation of PHP and HTML content is trivial to accomplish for the most part. The use of the 'include' function allows atomic files of solely HTML (or mostly HTML with a few PHP variables included) to be separately written and maintained without knowledge of the PHP only code.
For example, on a project I am working on, there was a desire to be able to change the look and feel of the website on-the-fly. If the structure of the HTML page is designed to be modular then the order of the display of HTML elements can be easily rearranged by modifying the order of the 'includes' of the HTML files in a 'main display' PHP file.
There are really two ways to use PHP - sprinkling the PHP code all around a bunch of HTML, or by making as much of the site as possible into small modular pieces. If you think about it, it's not all that different from using CSS. The rigid way of applying CSS is to use inline style tags throughout. The flexible modular way is the use an external style sheet with classes and id's and such. Either way you will get the same end result, but one is certainly easier to deal with.
Same story as everyone else for me. I placed the conditional offer and judiciously checked for any reconfirmation messages. When the price changed I went back and did it again. In the end, same story - no shares. I was okay with the random chance, but after hearing all the posts, I am not so sure things are on the level.
Slashdot Mirror
iPad fans will remark all day long that Android is a failure because there are no truly successful 10" tablets that compare to iPads. 7" tablets are casually dismissed as not being useful. This will all change of course once Apple releases a smaller form factor tablet at which time all the Apple fans will declare that finally a true 7" tablet has been released.
I lived in Beijing for 4 years and to be honest it's not going to be super easy to land an IT job as there are plenty of qualified local chinese engineers for most any task and they are going to be cheaper than you. That being said if you are somewhat lucky you might find a good gig.
Look for IT listings on the websites of the local monthly english language magazines:
http://www.thebeijinger.com/
http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing
Go to the local user group meetings and network such as the Beijing Linux user group:
http://www.clubbeautiful.com/ (strange domain I know)
These guys have been around a long time and do outsourcing work for large european companies mostly:
http://www.exoweb.net/en
These guys provide local hosting services and may possibly an avenue:
http://www.candisgroup.com/
From that same Wikipedia article:
"Mao Zedong encouraged population growth and China's population almost doubled from around 550 to over 900 million during the period of his leadership."
I lived in China for several years and it's common knowledge that the one child policy is in part a reaction to the earlier policies that encouraged population growth under Mao's reign.
You're absolutely right there are major inefficiencies in China's economy. I live in Beijing and as the original poster said business come and go with alarming frequency usually due to not having any idea at all what kind of business is likely to succeed in a given place. The other very common mistake is to cluster businesses in one area. While it might be nice for the consumer to have the choice between 5 cafes in one apartment complex / street block, it makes no sense for the business owners to have to face 4 direct competitors rather than zero.
Once China's 'catch-up' growth starts to slow -and it most certainly will at some point- then you will see a lot of people start to realize just how much the typical business owner has to learn about business...
While what you describe is true regarding dialects and the large variety of local and regional cultures in China, it should be mentioned that most all of these regions are still populated by the dominant ethnic group in China, the Han. Tibetans are not Han and if you visit China (where I live now) you can very easily tell the difference between a Tibetan and a Han. The same is true for the Uyghur people who are the primary ethnic group in Xinjiang - another region of China that was annexed by China and has had its local people slowly pushed out by an influx of Han Chinese.
"My point is that if you are trying to convince a Chinese person that Tibet deserve to be separated, and used their distinct culture and language as the reason, then by that reason many more parts of China also deserve to be separated. I think most people does not know how diverse in culture and language China is."
The difference here is a question of time. Most Han dominated regions of China have been a part of China during its various dynasties so despite having different dialects and local customs, these people and regions were still nominally part of a greater China. Tibet on the other hand has existed as an independent region for the bulk of the long history of the Chinese dynasties. If I live in Zhejiang province and have lived under Chinese society - in whatever form that society was in a particular dynasty - for 2000 years, I am going to share a lot more with someone from Hunan province than with a Tibetan who lived in their own country and culture up to the early 1950s...
I currently live in Beijing where I am the IT manager for a 60+ person company. A couple of things should be mentioned about the hardware and software market here...
First off, it's been possible to buy machines without Windows and even bundled with Linux long before Dell started shipping with Ubuntu in the US. In fact when we bought a laptop from Dell we went with the Linux option which was Red Flag Linux in the form of an install CD and docs. This was a truly naked PC. In the ads for one of the two major computer hardware markets about 10% of the desktop PC ads list Linux as an install option.
Secondly, people here see Windows and office and many other typical apps as totally and completely free items. Now I don't mean that they are unaware that these things typically cost money and sometimes a lot of it, I mean that Windows is pirated ALWAYS and by EVERYONE. Part of this can be chalked up to the general lack of seriousness about IP but even more so due to price. The real full price of Windows the way MS would like it just won't fly here. Even if they do price at the equivalent of $3 per install people will not pay when it can be so readily available for $0.
The computer markets here are clustered in two main spots where you can one or more buildings full of hundreds of small companies all selling more or less the same sets of hardware and software. If one vendor starts charging for Windows they will lose business IMMEDIATELY to the guy next to him.
Just the other day I went to one of the markets and perused one of the marketing flyers. While it is possible to buy legit Windows, the prices are completely disconnected with reality here. For legit Windows Vista Home Premium the price was 2,200RMB and for Office 2007 5,150RMB. The put that in perspective that is about $280 and $660 respectively. The average person here in Beijing makes around 2,000 to 5,000RMB per month. Are they expected to save up for months and months (after paying for housing, food, transportation) to pay full western prices for Windows? Of course they will not and piracy continues unabated.
While I think that MS is making some small strides in starting to bank revenue here, it's going to be a long long long time before they can capture the revenue per user that they are used to in the West.
I can't answer your websphere or tivoli questions but at my company we've been running several dozen servers running debian with the DB2 client with no problems for several years now. It's not terribly difficult to get up and running. In lieu of using alien to convert the RPM to DEB, I've just rolled my own debian package with the DB2 client contents.
actually, you just specify an include path(s) that is outside of the document tree of the webserver. PHP itself takes care of including the files it needs and the enduser isn't able to directly access them. This is basic PHP stuff here folks....
I've been using sylpheed-claws for some time now. How does evolution compare in terms of features, speed, stability and memory footprint?
Uh, can you point me to the HTML spec that describes the way to set a background image in a tag? I couldn't find it. I can however locate the CSS property 'background-image' which is supported quite nicely in Mozilla and IE. Show me IE-specific HTML tags that do not have equivalent functionality in CSS 1 or 2....
We were early adopters of then PacBell's DSL service. There were many problems in the beginning but for the last 1.5 years or so it has been smooth sailing.
after already defining colors....
L BLU\])\[$WHT\]--\[$LBLU\](\[$LGRN\]\u\[$LBLU\])\[$ WHT\]--\[$LBLU\](\[$LCYN\]\w\[$LBLU\])
PS1="\[$LBLU\](\[$LRED\]*\[$LYEL\]\h\[$LRED\]*\[$
see it here:
http://www.triptonite.com/~jaydub/bash.jpg
Point in fact, California recently surpassed France in annual GDP, making it the fifth largest economy in the world.
I have lived in california now for twelve years and I can safely say two things:
1) Most cultural comments about california ring true with the exception of parts of northern california where you have a real multicultural, open-minded culture where the concept of 'normal' people does not have to mean a narrow, middle america whitebread idea of normal.
2) Only in the last couple of years has there been a massive influx of people from all over the rest of the country chasing dreams of easy money. This is what has led to out of control rents and impossible dreams to own a home. Locals have been just as guilty at times of greed, but i know many people who were okay before the boom and are doing just fine thank you after the boom. What they didn't do was think that the whole world had changed economically and rush out and buy up everything in sight.
That being said, I think considering moving to other parts of the country to seek better opportunities is fine, but you will find less people who were in california already that will be willing to do that because we remember how it was and how it can be.....
I have been using daily builds off and on for about six months. For the last two months I have used mozilla on a daily basis and find it to be quite responsive and relatively crashfree compared to NN4.x Other than some problems with poorly written javascript code, I have not had many pages fail to render correctly.
As for platforms, I have used with varying levels of success:
Amd K6-200 - slow startup, slow response but not too much worse than NN4.x
Amd K6-2 350 - Only marginally faster than 200 mhz machine
Amd Athlon 750 - other than startup time, very fast and stable.
Amd Duron 650 - Fast and responsive.
These machines had between 96MB and 256MB of memory so that obviously has some impact.
You can add lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list
to pick up packages from other sources. For the
latest KDE stuff, add these:
deb http://kde.tdyc.com/ potato kde kde2 contrib
deb http://kde.tdyc.com/ woody kde kde2 contrib
As always, those that are first to criticize
are last to research and try stuff out
About a month ago, I went to hear a talk from one of folks at iCast, formally of icecast. The guy informed me that they are in fact working on an open-source video format. It is not based on mpeg4. I came away impressed with their committment to open source and their dedication to freeing users from the potential bonds of the mp3 format.
Separation of PHP and HTML content is trivial to accomplish for the most part. The use of the 'include' function allows atomic files of solely HTML (or mostly HTML with a few PHP variables included) to be separately written and maintained without knowledge of the PHP only code.
For example, on a project I am working on, there was a desire to be able to change the look and feel of the website on-the-fly. If the structure of the HTML page is designed to be modular then the order of the display of HTML elements can be easily rearranged by modifying the order of the 'includes' of the HTML files in a 'main display' PHP file.
There are really two ways to use PHP - sprinkling the PHP code all around a bunch of HTML, or by making as much of the site as possible into small modular pieces. If you think about it, it's not all that different from using CSS. The rigid way of applying CSS is to use inline style tags throughout. The flexible modular way is the use an external style sheet with classes and id's and such. Either way you will get the same end result, but one is certainly easier to deal with.
Same story as everyone else for me. I placed the conditional offer and judiciously checked for any reconfirmation messages. When the price changed I went back and did it again. In the end, same story - no shares. I was okay with the random chance, but after hearing all the posts, I am not so sure things are on the level.