on a work computer i tried to search for something inside a folder that I knew was there and couldn't find it, 5 minutes later i found it by digging around through the sub-folders, what a mess.
I've been a grandFATHER since my early 40's (43) and got out of programming in the early 80's because of Basic (it was so... dirty... cheap tricks and fluff coding, not like Pascal, a purity that defies failure), so the grandma part is OK, but 20 years with C? That is suspect. Oh wait, it's 2011, hmmm, 1991, damn i'm getting old (stumbles off grumbling to a CRT with a green screen)
I have to agree, the absolute worst, however, is when money is poured into "renovation" which involves using modern workers (painters, carpenters, other tradespeople) and modern materials (particle board, mdf, paint and plywood, and especially concrete/ mortar). the results are garish, heinous and shocking. Modern renovations of Chinese temples are a travesty.
A close friend, a Chinese Taoist abbot, has taken the temple where he lives and done very little to it. He works on it himself, in his free time, with almost nothing in funds he uses what was used originally, local materials. The result is organic, original and a true presentation of what a working temple was and should be today. It is really lovely and almost empty of visitors, which was one of his goals. It is a temple after all, not a tourist attraction.
I was managing to stay out of discussions today because my keyboard was plugged into my WeTab, trying to add Plop, but this topic calls for an old man's response.
Back before most of you were in short pants I was given a portable typewriter by my mother. I was in 5th grade and my handwriting was execrable, unreadable and ugly. Still is BTW. But, I was warned by many people:"Do not learn how to touch type." (actually they said "type", "touch typing" was not in the vernacular back then) and I took their advice and didn't. Still don't really "touch" type, I "memory type" my fingers generally remember where stuff is and if I don't think about it they go where I want and type what I want. It is not super fast, but then that isn't my goal.
Why didn't you want to touch type BITD? Because once you did you became a "typist." That meant that everyone wanted you to type stuff for them and you got hired for jobs at a lower level (as a typist, someone with manual skills) and got paid less money. Typing was for "workers" not "thinkers".
As others below have remarked there are some mistakes in this post. As well, while they try to consider the cultural reasons for the piracy, or support of piracy in China, I will repeat a rant about the cause, the support and the effect:
cause: Chinese people have been told, over and over without relent, that cheaper is better. we demand cheap from them and they, following our dictates, believe it. It also is supported by and resonates with their ethos that requires them to provide support for their extended family and to be judged by their family based on their ability to spread money around the family. Thus a successful person in the eyes of the family saves money at every instance and spreads it around within the family.
note: the children of the 90s, unlike previous generations, are the recipients of a vastly increased store of money. Rather than save this (which children, in general, don't do in Asia) they spend it on "trendy" consumer goods. These are the people who are shopping in the "potemkin" downtown stores and buying the iPads, Macs and expensive "potemkin" items. They are an anomally, or a harbinger of the future, who knows. Personally, I don't think their economy can support a luxury class of 10% of the population. Last year, when the iPad appeared in China, my students showed up in class with them in short order. they have the money and the social need to do it.
Support: Chinese culture has, forever, considered it the role of an intelligent, skilled and lettered person to repeat the wisdom of the ancients that Confucius saved from the Zhou dynasty (which he considered the height of culture and the most advanced civilization possible). This was preserved in a set of "classics"and a scholar (which was to say anyone who had the leisure to read and think) would memorize these and be able to repeat them word for word. Because of this, it was common practice to use them as a kind of shorthand to point to the idea that was being discussed in the original "classic" or in those particular lines of the classic that the quote came from. You would not preface the quote with anything like "as Confucius said in the classic of filial piety" because your reader would know that automatically because they also had memorized the classic and would immediately recognize the quote and what it referred to. As time went on this aesthetic ( that you just have to quote a piece of any important piece of writing in your field and you can assume that other intelligent and well read people will recognize the source and put the ideas together) became an important part of the Chinese intelligentsia's approach to writing and understanding. Note that you would have to memorize massive amounts of other people's writing to really be educated in this approach to knowledge, which is still the Chinese approach to education.
Effect: When American manufacturing moved to China it seemed "all-good." Chinese people had a work ethic that seemed frugal, focused on saving money and not on wasting money. Thus we got our cheap consumer goods and the unintended consequences of the Chinese view of copying others good and valuable ideas.
And here we are today.
One last point, the parent pretty clearly is living in Shanghai or Beijing or one of the other "westernized" cities, in the heartland things are more.... stark... in their clarity
Don't you see, please, before it's too late.... what does a PYTHON do???? first there is the gentle embrace, gentle but firm, the iron squeeze in the velvet coils, then the extension as it slowly wraps itself around the hapless victim... then the final extinction of the light as you are crushed into oblivion and swallowed into the dark recesses that harbor the crumbs of its previous meals! NOOOOO! escape!
While you might think that you know the "truth" about Tiananmen or any other story that makes it into the popular western press, you don't know the whole story. You really can't know it because you are so completely immersed in western ideas of society, social contract, societal roles and the place of the individual in society. Because you can't hold the western and the eastern view simultaneously you define yours as "right" and theirs as "wrong". They are "bad" while you are "good".
Well, that is just too damn simple. There are direct connections between your demand for the cheap shit that was being made over here that gave the government the power to crush a rebellion that was focused on societal change that would have threatened the existing power structure that might have threatened the government that was supplying you with your cheap shit. The Chinese went on to thank the US government for not making too much of a fuss about it by helping support Bush and minions with the debt problems created by his bullshit in Iraq.
OK, now maybe this tirade up above is wrong, warped, weak or otherwise flawed, go ahead and snipe at it, but it is an attempt to look at the facts in the history and see that you are to blame for things that happen in China, just as China is to blame for the American financial bomb. The world has achieved this level of complexity and China is a part of it.
Now, Twitter in China. Been here for a while in another name, not popular but still in wide use. The reason it is not popular (in the way that twitter is popular in the west ) I think has to do with the relationship of people to society and the personal view of the individual in society. Here, the individual opinion has very little value and expressing your opinion in a twitter setting is.... just not something people really want to do or to read. Better to read a fantasy created about a popular actor or singer than to hear the drivel that they really think. It just has little value in this society.
If it does get used, it will be by the new generation (the 90s kids) who have grown up as "little emperors" and who are the center of their family world. Then it would be a way for the parents and g-parents to continue to dote upon the brats and to complain to the caregivers at school and lessons when the brat tweets about something they don't like something. Ugly, ugly picture frankly.
Let me ditto this, I was checking a local expat forum for shipping companies to move my stuff back to the US, and the level of... what to call it? not a discussion when someone spews puerile sewage all over the page and then attaches a video so we can see them mouthing "fuck you".
No i'm not old and crotchety normally, but this was supposed to be an informational forum for people who live overseas. The level was just childish and... damn, what is the word for this pitiful kind of psycho-tourettic speech?
Not only that but the Minister of Transportation has said that the existing track is not safe and recommended a reduction in top speeds to, hopefully, reduce the chance of a major accident.
typically 50+ Hmmmm, I am 56 and work in an office full of clueless keyboard bangers who I scare away by threatening them with the "Linux Virus" There is no age band for clueless people, maybe you might oughta' try that age thing on a few others, like RMS say, or Steve Wozniak, both of whom have more creds than you will probably get in a life of tech work.
Last week I was chief invigilator for an exam that included a listening component. I created a set of USB pendrives with portable apps and VLC player loaded on together with the sound file to be played over the speakers in the class rooms. The only person who couldn't figure out how to drag and drop the sound file onto the player was the 28 year old Stanford grad who talks up his tech ability. You are officially refuted by anecdote, hang your head.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Of course, when I got the drives back the only one that didn't have a virus on it (mostly the "recycler" virus) was the one from my tech illiterate office mate, so go figure.
I'm about to send a 28 cu m. container to the US with all my earthly possessions, this story does not make me happy. Who allowed this spiteful and destructive article in here anyway?
No, there are very few people (who anyone bothers to read, I'm excluding the retards and btards that post garbage freely on the tubes) who try to run down the king. While there have been some very unusual things that happened back before world war two and during WWII in regards the Thai monarchy there is no question that the king grew into greatness as the king of thailand.
As for comments about his son, well these too were true 20 or more years ago, but he also has mellowed a great deal and marriage, fatherhood and a recognition that he was a bit over the top have changed him somewhat. Is he perfect, well ne of course not. Growing up as a prince can't be a good way to build good peoplehood in this world. But he ain't the punk he was once portrayed as being. (and may have been)
Yes Thailand has some super serious effed up stuff going on over there. Thai culture is nothing like the face you see as a tourist and anyone stoopid enough to "marry" into it deserves the thrashing they get for it, but the reality of the royal family is that they are about to lose the person who they revere as king, father and husband and they are somewhat paralyzed by the coming transition as well as everyone else. I can only wish them peace and quiet while they go through this with the country.
Ditto, or they are running a malware anti-virus or one that is so lame that it only catches 1990s viruses (like 360 in China, the crappiest piece of av shit i have ever seen.) It is clearly only the people who have the good sense to actually pay attention to good av or anti mal stuff that would be people trying this out as first users.
Hmmm, Yes, but. I worked as a translator/ editor/ friend of a Chinese researcher who was studying a particular heart defect. In order to even begin the research he first had to engineer/ hybridize/ create/ breed a race of mice that had the heart defect. He was in a race with (as I recall, this was 15 years ago) 4 other research groups in different universities to create the mice and begin the actual research.
He succeeded before the other and created the mice, but no one else in the lab was able to recreate the work, even under his supervision. He could repeat it, but they couldn't and other research groups finally bought the mice from our university.
It was not reproducible, he got a PhD based on his work creating the mice breed. From what I have heard since then, there are other, similar situations in modern science. It is not that it is not reproducible, it is incontrovertible, the mice exist, there is no other way to create them except to succeed at creating them, even if no one else can. The scientific method was basic to the entire process, but...
I worked with gnome shell twice during the testing process. First time just could not make it happy for me. But then I quit it and went back to gnome 2 and.... well somehow I seemed to be able to see better what they were trying to do. I get the idea that is driving it and like that idea.
So, I tried it again and once I got past the hump I didn't go back. I am still using fedora 14 with the old gnome shell from the repositories which is a very older version, I am planning on upping in the next few weeks though and will be happy about it I think.
People are complaining about change, but, to quote a Taoist text from 1300 or so: The only changeless change is Change. We have to move on, its just what people do, even as they kvetch about it.
Been using Miro for years (since the days of the "Democracy Player" anyway) and obviously retardo parent has never used it. I will not compare it to iTunes, totally unfair because I have never used iTunes. From what I hear it is rather sucky, but who knows. Obviously the beloved parent is some other kind of fanboi, or maybe just a hateboi, a free lance hater of anything people actually care something about. I've heard there are some of these types in the wild.
Miro is good, works fine for my limited purposes, happy for them and for the people who will find it now and find out how nice it is.
A few months ago there was a widely read story here (in China) that I saw poke its head above the horizon in the west as well about Chinese manufacturers complaining about Apple's requirements on them relating to iPad 2 manufacturing and worker safety. Please understand that I see people everyday at the market or (for example today at Aushan, a hypermarket) just on the street who are suffering from work related disabling injuries from burns to loss of limbs. The worker laws here are mostly non-existent, so when a manufacturer complains then it means something is bad. Why? the general rule here is that a human life in a factory is worth about 10,000 RMB (divide by @6.6 to get equivalent dollars, or @9.0 for Euros). So a major factory explosion does cost the factory something and that is what they wanted to avoid: death and disability.
Invigilators are, for the most part, not equipped or trained to do all this. I was shocked when I was invigilating an exam last semester and the students DIDN'T have hacked calculators. I mean really, what self-respecting student, knowing that they were going to need a certain set of tools that they were not supposedto have in their calculator would not load it in knowing that they wouldn't be checked? I was told that our students are too lazy to cheat. Yeah right, but they weren't cheating it seemed. What is the world coming too?
I live in China, we use the damn things however we choose, with R4 cards and whatever software we choose to DL. Come and get us Nintendo! They won't, they fear the Chinese government and people and the marketing power of umpty-grunch Chinese people buying their devices, ignoring the TOS but growing the user base figures to make them look big and powerful. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
MMMMMMmaybe, but it strikes me as similar to the idea that there are super-intelligent secret societies running things for their own gain. The simple truth is that China, like every other country in the world, has bread and butter issues to deal with today, tomorrow and into the future. Problems that will mean a loss that will push them out of the running for future tech stuff. They are trying, through some small, limited, but highly touted education initiatives to build a better system for the future, but I have serious doubts about their ability to follow through on it. There are just too many old, poor, uneducated and healthy people in the country. The retirement age is 60 and the average life expectancy is pushing 75. Think about the cost. The Chinese have and they are worried.
The one child policy has created a knock-on problem to the Maoist policy to populate the world with chinese people. The problem is that there are now 4 parents who have had only one child per couple. That means that they are being supported in their old age by only 2 kids. But, the next generation is supporting 4 parents and eight grandparents. For this reason they need to allow more children per family. But if they do the resulting population bounce will destroy the economy through unemployment because they don't have the job need, even with factories at full production, but they can't be at full production because the cost of caring for the elderly has risen so much that wages will have to rise to support the 12+ people being supported with 2 salaries which will reduce the competitiveness of chinese factories.
The government can do the math and read the tables. the future is grim, and they are hoping that the next power shift will bring some new ideas that will bring a new hope and new future for them. I doubt, i doubt greatly
Yeah, falling bodies... I was in Nanjing last weekend with my wife (studying at at the Nanjing TCM university) and was telling her how it is really getting on my nerves about people walking in the bike and motorcycle lane when the sidewalk is empty. Apparently this was an old rant, cause she said she had heard it before and mentioned it to one of her Chinese teachers. The teacher looked embarrassed and said that it became standard practice after a few people were killed by being fallen upon by suicides back in the 60' or 70's. Now it is SOP to never walk on a sidewalk that goes up against a building.
Slashdot Mirror
on a work computer i tried to search for something inside a folder that I knew was there and couldn't find it, 5 minutes later i found it by digging around through the sub-folders, what a mess.
I've been a grandFATHER since my early 40's (43) and got out of programming in the early 80's because of Basic (it was so... dirty... cheap tricks and fluff coding, not like Pascal, a purity that defies failure), so the grandma part is OK, but 20 years with C? That is suspect. Oh wait, it's 2011, hmmm, 1991, damn i'm getting old (stumbles off grumbling to a CRT with a green screen)
hybrids use no plugs for electricity, it is all generated by the vehicle itself. Sorry to burst your obviously ill-informed bubble.
I have to agree, the absolute worst, however, is when money is poured into "renovation" which involves using modern workers (painters, carpenters, other tradespeople) and modern materials (particle board, mdf, paint and plywood, and especially concrete/ mortar). the results are garish, heinous and shocking. Modern renovations of Chinese temples are a travesty.
A close friend, a Chinese Taoist abbot, has taken the temple where he lives and done very little to it. He works on it himself, in his free time, with almost nothing in funds he uses what was used originally, local materials. The result is organic, original and a true presentation of what a working temple was and should be today. It is really lovely and almost empty of visitors, which was one of his goals. It is a temple after all, not a tourist attraction.
I was managing to stay out of discussions today because my keyboard was plugged into my WeTab, trying to add Plop, but this topic calls for an old man's response.
Back before most of you were in short pants I was given a portable typewriter by my mother. I was in 5th grade and my handwriting was execrable, unreadable and ugly. Still is BTW. But, I was warned by many people:"Do not learn how to touch type." (actually they said "type", "touch typing" was not in the vernacular back then) and I took their advice and didn't. Still don't really "touch" type, I "memory type" my fingers generally remember where stuff is and if I don't think about it they go where I want and type what I want. It is not super fast, but then that isn't my goal.
Why didn't you want to touch type BITD? Because once you did you became a "typist." That meant that everyone wanted you to type stuff for them and you got hired for jobs at a lower level (as a typist, someone with manual skills) and got paid less money. Typing was for "workers" not "thinkers".
I guess that has changed?
As others below have remarked there are some mistakes in this post. As well, while they try to consider the cultural reasons for the piracy, or support of piracy in China, I will repeat a rant about the cause, the support and the effect:
cause: Chinese people have been told, over and over without relent, that cheaper is better. we demand cheap from them and they, following our dictates, believe it. It also is supported by and resonates with their ethos that requires them to provide support for their extended family and to be judged by their family based on their ability to spread money around the family. Thus a successful person in the eyes of the family saves money at every instance and spreads it around within the family.
note: the children of the 90s, unlike previous generations, are the recipients of a vastly increased store of money. Rather than save this (which children, in general, don't do in Asia) they spend it on "trendy" consumer goods. These are the people who are shopping in the "potemkin" downtown stores and buying the iPads, Macs and expensive "potemkin" items. They are an anomally, or a harbinger of the future, who knows. Personally, I don't think their economy can support a luxury class of 10% of the population. Last year, when the iPad appeared in China, my students showed up in class with them in short order. they have the money and the social need to do it.
Support: Chinese culture has, forever, considered it the role of an intelligent, skilled and lettered person to repeat the wisdom of the ancients that Confucius saved from the Zhou dynasty (which he considered the height of culture and the most advanced civilization possible). This was preserved in a set of "classics"and a scholar (which was to say anyone who had the leisure to read and think) would memorize these and be able to repeat them word for word. Because of this, it was common practice to use them as a kind of shorthand to point to the idea that was being discussed in the original "classic" or in those particular lines of the classic that the quote came from. You would not preface the quote with anything like "as Confucius said in the classic of filial piety" because your reader would know that automatically because they also had memorized the classic and would immediately recognize the quote and what it referred to. As time went on this aesthetic ( that you just have to quote a piece of any important piece of writing in your field and you can assume that other intelligent and well read people will recognize the source and put the ideas together) became an important part of the Chinese intelligentsia's approach to writing and understanding. Note that you would have to memorize massive amounts of other people's writing to really be educated in this approach to knowledge, which is still the Chinese approach to education.
Effect: When American manufacturing moved to China it seemed "all-good." Chinese people had a work ethic that seemed frugal, focused on saving money and not on wasting money. Thus we got our cheap consumer goods and the unintended consequences of the Chinese view of copying others good and valuable ideas.
And here we are today.
One last point, the parent pretty clearly is living in Shanghai or Beijing or one of the other "westernized" cities, in the heartland things are more.... stark... in their clarity
Don't you see, please, before it's too late.... what does a PYTHON do???? first there is the gentle embrace, gentle but firm, the iron squeeze in the velvet coils, then the extension as it slowly wraps itself around the hapless victim... then the final extinction of the light as you are crushed into oblivion and swallowed into the dark recesses that harbor the crumbs of its previous meals! NOOOOO! escape!
i thought the idea woukd be to use ntp and gps to be able to specify exactly what time it is for you wherever you are. That sounds more fun to me
While you might think that you know the "truth" about Tiananmen or any other story that makes it into the popular western press, you don't know the whole story. You really can't know it because you are so completely immersed in western ideas of society, social contract, societal roles and the place of the individual in society. Because you can't hold the western and the eastern view simultaneously you define yours as "right" and theirs as "wrong". They are "bad" while you are "good".
Well, that is just too damn simple. There are direct connections between your demand for the cheap shit that was being made over here that gave the government the power to crush a rebellion that was focused on societal change that would have threatened the existing power structure that might have threatened the government that was supplying you with your cheap shit. The Chinese went on to thank the US government for not making too much of a fuss about it by helping support Bush and minions with the debt problems created by his bullshit in Iraq.
OK, now maybe this tirade up above is wrong, warped, weak or otherwise flawed, go ahead and snipe at it, but it is an attempt to look at the facts in the history and see that you are to blame for things that happen in China, just as China is to blame for the American financial bomb. The world has achieved this level of complexity and China is a part of it.
Now, Twitter in China. Been here for a while in another name, not popular but still in wide use. The reason it is not popular (in the way that twitter is popular in the west ) I think has to do with the relationship of people to society and the personal view of the individual in society. Here, the individual opinion has very little value and expressing your opinion in a twitter setting is .... just not something people really want to do or to read. Better to read a fantasy created about a popular actor or singer than to hear the drivel that they really think. It just has little value in this society.
If it does get used, it will be by the new generation (the 90s kids) who have grown up as "little emperors" and who are the center of their family world. Then it would be a way for the parents and g-parents to continue to dote upon the brats and to complain to the caregivers at school and lessons when the brat tweets about something they don't like something. Ugly, ugly picture frankly.
Let me ditto this, I was checking a local expat forum for shipping companies to move my stuff back to the US, and the level of ... what to call it? not a discussion when someone spews puerile sewage all over the page and then attaches a video so we can see them mouthing "fuck you".
No i'm not old and crotchety normally, but this was supposed to be an informational forum for people who live overseas. The level was just childish and... damn, what is the word for this pitiful kind of psycho-tourettic speech?
Not only that but the Minister of Transportation has said that the existing track is not safe and recommended a reduction in top speeds to, hopefully, reduce the chance of a major accident.
typically 50+
Hmmmm, I am 56 and work in an office full of clueless keyboard bangers who I scare away by threatening them with the "Linux Virus"
There is no age band for clueless people, maybe you might oughta' try that age thing on a few others, like RMS say, or Steve Wozniak, both of whom have more creds than you will probably get in a life of tech work.
Last week I was chief invigilator for an exam that included a listening component. I created a set of USB pendrives with portable apps and VLC player loaded on together with the sound file to be played over the speakers in the class rooms. The only person who couldn't figure out how to drag and drop the sound file onto the player was the 28 year old Stanford grad who talks up his tech ability. You are officially refuted by anecdote, hang your head.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Of course, when I got the drives back the only one that didn't have a virus on it (mostly the "recycler" virus) was the one from my tech illiterate office mate, so go figure.
I'm about to send a 28 cu m. container to the US with all my earthly possessions, this story does not make me happy. Who allowed this spiteful and destructive article in here anyway?
wei shenme bu gaosu wo
No, there are very few people (who anyone bothers to read, I'm excluding the retards and btards that post garbage freely on the tubes) who try to run down the king. While there have been some very unusual things that happened back before world war two and during WWII in regards the Thai monarchy there is no question that the king grew into greatness as the king of thailand.
As for comments about his son, well these too were true 20 or more years ago, but he also has mellowed a great deal and marriage, fatherhood and a recognition that he was a bit over the top have changed him somewhat. Is he perfect, well ne of course not. Growing up as a prince can't be a good way to build good peoplehood in this world. But he ain't the punk he was once portrayed as being. (and may have been)
Yes Thailand has some super serious effed up stuff going on over there. Thai culture is nothing like the face you see as a tourist and anyone stoopid enough to "marry" into it deserves the thrashing they get for it, but the reality of the royal family is that they are about to lose the person who they revere as king, father and husband and they are somewhat paralyzed by the coming transition as well as everyone else. I can only wish them peace and quiet while they go through this with the country.
unfortunately they won't get it
Ditto, or they are running a malware anti-virus or one that is so lame that it only catches 1990s viruses (like 360 in China, the crappiest piece of av shit i have ever seen.) It is clearly only the people who have the good sense to actually pay attention to good av or anti mal stuff that would be people trying this out as first users.
Hmmm, Yes, but. I worked as a translator/ editor/ friend of a Chinese researcher who was studying a particular heart defect. In order to even begin the research he first had to engineer/ hybridize/ create/ breed a race of mice that had the heart defect. He was in a race with (as I recall, this was 15 years ago) 4 other research groups in different universities to create the mice and begin the actual research.
He succeeded before the other and created the mice, but no one else in the lab was able to recreate the work, even under his supervision. He could repeat it, but they couldn't and other research groups finally bought the mice from our university.
It was not reproducible, he got a PhD based on his work creating the mice breed. From what I have heard since then, there are other, similar situations in modern science. It is not that it is not reproducible, it is incontrovertible, the mice exist, there is no other way to create them except to succeed at creating them, even if no one else can. The scientific method was basic to the entire process, but...
GV is not available worldwide, in fact most google services are not available worldwide.
I worked with gnome shell twice during the testing process. First time just could not make it happy for me. But then I quit it and went back to gnome 2 and.... well somehow I seemed to be able to see better what they were trying to do. I get the idea that is driving it and like that idea.
So, I tried it again and once I got past the hump I didn't go back. I am still using fedora 14 with the old gnome shell from the repositories which is a very older version, I am planning on upping in the next few weeks though and will be happy about it I think.
People are complaining about change, but, to quote a Taoist text from 1300 or so: The only changeless change is Change. We have to move on, its just what people do, even as they kvetch about it.
Been using Miro for years (since the days of the "Democracy Player" anyway) and obviously retardo parent has never used it. I will not compare it to iTunes, totally unfair because I have never used iTunes. From what I hear it is rather sucky, but who knows. Obviously the beloved parent is some other kind of fanboi, or maybe just a hateboi, a free lance hater of anything people actually care something about. I've heard there are some of these types in the wild.
Miro is good, works fine for my limited purposes, happy for them and for the people who will find it now and find out how nice it is.
A few months ago there was a widely read story here (in China) that I saw poke its head above the horizon in the west as well about Chinese manufacturers complaining about Apple's requirements on them relating to iPad 2 manufacturing and worker safety. Please understand that I see people everyday at the market or (for example today at Aushan, a hypermarket) just on the street who are suffering from work related disabling injuries from burns to loss of limbs. The worker laws here are mostly non-existent, so when a manufacturer complains then it means something is bad. Why? the general rule here is that a human life in a factory is worth about 10,000 RMB (divide by @6.6 to get equivalent dollars, or @9.0 for Euros). So a major factory explosion does cost the factory something and that is what they wanted to avoid: death and disability.
They failed.
Apple, I'm sure, is very distraught about this.
Invigilators are, for the most part, not equipped or trained to do all this. I was shocked when I was invigilating an exam last semester and the students DIDN'T have hacked calculators. I mean really, what self-respecting student, knowing that they were going to need a certain set of tools that they were not supposedto have in their calculator would not load it in knowing that they wouldn't be checked? I was told that our students are too lazy to cheat. Yeah right, but they weren't cheating it seemed. What is the world coming too?
I live in China, we use the damn things however we choose, with R4 cards and whatever software we choose to DL. Come and get us Nintendo! They won't, they fear the Chinese government and people and the marketing power of umpty-grunch Chinese people buying their devices, ignoring the TOS but growing the user base figures to make them look big and powerful. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
MMMMMMmaybe, but it strikes me as similar to the idea that there are super-intelligent secret societies running things for their own gain. The simple truth is that China, like every other country in the world, has bread and butter issues to deal with today, tomorrow and into the future. Problems that will mean a loss that will push them out of the running for future tech stuff. They are trying, through some small, limited, but highly touted education initiatives to build a better system for the future, but I have serious doubts about their ability to follow through on it. There are just too many old, poor, uneducated and healthy people in the country. The retirement age is 60 and the average life expectancy is pushing 75. Think about the cost. The Chinese have and they are worried.
The one child policy has created a knock-on problem to the Maoist policy to populate the world with chinese people. The problem is that there are now 4 parents who have had only one child per couple. That means that they are being supported in their old age by only 2 kids. But, the next generation is supporting 4 parents and eight grandparents. For this reason they need to allow more children per family. But if they do the resulting population bounce will destroy the economy through unemployment because they don't have the job need, even with factories at full production, but they can't be at full production because the cost of caring for the elderly has risen so much that wages will have to rise to support the 12+ people being supported with 2 salaries which will reduce the competitiveness of chinese factories.
The government can do the math and read the tables. the future is grim, and they are hoping that the next power shift will bring some new ideas that will bring a new hope and new future for them. I doubt, i doubt greatly
Yeah, falling bodies... I was in Nanjing last weekend with my wife (studying at at the Nanjing TCM university) and was telling her how it is really getting on my nerves about people walking in the bike and motorcycle lane when the sidewalk is empty. Apparently this was an old rant, cause she said she had heard it before and mentioned it to one of her Chinese teachers. The teacher looked embarrassed and said that it became standard practice after a few people were killed by being fallen upon by suicides back in the 60' or 70's. Now it is SOP to never walk on a sidewalk that goes up against a building.