While I have run Linux since Core5 and never had a single virus INFECTION, I have caught quite a few that were passing through my machines: windows viruses in the browser, in email or (especially now) on USB sticks. I generally find about 50% of my student's USB sticks have a virus or other malware on them, most visible in Linux to simple inspection, but then I run Avast for a quick double-check. As well I run Avast for Linux once a month whether I need it or not. Finally, I run it on my virtual Windows machines that I use in case the IT monkeys start to circle my office looking for that damn "linux virus" they know I have.
OK, I will say it again, you are trying to impose western ideas and expectations on a place where they are complete fantasy.
Imagine a western worker, struggling for years in a dangerous and shitty workplace, coming home to a 6 person dorm room with a three tier bunk bed on two sides of a shotgun room, exhausted after 14-16 hours of work, 7 days a week, year after year. He finally saves enough money to start his own business and looks back on his experience, his friends, the grinding suffering of that life and decides to make a small difference by giving his employees some small considerations for their hard work. His employees work harder, make a better product, reward him for his reward of them. A resonant (?) system grows that benefits everyone.
But here in China (Asia in general in fact) this will not happen. The workers don't care about their fellows, they are all looking for a "lucky" break. If you want a better job you quit the old one and try to find a new one that will be better. There is absolutely no interest or care to produce anything "better" or "faster" because then that will become the standard and everyone will have to meet those expectations, for the same money they were getting before. The resonance actually works the other way since both the workers and the equipment are not maintained and quickly run down and achieve the Peter Principle of maximal inefficiency from upward mobility ( to put it another way: as a company is successful they achieve better performance from their workforce and therefore generate higher expectations that eventually result in an unsupportable level of efficiency which crashes into inefficiency which becomes a new standard.)
The idea of a "lucky break" is of great importance here. Lotteries and gambling is rampant. Everyone sees no escape from their current bind without good luck. Hard work never got anyone anything here, except for more hard work of course. We have a secretary here who works in one department. Her boss, the head of department just got a "promotion" (no, NOT what you think, she had made some high level trouble and said some... interesting things about the president and so was also given the task of being the "Head" of the president's office.) Now the secretary is looking feverishly for a new job. ????? Her workload just doubled or more, only by quitting can she get away from this situation which means that for $120/ month she would have to handle two secretarial positions.
And, of course this is what the admin wants because in that way the new head gets punished by having her secretary leave and dumping all the work on her assistant while they try to hire a new secretary for $120 a month. Now maybe this goes on in the west as well, but I find the whole thing very Asian.
I don't know about your numbers, but I do know that there is beginning to be a... well what appears to be a planned and deliberate media attack against China. Yes I know China appears scary because they have grabbed so much power so quickly and they really do not have the finesse to know how to use it, work with it or manage it effectively, but they are in an accrual phase anyway.
Case 1 for me was the frenzy last weekend about the "Chinese church stopped from having Easter services". This was sheer BS. The story inside the story (and all I did was read the article and apply a tiny bit of understanding) is that an unsanctioned church (tiny bit of special knowledge: Chinese religious bodies must register with the government. Kind of like registering with IRS for tax free status, but more complex since everyone in the institution automatically receives a stipend from the government if they are in a religious institution, and the government wants to place an official inside the institution to make sure that money is handled properly.
OK, the church was not just unregistered, it insisted on NOT registering. Why you might ask. Well it was in the story but no one actually said it: The name of the church was given in Chinese a number of times, but the translation only once at the end of the story: "Watchtower". Oh yeah, they are Jehovah's Witnesses and refuse to have any government connection much less oversight. They are banned in countries all over the world because of this and it's results (no government service for young people). They showed up in the park to have their Easter service: a public park of course and how many were there? about a thousand. You can't have a meeting with ten people without a government permit here (tiny bit of extra knowledge) and they pack a thousand people in a public park and....
Oh, a deliberate publicity stunt! of course. I know the reporters knew this, and possibly wrote the story that way and had it rewritten for them in the west. If not then they already know what is expected now. Yes I am old and a little cynical, but this anti-whoever of the week will just get worse. I am NOT a Chinese apologist, I AM a realist. The Chinese have plenty of problems, you and I don't like their solutions, but then again they don't think much of ours either. Reality requires clear vision, media obscures it , use your mind fully please.
Your final exercise today is to parse the following sig:
We Chinese have this scam totally past you puny westerners. First we block google, facebook, twitter, youtube, any blogs or political sites as well as many other random pages people might want to visit. Then, any failed connection gets redirected to the government "search engine" which makes sure that you can't find anything that might be "pornographic" (like pictures or commentary of pornographic protesters or pornographic political criminals like that Nobel prize pornographer) and then you are protected together with your children because if you are thinking about pornography you will pollute the environment that your children are growing up in and they will become polluted by these pornographic thoughts. We are just trying to protect the mental stability of our beloved people and their precious offspring who are the hope of our future!
No, it is not inexplicable. This place is full of script kiddies who have access to both the scripts and the limited know-how required to run the botnets. They also have two other things that are required and that most people forget: 1) they have absolutely no morals and no interest in anyone besides their immediate family. 2) they have a good stack of easy money from their family who are proud of their offspring and their "business acumen"
Chinese message boards are packed with people who consider anything western to be fair game for anything they want to do. You are sheep for the fleecing to these kids. I lived on this little island off the coast near Shanghai where the NYT reported on some kiddies who were holed up in a concrete box 1 room apartment just slamming away at networks in the west trying to bust in and grab anything. And they were pretty skilled. The kids where I live now are less skilled, but perfectly happy to stay up all night and rake in a thousand dollars (almost 10 times minimum MONTHLY wage here) from one simple mistake on somebodies part in the US.
There is no reason for them to stop. The government is run by their parents. It is up to you to protect yourself.
I probably should read more before i remark on this, but.... it's almost bedtime. What is there to learn about Linux: it is not something that the user touches really. The only effect Linux will have on them will be that their computer will be on before the coffee is ready.
Now, the next question is what Desktop Environment and window manager will they use? That could be more problematic, but, again, K and gnome are pretty adaptable and as the company that did Tomato here in China, or Linpus and others have discovered, you can make a desktop as ugly and unusable as Windows if you work at it a little.
Finally, we have application sets, many German companies already use Firefox and Open Office (Star Office was a German company originally after all) already, other products can be either ported to linux (if the company has the clout with the owner, or developed anew if they want to pay devs, or run through other layers of non-emulation and virtualization, at least temporarily.
Really, the problem that I see is the name, the idea the fear of the Linux virus, the change germs that you just can't wash off. Depending on how the transition is handled (do they send in a bunch of neck-beards with bad attitudes to tell the drones what to do or do they send in Mr Rogers to encourage change and diversity) it might go fine and everyone will be happy, or it will be a mess and they will be rioting at the office door of the person who has to take the blame for the "debacle."
The problem is not the difference between Linux and other things, the problem is how the transition is handled, done properly it can be lovely and yield 10,000 Linux zealots who will insist that they never want to see a Windows computer again.
I've said this before, but I want a tablet phone that runs Meego, has a pixel qi screen, wifi and phone capability. I could care less about "3G, 4G" or any other "G" but I do want to use it for my primary phone.
Why? I hate holding a stupid phone against my head. No, I don't think I'm frying my brain, I don't talk that much, but when I do I use a bluetooth headset with stereo earbuds and a clip-on mike. The phone is in my bag and I Just answer and go on.
But! making calls out, dialing, texting, reading text, and the myriad of other functions I use my phone for (podcasts, music mostly, not much of a myriad i guess;) would be a whole hell of a lot easier on a larger form. Seeing the screen, larger qwerty keyboard, syncing my address book back to my main computer, skyping and ekigaing with video, everything would just be better on a larger form. Everybody seems to think that the phone form is the best and I disagree. I got my manpurse, it's perfect for the tablet, clip the bluetooth mike on the shoulder strap and off i go to conquer the world.
Only one small problem, they aren't making the damn thing yet. I WANT IT!!!
Yes that is what they will try, but by the time they are ready to try their own society will be the bloated mess described above as well as ours and the real winner will be somewhere in Africa or South America
Maybe he realized that this is equivalent to giving kids a big screen PSP or DS since that is really all they are. I have yet to see anyone use them for anything other than stupid physics games (no,I am not saying that physics is stupid, just the games, physics is the adjective, not the noun) and the occasional: "hey look at the cool thing my iPad can do!" which is never repeated afterwards through that app.
i'm thinking i DO want an xxx domain, i mean, really, if i know the numbers and everyone else is blocked and the xxx sites are anathema to most people the cost for one should be dead cheap and pretty secure since no one will be caught dead going to one. hmmmm, i think i like it. like what spammer is going to go after an xxx domain if they are blocked, and and
There has been and continues to be lively debate and strong belief/opinion surrounding issues of the relationship between language and the brain/ thought process/ consciousness. While a statistical analysis is one way to provide fodder for the debate, as well as ancillary debates concerning origin(s) these things are of little practical concern currently. The people who get wrapped up in them tend to need a life or another research topic. If linguists want something to reasonably get passionate about we fuss about the current loss of languages every year and the resulting loss of cultural identity which language provides. We are becoming a race without core cultural values that came from the previous linguo-cultural centers that we called "home."
Another issue I prefer to worry about is that with the numbers of people who are growing up without a "home culture" there are also large numbers of people who don't seem to be developing deep language/ thought/ processing skills because they speak many languages but none well, none with the ability to do high level analysis and come to creative solutions to even simple everyday problems. Michael Agar pointed to this in his book "Language Shock" when he described a student who spoke a number of languages, including English, but none of them well enough to express himself academically. I work with students who are required to speak English and use English in an "English as a Medium of Instruction" environment, but these students cannot organize their ideas logically in any language, much less a second language.
So, while armchair folks might want to care about origins, they have little value when the present is full of major and important worries regarding language.
When I arrived in the US in 1960 there was a wonderful sense of "the future will be better for our family" in everyone which had been sadly lacking in Europe (esp. Germany where we had been) When I arrived in Thailand in 1994 it was only a matter of hours before I recognized that same sentiment in the air. People were taking risks, sleeping on cardboard in a concrete box that was their new store, they would make a future out of it for their kids. When I arrived in China (Yunnan) in 2000, the same sentiment pervaded the air. Families (3 generations) lived together in a closet in back of their store so that the kids would get a good education and go to a good school. The kids studied.
Now I live near Shanghai and you know what? They have already lost it. What we call the "90s kids" are full of themselves and the idea that they are owed a job, money, a house, a future because of nothing more than their existence.
I sense that this is a global movement, as people move out of poverty they are moving into a place where the children carry a sense of entitlement that crushes their innovative spirit.
Putonghua, the mainland common language has three consonant finals:/r/,/n/ and/ng/ (apologies for not knowing how to write the proper symbol). The same is true for some other languages and varieties of Chinese, though some, like Guangdong Hua (Cantonese), have a few more. Beijing Hua (the language used in the capital "Peking") also has a final "r" that appears in many words that end in a vowel (so "hua" becomes "huar") where it is not used in Putonghua. To say that the only final consonant in "Mandarin" is/ng/ just plain wrong.
There are many things you could say about finals: in putonghua there are no plosive finals, for example, but why bother? It is just another language and to try to render Swedish into another language is not easy. Frankly, not speaking Swedish, I am betting that I mispronounce the name of their capital city. I am sure that I amero-anglicize it in a way that might make some of them wince. I know my Dutch wife always laughs at my Dutch pronunciation, reminding me that I am butchering the vowels and the consonants. I struggle to get a correct pronunciation of Amsterdam. the American version is.... well not right.
MMM, the IBM part is a little off as I heard it: IBM made the P6, it rocked. But they had a number of customers for it, Sony, Nintendo, even MS as well as Apple. The talks with Apple broke down over how much IBM had to change it so that they could "sell" the whole chip to apple (including the IP) and then still sell the "P6" chip to other companies as well. Apple just wanted to own the whole thing, they didn't want to pay for the complete development of course. The final decision involved accepting the Intel chip, a cheaper price and giving up control of the IP. The core 2 chip couldn't touch the P6 (which runs your PS3 and most of the IBM supercomputers) but Apple never really cared about that aspect of it. The only advantage for them would be that they could slow it down for temp control and therefore not have noisy fans running in their stuff, which was a Jobs thing. They accepted the core 2, slowed it down and still, using hardware control of the HDD and other peripherals, manged to keep things at an acceptable speed. I'm sure most of you guys know that the Apple intel kit is not that fast and has fallen behind at about the same rate as other intel stuff: as opposed to the older ppc macs that kept up or ahead of intel for a few years after purchase.
Well, it is an extremely complex system and judging responsibility (not blame) is probably not worth the effort. The simple fact, however, is that we, the people, have effed up so much of the world we live on it is arguable that there is no system that remains balanced in the entire ecosystem. We have not yet managed to push the damn planet out of orbit yet, i admit, but would not be surprised to discover that it is in the offing momentarily.
If systemic imbalance is responsible for extinctions then we could be the force behind this wave of extinction. The interesting thing, what I kind of like about this approach is that it advocates doing nothing. I too advocate doing nothing. In fact, I am now starting the "do nothing" movement.
I suggest, that in order to stop the tidal wave of imbalances we have created I propose a ten year moratorium on everything: work, play, TV, government, travel except by foot, power generation, home building, education, law, you name it we should just stop for a decade and leave everything alone. I mean, really, what in this world have we failed to EF up? we need to just leave things alone for a while and see if they don't start to get a little better without us doing something!
Think about it, we have no great need of most of what we do, think how nice it would be to wake up and say, today I will do nothing, for no reason and no purpose! Oh Bliss, Oh Joy! We have had too damn much of these damn people who want to "improve" the world: what did they ever succeed at anyway? The Bible: just a bunch of damn itinerant busy bodies who stole the Canaanites stuff and said "god made me do it" They needed this moratorium even back then. The internet: must people just burn their brains and eyes out watching cheap entertainment garbage so they can avoid looking at and talking to their families.
The time for a change is now! Change to non-doing, achieve the Chinese summit of WuWei (non-doing that is the ultimate DOING) Might as well be us cause the Chinese have totally failed at it, so friends, join together immediately and begin now, stop it, stop everything, stop it all and just be.
I'm not convinced by anyone or anything. Frankly, this all seems to be the problem with you puny humans, you want things to stay the same (what you are used to) while they get better and better (bigger, faster, easier, more everything). You can't have both.
Both KDE and Gnome (and E17 BTW) have responded by giving you what they think you want (what you said you wanted: bigger, faster, full of more stuff, etc) and are surprised why you hate it because it is not the same as what they always had.
Can we agree that this is stupid? And then, can we agree that it is time for you puny meatballs to grow the F up and start to look forward to the challenge of the new? the excitement of digging in to something that might be better, or not?
My 16 year old daughter tried KDE because I said it looked KOOL but I hated the "K" in everything. She hung with for a while and loves it.
I tried Gnome 3 and, while it took three tries, finally got it and now i am hanging with.
I am wishing that fedora had a straight-up E17 spin cause i want to try it, in fact i am thinking about putting my wife on E17, but she is kind of human about it, wants things to stay the same. darn it.
So, instead of wanting to stay with, lets try new. I have stayed with gnome for a long time as they have grown in increments. that was cool, but the shell is cool too. i use what i have, i try what i can, i work through what i have to. u can too, really.
I beat all of you to it. My sone is in second grade in China. He is doing long division, multiplication with terms up to 12x12 and has word problems with variables already. Simple ones of course, but the entry level stuff he is doing at 8 years old is where in relation to US education?
The funny part of the story is that my Chinese colleagues all insisted that western kids "can't" do math like Chinese kids can. I don't even tell them he is in the top 3 in his class (in Chinese, Math and English.)
Yeah, a good friend of mine started drinking the Apple kool-aid last summer with an iPhone. 4 months ago he bought an iPad and last week a macbook pro. I'm expecting his wife to divorce him soon cause he is spending way more on that stuff than on her.
here is some anecdotal stuff, but not objective measurement: I went out to lunch today (I work in the DU Shu Lake Higher education "town" or district, all universities and colleges) and sat at a table next to 4 kids, undergrads at one of the tech vocationals in the neighborhood. They were having a hot discussion about SOB and embedded systems, that led them to a technical question that related to some higher math and one of them asked about a particular equation, another spouted the equation and wrote it with a chopstick on the table while the others nodded. A few minutes later another (female) student reached back and tapped one of the guys and asked another question about a particular teacher and they talked about them for a bit. The consensus was that they were OK, but not great.
Now, this is a cheap noodle shop in a small town outside of Shanghai, tech students here are not the top 10%, they are probably in the bottom half in fact. But they have the passion to talk about this stuff while they are at lunch, discuss, pass on insights, interact about their education. Where is this happening in American community colleges? (about the same level)
I really like all these ideas, it would essentially chop off the balls of almost every multinational in the world in the name of IP protection while not providing any protection and probably encouraging piracy since there would be no way to avoid the consequences anyway. This is genius MS!!!!
As an editor I have a vested interest in agreeing with you, but I only have to point to a few instances to exemplify why it is true.
1) Harry Potter: go back and re-read the first HP novel. It was tight, well-integrated, crafted to be exciting and full of novel twists and interest. Now go and try to drag yourself through the last one (I actually gave up on the one before this, it was just such tedium to struggle through the morass of useless verbiage). That is what happens when an author becomes so rich, famous and powerful that they can dictate to the publisher whether they will be edited or not. The excuse is always that the readers want MORE not less. Well, less IS more, in quality terms anyway. Literary obesity is what i call this.
2) Clive Cussler: once I was stuck in Vientiane waiting for a visa. I bought the biggest (2nd hand) book I could find. God what a piece of trash. I was embarrassed to be a human by the self-referent, self-aggrandizing, self-love fest that was posing as a piece of creative writing. Literary masturbation is a good name for this shite.
I could rant on but you get the idea. I do not apologize for my ranting, because these books MIGHT have some value buried deep in their piles of useless words, but damned if i could find it.
When I lived in Thailand and my car registration or insurance or drivers license expired it was no big deal. When I got stopped in a random check (pretty much SOP when the policemen's car payments were due) all i did was pay about half the court fine directly to the cop and go on with a verbal warning to "Always wear your seatbelt!"
But the same cops were running the drug delivery system that provided cheap heroin around the world through the golden triangle. They bought the car/truck/SUV with the drug money, got a bank loan for the difference (anything not made in Thailand--like what everybody wanted to own of course-- was subject to a 100% tariff, so the prices for the stuff the cops buy is insane and they used to make the down payment with drug money and the monthlies with the "working funds")
Now, can you see where all this is going? a 100% tariff to protect domestic manufacturers creates a false demand for consumer products that are "desirable" which feeds the drug system run by "underground" government forces who are grossly underpaid to begin with in order to keep taxes down (wait, what about that 100% tariff? Oh that's not a tax on individuals, only on foreign interests) and they supplement their pitifully inadequate income which has been inflated to unreasonableness by drug income and, and, and
The system feeds the whole damn mess, the cops are just as sucked in as the junkies, you are supporting it by buying the cheapest possible products (where is your HDD made? China or Thailand probably), by supporting drug laws to keep your community "clean" (no i don't want junkies running wild all over my shit either, but think about why they are what they are and who is responsible for the world they are running from) so you are responsible for this as much as the Thai or Chinese people and their government. Those of you who pretend that you can hide behind your border, both the government fallacy of nationalistic border and the individual fallacy of property line or privacy, are living in a dream. this world respects no borders, you are connected and responsible. Accept it, work with it or lie quivering in a heap under your aluminum hat because it is what it is.
Let me support this with a completely different viewpoint. I left the US in 2000 to teach English in Asia (where i am now). I did not leave in anger, upset or need to find some cheap Asian..... well, I am married to a lovely Dutch artist (etc.). When 9/11happened I didn't even hear about it for 2 or 3 days afterwards. My students told me about it actually. Since then I have only been back to the US a handful of times, it is expensive to try to move a family of 4 or 5 halfway around the globe for a few weeks of vacation.
I am baffled by the patriot act, the fear that I feel when I step out of the plane in any American city. I mean, you are going to die, really, you are. The only question is when and how. Look at the odds, 100% is death, a large percentage is stupid meaningless death, then there is the horribly painful variety. So, if you can achieve a meaningful, painless death you are winning, right? What happened to people willing to die for freedom, liberty and the American way? My dad fought from D-day to Berlin, 250% casualties in his division (the fighting 25th) then he turned around and spent three years in Korea with almost the same casualty rate (just under 200% I think: they replenished the ranks when people died so you could get that kind of casualty rate). Who is willing to do that today? Actually we know who they are and they are mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan so they don't get their dander up in the US (or am I paranoid about that?)
Each time I return it is more... sad, painful, depressing.... I left a place that had balls and tits, now all we seem to have are floozies and pimps. The teaparty seems like a pack of corporate pimps trying to do a sleight of hand trick on the masses while Sarah Palin is just a trailer-trash.... lady....of dubious morals willing to sell her assets to gain something of questionable value. Essentially she's a crackhead strawberry (old slang, out of touch, i know;).
But I'm coming back to the US to try to live again, at least for a while. I love the place, and the people and the ideals. I have a deeper view of things than when I left, and I am worried that it will cause me and my family trouble. As my colleagues here know, I don't suffer fools gladly, basically I don't enough time left on this earth to waste on idiots. SO, we will see, fortunately I am not running away from anything, I can come back if it is too awful. It is, thank god, a big world.
Slashdot Mirror
While I have run Linux since Core5 and never had a single virus INFECTION, I have caught quite a few that were passing through my machines: windows viruses in the browser, in email or (especially now) on USB sticks. I generally find about 50% of my student's USB sticks have a virus or other malware on them, most visible in Linux to simple inspection, but then I run Avast for a quick double-check. As well I run Avast for Linux once a month whether I need it or not. Finally, I run it on my virtual Windows machines that I use in case the IT monkeys start to circle my office looking for that damn "linux virus" they know I have.
OK, I will say it again, you are trying to impose western ideas and expectations on a place where they are complete fantasy.
Imagine a western worker, struggling for years in a dangerous and shitty workplace, coming home to a 6 person dorm room with a three tier bunk bed on two sides of a shotgun room, exhausted after 14-16 hours of work, 7 days a week, year after year. He finally saves enough money to start his own business and looks back on his experience, his friends, the grinding suffering of that life and decides to make a small difference by giving his employees some small considerations for their hard work. His employees work harder, make a better product, reward him for his reward of them. A resonant (?) system grows that benefits everyone.
But here in China (Asia in general in fact) this will not happen. The workers don't care about their fellows, they are all looking for a "lucky" break. If you want a better job you quit the old one and try to find a new one that will be better. There is absolutely no interest or care to produce anything "better" or "faster" because then that will become the standard and everyone will have to meet those expectations, for the same money they were getting before. The resonance actually works the other way since both the workers and the equipment are not maintained and quickly run down and achieve the Peter Principle of maximal inefficiency from upward mobility ( to put it another way: as a company is successful they achieve better performance from their workforce and therefore generate higher expectations that eventually result in an unsupportable level of efficiency which crashes into inefficiency which becomes a new standard.)
The idea of a "lucky break" is of great importance here. Lotteries and gambling is rampant. Everyone sees no escape from their current bind without good luck. Hard work never got anyone anything here, except for more hard work of course. We have a secretary here who works in one department. Her boss, the head of department just got a "promotion" (no, NOT what you think, she had made some high level trouble and said some ... interesting things about the president and so was also given the task of being the "Head" of the president's office.) Now the secretary is looking feverishly for a new job. ????? Her workload just doubled or more, only by quitting can she get away from this situation which means that for $120/ month she would have to handle two secretarial positions.
And, of course this is what the admin wants because in that way the new head gets punished by having her secretary leave and dumping all the work on her assistant while they try to hire a new secretary for $120 a month. Now maybe this goes on in the west as well, but I find the whole thing very Asian.
I don't know about your numbers, but I do know that there is beginning to be a ... well what appears to be a planned and deliberate media attack against China. Yes I know China appears scary because they have grabbed so much power so quickly and they really do not have the finesse to know how to use it, work with it or manage it effectively, but they are in an accrual phase anyway.
Case 1 for me was the frenzy last weekend about the "Chinese church stopped from having Easter services". This was sheer BS. The story inside the story (and all I did was read the article and apply a tiny bit of understanding) is that an unsanctioned church (tiny bit of special knowledge: Chinese religious bodies must register with the government. Kind of like registering with IRS for tax free status, but more complex since everyone in the institution automatically receives a stipend from the government if they are in a religious institution, and the government wants to place an official inside the institution to make sure that money is handled properly.
OK, the church was not just unregistered, it insisted on NOT registering. Why you might ask. Well it was in the story but no one actually said it: The name of the church was given in Chinese a number of times, but the translation only once at the end of the story: "Watchtower". Oh yeah, they are Jehovah's Witnesses and refuse to have any government connection much less oversight. They are banned in countries all over the world because of this and it's results (no government service for young people). They showed up in the park to have their Easter service: a public park of course and how many were there? about a thousand. You can't have a meeting with ten people without a government permit here (tiny bit of extra knowledge) and they pack a thousand people in a public park and....
Oh, a deliberate publicity stunt! of course. I know the reporters knew this, and possibly wrote the story that way and had it rewritten for them in the west. If not then they already know what is expected now. Yes I am old and a little cynical, but this anti-whoever of the week will just get worse. I am NOT a Chinese apologist, I AM a realist. The Chinese have plenty of problems, you and I don't like their solutions, but then again they don't think much of ours either. Reality requires clear vision, media obscures it , use your mind fully please.
Your final exercise today is to parse the following sig:
We Chinese have this scam totally past you puny westerners. First we block google, facebook, twitter, youtube, any blogs or political sites as well as many other random pages people might want to visit. Then, any failed connection gets redirected to the government "search engine" which makes sure that you can't find anything that might be "pornographic" (like pictures or commentary of pornographic protesters or pornographic political criminals like that Nobel prize pornographer) and then you are protected together with your children because if you are thinking about pornography you will pollute the environment that your children are growing up in and they will become polluted by these pornographic thoughts. We are just trying to protect the mental stability of our beloved people and their precious offspring who are the hope of our future!
More kool-aid?
No, it is not inexplicable. This place is full of script kiddies who have access to both the scripts and the limited know-how required to run the botnets. They also have two other things that are required and that most people forget: 1) they have absolutely no morals and no interest in anyone besides their immediate family.
2) they have a good stack of easy money from their family who are proud of their offspring and their "business acumen"
Chinese message boards are packed with people who consider anything western to be fair game for anything they want to do. You are sheep for the fleecing to these kids. I lived on this little island off the coast near Shanghai where the NYT reported on some kiddies who were holed up in a concrete box 1 room apartment just slamming away at networks in the west trying to bust in and grab anything. And they were pretty skilled. The kids where I live now are less skilled, but perfectly happy to stay up all night and rake in a thousand dollars (almost 10 times minimum MONTHLY wage here) from one simple mistake on somebodies part in the US.
There is no reason for them to stop. The government is run by their parents. It is up to you to protect yourself.
I probably should read more before i remark on this, but .... it's almost bedtime. What is there to learn about Linux: it is not something that the user touches really. The only effect Linux will have on them will be that their computer will be on before the coffee is ready.
Now, the next question is what Desktop Environment and window manager will they use? That could be more problematic, but, again, K and gnome are pretty adaptable and as the company that did Tomato here in China, or Linpus and others have discovered, you can make a desktop as ugly and unusable as Windows if you work at it a little.
Finally, we have application sets, many German companies already use Firefox and Open Office (Star Office was a German company originally after all) already, other products can be either ported to linux (if the company has the clout with the owner, or developed anew if they want to pay devs, or run through other layers of non-emulation and virtualization, at least temporarily.
Really, the problem that I see is the name, the idea the fear of the Linux virus, the change germs that you just can't wash off. Depending on how the transition is handled (do they send in a bunch of neck-beards with bad attitudes to tell the drones what to do or do they send in Mr Rogers to encourage change and diversity) it might go fine and everyone will be happy, or it will be a mess and they will be rioting at the office door of the person who has to take the blame for the "debacle."
The problem is not the difference between Linux and other things, the problem is how the transition is handled, done properly it can be lovely and yield 10,000 Linux zealots who will insist that they never want to see a Windows computer again.
activation servers be damned, i live in the real Asian world where you can get a copy of xp SP3 for $2.00 and no activation needed.
I've said this before, but I want a tablet phone that runs Meego, has a pixel qi screen, wifi and phone capability. I could care less about "3G, 4G" or any other "G" but I do want to use it for my primary phone.
Why? I hate holding a stupid phone against my head. No, I don't think I'm frying my brain, I don't talk that much, but when I do I use a bluetooth headset with stereo earbuds and a clip-on mike. The phone is in my bag and I Just answer and go on.
But! making calls out, dialing, texting, reading text, and the myriad of other functions I use my phone for (podcasts, music mostly, not much of a myriad i guess;) would be a whole hell of a lot easier on a larger form. Seeing the screen, larger qwerty keyboard, syncing my address book back to my main computer, skyping and ekigaing with video, everything would just be better on a larger form. Everybody seems to think that the phone form is the best and I disagree. I got my manpurse, it's perfect for the tablet, clip the bluetooth mike on the shoulder strap and off i go to conquer the world.
Only one small problem, they aren't making the damn thing yet. I WANT IT!!!
Yes that is what they will try, but by the time they are ready to try their own society will be the bloated mess described above as well as ours and the real winner will be somewhere in Africa or South America
Maybe he realized that this is equivalent to giving kids a big screen PSP or DS since that is really all they are. I have yet to see anyone use them for anything other than stupid physics games (no,I am not saying that physics is stupid, just the games, physics is the adjective, not the noun) and the occasional: "hey look at the cool thing my iPad can do!" which is never repeated afterwards through that app.
i'm thinking i DO want an xxx domain, i mean, really, if i know the numbers and everyone else is blocked and the xxx sites are anathema to most people the cost for one should be dead cheap and pretty secure since no one will be caught dead going to one. hmmmm, i think i like it. like what spammer is going to go after an xxx domain if they are blocked, and and
There has been and continues to be lively debate and strong belief/opinion surrounding issues of the relationship between language and the brain/ thought process/ consciousness. While a statistical analysis is one way to provide fodder for the debate, as well as ancillary debates concerning origin(s) these things are of little practical concern currently. The people who get wrapped up in them tend to need a life or another research topic. If linguists want something to reasonably get passionate about we fuss about the current loss of languages every year and the resulting loss of cultural identity which language provides. We are becoming a race without core cultural values that came from the previous linguo-cultural centers that we called "home."
Another issue I prefer to worry about is that with the numbers of people who are growing up without a "home culture" there are also large numbers of people who don't seem to be developing deep language/ thought/ processing skills because they speak many languages but none well, none with the ability to do high level analysis and come to creative solutions to even simple everyday problems. Michael Agar pointed to this in his book "Language Shock" when he described a student who spoke a number of languages, including English, but none of them well enough to express himself academically. I work with students who are required to speak English and use English in an "English as a Medium of Instruction" environment, but these students cannot organize their ideas logically in any language, much less a second language.
So, while armchair folks might want to care about origins, they have little value when the present is full of major and important worries regarding language.
When I arrived in the US in 1960 there was a wonderful sense of "the future will be better for our family" in everyone which had been sadly lacking in Europe (esp. Germany where we had been)
When I arrived in Thailand in 1994 it was only a matter of hours before I recognized that same sentiment in the air. People were taking risks, sleeping on cardboard in a concrete box that was their new store, they would make a future out of it for their kids.
When I arrived in China (Yunnan) in 2000, the same sentiment pervaded the air. Families (3 generations) lived together in a closet in back of their store so that the kids would get a good education and go to a good school. The kids studied.
Now I live near Shanghai and you know what? They have already lost it. What we call the "90s kids" are full of themselves and the idea that they are owed a job, money, a house, a future because of nothing more than their existence.
I sense that this is a global movement, as people move out of poverty they are moving into a place where the children carry a sense of entitlement that crushes their innovative spirit.
Putonghua, the mainland common language has three consonant finals: /r/, /n/ and /ng/ (apologies for not knowing how to write the proper symbol). The same is true for some other languages and varieties of Chinese, though some, like Guangdong Hua (Cantonese), have a few more. Beijing Hua (the language used in the capital "Peking") also has a final "r" that appears in many words that end in a vowel (so "hua" becomes "huar") where it is not used in Putonghua. To say that the only final consonant in "Mandarin" is /ng/ just plain wrong.
There are many things you could say about finals: in putonghua there are no plosive finals, for example, but why bother? It is just another language and to try to render Swedish into another language is not easy. Frankly, not speaking Swedish, I am betting that I mispronounce the name of their capital city. I am sure that I amero-anglicize it in a way that might make some of them wince. I know my Dutch wife always laughs at my Dutch pronunciation, reminding me that I am butchering the vowels and the consonants. I struggle to get a correct pronunciation of Amsterdam. the American version is.... well not right.
MMM, the IBM part is a little off as I heard it: IBM made the P6, it rocked. But they had a number of customers for it, Sony, Nintendo, even MS as well as Apple. The talks with Apple broke down over how much IBM had to change it so that they could "sell" the whole chip to apple (including the IP) and then still sell the "P6" chip to other companies as well. Apple just wanted to own the whole thing, they didn't want to pay for the complete development of course. The final decision involved accepting the Intel chip, a cheaper price and giving up control of the IP. The core 2 chip couldn't touch the P6 (which runs your PS3 and most of the IBM supercomputers) but Apple never really cared about that aspect of it. The only advantage for them would be that they could slow it down for temp control and therefore not have noisy fans running in their stuff, which was a Jobs thing. They accepted the core 2, slowed it down and still, using hardware control of the HDD and other peripherals, manged to keep things at an acceptable speed. I'm sure most of you guys know that the Apple intel kit is not that fast and has fallen behind at about the same rate as other intel stuff: as opposed to the older ppc macs that kept up or ahead of intel for a few years after purchase.
Well, it is an extremely complex system and judging responsibility (not blame) is probably not worth the effort. The simple fact, however, is that we, the people, have effed up so much of the world we live on it is arguable that there is no system that remains balanced in the entire ecosystem. We have not yet managed to push the damn planet out of orbit yet, i admit, but would not be surprised to discover that it is in the offing momentarily.
If systemic imbalance is responsible for extinctions then we could be the force behind this wave of extinction. The interesting thing, what I kind of like about this approach is that it advocates doing nothing. I too advocate doing nothing. In fact, I am now starting the "do nothing" movement.
I suggest, that in order to stop the tidal wave of imbalances we have created I propose a ten year moratorium on everything: work, play, TV, government, travel except by foot, power generation, home building, education, law, you name it we should just stop for a decade and leave everything alone. I mean, really, what in this world have we failed to EF up? we need to just leave things alone for a while and see if they don't start to get a little better without us doing something!
Think about it, we have no great need of most of what we do, think how nice it would be to wake up and say, today I will do nothing, for no reason and no purpose! Oh Bliss, Oh Joy! We have had too damn much of these damn people who want to "improve" the world: what did they ever succeed at anyway? The Bible: just a bunch of damn itinerant busy bodies who stole the Canaanites stuff and said "god made me do it" They needed this moratorium even back then. The internet: must people just burn their brains and eyes out watching cheap entertainment garbage so they can avoid looking at and talking to their families.
The time for a change is now! Change to non-doing, achieve the Chinese summit of WuWei (non-doing that is the ultimate DOING) Might as well be us cause the Chinese have totally failed at it, so friends, join together immediately and begin now, stop it, stop everything, stop it all and just be.
I thank you and the hairy nosed wombats thank you
I'm not convinced by anyone or anything. Frankly, this all seems to be the problem with you puny humans, you want things to stay the same (what you are used to) while they get better and better (bigger, faster, easier, more everything). You can't have both.
Both KDE and Gnome (and E17 BTW) have responded by giving you what they think you want (what you said you wanted: bigger, faster, full of more stuff, etc) and are surprised why you hate it because it is not the same as what they always had.
Can we agree that this is stupid? And then, can we agree that it is time for you puny meatballs to grow the F up and start to look forward to the challenge of the new? the excitement of digging in to something that might be better, or not?
My 16 year old daughter tried KDE because I said it looked KOOL but I hated the "K" in everything. She hung with for a while and loves it.
I tried Gnome 3 and, while it took three tries, finally got it and now i am hanging with.
I am wishing that fedora had a straight-up E17 spin cause i want to try it, in fact i am thinking about putting my wife on E17, but she is kind of human about it, wants things to stay the same. darn it.
So, instead of wanting to stay with, lets try new. I have stayed with gnome for a long time as they have grown in increments. that was cool, but the shell is cool too. i use what i have, i try what i can, i work through what i have to. u can too, really.
I beat all of you to it. My sone is in second grade in China. He is doing long division, multiplication with terms up to 12x12 and has word problems with variables already. Simple ones of course, but the entry level stuff he is doing at 8 years old is where in relation to US education?
The funny part of the story is that my Chinese colleagues all insisted that western kids "can't" do math like Chinese kids can. I don't even tell them he is in the top 3 in his class (in Chinese, Math and English.)
Yeah, a good friend of mine started drinking the Apple kool-aid last summer with an iPhone. 4 months ago he bought an iPad and last week a macbook pro. I'm expecting his wife to divorce him soon cause he is spending way more on that stuff than on her.
here is some anecdotal stuff, but not objective measurement:
I went out to lunch today (I work in the DU Shu Lake Higher education "town" or district, all universities and colleges) and sat at a table next to 4 kids, undergrads at one of the tech vocationals in the neighborhood. They were having a hot discussion about SOB and embedded systems, that led them to a technical question that related to some higher math and one of them asked about a particular equation, another spouted the equation and wrote it with a chopstick on the table while the others nodded.
A few minutes later another (female) student reached back and tapped one of the guys and asked another question about a particular teacher and they talked about them for a bit. The consensus was that they were OK, but not great.
Now, this is a cheap noodle shop in a small town outside of Shanghai, tech students here are not the top 10%, they are probably in the bottom half in fact. But they have the passion to talk about this stuff while they are at lunch, discuss, pass on insights, interact about their education. Where is this happening in American community colleges? (about the same level)
So, how long will it take?
I really like all these ideas, it would essentially chop off the balls of almost every multinational in the world in the name of IP protection while not providing any protection and probably encouraging piracy since there would be no way to avoid the consequences anyway. This is genius MS!!!!
As an editor I have a vested interest in agreeing with you, but I only have to point to a few instances to exemplify why it is true.
1) Harry Potter: go back and re-read the first HP novel. It was tight, well-integrated, crafted to be exciting and full of novel twists and interest. Now go and try to drag yourself through the last one (I actually gave up on the one before this, it was just such tedium to struggle through the morass of useless verbiage). That is what happens when an author becomes so rich, famous and powerful that they can dictate to the publisher whether they will be edited or not. The excuse is always that the readers want MORE not less. Well, less IS more, in quality terms anyway. Literary obesity is what i call this.
2) Clive Cussler: once I was stuck in Vientiane waiting for a visa. I bought the biggest (2nd hand) book I could find. God what a piece of trash. I was embarrassed to be a human by the self-referent, self-aggrandizing, self-love fest that was posing as a piece of creative writing. Literary masturbation is a good name for this shite.
I could rant on but you get the idea. I do not apologize for my ranting, because these books MIGHT have some value buried deep in their piles of useless words, but damned if i could find it.
There is bribery and bribery
When I lived in Thailand and my car registration or insurance or drivers license expired it was no big deal. When I got stopped in a random check (pretty much SOP when the policemen's car payments were due) all i did was pay about half the court fine directly to the cop and go on with a verbal warning to "Always wear your seatbelt!"
But the same cops were running the drug delivery system that provided cheap heroin around the world through the golden triangle. They bought the car/truck/SUV with the drug money, got a bank loan for the difference (anything not made in Thailand--like what everybody wanted to own of course-- was subject to a 100% tariff, so the prices for the stuff the cops buy is insane and they used to make the down payment with drug money and the monthlies with the "working funds")
Now, can you see where all this is going? a 100% tariff to protect domestic manufacturers creates a false demand for consumer products that are "desirable" which feeds the drug system run by "underground" government forces who are grossly underpaid to begin with in order to keep taxes down (wait, what about that 100% tariff? Oh that's not a tax on individuals, only on foreign interests) and they supplement their pitifully inadequate income which has been inflated to unreasonableness by drug income and, and, and
The system feeds the whole damn mess, the cops are just as sucked in as the junkies, you are supporting it by buying the cheapest possible products (where is your HDD made? China or Thailand probably), by supporting drug laws to keep your community "clean" (no i don't want junkies running wild all over my shit either, but think about why they are what they are and who is responsible for the world they are running from) so you are responsible for this as much as the Thai or Chinese people and their government. Those of you who pretend that you can hide behind your border, both the government fallacy of nationalistic border and the individual fallacy of property line or privacy, are living in a dream. this world respects no borders, you are connected and responsible. Accept it, work with it or lie quivering in a heap under your aluminum hat because it is what it is.
I guess i shouldn't ask how they ran up a £1000 bill at a hotel, should I?
Let me support this with a completely different viewpoint. I left the US in 2000 to teach English in Asia (where i am now). I did not leave in anger, upset or need to find some cheap Asian ..... well, I am married to a lovely Dutch artist (etc.). When 9/11happened I didn't even hear about it for 2 or 3 days afterwards. My students told me about it actually. Since then I have only been back to the US a handful of times, it is expensive to try to move a family of 4 or 5 halfway around the globe for a few weeks of vacation.
I am baffled by the patriot act, the fear that I feel when I step out of the plane in any American city. I mean, you are going to die, really, you are. The only question is when and how. Look at the odds, 100% is death, a large percentage is stupid meaningless death, then there is the horribly painful variety. So, if you can achieve a meaningful, painless death you are winning, right? What happened to people willing to die for freedom, liberty and the American way? My dad fought from D-day to Berlin, 250% casualties in his division (the fighting 25th) then he turned around and spent three years in Korea with almost the same casualty rate (just under 200% I think: they replenished the ranks when people died so you could get that kind of casualty rate). Who is willing to do that today? Actually we know who they are and they are mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan so they don't get their dander up in the US (or am I paranoid about that?)
Each time I return it is more... sad, painful, depressing.... I left a place that had balls and tits, now all we seem to have are floozies and pimps. The teaparty seems like a pack of corporate pimps trying to do a sleight of hand trick on the masses while Sarah Palin is just a trailer-trash .... lady ....of dubious morals willing to sell her assets to gain something of questionable value. Essentially she's a crackhead strawberry (old slang, out of touch, i know;).
But I'm coming back to the US to try to live again, at least for a while. I love the place, and the people and the ideals. I have a deeper view of things than when I left, and I am worried that it will cause me and my family trouble. As my colleagues here know, I don't suffer fools gladly, basically I don't enough time left on this earth to waste on idiots. SO, we will see, fortunately I am not running away from anything, I can come back if it is too awful. It is, thank god, a big world.