This is a copy and paste of a response made to a comment I made a while back,
it really opened my eyes as to *why* chinese are so into open source. I believe
that Chinese frugalness (as explained by the below re-post) is to blame for the
rampant piracy of The Two Towers.
Before I get to the repost i'd like to add in my own link and two cents from
the SVCD Faq I read.
The political objectives of the Chinese government. It
was decided that DVD - while undoubtedly a good technical specification as
such - is all too tightly controlled by DVD Consortium, a closed body of
foreign companies. The Chinese government did not quite like the idea that the
domestic home electronics industry would have to pay royalties to foreign
companies in order to manufacture next generation video disc products for
Chinese people. It was calculated that creating a royalty-free, full-fledged
video disc format on their own would be a major long-term win for the domestic
industry. Moreover, this was also considered an issue of national pride; an
opportunity to flex some technical muscle, and to send a clear signal to the
outside world that China has enough critical mass to be able to ignore foreign
entertainment standards it does not want to conform to. (Chinese politicians
and researchers are now keen to celebrate SVCD as the first international
high-tech standard that has been developed in China.) Finally, it was also
thought that a Chinese video disc standard would help in pressuring the DVD
Consortium to keep the licensing fees down, at least for the Chinese market.
Cool huh? It's a part of their culture folks. How can Hollywood
fight an entire culture of 4 billion people?
The only thing that strikes us Americans as odd is the communist goverment
that is in power there. As geeks we are appalled that they would dare install a
firewall to protect their people, which in our eyes is a violation of their
free speech, but this is what their society just does. How do you
convince this culture of 4 billion people that what they are doing is not being
frugal but stealing
It would begin at a goverment level, and the police would have to crack down
on the street vendors that bootleg it. Will it happen? I doubt it, from the
above snippet of the SVCD faq I bet the goverment is celebrating yet another
victory.
I
am, for one. (Re: Are there any Chinese slash..) (Score:5,
Informative)
by DigitalHammer (581235)
<digitalhammer001&hotmail,com>
on Wednesday August 14, @02:49AM (#4068791)
Is there any Chinese Slashdotters...that can provide a cultural
insight as to why china would be so open to open source?
First of all I would like to state that I am of pure Chinese descent.
To answer your question, I believe there are 3 factors that make China very
open to open source: Confucianism, the WTO, and Microsoft licensing.
The centuries-old mentality of being extremly frugal with one's money or
possesions. Though this idea is ancient, the Communist government began to
encourage the use of this virtue in times of famine and hardship. This
article from Time Magazine titled Overeating Dying in China further
explains:
In the early 1980s when some nouveau rich squandered their money on
restaurants delicacies and government officials took advantage of their jobs
to attend luxurious feasts, a distorted concept was built up in most
Chinese's minds: the wealthier one is, the more fatty foods are on your
dinning table.
The grumbles about upstarts' arrogance and the government officials'
corruption turned into general disapproval. People began to look
favorably at the ancient Chinese maxim which praises abstinence in
consumption....Considering the 30 million destitute Chinese struggling
in remote mountainous areas and those laid-off work who are living a hard
life, traditional virtues like fighting one's way up and building the
country through hardship and thrift are still highly encouraged by the
Chinese government.
This frugal ideal, reinvigorated in the minds of mainland Chinese,
compounded with ancient Confucian values of filial piety encourage the
development and acceptance of open source software over propeitery ones in
China. The bit about filial piety applies to the corporate environment of
Chinese businesses. Filial piety in Chinese families enforce the younger
family members' respect of older ones. This encourages the younger members'
to set priorities that value the importance of the older family member
(typically the father, mother, and grandparents). Chinese children, raised
under this mentality, carry these priorities over to their workplace where
they place their upmost importance upon the boss and senior officials
(formerly occupied by older family members).
In most, if not all jobs in China involving internal technology, the IT
manager must find software that will create a stable infrastructure while
saving as much money as possible. This is where the frugal mentality and
the rigid set of priorities converge to brighten the appeal of open source
software. Because China is attempting to gain full membership within the WTO,
which requires its adherance to strict IP rules, the country began an
enormous crackdown on the pirated software industry. Using pirated (MS)
software no longer was an option, as it used to be 10 years ago. Another
path would be to purchase MS software licenses. However, the thought of
accepting the dinosauric financial demands of Microsoft licensing contracts
clashed with the frugal mentality prolific with Chinese tech companies, and
the set of priorities spawned by Confucian filial piety led them to consider
the amount of funds that could be saved and allocated for other departments
by not buying licenses. In turn, Chinese techs were left with another
option: Open source software, more specifically Linuix. The legal and
cost-free nature of the penguin OS became an appealing option to the Chinese
techs, and in turn took the opportunity to develop and integrate it in to
their corporate infrastructure.
Chinese cultural traditions of filial piety and frugality are further
explained in this excerpt of the site Paul Herbig's Working Papers:
Chinese Network
The Chinese commonwealth is a group of small Chinese companies from all over
the world affiliated with each other, protecting and taking care of each
others businesses. They are also referred to as 'Greater China', or the
'Chinese Network'.
The survival mentality and the Confucian tradition of patriarchal authority,
form the values of a typical Chinese entrepreneur - one who seeks to control
his own small dynasty. These so call life raft values are:
l.Thrift ensures survival.
2.A high, even irrational, level of savings is desirable, regardless of
immediate needs.
3.Hard work to the point of exhaustion is necessary to ward off the many
hazards present in an unpredictable world.
4.The only people you can trust are family-- and a business enterprise is
created as a familial life raft.
5.The judgment of an incompetent relative in the family business is more
reliable than that of a competent stranger.
6.Obedience to patriarchal authority is essential to maintaining coherence
and direction for the enterprise;
7.Investment must be based on kinship or clan affiliations,not abstract principles.
8.Tangible goods, like real estate,natural resources, and gold bars are preferable to intangibles like
illiquid securities or intellectuals properties.
9.Keep your bags packed at all times,day or night (Kao,p.25).
Unlike the Japanese Keiretsu, the Chinese network is an open system for all
Chinese entrepreneurs all over the world. They watch for each others
businesses and help those who are in need. These Chinese entrepreneurs have
a give - and - take relationship. The network is usually formed by joint
ventures, weddings, political opportunities and common cultures. Ownership
of the company are usually passed to relatives, regardless of their
educational background or competency (the classic example is An Wang's
passing of his company, Wang Computers, to his mediocre son instead of
professional managers--which ended in failure). Generation after generation,
no matter in what culture they were brought up, every Chinese seeks control
and security of their businesses.
The first Chinese generation has a survival and Confucius mentality. Every
business decision is made for the future of the family. Unlike the old
generation, the younger generation are born in other countries outside of
mainland China. They do not only carry the Chinese culture, but the one they
were born in as well. This generation, especially if born in a western
country, has a sense of individualism. Companies like Winbond,a high-tech
company in Taiwan, which considers themselves to be a Chinese company ,
believes that you should respect your family and love ones but you have to
set your mind on what is right for the company. D.Y. Yang,owner of Winbond,
says, A Chinese company depends less on data and more on
intuition,feelings,and people. But on the other hand, he also mentions, Of
course you have to respect the family business structure, but since this is
a high tech company,individual contributions are important (Kao,p31).
---snip
I have heard about the open markets in china where you can purchase
bootlegs of any software for near the cost of the CD. If the choice is
between M$ at.5 dollars and Linux at.5 dollars linux wins.
On a side note, frugality, combined with Communist ideals and Confucian
values led to the explosive growth of the pirated software and media
industry in China, as this essay written by Rutgers Univesity student Sheng
Ding explains:
Confucius's concept of the transmission of culture and Marx's views on
the social nature of language and invention arose from very different
ideological foundations. Nonetheless, because each school of thought in its
own way saw intellectual creation as fundamentally a product of the larger
society from which it emerged, neither elaborated a strong rationale for
treating it as establishing private ownership interests.[15] Deeply
influenced by these two ideologies, China falls behind all developed
countries and many developing countries in the field of intellectual
property protection. It is also not difficult to understand why most of
Chinese did not know what were IPRs in 1980s.
Well, I am confident that this reply answers your question. More information
about Chinese philosophies and other ideals that are involved in China's
flourishing open source movement can be found below:
A lot can be told from a person from their waste. You can tell what they eat, what kind of health they're in, what kinds of drugs are in their systems and if they're pregnant.
It wouldn't take much to plant small sensors that could detect these things and more. For that matter a microphone could be run up the trap of your sink and you would never know it was there (how often do you take apart the trap?)
As we begin this new age of homeland security and goverment paranoia, I saw something like this coming a long time ago. I bet we're not too far from law enforcement using these types of robots in survelience. To a judge, it shouldn't make any difference if a person goes inside a house and plants a wireless mic, or if a robot climbs up the sewers and does it.
And these things are laying a network medium as they go, no problem reporting back to base what they've found.
Soundchoice has been offering custom CDG karaoke cd's for about 1.5 years now. Go online, select your tracks, plop in a credit card number and a magical CD comes to your house from this magical guy named the fed ex man.
I know bittorrent's RH8 iso share all too well. I spent a good hour with the author (Hi Bram) learning how to set myself up as a seed node for the first RH8 disk while in #bittorrent on irc.openprojects.net.
Going back to MY point.. For every 1 legitimate use of P2P there's 100 others who would use it to pirate/warez things that don't belong to them. Period! Until P2P can implement DRM, it's shark food to the MPAA and RIAA attorneys.
Below is proof of what I just said, the link below is to some page with links to a bunch of bittorrent trackers hosting many illeagle files.
http://www.bstark.pp.se/bittorrent/?s=all
Maybe it's time open source created some kind of open DRM?
I'm not trying to troll here. Since napster all i've ever seen P2P used for is piracy of music, applications, pretty much whatever you wanted.
I am that pot calling the kettle black. I am your average joe user. I have kazaa and routinely use it for downloading music. Yes I am a criminal. As are %99.9999 of all other P2P users.
I understand the benifits of P2P, each client acting as a server and bonding the collective bandwidth of all the clients together. Yes I know it can be used for free speech, and I know for legitimate file distribution it can't be beat. That's just it though, it's never going to be legitimate without some type of DRM.
I downloaded doom3 alpha (Sorry Carmack, it kicks ass though:) I saw no less than 100 users sharing the file. Nobody is supposed to have it but I do. Thanks to the decentralized nature of P2P there's no accountability. Websites that were hosting the file got a nasty attorney letter though.
Here is my slashdottish geek comment. P2P creators need to start focusing on making their clients good for legitimate uses. For example, I think it would kick ass if the distro's started using P2P for their distro's, or a P2P based web server/browser. Anything to turn it from a black to a white sheep.
*Note to mods Sorry I don't mean to be Mr. Obvious here, but I just feel any future P2P doesn't stand a chance if it doesn't have a legitimate foundation to stand on. The RIAA & MPAA has already proven what a great team of legal sharks they have and can overcome any technological advancements made in P2P
my 2 cents
10 Mbits per bonded pair
on
New Look at ADSL2
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The result is a far greater flexibility with downstream data rates:
20 Mbps on 2 bonded pairs 30 Mbps on 3 bonded pairs 40 Mbps on 4 bonded pairs
So basically you get 10Mbps per phone line tops over the 1.5 we max out at now.
Well not a huge history, but just some interesting trivia..
Ricochet's wireless modems were not run out of the Bay area office as some like to think. Bay area was mainly a "peoples interface"
The real behind the curtain work occured down in texas. The NOC in texas was responisible for authenticating the modems and ultimately had complete control over the system.
[training speil] When the ricochet is turned on, it's unique number goes over the poletops until it hits a WAP, then down to texas where the number is checked against the customer database. If it checks out an authorization command is sent back to the modem allowing it to connect to the ricochet network. [end training speil]
Texas is a huge flat land mass located in the southern portion of the united states. It borders the carribean and has fairly nice weather (except for the occasional tornado) These geographical features are what makes it so appealing to wireless development.
Also to note are the remote oil fields that depend on pump yeild data that is usually sent wirelessly because it's cheaper in terms of right of way. So basically there's a demand in texas for anything new in wireless data transfer.
Texas is cool place to watch on "King of the Hill", but I wouldn't want to live there just because I love where I live (Friends, family, ect) I'm surprised slashdot editors would allow such a seething comment to make it through. Just because you love where you live is no reason to clown on someplace else.
Truespace 6 has a facial animator tool. With it you can map your own face onto a model, then there are preset controls to set the expressions. Compared to other 3d packages TS6 is pretty cheap.
So instead of trying to provide some insightful comment built on reason, i'll just go imaginitive and see what I come up with...
I'm guessing that the problem occurs first in domestic livestock then moves it's way down to the wild population. This is a great agurment for natural selection VS. controlled breeding, gene manipulation and cloning.
For whatever reason, us humans have the gall to think we can master in 20 years what took nature millions of years to perfect. Despite natural selection being cruel in both the animal world and human (small geeks get beat up/eat up by jocks) just the fact that it has worked over eons is proof alone that it is far better than any technology we as humans can develop.
I used to tell this story when I got drunk to people, it's funny so laugh..
Why alchohol makes you smarter. Your brain is like a herd of buffalo. The process of natural selection makes the herd healthier because the wolves will kill the slower buffalo trailing the herd first. By killing off the sick and weak buffalo the herd is left with healthy stock to breed, thus introducing healthier buffalo's into the herd. Your brain is like that hurd of buffalo when you drink. The alchahol kills off the slow and weak brain cells leaving only the healthy ones to reproduce, thereby making your brain a faster more efficient machine. This is why everybody feels a little stronger when drinking!/end joke That little joke does have grounding in reality in that the domesticated animals were not bred for diesease resistance or agressiveness, but rather for docileness and meat. This in turn has made them more susceptable to dieseases that their wild cousins would normally laugh off.
Add to that equation the use of antibiotics and steroids in domestic livestock. It's been proven with humans that over time a diesease will mutate where it is no longer killed by an antibody. We then change it a bit, and the diesease mutates yet again. Steroids inhibit the production of white blood cells while strengthening muscles. Steroids don't kill the germ, they just make you feel like you have none. So germs can keep on breeding inside an organism all jacked up on steroids and it wouldn't even know it.
The hugely scarey thing is humans are now *considering* tweaking with our own genes, and despite that 3lb's of grey stuff we got on top of our heads, unless we irraditate the earth (in which case we ruin it) there is no way we are going to be able to stop the googleplex of 1 celled organisms that inhabit this earth from overthrowing us.
I guess the moral i'd like to make to all this is we need to "re-teach" ourselves to live in harmony with nature. Just because you destroy a forest, pave it, and put pavement over it doesn't mean you "conquered" nature. If it's not there how can you say it was conquered??
You make it sound impossible to port games to other o/s's...
The quake3 engine runs on all platforms, Crystal space is a nice open source 3d engine. Allegro is a great cross platform sound platform. Hell open GL is completely cross platform.
Unfortunatly commercial companies are still inclined to use their own in house API's because they smoke crack. On my dreamcast during the opening title screens I see nothing but "mpeg 2 softdec by" ect.
Well maybe they don't have a problem giving the authors props, which leaves only 1 logical conclusion for me. It is an issue of documentaion and support for whatever api/driver/code they are using. Sure open source is great but who you gonna call when it breaks?
Yes I know,/. is the worst place to get the right answer, but I just want to see other peoples opinions on this...
1. For a while now i've been wondering what will happen the day robots autononymously roam the city performing chores and somebody decides to take a baseball bat to one. 2. How would you catch said criminal and what sort of punishment do you think they should recieve? 3. What categories of law would they have broken? 4. What laws and punishments should be legislated in to deter people from doing this??
I'm all in favor of having cars that drive themselves, robots that can go down to quickie mart and do the shopping for me ect... But what insurance do I private joe citizen have against would be theives and vandals?
Nah it bothers me you didnt read the above post I made where I clearly states that this branch of the.gov requires degree with experience from its contractors. 10 years experience. (did nuke even exist 10 years ago?)
I would have except the.gov expects you in the very least to have a track record with a degree. Track record I have but thanks to my unwise decision to drop out of college to become a MCSE sorta blew my chances there.
Well the solution they ended up going with (the name escapes me at the moment) was a $200k solution (not a typo)
The support contract specifically states that the software vendor has to come out on site and install it, train users, fix it remotely anytime and a 24hr turnaround for anything that requires a live person.
Perhaps if the makers of nuke, slash, ect all got off their collective asses, actually marketing their software in addition to keeping the open source strategy they've used and provided "services" as well as software perhaps this would have turned out differently. The fact that they rely "solely" on open source to market their code is just shooting themselves in the foot.
Hey Malda, just a question, is a 200k sale worth a dog and pony show to you?
Uhhm, you must not have read my comment because I totally addressed every reason why it was rejected. Your response comes across as an attack of some sort and the funniest part is you're attacking me with the point I just made.
Free software only will make a dent where there is no budget at all like the website I run on my sig, I do for free for a free local bay area music magazine. Trust me, when you're a free magazine and you're only revenue stream is your advertisers those 50k mags we print up a month eat any budget up quickly.
It really isn't the end of story either... Turns out with the recent collapse of the economy her branch of the.gov is starting to see a lot of silicon valley talent come through their doors now, for a reasonable 60k@year or so. 2 years ago people that just knew frontpage were demanding $100k@year. The recent college grads have a lot of experience in php and mysql now and I predict it won't take long for it to become common place in the.gov.
You would be surprised by how many military web servers are running IIS. There are a lot of underqualified administrators out there and the military is no exception.
Ok I happen to be married to someone that runs a lot of goverment websites both internal and external. Last year she came to me asking about content management...
I took it as an oppertunity to preach about how well postnuke had worked out for me, citing it's run without a hiccup 2 years straight without a glitch (check my sig)
The sad thing is though, the branch of the.gov she works for would not accept it. Who will support it? Is there a # we can call if it breaks?? Is training material availiable??
That was just for the web portion of it. Trying to convince them that a totally FREE linux/php/apache/mysql solution was better than M$ was like pulling teeth. Even though we could show them it ran on windows, it was so foriegn to them that they just flat out refused it completely.
There was other issues too, they have an ancient database on this branch of the.gov and since there was no database connector for mysql (was one for MSsql2000) building that connector would have been another issue in developing it.
There's both good and bad reasons why some.gov sites run on MS, but case in point, it's not because they have underqualified admins.
I go to karaoke every week, and lately i've been making my own karaoke VCD's of more modern songs.
I decided to do La La land by green velvet one week and just for kicks I thought I would make a talking head ala max headroom. http://www.zeromag.com/images/downloads/videos/t ry 1.avi
(Divx compressed BTW 6 megs)
Basically I just recorded a second track of my singing without the music, then pumped the wav through the facial animator in truespace 6.
What I found was it actually made it a bit easier for me to keep up with the words because I would watch how the lips on my on screen persona and mimic them myself.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a copy and paste of a response made to a comment I made a while back, it really opened my eyes as to *why* chinese are so into open source. I believe that Chinese frugalness (as explained by the below re-post) is to blame for the rampant piracy of The Two Towers.
Before I get to the repost i'd like to add in my own link and two cents from the SVCD Faq I read.
Cool huh? It's a part of their culture folks. How can Hollywood fight an entire culture of 4 billion people?
The only thing that strikes us Americans as odd is the communist goverment that is in power there. As geeks we are appalled that they would dare install a firewall to protect their people, which in our eyes is a violation of their free speech, but this is what their society just does. How do you convince this culture of 4 billion people that what they are doing is not being frugal but stealing
It would begin at a goverment level, and the police would have to crack down on the street vendors that bootleg it. Will it happen? I doubt it, from the above snippet of the SVCD faq I bet the goverment is celebrating yet another victory.
I am, for one. (Re: Are there any Chinese slash..) (Score:5, Informative)by DigitalHammer (581235) <digitalhammer001&hotmail,com> on Wednesday August 14, @02:49AM (#4068791) Is there any Chinese Slashdotters...that can provide a cultural insight as to why china would be so open to open source?
First of all I would like to state that I am of pure Chinese descent.
To answer your question, I believe there are 3 factors that make China very open to open source: Confucianism, the WTO, and Microsoft licensing.
The centuries-old mentality of being extremly frugal with one's money or possesions. Though this idea is ancient, the Communist government began to encourage the use of this virtue in times of famine and hardship. This article from Time Magazine titled Overeating Dying in China further explains:
In the early 1980s when some nouveau rich squandered their money on restaurants delicacies and government officials took advantage of their jobs to attend luxurious feasts, a distorted concept was built up in most Chinese's minds: the wealthier one is, the more fatty foods are on your dinning table.
The grumbles about upstarts' arrogance and the government officials' corruption turned into general disapproval. People began to look favorably at the ancient Chinese maxim which praises abstinence in consumption....Considering the 30 million destitute Chinese struggling in remote mountainous areas and those laid-off work who are living a hard life, traditional virtues like fighting one's way up and building the country through hardship and thrift are still highly encouraged by the Chinese government.
This frugal ideal, reinvigorated in the minds of mainland Chinese, compounded with ancient Confucian values of filial piety encourage the development and acceptance of open source software over propeitery ones in China. The bit about filial piety applies to the corporate environment of Chinese businesses. Filial piety in Chinese families enforce the younger family members' respect of older ones. This encourages the younger members' to set priorities that value the importance of the older family member (typically the father, mother, and grandparents). Chinese children, raised under this mentality, carry these priorities over to their workplace where they place their upmost importance upon the boss and senior officials (formerly occupied by older family members).
In most, if not all jobs in China involving internal technology, the IT manager must find software that will create a stable infrastructure while saving as much money as possible. This is where the frugal mentality and the rigid set of priorities converge to brighten the appeal of open source software. Because China is attempting to gain full membership within the WTO, which requires its adherance to strict IP rules, the country began an enormous crackdown on the pirated software industry. Using pirated (MS) software no longer was an option, as it used to be 10 years ago. Another path would be to purchase MS software licenses. However, the thought of accepting the dinosauric financial demands of Microsoft licensing contracts clashed with the frugal mentality prolific with Chinese tech companies, and the set of priorities spawned by Confucian filial piety led them to consider the amount of funds that could be saved and allocated for other departments by not buying licenses. In turn, Chinese techs were left with another option: Open source software, more specifically Linuix. The legal and cost-free nature of the penguin OS became an appealing option to the Chinese techs, and in turn took the opportunity to develop and integrate it in to their corporate infrastructure.
Chinese cultural traditions of filial piety and frugality are further explained in this excerpt of the site Paul Herbig's Working Papers:
Chinese Network
The Chinese commonwealth is a group of small Chinese companies from all over the world affiliated with each other, protecting and taking care of each others businesses. They are also referred to as 'Greater China', or the 'Chinese Network'.
The survival mentality and the Confucian tradition of patriarchal authority, form the values of a typical Chinese entrepreneur - one who seeks to control his own small dynasty. These so call life raft values are:
l.Thrift ensures survival.
2.A high, even irrational, level of savings is desirable, regardless of immediate needs.
3.Hard work to the point of exhaustion is necessary to ward off the many hazards present in an unpredictable world.
4.The only people you can trust are family-- and a business enterprise is created as a familial life raft.
5.The judgment of an incompetent relative in the family business is more reliable than that of a competent stranger.
6.Obedience to patriarchal authority is essential to maintaining coherence and direction for the enterprise;
7.Investment must be based on kinship or clan affiliations
8.Tangible goods, like real estate
9.Keep your bags packed at all times,day or night (Kao,p.25).
Unlike the Japanese Keiretsu, the Chinese network is an open system for all Chinese entrepreneurs all over the world. They watch for each others businesses and help those who are in need. These Chinese entrepreneurs have a give - and - take relationship. The network is usually formed by joint ventures, weddings, political opportunities and common cultures. Ownership of the company are usually passed to relatives, regardless of their educational background or competency (the classic example is An Wang's passing of his company, Wang Computers, to his mediocre son instead of professional managers--which ended in failure). Generation after generation, no matter in what culture they were brought up, every Chinese seeks control and security of their businesses.
The first Chinese generation has a survival and Confucius mentality. Every business decision is made for the future of the family. Unlike the old generation, the younger generation are born in other countries outside of mainland China. They do not only carry the Chinese culture, but the one they were born in as well. This generation, especially if born in a western country, has a sense of individualism. Companies like Winbond,a high-tech company in Taiwan, which considers themselves to be a Chinese company , believes that you should respect your family and love ones but you have to set your mind on what is right for the company. D.Y. Yang,owner of Winbond, says, A Chinese company depends less on data and more on intuition,feelings,and people. But on the other hand, he also mentions, Of course you have to respect the family business structure, but since this is a high tech company,individual contributions are important (Kao,p31).
---snip
I have heard about the open markets in china where you can purchase bootlegs of any software for near the cost of the CD. If the choice is between M$ at
On a side note, frugality, combined with Communist ideals and Confucian values led to the explosive growth of the pirated software and media industry in China, as this essay written by Rutgers Univesity student Sheng Ding explains:
Confucius's concept of the transmission of culture and Marx's views on the social nature of language and invention arose from very different ideological foundations. Nonetheless, because each school of thought in its own way saw intellectual creation as fundamentally a product of the larger society from which it emerged, neither elaborated a strong rationale for treating it as establishing private ownership interests.[15] Deeply influenced by these two ideologies, China falls behind all developed countries and many developing countries in the field of intellectual property protection. It is also not difficult to understand why most of Chinese did not know what were IPRs in 1980s.
Well, I am confident that this reply answers your question. More information about Chinese philosophies and other ideals that are involved in China's flourishing open source movement can be found below:
Paul Herbig's Working Papers [google.com]
A Paper on IP Rights in China, by Sheng Ding [rutgers.edu]
The Chinese Way with Money, an article from the Shanghai Star [chinadaily.com.cn]
A lot can be told from a person from their waste. You can tell what they eat, what kind of health they're in, what kinds of drugs are in their systems and if they're pregnant.
It wouldn't take much to plant small sensors that could detect these things and more. For that matter a microphone could be run up the trap of your sink and you would never know it was there (how often do you take apart the trap?)
As we begin this new age of homeland security and goverment paranoia, I saw something like this coming a long time ago. I bet we're not too far from law enforcement using these types of robots in survelience. To a judge, it shouldn't make any difference if a person goes inside a house and plants a wireless mic, or if a robot climbs up the sewers and does it.
And these things are laying a network medium as they go, no problem reporting back to base what they've found.
Think about that for a moment, then mod me.
http://www.mykaraokecdg.com/xcart/customer/
Soundchoice has been offering custom CDG karaoke cd's for about 1.5 years now. Go online, select your tracks, plop in a credit card number and a magical CD comes to your house from this magical guy named the fed ex man.
I know bittorrent's RH8 iso share all too well. I spent a good hour with the author (Hi Bram) learning how to set myself up as a seed node for the first RH8 disk while in #bittorrent on irc.openprojects.net.
Going back to MY point.. For every 1 legitimate use of P2P there's 100 others who would use it to pirate/warez things that don't belong to them. Period! Until P2P can implement DRM, it's shark food to the MPAA and RIAA attorneys.
Below is proof of what I just said, the link below is to some page with links to a bunch of bittorrent trackers hosting many illeagle files.
http://www.bstark.pp.se/bittorrent/?s=all
Maybe it's time open source created some kind of open DRM?
I'm not trying to troll here. Since napster all i've ever seen P2P used for is piracy of music, applications, pretty much whatever you wanted.
:) I saw no less than 100 users sharing the file. Nobody is supposed to have it but I do. Thanks to the decentralized nature of P2P there's no accountability. Websites that were hosting the file got a nasty attorney letter though.
I am that pot calling the kettle black. I am your average joe user. I have kazaa and routinely use it for downloading music. Yes I am a criminal. As are %99.9999 of all other P2P users.
I understand the benifits of P2P, each client acting as a server and bonding the collective bandwidth of all the clients together. Yes I know it can be used for free speech, and I know for legitimate file distribution it can't be beat. That's just it though, it's never going to be legitimate without some type of DRM.
I downloaded doom3 alpha (Sorry Carmack, it kicks ass though
Here is my slashdottish geek comment. P2P creators need to start focusing on making their clients good for legitimate uses. For example, I think it would kick ass if the distro's started using P2P for their distro's, or a P2P based web server/browser. Anything to turn it from a black to a white sheep.
*Note to mods
Sorry I don't mean to be Mr. Obvious here, but I just feel any future P2P doesn't stand a chance if it doesn't have a legitimate foundation to stand on. The RIAA & MPAA has already proven what a great team of legal sharks they have and can overcome any technological advancements made in P2P
my 2 cents
The result is a far greater flexibility with downstream data rates:
20 Mbps on 2 bonded pairs
30 Mbps on 3 bonded pairs
40 Mbps on 4 bonded pairs
So basically you get 10Mbps per phone line tops over the 1.5 we max out at now.
They're one and the same, check the link above to a national geographic atlas. I've played enough pirates gold to know where it is.
Can I get some quality karma whoring for puttin this guy down please :)
:(
/ in dex.html?id=362&size=medium&left=-70.59&bottom=19. 05&right=-70.19&top=19.45
I guess it's true what they're sayin about todays kids, show them a world map and they wouldn't be able to show you what continent they live on
http://plasma.nationalgeographic.com/mapmachine
Well not a huge history, but just some interesting trivia..
Ricochet's wireless modems were not run out of the Bay area office as some like to think. Bay area was mainly a "peoples interface"
The real behind the curtain work occured down in texas. The NOC in texas was responisible for authenticating the modems and ultimately had complete control over the system.
[training speil]
When the ricochet is turned on, it's unique number goes over the poletops until it hits a WAP, then down to texas where the number is checked against the customer database. If it checks out an authorization command is sent back to the modem allowing it to connect to the ricochet network.
[end training speil]
Texas is a huge flat land mass located in the southern portion of the united states. It borders the carribean and has fairly nice weather (except for the occasional tornado) These geographical features are what makes it so appealing to wireless development.
Also to note are the remote oil fields that depend on pump yeild data that is usually sent wirelessly because it's cheaper in terms of right of way. So basically there's a demand in texas for anything new in wireless data transfer.
Texas is cool place to watch on "King of the Hill", but I wouldn't want to live there just because I love where I live (Friends, family, ect) I'm surprised slashdot editors would allow such a seething comment to make it through. Just because you love where you live is no reason to clown on someplace else.
Humans feel pain when they hear sounds of 120 decibels, a level typically reached next to the speakers at a rock concert.
The sounds pumped through the Penn State fridge reach 173 dB, tens of thousands of times more intense than any rock concert.
So let's see then (simple arithmatic)
173
-120
-----
53
Hardly what I would call "tens of thousands"
Your university has to have a pc somewhere...
Truespace 6 has a facial animator tool. With it you can map your own face onto a model, then there are preset controls to set the expressions. Compared to other 3d packages TS6 is pretty cheap.
More info at
http://www.caligari.com
So instead of trying to provide some insightful comment built on reason, i'll just go imaginitive and see what I come up with...
/end joke
I'm guessing that the problem occurs first in domestic livestock then moves it's way down to the wild population. This is a great agurment for natural selection VS. controlled breeding, gene manipulation and cloning.
For whatever reason, us humans have the gall to think we can master in 20 years what took nature millions of years to perfect. Despite natural selection being cruel in both the animal world and human (small geeks get beat up/eat up by jocks) just the fact that it has worked over eons is proof alone that it is far better than any technology we as humans can develop.
I used to tell this story when I got drunk to people, it's funny so laugh..
Why alchohol makes you smarter.
Your brain is like a herd of buffalo. The process of natural selection makes the herd healthier because the wolves will kill the slower buffalo trailing the herd first. By killing off the sick and weak buffalo the herd is left with healthy stock to breed, thus introducing healthier buffalo's into the herd.
Your brain is like that hurd of buffalo when you drink. The alchahol kills off the slow and weak brain cells leaving only the healthy ones to reproduce, thereby making your brain a faster more efficient machine. This is why everybody feels a little stronger when drinking!
That little joke does have grounding in reality in that the domesticated animals were not bred for diesease resistance or agressiveness, but rather for docileness and meat. This in turn has made them more susceptable to dieseases that their wild cousins would normally laugh off.
Add to that equation the use of antibiotics and steroids in domestic livestock. It's been proven with humans that over time a diesease will mutate where it is no longer killed by an antibody. We then change it a bit, and the diesease mutates yet again. Steroids inhibit the production of white blood cells while strengthening muscles. Steroids don't kill the germ, they just make you feel like you have none. So germs can keep on breeding inside an organism all jacked up on steroids and it wouldn't even know it.
The hugely scarey thing is humans are now *considering* tweaking with our own genes, and despite that 3lb's of grey stuff we got on top of our heads, unless we irraditate the earth (in which case we ruin it) there is no way we are going to be able to stop the googleplex of 1 celled organisms that inhabit this earth from overthrowing us.
I guess the moral i'd like to make to all this is we need to "re-teach" ourselves to live in harmony with nature. Just because you destroy a forest, pave it, and put pavement over it doesn't mean you "conquered" nature. If it's not there how can you say it was conquered??
Just my 2cents.
You make it sound impossible to port games to other o/s's...
The quake3 engine runs on all platforms, Crystal space is a nice open source 3d engine. Allegro is a great cross platform sound platform. Hell open GL is completely cross platform.
Unfortunatly commercial companies are still inclined to use their own in house API's because they smoke crack. On my dreamcast during the opening title screens I see nothing but "mpeg 2 softdec by" ect.
Well maybe they don't have a problem giving the authors props, which leaves only 1 logical conclusion for me. It is an issue of documentaion and support for whatever api/driver/code they are using. Sure open source is great but who you gonna call when it breaks?
Yes I know, /. is the worst place to get the right answer, but I just want to see other peoples opinions on this...
1. For a while now i've been wondering what will happen the day robots autononymously roam the city performing chores and somebody decides to take a baseball bat to one.
2. How would you catch said criminal and what sort of punishment do you think they should recieve?
3. What categories of law would they have broken?
4. What laws and punishments should be legislated in to deter people from doing this??
I'm all in favor of having cars that drive themselves, robots that can go down to quickie mart and do the shopping for me ect... But what insurance do I private joe citizen have against would be theives and vandals?
Running your windows games using winex is like trying to swim laps wearing a 3 peice suit.
WineX is not a replacement for native ports.
Face auctions on e-bay
(shudders)
Nah it bothers me you didnt read the above post I made where I clearly states that this branch of the .gov requires degree with experience from its contractors. 10 years experience. (did nuke even exist 10 years ago?)
So an american company selling gasoline to the nazi's to burn books is good? You have me confused sir.
Internet censorship is no better than a Nazi bookburning. Doesn't make a difference if they're blocking printed text or unicode.
I would have except the .gov expects you in the very least to have a track record with a degree. Track record I have but thanks to my unwise decision to drop out of college to become a MCSE sorta blew my chances there.
Well the solution they ended up going with (the name escapes me at the moment) was a $200k solution (not a typo)
The support contract specifically states that the software vendor has to come out on site and install it, train users, fix it remotely anytime and a 24hr turnaround for anything that requires a live person.
Perhaps if the makers of nuke, slash, ect all got off their collective asses, actually marketing their software in addition to keeping the open source strategy they've used and provided "services" as well as software perhaps this would have turned out differently. The fact that they rely "solely" on open source to market their code is just shooting themselves in the foot.
Hey Malda, just a question, is a 200k sale worth a dog and pony show to you?
Uhhm, you must not have read my comment because I totally addressed every reason why it was rejected. Your response comes across as an attack of some sort and the funniest part is you're attacking me with the point I just made.
.gov is starting to see a lot of silicon valley talent come through their doors now, for a reasonable 60k@year or so. 2 years ago people that just knew frontpage were demanding $100k@year. The recent college grads have a lot of experience in php and mysql now and I predict it won't take long for it to become common place in the .gov.
Free software only will make a dent where there is no budget at all like the website I run on my sig, I do for free for a free local bay area music magazine. Trust me, when you're a free magazine and you're only revenue stream is your advertisers those 50k mags we print up a month eat any budget up quickly.
It really isn't the end of story either... Turns out with the recent collapse of the economy her branch of the
Amen brother... Let me lay some experience on ya.
.gov she works for would not accept it. Who will support it? Is there a # we can call if it breaks?? Is training material availiable??
.gov and since there was no database connector for mysql (was one for MSsql2000) building that connector would have been another issue in developing it.
.gov sites run on MS, but case in point, it's not because they have underqualified admins.
You would be surprised by how many military web servers are running IIS. There are a lot of underqualified administrators out there and the military is no exception.
Ok I happen to be married to someone that runs a lot of goverment websites both internal and external. Last year she came to me asking about content management...
I took it as an oppertunity to preach about how well postnuke had worked out for me, citing it's run without a hiccup 2 years straight without a glitch (check my sig)
The sad thing is though, the branch of the
That was just for the web portion of it. Trying to convince them that a totally FREE linux/php/apache/mysql solution was better than M$ was like pulling teeth. Even though we could show them it ran on windows, it was so foriegn to them that they just flat out refused it completely.
There was other issues too, they have an ancient database on this branch of the
There's both good and bad reasons why some
I go to karaoke every week, and lately i've been making my own karaoke VCD's of more modern songs.
t ry 1.avi
I decided to do La La land by green velvet one week and just for kicks I thought I would make a talking head ala max headroom.
http://www.zeromag.com/images/downloads/videos/
(Divx compressed BTW 6 megs)
Basically I just recorded a second track of my singing without the music, then pumped the wav through the facial animator in truespace 6.
What I found was it actually made it a bit easier for me to keep up with the words because I would watch how the lips on my on screen persona and mimic them myself.
Anyways, enjoy folks.
I agree with the AC, GWB=Great leader??? WTF are you smoking and can I have some?