Well, it's like this: they've already overthrown their government twice in the last hundred years, and came close two more times.
Each time, the new boss was just the same as the old boss, so the consensus has emerged that overthrowing the government isn't a particularly good way to make things better (particularly when the current government is doing a creditable job of making things better on their own initiative).
The test is flawed. I live in China, and I've been checking the sites that show up in the blocked list. The test has a high false-positive rate, and sites that fail one test one time are not removed from the list even if a subsequent test shows them as accessible.
Google was added to the block list early Saturday morning, China time. They blocked Google once before, in March, 2001, but gave it up after a week due to popular discontent.
Presumably, this time around it is part of a general heightening of security during the run-up to the pivotal Party Congress in November, when all of the third generation leaders are set to retire.
For about one week in March, 2001, it was blocked (presumably due to the cache feature). After a week it was unblocked again (presumably due to popular outrage).
It was blocked again early Saturday morning, China time. It will be interesting to see how long it lasts this time around, as it is even more popular now than it was 18 months ago.
I want to reemphasize the point made in the parent:
"For China, at least, this project isn't really relevant." The "hactivist" crowd has never been any good at doing their homework, and this is just the latest example.
The Chinese government DOESN'T EVEN BLOCK THE GOOGLE CACHE. Any site that's blocked, you just look it up in Google, and hit the "cached" link. They did block Google, once, for about a week, until popular outrage made them give it up.
That should give you an idea of just how "terrified" they are by the so-called threat the Internet poses to their hold on power. What they're really afraid of are the tens of millions of affluent, educated, urban Internet users rising up in revolt if their favorite toy gets taken away from them.
That, and the hundreds of millions of undereducated, underemployed peasants and factory workers who don't have a future, and barely enough to eat, much less Internet access.
"C# didn't exist when he started volume 4. Java didn't exist when he started 1-3. Are you suggesting that he should rewrite each volume every time a new language becomes fashionable?"
That's a silly argument, even if Knuth himself makes it.
MIX is an idealized abstraction of a mostly obsolete generation of CISC processors. There have been more changes in the fundamental structure of processor architectures in the intervening years than there have been in Algol-family languages (compare the 8080 to IA64, versus C to Java).
Knuth could easily (if anyone could easily) create an idealized abstraction of an Algol-family high-level language, use that, and his work would be far more accessible to all the C, Pascal, C++, Ada, Java, Python, PHP, C#, etc., etc., etc., programmers in the world than it is when implemented in MIX.
China maintains a soft peg against the dollar, so the RMB Yuan has traded at approximately 8.28 to the dollar for the last eight years, plus or minus a percent or so.
Thus, there is no net benefit or detriment to a low dollar in U.S.-China trade.
According to the South China Morning Post, they're going after unlicenced dance halls, bath houses, saunas and beauty salons as well:
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Cyber-cafe crackdown extended
Beijing and other major cities order safety checks on all entertainment venues after killer fire
STAFF REPORTER in Beijing and CLARA LI in Shenzhen
A crackdown on Beijing's Internet cafes is being extended to all public entertainment venues in the city following Sunday's cyber-cafe blaze which killed 24 people, official media reported.
The order for safety inspection checks on all public entertainment venues was made by Beijing Communist Party secretary Jia Qinglin on Monday, the Beijing Morning Post reported yesterday. Other major cities have followed suit.
Most of the 24 killed and 13 injured in the fire at the Lanjisu Internet Cafe early on Sunday were students from a nearby university. Firemen discovered the cafe's only door was locked and all windows were barred.
In a meeting with city officials, Mr Jia said central Government leaders were "very concerned" about the fire and demanded immediate action to find out what caused the tragedy and assist victims and their families.
"We must take resolute measures to eliminate all hidden safety hazards . . . and quickly rectify [our management] of cultural and entertainment facilities as well as public venues," Mr Jia said.
"All illegal Internet cafes, dance halls, bath houses, saunas and beauty salons must be closed. At the same time, safety inspections will be carried out in all lines of trade and industry.
"Leading cadres must take personal responsibility for safety . . . to ensure stability and protect life and property of the public."
The Internet cafe was "allowed" to be legal on the condition it met the capitalization, safety, employment benefits and other requirements that any business must meet for licensing.
Including PAYING TAXES. Unlicenced Internet cafes in China are unlicenced largely for the same reason most unlicenced (but potentially legitimate) businesses in China are unlicenced: tax avoidance.
Re:Gentoo's Portage system r00lz
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
"they write out the new version config files and you are left to merge them manually."
Exactly my point.
"It would be nice to see some tools which would make some more sense of this."
And when those tools arrive, I'll consider migrating from Debian for production use. Until then, forget it.
(And, P.S., not to pick on Gentoo, either. I was a loyal FreeBSD bigot for years, but finally got fed up with the fact that, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, the developers "are so amazingly primitive that they still think mergemaster is a pretty neat idea".)
Re:Gentoo's Portage system r00lz
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, cool, but what does Gentoo do for you when you have a stack of production servers with running live configuration files that need to be upgraded to a new version?
Yup. Nothing at all.
Debconf on the other hand gives you a handy choice of user interfaces and prioritized prompt questions, and will restart your services for you when it's done.
And should we be surprised that the GNU desktop's fonts still look like shit? You can't make a shitty font beautiful by adding anti-aliasing any more than you can make an ugly actress beautiful by using soft focus.
It seems the Free Software crowd has the same view towards fonts as women; any they can find that are willing to get in bed with them are beautiful enough. Debian (which still has the ugliest out-of-the-box font settings) is now in the process of kicking out perfectly good (but ideologically impure) fonts from their X 4.2 package.
Out in the real world, they spend all day looking at beautiful fonts (Microsoft, despite being purely evil and only halfway competent, has excellent screen fonts; and Apple, of course). So do I (what's so hard about "apt-get install msttcorefonts"?). So should you.
"Beauty" isn't any less a principle than "Freedom".
Chinese peasants have been encouraged to make money as private citizens, completely independent of the government, ever since Deng "To Get Rich Is Glorious" Xiaoping launched the opening and reform policies in 1978.
The biggest problem the Chinese government currently faces is kicking all the employees of loss-making state-owned enterprises off the government teat without sparking an insurrection of hundreds of millions of laid-off workers.
If you have any suggestions for how to solve that problem, you can put them in the suggestion box outside Zhongnanhai. I'm sure they'll be read with great interest.
Per-capita, the Chinese government executes approximately as many Chinese as Dubya executed Texans when he was governor.
Re:There is a huge need for something like this
on
Debian NetBSD
·
· Score: 1
I know this may be hard for some people to understand, but generally speaking, when you pay for a piece of commercial software, there is an expectation of commercial support for that software.
Yes, it is possible to buy a Linux license for Oracle and run it (with some fiddling) on FreeBSD, but Oracle won't support it, which sort of defeats the purpose.
There is a huge need for something like this
on
Debian NetBSD
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Right now if you need any sort of third-party application support (Oracle, etc.) or kernel threads (Java Hotspot, etc.) you need to run a Linux kernel.
If you don't need third party application support or kernel threads, however, FreeBSD has a much more solid, reliable kernel.
It would be excellent if you could maintain different machines with different kernels as needed, but have everything on top of that be Debian (both because Debian is excellent, and because supporting a heterogenous OS environment is a pain best avoided if possible).
"The government having the capacity to screen emails at ISPs may be unpleasant to you. If so, encrypt your email. Carnivore _may_ be something that we need to stop, but it is NOTHING like the opression suffered by the people of the PRC.
Get off your self-righteous horse, and live under martial law at the hands of a despotic dictator for a while. Then come whining to me about 'oppression' in the US."
Well, I've lived in China for eight years. Frankly, your opinion is grossly misinformed by all the propaganda you get from the American media.
So, I take your challenge and put it back to you: get off your self-righteous high horse, live in China for a year and then, and only then, whine about the oppression suffered by people who live here.
China is a one-party state with a regulated market economy. The "one party" still happens to be called the "Communist Party", but it has long since abandoned the principles of Marx, Lenin, and Mao.
Amen, brother. I finally gave up on FreeBSD (after being a loyal Berkeley Unix fan since the mid-1980's) a few months ago. It was the kernel threads and third-party application support issues that drove me over the edge.
However, after migrating a few systems over to Debian, I don't think I could go back to the "make buildworld" grind. No longer do I dread scrolling through page after eye-numbing page of mergemaster unified diffs every time I do a "make installworld". No longer do I worry about some idiot committer covertly changing some default configuration file parameter somewhere that breaks my machine.
It's just so easy now. With one apt-proxy in the office, everything stays right up to date, no fuss, no muss. If there is any significant change anywhere, a proper information dialog pops up with an easy-to-handle prompt.
FreeBSDistas like to brag about their ports distribution and makefile prowess. That's just because they've never experienced what real, disciplined package management can be like.
However, the two to three hundred million urban (non-agrarian) Chinese comprise a market comparable to North America or Europe.
When China-savvy business people talk about the China market, that's what they're really talking about.
The other billion are doing a lot better under economic reform than they were before, but they're still a long way from worrying about licensing costs of software for their non-existent PCs.
Sorry, but you've generalized like one fifth of the world's population based on your limited experience with one individual.
I've managed software development in Beijing for the last five years. I've hired dozens of programmers over the years, and I can categorically state that your Chinese programmer is a dim bulb.
There is a very strong correlation between good software development skills and good English skills. Generally speaking, the Chinese students who really "get" programming are also the students who "get" English.
Consequently, my Chinese sucks, because my employees have always spoken better English than I speak Chinese, so that's the language we speak.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's like this: they've already overthrown their government twice in the last hundred years, and came close two more times.
Each time, the new boss was just the same as the old boss, so the consensus has emerged that overthrowing the government isn't a particularly good way to make things better (particularly when the current government is doing a creditable job of making things better on their own initiative).
The test is flawed. I live in China, and I've been checking the sites that show up in the blocked list. The test has a high false-positive rate, and sites that fail one test one time are not removed from the list even if a subsequent test shows them as accessible.
Presumably, this time around it is part of a general heightening of security during the run-up to the pivotal Party Congress in November, when all of the third generation leaders are set to retire.
For about one week in March, 2001, it was blocked (presumably due to the cache feature). After a week it was unblocked again (presumably due to popular outrage).
It was blocked again early Saturday morning, China time. It will be interesting to see how long it lasts this time around, as it is even more popular now than it was 18 months ago.
There is an alternative.
It's called apt-get.
The Chinese government DOESN'T EVEN BLOCK THE GOOGLE CACHE. Any site that's blocked, you just look it up in Google, and hit the "cached" link. They did block Google, once, for about a week, until popular outrage made them give it up.
That should give you an idea of just how "terrified" they are by the so-called threat the Internet poses to their hold on power. What they're really afraid of are the tens of millions of affluent, educated, urban Internet users rising up in revolt if their favorite toy gets taken away from them.
That, and the hundreds of millions of undereducated, underemployed peasants and factory workers who don't have a future, and barely enough to eat, much less Internet access.
That's a silly argument, even if Knuth himself makes it.
MIX is an idealized abstraction of a mostly obsolete generation of CISC processors. There have been more changes in the fundamental structure of processor architectures in the intervening years than there have been in Algol-family languages (compare the 8080 to IA64, versus C to Java).
Knuth could easily (if anyone could easily) create an idealized abstraction of an Algol-family high-level language, use that, and his work would be far more accessible to all the C, Pascal, C++, Ada, Java, Python, PHP, C#, etc., etc., etc., programmers in the world than it is when implemented in MIX.
China maintains a soft peg against the dollar, so the RMB Yuan has traded at approximately 8.28 to the dollar for the last eight years, plus or minus a percent or so.
Thus, there is no net benefit or detriment to a low dollar in U.S.-China trade.
(And no, this is not accidental.)
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Cyber-cafe crackdown extended
Beijing and other major cities order safety checks on all entertainment venues after killer fire
STAFF REPORTER in Beijing and CLARA LI in Shenzhen
A crackdown on Beijing's Internet cafes is being extended to all public entertainment venues in the city following Sunday's cyber-cafe blaze which killed 24 people, official media reported.
The order for safety inspection checks on all public entertainment venues was made by Beijing Communist Party secretary Jia Qinglin on Monday, the Beijing Morning Post reported yesterday. Other major cities have followed suit.
Most of the 24 killed and 13 injured in the fire at the Lanjisu Internet Cafe early on Sunday were students from a nearby university. Firemen discovered the cafe's only door was locked and all windows were barred.
In a meeting with city officials, Mr Jia said central Government leaders were "very concerned" about the fire and demanded immediate action to find out what caused the tragedy and assist victims and their families.
"We must take resolute measures to eliminate all hidden safety hazards . . . and quickly rectify [our management] of cultural and entertainment facilities as well as public venues," Mr Jia said.
"All illegal Internet cafes, dance halls, bath houses, saunas and beauty salons must be closed. At the same time, safety inspections will be carried out in all lines of trade and industry.
"Leading cadres must take personal responsibility for safety . . . to ensure stability and protect life and property of the public."
The Internet cafe was "allowed" to be legal on the condition it met the capitalization, safety, employment benefits and other requirements that any business must meet for licensing.
Including PAYING TAXES. Unlicenced Internet cafes in China are unlicenced largely for the same reason most unlicenced (but potentially legitimate) businesses in China are unlicenced: tax avoidance.
Exactly my point.
"It would be nice to see some tools which would make some more sense of this."
And when those tools arrive, I'll consider migrating from Debian for production use. Until then, forget it.
(And, P.S., not to pick on Gentoo, either. I was a loyal FreeBSD bigot for years, but finally got fed up with the fact that, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, the developers "are so amazingly primitive that they still think mergemaster is a pretty neat idea".)
Yeah, cool, but what does Gentoo do for you when you have a stack of production servers with running live configuration files that need to be upgraded to a new version?
Yup. Nothing at all.
Debconf on the other hand gives you a handy choice of user interfaces and prioritized prompt questions, and will restart your services for you when it's done.
Real professionals wouldn't do it any other way.
And should we be surprised that the GNU desktop's fonts still look like shit? You can't make a shitty font beautiful by adding anti-aliasing any more than you can make an ugly actress beautiful by using soft focus.
It seems the Free Software crowd has the same view towards fonts as women; any they can find that are willing to get in bed with them are beautiful enough. Debian (which still has the ugliest out-of-the-box font settings) is now in the process of kicking out perfectly good (but ideologically impure) fonts from their X 4.2 package.
Out in the real world, they spend all day looking at beautiful fonts (Microsoft, despite being purely evil and only halfway competent, has excellent screen fonts; and Apple, of course). So do I (what's so hard about "apt-get install msttcorefonts"?). So should you.
"Beauty" isn't any less a principle than "Freedom".
Chinese peasants have been encouraged to make money as private citizens, completely independent of the government, ever since Deng "To Get Rich Is Glorious" Xiaoping launched the opening and reform policies in 1978.
The biggest problem the Chinese government currently faces is kicking all the employees of loss-making state-owned enterprises off the government teat without sparking an insurrection of hundreds of millions of laid-off workers.
If you have any suggestions for how to solve that problem, you can put them in the suggestion box outside Zhongnanhai. I'm sure they'll be read with great interest.
Per-capita, the Chinese government executes approximately as many Chinese as Dubya executed Texans when he was governor.
Yes, it is possible to buy a Linux license for Oracle and run it (with some fiddling) on FreeBSD, but Oracle won't support it, which sort of defeats the purpose.
If you don't need third party application support or kernel threads, however, FreeBSD has a much more solid, reliable kernel.
It would be excellent if you could maintain different machines with different kernels as needed, but have everything on top of that be Debian (both because Debian is excellent, and because supporting a heterogenous OS environment is a pain best avoided if possible).
That's a lie. Encryption is legal in China.
In fact, they encourage it to keep sensitive commercial information from the prying eyes of the NSA, et al.
Consequently, anyone who has anything subversive to send just puts it in a password-protected zip file.
Much easier than Navajo.
Get off your self-righteous horse, and live under martial law at the hands of a despotic dictator for a while. Then come whining to me about 'oppression' in the US."
Well, I've lived in China for eight years. Frankly, your opinion is grossly misinformed by all the propaganda you get from the American media.
So, I take your challenge and put it back to you: get off your self-righteous high horse, live in China for a year and then, and only then, whine about the oppression suffered by people who live here.
China is a one-party state with a regulated market economy. The "one party" still happens to be called the "Communist Party", but it has long since abandoned the principles of Marx, Lenin, and Mao.
However, after migrating a few systems over to Debian, I don't think I could go back to the "make buildworld" grind. No longer do I dread scrolling through page after eye-numbing page of mergemaster unified diffs every time I do a "make installworld". No longer do I worry about some idiot committer covertly changing some default configuration file parameter somewhere that breaks my machine.
It's just so easy now. With one apt-proxy in the office, everything stays right up to date, no fuss, no muss. If there is any significant change anywhere, a proper information dialog pops up with an easy-to-handle prompt.
FreeBSDistas like to brag about their ports distribution and makefile prowess. That's just because they've never experienced what real, disciplined package management can be like.
You are exactly right.
However, the two to three hundred million urban (non-agrarian) Chinese comprise a market comparable to North America or Europe.
When China-savvy business people talk about the China market, that's what they're really talking about.
The other billion are doing a lot better under economic reform than they were before, but they're still a long way from worrying about licensing costs of software for their non-existent PCs.
I've managed software development in Beijing for the last five years. I've hired dozens of programmers over the years, and I can categorically state that your Chinese programmer is a dim bulb.
There is a very strong correlation between good software development skills and good English skills. Generally speaking, the Chinese students who really "get" programming are also the students who "get" English.
Consequently, my Chinese sucks, because my employees have always spoken better English than I speak Chinese, so that's the language we speak.
If you want to actually deploy services (e.g. JBoss), or run desktop apps (e.g. NetBeans), stick to Linux.