"Oops, that was a bit of a rant. Sorry about that."
It would have been a much better rant if you actually knew what you were talking about.
Both the Economist and (Asian) Wall Street Journal are widely available in China in their print editions, and the online versions are unblocked, thus freely available to some 20 million current Chinese Internet users.
Back to the drawing board with that geopolitical analysis.
"You WILL view only acceptable web sites. And if you don't, then you can be dragged off to die in a slave labor camp or shot with your spouse billed for the ammunition. And China is exactly that kind of fascist rathole."
<yoda>Fascist? Rathole? My home this is!</yoda>
And, like most people who've never been here, you've got it all wrong. Mostly because all you know about China is what you've seen in the Western press. Think about that for a while, and then re-read your rant.
It goes even deeper than that. Remember why Gates absolutely freaked out about Netscape (back in the day). It threatened to disintermediate Microsoft from the user experience: the browser would become "the user experience", and it would be OS independent. Netscape was punished for its sins.
Then came Java, which was intended to do the same thing, but failed miserably when it overpromised and underdelivered.
Now comes Debian, presenting the opportunity for a truly OS-independent user experience. Will it work? Who knows. Is it worth a shot? Absolutely.
Do what I do. Use the Mandrake install ISO's to bootstrap your configuration (partitioning, X configuration, etc.) exactly the way you like it, then use that as the starting point for the Debian install.
It's sick, but it works fairly well once you get the hang of it. And the beauty of Debian is you (almost) never have to install the same machine more than one time.
"And for that matter, most people in urban china can't afford to buy a car"
Maybe so, but enough of them can afford it to make the commute very bad, and getting worse all the time.
One of the recent trends in Beijing is electric-powered bicycles (motocycles are heavily restricted, and, as you note, most people can't afford a car). They go for several hundred dollars (US). Once the production costs on the Segway class of vehicles comes down, there will absolutely be a market here.
The context of my quote in the conversation I had with the reporter (who, incidently, is by far the most technologically "with it" reporter I've ever met; which is unsurprising, considering his beat).
As for China's technical elite, they're there if you know where to look for them. As IT in China has been my livelihood for the last seven years, I'm quite familiar with the community and culture.
As the person (Michael Robinson) quoted, allow me to respond. The context was a discussion about the attitudes of China's technical elite. And, among people who make their living writing software, selling hardware, or other related pursuits, there is in fact grassroots anti-Microsoft sentiment.
One of the most common questions I get when interviewing prospective developers is whether the development platform will be Microsoft (.NET, Visual whatever, etc.) or non-Microsoft (J2EE, Unix, etc.).
There is a marked preference for "not Microsoft", particularly among the kind of applicants who you would actually trust to write code.
Why? Because, frankly, in core features (scheduling, VM, I/O, stability, etc.), the FreeBSD kernel is much better than the Linux kernel.
However, the flip side is that the FreeBSD kernel is an ancient, unthreaded, monolithic kernel with lagging device support, and non-existent ISV support.
So, if you don't need to run Java or other closed-source third-party software, and don't need the latest PCCARD or USB dongle, run FreeBSD. Otherwise, run Linux. A Debian environment built on top of the FreeBSD kernel would greatly facilitate switching back and forth as circumstances required.
I've been using BSD Unix since 1982. I've been
a user and supporter of FreeBSD since 2.0.5. As
CTO, I built an entire e-commerce company on FreeBSD as a
platform. But
I've finally given up on FreeBSD and am in the
process of moving over to Debian.
It had been apparent to me for some time that
FreeBSD was slipping into the Amiga death spiral,
but what finally convinced me to cut my losses was
the "one year" delay of 5.0. This most recent
incident is just the final nail in the coffin.
It's true that FreeBSD has a noticeably better
scheduler, VM, filesystem and network stack. The fact, though,
is that Linux is at least 90% as good at what
FreeBSD is good at, but for third-party application support, FreeBSD is like 10% as good
as Linux. In a number of important cases, FreeBSD just can't do the job, period.
Consider:
The most recent FreeBSD Java release is 1.1.8 . This will probably be the last release of Java for FreeBSD ever. (Yes there are patches for later versions, but they can't and won't be
released as "Java(tm)".)
No Oracle client libraries for FreeBSD. If
you want PHP connectivity to your Oracle database, you're SOL.
Almost no other native commercial applications (some run under the Linux compatibility layer,
but there is no vendor support for such deployment).
Seriously lagging support for device drivers, DRI,
ACPI, CARDBUS, etc.
Meanwhile, Debian's package management is as
strong if not stronger than FreeBSD's cvsup and
ports. The community is as strong, if not stronger. And all the software I used under
FreeBSD works under Debian, except better. (There's all that FSF religion, but as long as my
computers work, I can probably learn to live with
it.)
As my development manager said, "If even you are
abandoning FreeBSD, then how can it continue?"
Well, I don't know, but it's not my problem anymore.
By the way, the URL for the published version
of the Bill Gates hit piece has moved from
where it was two years ago when I wrote the above
cited essay. The
new location is here.
The program called loader is the final stage of FreeBSD's kernel boot-
strapping process. On IA32 (i386) architectures, it is a BTX client. It
is linked statically to libstand(3) and usually located in the directory /boot.
It provides a scripting language that can be used to automate tasks, do
pre-configuration or assist in recovery procedures. This scripting lan-
guage is roughly divided in two main components. The smaller one is a
set of commands designed for direct use by the casual user, called
"builtin commands" for historical reasons. The main drive behind these
commands is user-friendlyness. The bigger component is an ANS Forth com-
patible Forth interpreter based on ficl, by John Sadler.
"Properly used and implemented PGP is uncrackable by brute force."
I think its rather likely that the PGP in
question was neither "properly used" nor "implemented" for values of "properly" sufficiently
strict to support your claim.
Weak passphrase, weak PNRG, weak data leakage
protection. You name it. It's a reasonable
assumption that in the particular context under
discussion, PGP was not "uncrackable".
It may or may not be the case that it was
uncrackable given the time and resources
available for the task, which is really the
question at hand.
"Most of them are equivalent except for details of wording, but the license used for BSD until 1999 had a special problem: the ``obnoxious BSD advertising clause''. It said that every advertisement mentioning the software must include a particular sentence....To address this problem, in my ``spare time'' I talk with developers who have used BSD-style licenses, asking them if they would please remove the advertising clause."
There isn't any advertising clause in the
GNU project software license. If Stallman feels the
need to put one in, he's more than welcome.
Otherwise, he just should just learn to live
with the consequences of "freedom".
"Market" is a word that refers to a place where
things are bought and sold.
When a product has 3% of a market that means
that 3% of the total amount of money exchanged
for that category of product is given in exchange
for the product in question.
Now, you may argue, with considerable
justification, that market share is a
meaningless metric of open-source software acceptance, but for the mass of
humanity that isn't still living with their
parents, markets are what put food on the table.
Any object in orbit is in a state of constantly
falling toward the Earth, at a rate determined
by the gravitational force of the Earth at the
altitude of the object. A stable orbit is
achieved when the vertical component of the
object's velocity vector exactly matches the
accelleration toward earth.
Thus the velocity of any object in a stable
orbit at any given altitude is determined by
the mass of the Earth, which is absolutely not
"arbitrary".
The farther from Earth, the lower the gravitational attraction, thus the lower the
orbital velocity. This is why a GSM satellite
completes an orbit in a few hours, and the
Moon completes an orbit once a month.
I live in China, and the arguments ICANN makes
for its continuing role are exactly, and
I mean exactly, the arguments that the Chinese
Communist Party makes for not allowing the
existence of competing political parties.
Simply substitute "social stability" wherever
you see "Internet stability", and there you go.
No, you don't want Napster for scientific papers, you want Google for scientific papers.
The Google page-ranking algorithm is exactly
a "distributed peer-review" mechanism.
What's really important for researchers is
not the raw quantity of their publications, but
how frequently their work is cited by other
researchers (recursively; citations by other
highly-cited researchers count more). That can be done automatically and
cheaply.
Re:Typical anti-chinese bullshit
on
First Arcology?
·
· Score: 1
"It amazes me that we just ended the Cold War a few years ago, after which everyone emerged blinking from behind the Iron Curtain to tell us that, yes indeed, we were right, the Soviet Communist system really did oppress, abuse, spy upon and intimidate its citizens on an ongoing basis for over 70 years. This despite all the decades of Smiling Soviet Propaganda we were all exposed to on a regular basis."
The difference being that there hasn't been a "Bamboo Curtain" for over 20 years. There are regular direct flights between major American and major Chinese cities. Chinese invariably outnumber Americans on those flights, both ways (which
may partly account for why Chinese are so much
better informed about America than vice versa).
You should hop on a plane some day and see for yourself
how much is smiling propaganda and how much is
reality.
No, Taiwan says Mongolia is part of China. China says Outer Mongolia is an independent country (with whom they enjoy healthy diplomatic relations).
Inner Mongolia is part of China, and has been pretty much since the Yuan Dynasty (during which the Chinese Empire was run by Mongolians).
Re:Typical anti-chinese bullshit
on
First Arcology?
·
· Score: 1
"The Chinese people had never been agressive towards their neighbors."
"Taiwan would certainly take issue with you there"
Uh, you may not have noticed, but the formal name for Taiwan is "The Republic of China". Taiwan's official "National Day" is the anniversary of the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and creation of the Chinese Republic in 1911. Taiwan is
"Chinese people".
You may have a point, though. Before their defeat by the Communists, and subsequent flight to Taiwan, the KMT did invade Outer Mongolia, and to this day, the Taiwanese government officially claims Mongolia as part of their sovereign territory.
Re:Typical pro-chinese bullshit
on
First Arcology?
·
· Score: 1
"In the second part of the XXth century alone, China has invaded (not "intervened in the affairs of"; "invaded") three different countries: Korea, Viet Nam, and Tibet."
Technically, China did not invade South Korea;
Chinese troops were supporting a North Korean
invasion of South Korea. And they only got
involved in the first place because Douglas
McArthur was going around claiming he didn't
consider Manchuria to be part of China (and showed every intention of crossing the Yalu to prove it).
The brief campaign in North Vietnam was an action to "teach them a lesson" after a persecution campaign against Vietnam's Chinese ethnic minority created a serious refugee crisis (you'll remember the "boat people crisis" of '78).
And China's invasion of Tibet was not an invasion of a "country", as Tibet has never been recognized
as a sovereign independent state in any modern sense of the word. Tibet wasn't any more a country than Navaho was. (Which is not to excuse
in any way the mistreatment of the Tibetans--or
Navaho for that matter--but merely to point out
there are gradations of "invasion".)
In modern history, China has not pursued a
foreign policy of hegemonism, and has not been guilty of unprovoked aggression against neighboring countries.
"*Every* country in the region has suffered a Chinese invasion at some point in its history. Some have managed to fight back, some haven't.
That's about as accurate, and meaningful, as saying, "*every* country in the Mediterranean region has suffered an Italian invasion at some point in its history".
"Speaking of dangerous, China has quite a reputation for buildings that collapse due to poor construction. This is because the Chinese goverment is not regulating construction effectively."
This is true, but not relevant. The problem isn't that China doesn't know how to regulate construction effectively. The problem is that China doesn't have the resources to effectively regulate every two-bit bridge and shopping mall in a country of 1.3 billion people.
For high-profile projects, Chinese construction is world-class. I suggest that anyone who has the opportunity visit the Jinmao Tower in Shanghai (the world's third-tallest building). A finer building you will not find anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
If that's the philosophy, then a "View current DOM as XHTML" menu item is clearly in order.
It would have been a much better rant if you actually knew what you were talking about.
Both the Economist and (Asian) Wall Street Journal are widely available in China in their print editions, and the online versions are unblocked, thus freely available to some 20 million current Chinese Internet users.
Back to the drawing board with that geopolitical analysis.
"You WILL view only acceptable web sites. And if you don't, then you can be dragged off to die in a slave labor camp or shot with your spouse billed for the ammunition. And China is exactly that kind of fascist rathole."
<yoda>Fascist? Rathole? My home this is!</yoda>
And, like most people who've never been here, you've got it all wrong. Mostly because all you know about China is what you've seen in the Western press. Think about that for a while, and then re-read your rant.
It goes even deeper than that. Remember why Gates absolutely freaked out about Netscape (back in the day). It threatened to disintermediate Microsoft from the user experience: the browser would become "the user experience", and it would be OS independent. Netscape was punished for its sins.
Then came Java, which was intended to do the same thing, but failed miserably when it overpromised and underdelivered.
Now comes Debian, presenting the opportunity for a truly OS-independent user experience. Will it work? Who knows. Is it worth a shot? Absolutely.
Do what I do. Use the Mandrake install ISO's to bootstrap your configuration (partitioning, X configuration, etc.) exactly the way you like it, then use that as the starting point for the Debian install.
It's sick, but it works fairly well once you get the hang of it. And the beauty of Debian is you (almost) never have to install the same machine more than one time.
Maybe so, but enough of them can afford it to make the commute very bad, and getting worse all the time.
One of the recent trends in Beijing is electric-powered bicycles (motocycles are heavily restricted, and, as you note, most people can't afford a car). They go for several hundred dollars (US). Once the production costs on the Segway class of vehicles comes down, there will absolutely be a market here.
The context of my quote in the conversation I had with the reporter (who, incidently, is by far the most technologically "with it" reporter I've ever met; which is unsurprising, considering his beat).
As for China's technical elite, they're there if you know where to look for them. As IT in China has been my livelihood for the last seven years, I'm quite familiar with the community and culture.
As the person (Michael Robinson) quoted, allow me to respond. The context was a discussion about the attitudes of China's technical elite. And, among people who make their living writing software, selling hardware, or other related pursuits, there is in fact grassroots anti-Microsoft sentiment.
One of the most common questions I get when interviewing prospective developers is whether the development platform will be Microsoft (.NET, Visual whatever, etc.) or non-Microsoft (J2EE, Unix, etc.).
There is a marked preference for "not Microsoft", particularly among the kind of applicants who you would actually trust to write code.
Why? Because, frankly, in core features (scheduling, VM, I/O, stability, etc.), the FreeBSD kernel is much better than the Linux kernel.
However, the flip side is that the FreeBSD kernel is an ancient, unthreaded, monolithic kernel with lagging device support, and non-existent ISV support.
So, if you don't need to run Java or other closed-source third-party software, and don't need the latest PCCARD or USB dongle, run FreeBSD. Otherwise, run Linux. A Debian environment built on top of the FreeBSD kernel would greatly facilitate switching back and forth as circumstances required.
It had been apparent to me for some time that FreeBSD was slipping into the Amiga death spiral, but what finally convinced me to cut my losses was the "one year" delay of 5.0. This most recent incident is just the final nail in the coffin.
It's true that FreeBSD has a noticeably better scheduler, VM, filesystem and network stack. The fact, though, is that Linux is at least 90% as good at what FreeBSD is good at, but for third-party application support, FreeBSD is like 10% as good as Linux. In a number of important cases, FreeBSD just can't do the job, period.
Consider:
Meanwhile, Debian's package management is as strong if not stronger than FreeBSD's cvsup and ports. The community is as strong, if not stronger. And all the software I used under FreeBSD works under Debian, except better. (There's all that FSF religion, but as long as my computers work, I can probably learn to live with it.)
As my development manager said, "If even you are abandoning FreeBSD, then how can it continue?" Well, I don't know, but it's not my problem anymore.
By the way, the URL for the published version of the Bill Gates hit piece has moved from where it was two years ago when I wrote the above cited essay. The new location is here.
As someone who deals routinely with journalists, I'd have to say your version is the J-school fantasyland version.
For an illustrative example of the real world version, click here (story of Time Asia hiring me to do a hatchet job on Bill Gates).
I've had a CNN reporter based in Beijing complain point blank that China coverage was for all practical purposes written in Atlanta.
I could go on with similar stories for pages and pages.
From FreeBSD "man loader":
The program called loader is the final stage of FreeBSD's kernel boot-
/boot.
strapping process. On IA32 (i386) architectures, it is a BTX client. It
is linked statically to libstand(3) and usually located in the directory
It provides a scripting language that can be used to automate tasks, do
pre-configuration or assist in recovery procedures. This scripting lan-
guage is roughly divided in two main components. The smaller one is a
set of commands designed for direct use by the casual user, called
"builtin commands" for historical reasons. The main drive behind these
commands is user-friendlyness. The bigger component is an ANS Forth com-
patible Forth interpreter based on ficl, by John Sadler.
I think its rather likely that the PGP in question was neither "properly used" nor "implemented" for values of "properly" sufficiently strict to support your claim.
Weak passphrase, weak PNRG, weak data leakage protection. You name it. It's a reasonable assumption that in the particular context under discussion, PGP was not "uncrackable".
It may or may not be the case that it was uncrackable given the time and resources available for the task, which is really the question at hand.
"Most of them are equivalent except for details of wording, but the license used for BSD until 1999 had a special problem: the ``obnoxious BSD advertising clause''. It said that every advertisement mentioning the software must include a particular sentence....To address this problem, in my ``spare time'' I talk with developers who have used BSD-style licenses, asking them if they would please remove the advertising clause."
There isn't any advertising clause in the GNU project software license. If Stallman feels the need to put one in, he's more than welcome.
Otherwise, he just should just learn to live with the consequences of "freedom".
persistent, acceleration, GPS satellite
When a product has 3% of a market that means that 3% of the total amount of money exchanged for that category of product is given in exchange for the product in question.
Now, you may argue, with considerable justification, that market share is a meaningless metric of open-source software acceptance, but for the mass of humanity that isn't still living with their parents, markets are what put food on the table.
Any object in orbit is in a state of constantly falling toward the Earth, at a rate determined by the gravitational force of the Earth at the altitude of the object. A stable orbit is achieved when the vertical component of the object's velocity vector exactly matches the accelleration toward earth.
Thus the velocity of any object in a stable orbit at any given altitude is determined by the mass of the Earth, which is absolutely not "arbitrary".
The farther from Earth, the lower the gravitational attraction, thus the lower the orbital velocity. This is why a GSM satellite completes an orbit in a few hours, and the Moon completes an orbit once a month.
Get thee to a physics book.
Simply substitute "social stability" wherever you see "Internet stability", and there you go.
The Google page-ranking algorithm is exactly a "distributed peer-review" mechanism.
What's really important for researchers is not the raw quantity of their publications, but how frequently their work is cited by other researchers (recursively; citations by other highly-cited researchers count more). That can be done automatically and cheaply.
The difference being that there hasn't been a "Bamboo Curtain" for over 20 years. There are regular direct flights between major American and major Chinese cities. Chinese invariably outnumber Americans on those flights, both ways (which may partly account for why Chinese are so much better informed about America than vice versa). You should hop on a plane some day and see for yourself how much is smiling propaganda and how much is reality.
No, Taiwan says Mongolia is part of China. China says Outer Mongolia is an independent country (with whom they enjoy healthy diplomatic relations).
Inner Mongolia is part of China, and has been pretty much since the Yuan Dynasty (during which the Chinese Empire was run by Mongolians).
"Taiwan would certainly take issue with you there"
Uh, you may not have noticed, but the formal name for Taiwan is "The Republic of China". Taiwan's official "National Day" is the anniversary of the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and creation of the Chinese Republic in 1911. Taiwan is "Chinese people".
You may have a point, though. Before their defeat by the Communists, and subsequent flight to Taiwan, the KMT did invade Outer Mongolia, and to this day, the Taiwanese government officially claims Mongolia as part of their sovereign territory.
Technically, China did not invade South Korea; Chinese troops were supporting a North Korean invasion of South Korea. And they only got involved in the first place because Douglas McArthur was going around claiming he didn't consider Manchuria to be part of China (and showed every intention of crossing the Yalu to prove it).
The brief campaign in North Vietnam was an action to "teach them a lesson" after a persecution campaign against Vietnam's Chinese ethnic minority created a serious refugee crisis (you'll remember the "boat people crisis" of '78).
And China's invasion of Tibet was not an invasion of a "country", as Tibet has never been recognized as a sovereign independent state in any modern sense of the word. Tibet wasn't any more a country than Navaho was. (Which is not to excuse in any way the mistreatment of the Tibetans--or Navaho for that matter--but merely to point out there are gradations of "invasion".)
In modern history, China has not pursued a foreign policy of hegemonism, and has not been guilty of unprovoked aggression against neighboring countries.
"*Every* country in the region has suffered a Chinese invasion at some point in its history. Some have managed to fight back, some haven't.
That's about as accurate, and meaningful, as saying, "*every* country in the Mediterranean region has suffered an Italian invasion at some point in its history".
This is true, but not relevant. The problem isn't that China doesn't know how to regulate construction effectively. The problem is that China doesn't have the resources to effectively regulate every two-bit bridge and shopping mall in a country of 1.3 billion people.
For high-profile projects, Chinese construction is world-class. I suggest that anyone who has the opportunity visit the Jinmao Tower in Shanghai (the world's third-tallest building). A finer building you will not find anywhere.
I think I'll wait until the FBI can figure out
how to keep their own "Crown Jewels" secret before
I'll trust them with mine, thank you very much.