You're both right and wrong here. China does have unions but they are part of the Chinese Communist Party and just enforce it's decisions. The logic here is: Communism is for the people and there is a union. If you are exploited, then either turn to the existing union or stfu, because Communism is supposed to be a workers' paradise! And forming unions that don't belong to the party isn't allowed because of that logic. Note that Jack Ma is a fairly important member of the CCP sitting in its national committee.
Sounds like someone at Facebook took a look at WeChat / Weixin - it's basically that. Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram combined, in addition with games, payment systems, booking systems and whatnot. Not privacy friendly, but I guess that's what Zuck secretly wants.
similar story. After win 10 getting more stupid and also more unstable I switched to macOS. Mostly because it has better support for 2D and 3D software and I don't want to use a Win VM. I keep a Win 10 box purely for streaming games to my Mac via Steam.
de facto, pretty much, yes they had their own internet. Foreign sites are very slow, if not impossible to access in a reliable manner. It doesn't help that pretty much every foreign website loads stuff from websites blocked by China's firewall - Google APIs, Social Media's like buttons, etc. In addition, regular users on e.g. China Telecom, are on a network that has very low bandwidth to outside China (this could be circumvented in the past by paying extra, e.g. for the China Telecom "VIP Package"). Finally, most Chinese grew up with their own Chinese internet services. Also, they are much, much faster being inside the Great Firewall. If you stick to Chinese websites only, your experience is often very good in terms of speed.
Intersting. Was this a US MBA? It's quite the opposite from the teachings of my UK MBA. But it's interesting to note that many textbooks mention differences in philosophy regarding management in the US and Europe (and also Asia). This starts in approaches towards capitalism, towards business laws, ethics and down to how you run a business in detail. It's all close enough but different in terms of focus.
well said. As a MBA student with a CS degree under my belt I also have no idea how the MBA would be useful as a foundation. Then again, originally, it was never intended as that. It's a broad overview of how business works - and that's valuable knowledge if you are charged to actually run a business or part of it. It also gives you insight about some of the PHB decisions you had to suffer as a "tech guy" - not all of them are Dilbertesque idiocy; some actually have good business reasons behind them. However, I agree, there are still plenty of PHBs out there, with MBA and without, and a degree can only do so much - personality, integrity, commitment, empathy, humility, the ability to listen, to put others' needs first aren't things a MBA or any programme teaches you.
Your problem are "dependencies", like the stupid "Like" buttons you find on pretty much every website nowadays, or javascript crap loaded from elsewhere.
tip 1: get a custom hosts file. Some low-risk websites are just "blocked" by messing with DNS entries. This will make some dependencies load rather than time out. tip 2: lower your browser's timeouts. It will give up sooner trying to load Facebook's like button, and overall page load times will improve. tip 3: get a download accelerator. Those make a huge difference here in China! (with and without VPN)
The problem aren't just blocked sites per se, but all the dependencies Western websites have these days. Without a VPN load times are pretty bad (unless you tweak the browser's timeout values), since most websites include "like buttons" from blocked social media sites. Additionally, the Chinese regime tampers with the HTTPS protocol and its certificates. HTTPS either fails more often than it should, or your browser will warn you about dubious certificates. And sometimes you still have the good old "connection has been reset" errors, as if it were 2008.
But yes, if you stay within China's walled garden and stick to domestic services, your technical experience is actually good. Content wise it's a different matter. But I guess as long as my wife can watch her Qing Dynasty soaps in 4k all is well...
TQM is actually a quite good philosophy, and there is a lot of common sense in it. What you are upset about is the entire management-consulting-industry which over-formalizes and over-complicates things so they can sell you their overpriced services. They're the reason all those frameworks have a bad rep among engineers.
But this doesn't mean that the ideas behind the frameworks are bad. In fact, knowing about those frameworks can help you building your own procedures and policies if you apply them taking your technical expertise into account.
Niche: CG production for film and games. Python is used from writing small scripts to developing entire asset management and rendering pipelines, which help to bring your favorite game or movie to your new 4k TV
I hope they're paying you for this and you don't really believe what you say. The US may not be doing great, but when it comes to healthcare, pensions, social security, civil liberties, equality, sustainability, workers rights, corruption, China is so far behind in the middle ages, it isn't even a contest. That's why you see so many white elephants in China. It's much easier to pour concrete into awesome projects with high visibility, where people take home half the project budget in kickbacks. Changing the social and civil fabric of a society much more difficult than building some glitzy skyscrapers.
I really enjoyed Ed Catmull's book about Pixar. As someone who has worked in the games industry for over 10 years, I wish this book were recommended reading for everyone running a studio.
Read up on Marketing. You will likely have to "invent" something that brings value to an internal or external customer. So find out what this value is! Then read up on gradual vs. radical invention and what it means for how you run your R&D operations. The topic is also covered in operations management research (i.e. in books you read at business school). Having some knowledge of how academics do research is also very useful. Read up on how prototyping and product design work. Finally you need some relevant tech skills, but you may have them already since you're on Slashdot.
Social payments sounds a lot like WeChat Wallet / Alipay. Except those also combine the useful features of Apple Pay. Actually, Alipay makes Apple Pay look old.
A commodore VIC-20 with a C2N/1530 datasette tape player and a Commodore 1020 expansion box and a couple of game cartridges, like Commodore Tennis, which I think was a straight Pong rip-off. Tennis came with 2 Commodore paddle controllers, which were pretty unique, but useless for most other games. I also had an assortment of RAM cartridges to populate the expansion box with, which each added something between 1 and 8 kilobytes. I guess some time I should get it all from the attic and see if it still works. I stuck with C=. Next computer was a C64, followed by an Amiga 500, then a 386SX/20 PC.
I miss playing games like Ultima, or the Bard's Tale where you had to use a lot of your own imagination, because there was no voice over and no fancy graphics. Don't get me wrong, movie like experiences like The Witcher 3 are awesome, but it's not quite the same.
It's China. Really, regular IT people (not the government's hackers) here are notoriously clueless about security. I've encountered various systems in the last years here in China that ran with no passwords or default passwords, because some underpaid drone didn't care to do some extra work. Favorite Chinese passwords? qwerty, 12345, companynameCURRENTYEAR, some patterns you can type on your keyboard like 147896. Security through obscurity is also a favorite concept.
Are you afraid that your country might become an authoritarian police state? Here's the solution: move to a country that IS an authoritarian police state!
Pretty much everything people fear that Trump may do to the US is already reality in China, including no due process, no elections, censorship, heavy use of fossil fuels, assertive foreign policies, leader worship, nationalism and a Make China Great agenda. The only thing China has going is that there's no data caps - so maybe it's interesting if you're stuck with Comcast.
been living in China for 7 years now. I general it used to be like this. Around 2011 it really looked like the government relaxed its grip on censorship a bit.
However, in the last year things got worse. Xi has a much lower tolerance for people letting steam off, and he seems to be particularly concerned with his own image. Things are now censored far quicker than before and the regime seems to have lost most scruples as it realized how toothless the West is. Expect more show trials and confessions on TV and more sudden disappearances of people, regardless which passport they hold.
yes, they are even set up in some pseudo rivalry. I assume it was intended, originally, to create some sort of competition. Except it created a duopoly where they both carved up the market between them. i.e. in some parts of town you can only get China Telecom and Unicom will simply tell you they don't serve that area, and the other way round.
However, they also make life difficult. Competition, in Chinese terms, is not making life for the other corporation difficult, but for its customers. They too are the enemy. So if you happen to have multiple corporate sites, some on Unicom, some on Telecom, you can expect that connectivity between them will be quite bad, because the Telcos are punishing you for signing up with the competition - as if you had a choice...
And even though China Telecom's motto is "Service, First and Foremost" it's just as much an empty slogan as Kim Jong-Un's propaganda is. Actually, I'm pretty sure the China Telecom "service halls" have been modeled on some hell from Dante's Inferno. Waiting in queue to speak to a human to get anything done there will waste precious hours of your life.
interesting. I never bothered to look at the source. But I haven't encountered any of these ads recently as I'm pretty much on a VPN 99.99% of the time. Most outside websites are pretty much unusable without VPN these days. Im lucky that my company is a WFOE and shells out good money so they can afford a legal VPN that bypasses most of the bullshit the GFW and Chinese ISPs throw at you.
Every once in a while I got Chinese ads served on Western websites that never serve ads otherwise, especially not Chinese ones, and it would only stop when the VPN was turned on. The ads were in most case pop-overs that would appear on the bottom of pages. I suspected long ago that China Telecom was somehow adding their own ads to my browsing "experience".
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The CCP is run by those people. Many of the people sitting in the national congress are billionaires. They make members of the US senate look poor.
You're both right and wrong here. China does have unions but they are part of the Chinese Communist Party and just enforce it's decisions. The logic here is: Communism is for the people and there is a union. If you are exploited, then either turn to the existing union or stfu, because Communism is supposed to be a workers' paradise! And forming unions that don't belong to the party isn't allowed because of that logic. Note that Jack Ma is a fairly important member of the CCP sitting in its national committee.
Sounds like someone at Facebook took a look at WeChat / Weixin - it's basically that. Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram combined, in addition with games, payment systems, booking systems and whatnot. Not privacy friendly, but I guess that's what Zuck secretly wants.
similar story. After win 10 getting more stupid and also more unstable I switched to macOS. Mostly because it has better support for 2D and 3D software and I don't want to use a Win VM. I keep a Win 10 box purely for streaming games to my Mac via Steam.
de facto, pretty much, yes they had their own internet.
Foreign sites are very slow, if not impossible to access in a reliable manner. It doesn't help that pretty much every foreign website loads stuff from websites blocked by China's firewall - Google APIs, Social Media's like buttons, etc. In addition, regular users on e.g. China Telecom, are on a network that has very low bandwidth to outside China (this could be circumvented in the past by paying extra, e.g. for the China Telecom "VIP Package"). Finally, most Chinese grew up with their own Chinese internet services. Also, they are much, much faster being inside the Great Firewall. If you stick to Chinese websites only, your experience is often very good in terms of speed.
Intersting. Was this a US MBA? It's quite the opposite from the teachings of my UK MBA. But it's interesting to note that many textbooks mention differences in philosophy regarding management in the US and Europe (and also Asia). This starts in approaches towards capitalism, towards business laws, ethics and down to how you run a business in detail. It's all close enough but different in terms of focus.
well said. As a MBA student with a CS degree under my belt I also have no idea how the MBA would be useful as a foundation. Then again, originally, it was never intended as that. It's a broad overview of how business works - and that's valuable knowledge if you are charged to actually run a business or part of it. It also gives you insight about some of the PHB decisions you had to suffer as a "tech guy" - not all of them are Dilbertesque idiocy; some actually have good business reasons behind them.
However, I agree, there are still plenty of PHBs out there, with MBA and without, and a degree can only do so much - personality, integrity, commitment, empathy, humility, the ability to listen, to put others' needs first aren't things a MBA or any programme teaches you.
Your problem are "dependencies", like the stupid "Like" buttons you find on pretty much every website nowadays, or javascript crap loaded from elsewhere.
tip 1: get a custom hosts file. Some low-risk websites are just "blocked" by messing with DNS entries. This will make some dependencies load rather than time out.
tip 2: lower your browser's timeouts. It will give up sooner trying to load Facebook's like button, and overall page load times will improve.
tip 3: get a download accelerator. Those make a huge difference here in China! (with and without VPN)
The problem aren't just blocked sites per se, but all the dependencies Western websites have these days. Without a VPN load times are pretty bad (unless you tweak the browser's timeout values), since most websites include "like buttons" from blocked social media sites.
Additionally, the Chinese regime tampers with the HTTPS protocol and its certificates. HTTPS either fails more often than it should, or your browser will warn you about dubious certificates.
And sometimes you still have the good old "connection has been reset" errors, as if it were 2008.
But yes, if you stay within China's walled garden and stick to domestic services, your technical experience is actually good. Content wise it's a different matter. But I guess as long as my wife can watch her Qing Dynasty soaps in 4k all is well...
must be great hearing this from your ex-boss, who drove your shop to the wall, if you're a Yahoo employee
TQM is actually a quite good philosophy, and there is a lot of common sense in it. What you are upset about is the entire management-consulting-industry which over-formalizes and over-complicates things so they can sell you their overpriced services. They're the reason all those frameworks have a bad rep among engineers.
But this doesn't mean that the ideas behind the frameworks are bad. In fact, knowing about those frameworks can help you building your own procedures and policies if you apply them taking your technical expertise into account.
Niche: CG production for film and games. Python is used from writing small scripts to developing entire asset management and rendering pipelines, which help to bring your favorite game or movie to your new 4k TV
I hope they're paying you for this and you don't really believe what you say. The US may not be doing great, but when it comes to healthcare, pensions, social security, civil liberties, equality, sustainability, workers rights, corruption, China is so far behind in the middle ages, it isn't even a contest.
That's why you see so many white elephants in China. It's much easier to pour concrete into awesome projects with high visibility, where people take home half the project budget in kickbacks. Changing the social and civil fabric of a society much more difficult than building some glitzy skyscrapers.
I really enjoyed Ed Catmull's book about Pixar. As someone who has worked in the games industry for over 10 years, I wish this book were recommended reading for everyone running a studio.
Read up on Marketing. You will likely have to "invent" something that brings value to an internal or external customer. So find out what this value is! Then read up on gradual vs. radical invention and what it means for how you run your R&D operations. The topic is also covered in operations management research (i.e. in books you read at business school). Having some knowledge of how academics do research is also very useful. Read up on how prototyping and product design work. Finally you need some relevant tech skills, but you may have them already since you're on Slashdot.
Social payments sounds a lot like WeChat Wallet / Alipay. Except those also combine the useful features of Apple Pay. Actually, Alipay makes Apple Pay look old.
A commodore VIC-20 with a C2N/1530 datasette tape player and a Commodore 1020 expansion box and a couple of game cartridges, like Commodore Tennis, which I think was a straight Pong rip-off. Tennis came with 2 Commodore paddle controllers, which were pretty unique, but useless for most other games. I also had an assortment of RAM cartridges to populate the expansion box with, which each added something between 1 and 8 kilobytes. I guess some time I should get it all from the attic and see if it still works. I stuck with C=. Next computer was a C64, followed by an Amiga 500, then a 386SX/20 PC.
I miss playing games like Ultima, or the Bard's Tale where you had to use a lot of your own imagination, because there was no voice over and no fancy graphics. Don't get me wrong, movie like experiences like The Witcher 3 are awesome, but it's not quite the same.
someone called? Do I need to fetch the elder gods?
It's China. Really, regular IT people (not the government's hackers) here are notoriously clueless about security. I've encountered various systems in the last years here in China that ran with no passwords or default passwords, because some underpaid drone didn't care to do some extra work. Favorite Chinese passwords? qwerty, 12345, companynameCURRENTYEAR, some patterns you can type on your keyboard like 147896. Security through obscurity is also a favorite concept.
Are you afraid that your country might become an authoritarian police state? Here's the solution: move to a country that IS an authoritarian police state!
Pretty much everything people fear that Trump may do to the US is already reality in China, including no due process, no elections, censorship, heavy use of fossil fuels, assertive foreign policies, leader worship, nationalism and a Make China Great agenda. The only thing China has going is that there's no data caps - so maybe it's interesting if you're stuck with Comcast.
been living in China for 7 years now. I general it used to be like this. Around 2011 it really looked like the government relaxed its grip on censorship a bit.
However, in the last year things got worse. Xi has a much lower tolerance for people letting steam off, and he seems to be particularly concerned with his own image. Things are now censored far quicker than before and the regime seems to have lost most scruples as it realized how toothless the West is. Expect more show trials and confessions on TV and more sudden disappearances of people, regardless which passport they hold.
yes, they are even set up in some pseudo rivalry. I assume it was intended, originally, to create some sort of competition. Except it created a duopoly where they both carved up the market between them. i.e. in some parts of town you can only get China Telecom and Unicom will simply tell you they don't serve that area, and the other way round.
However, they also make life difficult. Competition, in Chinese terms, is not making life for the other corporation difficult, but for its customers. They too are the enemy. So if you happen to have multiple corporate sites, some on Unicom, some on Telecom, you can expect that connectivity between them will be quite bad, because the Telcos are punishing you for signing up with the competition - as if you had a choice...
And even though China Telecom's motto is "Service, First and Foremost" it's just as much an empty slogan as Kim Jong-Un's propaganda is. Actually, I'm pretty sure the China Telecom "service halls" have been modeled on some hell from Dante's Inferno. Waiting in queue to speak to a human to get anything done there will waste precious hours of your life.
interesting. I never bothered to look at the source. But I haven't encountered any of these ads recently as I'm pretty much on a VPN 99.99% of the time. Most outside websites are pretty much unusable without VPN these days. Im lucky that my company is a WFOE and shells out good money so they can afford a legal VPN that bypasses most of the bullshit the GFW and Chinese ISPs throw at you.
Every once in a while I got Chinese ads served on Western websites that never serve ads otherwise, especially not Chinese ones, and it would only stop when the VPN was turned on. The ads were in most case pop-overs that would appear on the bottom of pages. I suspected long ago that China Telecom was somehow adding their own ads to my browsing "experience".