There's a lot of recruiter hate going on here but it seems to miss the real problem. Having spent the last 6 years on the hiring side, it's very obvious that Jeff Atwood's FizzBuzz problem is too hard for 90% of the people applying for programming positions out there. When you end up with a situation like this, traditional hiring methods just don't work. Job board postings will get you hundreds of resumes in a single day but the quality is really crap and it is prohibitively expensive to do traditional interviews for every single resume received. HR recruiters, hated as they are, actually do provide higher quality candidates than posting on the job boards. However, it's something like an increase from 1% quality candidates to 5% quality. Still very poor.
We've ended up using a multi-prong approach to hiring ourselves. Besides using recruiters and posting to SIG boards, we've also optimized our candidate screening to handle the flood that comes in from job board postings. Since you can't tell much from resumes (some candidates lie, but an amazing number of good developers are also very bad at writing resumes), we try to call in all but the worst of the resumes received. Then we sit them through an automated testing system (we use Codility). Candidates that pass the equivalent of the FizzBuzz problem are then interviewed by technical interviewers that go over the code with them detail and attempt to thoroughly assess their true skill level. That automated testing step filters out the equivalent of 90% of our candidates, resulting in an almost 90% savings in our HR costs. It's very expensive to have good technical people spending hours interviewing after all, and they tend to hate it anyway.
It's not perfect. There are of course great people who get rejected or who even refuse to take an automated test. However, automated candidate testing means the difference between our top technical people spending 10% of their time interviewing or 100% of their time interviewing. With the scarcity of really good technical talent, we obviously chose to optimize our techie time.
that any factory or venture in China must be at least 51% domestically owned, such that they always will have the power?
No. That law was scrapped a while ago. There are now quite a few WOFE (Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprises) in China. They do have some minor restrictions (e.g. some paperwork stuff that requires that they work through intermediaries instead of doing things themselves) but for the most part are free to operate normally.
China is actually more welcoming to foreign enterprises than the US. I've worked in both countries.
For someone who is currently living in China and using it daily, I am very glad they made this particular decision. For those condemning Google for not sticking to "Don't Be Evil" or for selling out, consider this - which is the greater evil, to filter out some information (and let people know it _is_ being filtered), or to deny them access to information altogether?
It is easy to talk about sticking to principles and refusing censorship from the comfort of a (relatively) uncensored computer. But have you ever considered what life would be like for those without Google? When _every_ single search engine out there, including Yahoo, MSN or others, are all filtered? All this means is that the most effective information resource out there is gone and we have to rely on substandard competitors that cave in far more easily to any pressure (e.g. DOJ request for info). Finding _any_ information becomes harder. What good has it done anyone?
It is easy to paint every decision as black and white, good or evil. But life really isn't that simple. Google had to choose between bad and evil and they came up with a solution that was better than any of their competitors. At least they tell you that something is filtered out. At least a smart and curious person still can go out and find out what it was that was filtered. The alternatives (international or chinese) do not even do that.
Among my workmates, information is well shared. Everyone knows what happened in the square. Heck, a couple of them were there. They knew about the benzene spill in Harbin long before it came out in news. Don't worry. Information of this sort gets around fairly well through various means. Censoring it from Google really won't hide anything. All blocking Google means is that when we hit obscure technical problems, we can no longer find solutions quickly. When we want to learn about the latest technology, we must scan through pages and pages of listings to find a decent resource. Oh yes, we'll also make Overture rich cause sooner or later, we will click through one of their sponsored links.
Yep. The IOSN team has spent the better part of last week contacting reporters, correcting news stories and still, this story won't die. They contacted over 60 news agencies last week. BBC's original version was the standard mistake: "UN organizes software freedom day". Fortunately, BBC is responsive and by the time Slashdot got to it, it's the corrected version. Still, the UN angle is too strong for any of the news agencies to resist.
Sorry Henrik. They're doing the best they can but it's crazy how this story keeps spreading.
The delegate from the government of Mongolia who attended the Free and Open Source Software Asia Pacific (FOSSAP) consultation in February had an interesting tale to relate.
In order to expand the reach of their ICT in schools program some years ago, they put FOSS on 20% of the PCs they installed in the schools there. Microsoft had refused to give them a discount, so to have full reach, they had to resort to this.
Their findings? No surprised to anyone who's used FOSS for a while - kids adapted equally quickly to both FOSS and proprietary software (Windows). For ICT education purposes, there was no drawback with using FOSS.
Other countries, such as Thailand with their successful Schoolnet program, have had the same results.
Argh. This is a dupe (though not Timothy's fault). The BBC picked up on and added to the original article by David Lugard, that Slashdot previously linked to here. The IOSN guys contacted them, requested a correction and in the process supplied BBC with additional information about what was done. However, the article, like all those based on the original IDG/Infoworld article, is misleading. The IOSN was merely publicizing the event and if you clicked through the link, you would see that. (Assuming it's not/.'ed. It was down the whole of last week due to two consecutive postings onto Slashdot.)
Software Freedom Day's true website is at www.softwarefreedomday.org and credit should go to the great guys there who did so much to organize and publicize it, including the OpenCD people (Henrik) and others.
I hate making this kind of requests, but if anyone with mod points sees this post, please mod the parent post (from golisoda) up. That's sunil [at] iosn.net / sunil [at] apdip.net. The original article that caused this whole mess apparently comes from David Legard at idg.com.
Nope. There are several UN funded projects that have assisted FOSS. If a single desktop manual got MS all worked up, then they would have quit a long time ago when UNESCO sponsored the Free Software Directory or when UNCTAD released a favorable report that said OSS could boost IT sector in developing countries.
They could even have gotten upset when the IOSN released their FOSS primer (introducing FOSS to govt policy makers) or worse, their upcoming FOSS policy primer (guide on how to create national FOSS policies). They even held a meeting where policy-makers from over 20 Asia-Pacific countries all called for greater exploration of FOSS.
Instead, Microsoft announces a slew of partnerships with the UNDP and other UN agencies. Microsoft doesn't quit in a huff. They are far more mature than that.
Ob disclaimer: I don't speak for the UN, IOSN or Microsoft
The problem is the reporter just went to the IOSN site and read the blurb about SFD on the first page. The IOSN is publicizing efforts all around its area of mandate, which is the Asia-Pacific. 42 countries in all. (Let's not go into the International vs Asia-Pacific thing). It is NOT organizing SFD. It's just giving publicity and documenting efforts.
Please, the UN is not organizing this. Get the word out or there will be hell to pay for the next few days at the IOSN.
Dudes, no! That article is in error and the people in charge of IOSN have been desperately trying to correct them before it got into really wide circulation. They are giving publicity to Software Freedom Day which is the brainchild of someone else and can be found here:
www.softwarefreedomday.org
Note that there are no interviews with the staff of the IOSN or the UN in the article. No direct quotes. Some reporter just looked at the web site and jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Don't believe me? Email the IOSN people. They can be reached at sunil [at] iosn.net or khairil [at] iosn.net. They are the current torch bearers at the IOSN.
The UN is not "sponsoring" this. That implies far too much and is too dangerous a position to take. You can't imagine the UN would take such a controversial stance would you? However, the Free and Open Source Software section of the UN can widely publicize FOSS so long as they do not claim it is the UN's official position.
The material's under an open content license. Feel free to take the material, make it all slick and sexy and print it. If you make a bundle off that, do think about donating a pile of those books to the developing countries around the world that can't afford printed books. Those guys are the real target of the IOSN's efforts.
If you set up your YUM (or apt-get if you install apt-get on Fedora) configuration properly, you can upgrade from Fedora Core 1 to 2 to 3 (whenever it comes out) automatically. No need to download, burn and do a massive upgrade from CD.
The poster didn't bother to mention that the IOSN is a project of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which is focused on developing countries. They tend to deal with really poor countries with very limited resources. They are not focused on Joe-consumer in a rich, developed country.
Under these conditions, you want a distribution that can be freely downloaded, burned and redistributed without restrictions or problems. Fedora fits that bill and is targeted towards the desktop.
Don't know about India, but I left the US and am working in China right now. Salary's not quite as high as I was getting in the US but it's possible to live and save on it.
Funny thing is, I was a foreigner working in the US and now am once again a foreigner working in China. Let me say it's much EASIER to get a work visa in China than the US, with its byzantine laws, multiple requirements and lengthy paperwork.
Were you expecting to get a job as easily as finding one in the US? Sorry, that's reserved for citizens only. But you'll have less trouble getting a visa and finding a job than all the foreigners in the US right now.
Also see this article or do a google search on "niue government.nu" and you will see many references to a dispute between the ccTLD registrar and the government of Niue. The government is accusing the registrar of not sharing the proceeds from the.nu domain.
You are probably better off finding a better charity to donate to.
For those of you thinking of registering a.nu domain to assist Niue, don't. First, because there are better ways to fund your donation dollars, as has been pointed out by other posters.
The second reason is that there is a dispute going on between the government of Niue and the companies that control the.nu ccTLD. While both sides have their versions of the story, a telling fact is that the UN recognized government is locked out of their own web site (www.gov.nu). They can be found instead at www.niuegov.com. You will note that the updates on the gov.nu site stopped in October and continue on at the niuegov.com site, which is hosted by a UN agency (UNDP-APDIP to be exact).
Because of this, I truly doubt that any money spent with the.nu ccTLD registrar will reach the government. The registrar may assist in other ways, but it will not likely be through official channels.
One version of the dispute between the government and the registrar can be found here.
200+ degrees fahrenheit would kill a man quickly. 212 degrees being the boiling point of water, the minister would have been dead long before it reached 200 degrees. I believe there were several cases in the US where moms locked their kids in the car in summer and returned to find them dead. Temperatures reached only around 130-140 F then.
Re:Afghanistan could certainly benefit from LINUX.
on
Linux Comes To Afghanistan
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The UN is supporting Free/Open Source Software (not just Linux) through a variety of ways. Someone has already posted Netaid's site as a reply. Two others off the top of my head:
1) UNESCO's support of the Free Software portal. You can find it at: http://www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_freesoft/
2) The UNDP's International Open Source Network found at: http://www.iosn.net. This portal focuses on promoting Free/Open Source software to policy makers, government officials, etc. I believe there are other regional centers coming up as well.
There's a surprising amount of focus on Free/Open Source software in the UN, though most of it is only in the early stages.
There is a reason why organizations like the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) ranks ICT as one of its 6 main focus areas, alongside others such as Poverty Reduction and Environment. To quote the UNDP:
ICT is an increasingly powerful tool for participating in global markets; promoting political accountability;
improving the delivery of basic services; and enhancing local development opportunities. (emphasis mine)
You can find many stories of how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) assists UNDP programs here. A typical story is this one, about poverty alleviation, gender equality and economic development, all aided by the Internet.
Most of these programs are not done individually. Few people decide "let's stick a satellite dish here cause it's cool". If ICT projects such as these are found in developing countries, they are usually part of a integrated program to address multiple problems.
There is an amazing number of technology and open source initiatives being carried out by the UN and other international organizations. I will try to submit them to Slashdot as a story at a later date.
Flamebait. As a foreigner who worked in China (left in 99) and still maintains ties with people there, I can tell you that things are hardly as rosy as painted above. It's true that multinationals who have just recently gotten into China are on the hunt for "white" professionals due to their distrust for local talent/work ethics. However, due to the extreme cost differential between local and foreign workers, any "white" foreigner can pretty much expect to be replaced within 2 years by a local employee.
Any company that has been around for more than a couple of years has a large local staff, even of technical people. Upper management may be foreign, but that's maybe 1 position in 20. Getting that position is also extremely tough - even in 99, at the height of the tech boom in the US, you would find highly skilled foreigners in China working for only equity. We're talking about ivy league grads with years of work experience. The best way to get an upper management position was either to get transfered over from headquarters (i.e. home country of multinational) or to be best drinking buddies with the local General Manager.
This of course does not take into account the difficulties of legally acquiring a work permit in China, finding affordable housing, etc.
Working in China is quite an experience and I would recommend it for the adventurous. But don't expect to make a bundle of money or get a cushy job. I'm not sure such a position exists anywhere in the world anymore.
I have to respectfully disagree with your hypothesis that learning isn't fun. Granted, some parts are tedious, some parts are repetitive and frustration is no stranger during the learning process. However, the joy of discovery, the eureka moment when it all clicks into place, the self-confidence when you realize you have mastered a subject - I say all these more than counterbalance the tedious aspects of learning. Learning is its own reward. Mastering a matter makes it a joy all of its own.
Especially in this crowd, claiming that learning is no fun won't fly. What geek hasn't encountered frustration configuring something in linux? What geek hasn't repetitively typed man (subject)? Yet I will lay odds that few geeks will claims computers are no fun, that linux is boring.
Pardon me for preaching off a soapbox, but the attitude that 'learning isn't fun' bugs the hell out of me. It is that attitude that keeps people watching TV rather than reading a good book, or play video games till 5am while neglecting homework. The rewards aren't as immediate as other activities but learning IS fun, rewarding and enjoyable as long as we stick to it.
So make battlebot classes fun. I'll guarantee you that if those kids are actually building those bots, they'll encounter the tedium and frustration of engineering. But will that stop them from having fun in the end? Probably not. But it may encourage some of them to try something they never would have, and learn something in the process.
Last time I checked, they used a NOT list and it was a very small list. For mainstream use, you could pretty much access anything you wanted with the exception of a couple of news sites like CNN and sometimes, NYT. The blocking was erratic though... some months the sites were reachable, other days, they were perfectly fine. Of course, I'm sure a few dissident sites are blocked, but since I don't view those on a daily basis, I wouldn't know.
But it's really a non-issue. Even 4 years ago, all the internet cafes I visited by default went through a proxy that pretty much allowed you to view whatever you wanted. Knowledge of how to circumvent the blocks were very common among the younger audience. I'm sure it's even more prevalent today. For China, at least, this project isn't really relevant.
"Nondiscriminatory fashion" means that Microsoft must treat all potential licensors equally. If Microsoft licenses this patent to all users for $1 per copy distributed, that is still nondiscriminatory. Can Ximian afford to pay for something like that? Can the Samba project afford this? Can any open source project afford to pay even $1 per download?
Microsoft requiring licensing fees would be the kiss of death for any project.
The article states that Red Hat is specifically going after small to medium sized business, who don't see Oracle as a reasonable expense.
Oracle is expensive and charged on a per CPU (actually per Mhz) basis. So if you're building something that is expected to scale, you're looking at a lot of money.
For example, if you're building a cluster of web servers on stock x86 boxes, you'll find that the price of a single Oracle license on a single box will probably cost you in excess of five of those plain white boxes. For a small company, that is unacceptable.
Now it's been a while since I had that course on US/China in the Cold War, but if I recall correctly China works something like this.
Funny. I guess all the internet cafe owners I know in Beijing must be fake, since they were all private individuals trying to make a living. The only large chain I knew belonged to a guy well trained in western management philosophy. He wasn't a party member either.
China has changed a LOT since the cold war. Please don't base your assumptions on 20 year old data collected by scholars who have never set foot in the country.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of recruiter hate going on here but it seems to miss the real problem. Having spent the last 6 years on the hiring side, it's very obvious that Jeff Atwood's FizzBuzz problem is too hard for 90% of the people applying for programming positions out there. When you end up with a situation like this, traditional hiring methods just don't work. Job board postings will get you hundreds of resumes in a single day but the quality is really crap and it is prohibitively expensive to do traditional interviews for every single resume received. HR recruiters, hated as they are, actually do provide higher quality candidates than posting on the job boards. However, it's something like an increase from 1% quality candidates to 5% quality. Still very poor.
We've ended up using a multi-prong approach to hiring ourselves. Besides using recruiters and posting to SIG boards, we've also optimized our candidate screening to handle the flood that comes in from job board postings. Since you can't tell much from resumes (some candidates lie, but an amazing number of good developers are also very bad at writing resumes), we try to call in all but the worst of the resumes received. Then we sit them through an automated testing system (we use Codility). Candidates that pass the equivalent of the FizzBuzz problem are then interviewed by technical interviewers that go over the code with them detail and attempt to thoroughly assess their true skill level. That automated testing step filters out the equivalent of 90% of our candidates, resulting in an almost 90% savings in our HR costs. It's very expensive to have good technical people spending hours interviewing after all, and they tend to hate it anyway.
It's not perfect. There are of course great people who get rejected or who even refuse to take an automated test. However, automated candidate testing means the difference between our top technical people spending 10% of their time interviewing or 100% of their time interviewing. With the scarcity of really good technical talent, we obviously chose to optimize our techie time.
that any factory or venture in China must be at least 51% domestically owned, such that they always will have the power?
No. That law was scrapped a while ago. There are now quite a few WOFE (Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprises) in China. They do have some minor restrictions (e.g. some paperwork stuff that requires that they work through intermediaries instead of doing things themselves) but for the most part are free to operate normally.
China is actually more welcoming to foreign enterprises than the US. I've worked in both countries.
For someone who is currently living in China and using it daily, I am very glad they made this particular decision. For those condemning Google for not sticking to "Don't Be Evil" or for selling out, consider this - which is the greater evil, to filter out some information (and let people know it _is_ being filtered), or to deny them access to information altogether?
It is easy to talk about sticking to principles and refusing censorship from the comfort of a (relatively) uncensored computer. But have you ever considered what life would be like for those without Google? When _every_ single search engine out there, including Yahoo, MSN or others, are all filtered? All this means is that the most effective information resource out there is gone and we have to rely on substandard competitors that cave in far more easily to any pressure (e.g. DOJ request for info). Finding _any_ information becomes harder. What good has it done anyone?
It is easy to paint every decision as black and white, good or evil. But life really isn't that simple. Google had to choose between bad and evil and they came up with a solution that was better than any of their competitors. At least they tell you that something is filtered out. At least a smart and curious person still can go out and find out what it was that was filtered. The alternatives (international or chinese) do not even do that.
Among my workmates, information is well shared. Everyone knows what happened in the square. Heck, a couple of them were there. They knew about the benzene spill in Harbin long before it came out in news. Don't worry. Information of this sort gets around fairly well through various means. Censoring it from Google really won't hide anything. All blocking Google means is that when we hit obscure technical problems, we can no longer find solutions quickly. When we want to learn about the latest technology, we must scan through pages and pages of listings to find a decent resource. Oh yes, we'll also make Overture rich cause sooner or later, we will click through one of their sponsored links.
Yep. The IOSN team has spent the better part of last week contacting reporters, correcting news stories and still, this story won't die. They contacted over 60 news agencies last week. BBC's original version was the standard mistake: "UN organizes software freedom day". Fortunately, BBC is responsive and by the time Slashdot got to it, it's the corrected version. Still, the UN angle is too strong for any of the news agencies to resist.
Sorry Henrik. They're doing the best they can but it's crazy how this story keeps spreading.
The delegate from the government of Mongolia who attended the Free and Open Source Software Asia Pacific (FOSSAP) consultation in February had an interesting tale to relate.
In order to expand the reach of their ICT in schools program some years ago, they put FOSS on 20% of the PCs they installed in the schools there. Microsoft had refused to give them a discount, so to have full reach, they had to resort to this.
Their findings? No surprised to anyone who's used FOSS for a while - kids adapted equally quickly to both FOSS and proprietary software (Windows). For ICT education purposes, there was no drawback with using FOSS.
Other countries, such as Thailand with their successful Schoolnet program, have had the same results.
You can find references to Mongolia's report in the FOSSAP final report.
Argh. This is a dupe (though not Timothy's fault). The BBC picked up on and added to the original article by David Lugard, that Slashdot previously linked to here. The IOSN guys contacted them, requested a correction and in the process supplied BBC with additional information about what was done. However, the article, like all those based on the original IDG/Infoworld article, is misleading. The IOSN was merely publicizing the event and if you clicked through the link, you would see that. (Assuming it's not /.'ed. It was down the whole of last week due to two consecutive postings onto Slashdot.)
Software Freedom Day's true website is at www.softwarefreedomday.org and credit should go to the great guys there who did so much to organize and publicize it, including the OpenCD people (Henrik) and others.
I hate making this kind of requests, but if anyone with mod points sees this post, please mod the parent post (from golisoda) up. That's sunil [at] iosn.net / sunil [at] apdip.net. The original article that caused this whole mess apparently comes from David Legard at idg.com.
Don't waste mod points on this post.
Nope. There are several UN funded projects that have assisted FOSS. If a single desktop manual got MS all worked up, then they would have quit a long time ago when UNESCO sponsored the Free Software Directory or when UNCTAD released a favorable report that said OSS could boost IT sector in developing countries.
They could even have gotten upset when the IOSN released their FOSS primer (introducing FOSS to govt policy makers) or worse, their upcoming FOSS policy primer (guide on how to create national FOSS policies). They even held a meeting where policy-makers from over 20 Asia-Pacific countries all called for greater exploration of FOSS.
Instead, Microsoft announces a slew of partnerships with the UNDP and other UN agencies. Microsoft doesn't quit in a huff. They are far more mature than that.
Ob disclaimer: I don't speak for the UN, IOSN or Microsoft
The problem is the reporter just went to the IOSN site and read the blurb about SFD on the first page. The IOSN is publicizing efforts all around its area of mandate, which is the Asia-Pacific. 42 countries in all. (Let's not go into the International vs Asia-Pacific thing). It is NOT organizing SFD. It's just giving publicity and documenting efforts.
Please, the UN is not organizing this. Get the word out or there will be hell to pay for the next few days at the IOSN.
Dudes, no! That article is in error and the people in charge of IOSN have been desperately trying to correct them before it got into really wide circulation. They are giving publicity to Software Freedom Day which is the brainchild of someone else and can be found here:
www.softwarefreedomday.org
Note that there are no interviews with the staff of the IOSN or the UN in the article. No direct quotes. Some reporter just looked at the web site and jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Don't believe me? Email the IOSN people. They can be reached at sunil [at] iosn.net or khairil [at] iosn.net. They are the current torch bearers at the IOSN.
The UN is not "sponsoring" this. That implies far too much and is too dangerous a position to take. You can't imagine the UN would take such a controversial stance would you? However, the Free and Open Source Software section of the UN can widely publicize FOSS so long as they do not claim it is the UN's official position.
The material's under an open content license. Feel free to take the material, make it all slick and sexy and print it. If you make a bundle off that, do think about donating a pile of those books to the developing countries around the world that can't afford printed books. Those guys are the real target of the IOSN's efforts.
If you set up your YUM (or apt-get if you install apt-get on Fedora) configuration properly, you can upgrade from Fedora Core 1 to 2 to 3 (whenever it comes out) automatically. No need to download, burn and do a massive upgrade from CD.
The poster didn't bother to mention that the IOSN is a project of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which is focused on developing countries. They tend to deal with really poor countries with very limited resources. They are not focused on Joe-consumer in a rich, developed country.
Under these conditions, you want a distribution that can be freely downloaded, burned and redistributed without restrictions or problems. Fedora fits that bill and is targeted towards the desktop.
Don't know about India, but I left the US and am working in China right now. Salary's not quite as high as I was getting in the US but it's possible to live and save on it.
Funny thing is, I was a foreigner working in the US and now am once again a foreigner working in China. Let me say it's much EASIER to get a work visa in China than the US, with its byzantine laws, multiple requirements and lengthy paperwork.
Were you expecting to get a job as easily as finding one in the US? Sorry, that's reserved for citizens only. But you'll have less trouble getting a visa and finding a job than all the foreigners in the US right now.
Also see this article or do a google search on "niue government .nu" and you will see many references to a dispute between the ccTLD registrar and the government of Niue. The government is accusing the registrar of not sharing the proceeds from the .nu domain.
You are probably better off finding a better charity to donate to.
For those of you thinking of registering a .nu domain to assist Niue, don't. First, because there are better ways to fund your donation dollars, as has been pointed out by other posters.
.nu ccTLD. While both sides have their versions of the story, a telling fact is that the UN recognized government is locked out of their own web site (www.gov.nu). They can be found instead at www.niuegov.com. You will note that the updates on the gov.nu site stopped in October and continue on at the niuegov.com site, which is hosted by a UN agency (UNDP-APDIP to be exact).
.nu ccTLD registrar will reach the government. The registrar may assist in other ways, but it will not likely be through official channels.
The second reason is that there is a dispute going on between the government of Niue and the companies that control the
Because of this, I truly doubt that any money spent with the
One version of the dispute between the government and the registrar can be found here.
Actually, that was the Thai financial minister. You can find one of the many articles referring to it here:
. shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030512/1530243
200+ degrees fahrenheit would kill a man quickly. 212 degrees being the boiling point of water, the minister would have been dead long before it reached 200 degrees. I believe there were several cases in the US where moms locked their kids in the car in summer and returned to find them dead. Temperatures reached only around 130-140 F then.
The UN is supporting Free/Open Source Software (not just Linux) through a variety of ways. Someone has already posted Netaid's site as a reply. Two others off the top of my head:
1) UNESCO's support of the Free Software portal. You can find it at:
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_freesoft/
2) The UNDP's International Open Source Network found at:
http://www.iosn.net. This portal focuses on promoting Free/Open Source software to policy makers, government officials, etc. I believe there are other regional centers coming up as well.
There's a surprising amount of focus on Free/Open Source software in the UN, though most of it is only in the early stages.
You can find many stories of how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) assists UNDP programs here. A typical story is this one, about poverty alleviation, gender equality and economic development, all aided by the Internet.
Most of these programs are not done individually. Few people decide "let's stick a satellite dish here cause it's cool". If ICT projects such as these are found in developing countries, they are usually part of a integrated program to address multiple problems.
There is an amazing number of technology and open source initiatives being carried out by the UN and other international organizations. I will try to submit them to Slashdot as a story at a later date.
Flamebait. As a foreigner who worked in China (left in 99) and still maintains ties with people there, I can tell you that things are hardly as rosy as painted above. It's true that multinationals who have just recently gotten into China are on the hunt for "white" professionals due to their distrust for local talent/work ethics. However, due to the extreme cost differential between local and foreign workers, any "white" foreigner can pretty much expect to be replaced within 2 years by a local employee.
Any company that has been around for more than a couple of years has a large local staff, even of technical people. Upper management may be foreign, but that's maybe 1 position in 20. Getting that position is also extremely tough - even in 99, at the height of the tech boom in the US, you would find highly skilled foreigners in China working for only equity. We're talking about ivy league grads with years of work experience. The best way to get an upper management position was either to get transfered over from headquarters (i.e. home country of multinational) or to be best drinking buddies with the local General Manager.
This of course does not take into account the difficulties of legally acquiring a work permit in China, finding affordable housing, etc.
Working in China is quite an experience and I would recommend it for the adventurous. But don't expect to make a bundle of money or get a cushy job. I'm not sure such a position exists anywhere in the world anymore.
I have to respectfully disagree with your hypothesis that learning isn't fun. Granted, some parts are tedious, some parts are repetitive and frustration is no stranger during the learning process. However, the joy of discovery, the eureka moment when it all clicks into place, the self-confidence when you realize you have mastered a subject - I say all these more than counterbalance the tedious aspects of learning. Learning is its own reward. Mastering a matter makes it a joy all of its own.
Especially in this crowd, claiming that learning is no fun won't fly. What geek hasn't encountered frustration configuring something in linux? What geek hasn't repetitively typed man (subject)? Yet I will lay odds that few geeks will claims computers are no fun, that linux is boring.
Pardon me for preaching off a soapbox, but the attitude that 'learning isn't fun' bugs the hell out of me. It is that attitude that keeps people watching TV rather than reading a good book, or play video games till 5am while neglecting homework. The rewards aren't as immediate as other activities but learning IS fun, rewarding and enjoyable as long as we stick to it.
So make battlebot classes fun. I'll guarantee you that if those kids are actually building those bots, they'll encounter the tedium and frustration of engineering. But will that stop them from having fun in the end? Probably not. But it may encourage some of them to try something they never would have, and learn something in the process.
Last time I checked, they used a NOT list and it was a very small list. For mainstream use, you could pretty much access anything you wanted with the exception of a couple of news sites like CNN and sometimes, NYT. The blocking was erratic though ... some months the sites were reachable, other days, they were perfectly fine. Of course, I'm sure a few dissident sites are blocked, but since I don't view those on a daily basis, I wouldn't know.
But it's really a non-issue. Even 4 years ago, all the internet cafes I visited by default went through a proxy that pretty much allowed you to view whatever you wanted. Knowledge of how to circumvent the blocks were very common among the younger audience. I'm sure it's even more prevalent today. For China, at least, this project isn't really relevant.
Not true.
"Nondiscriminatory fashion" means that Microsoft must treat all potential licensors equally. If Microsoft licenses this patent to all users for $1 per copy distributed, that is still nondiscriminatory. Can Ximian afford to pay for something like that? Can the Samba project afford this? Can any open source project afford to pay even $1 per download?
Microsoft requiring licensing fees would be the kiss of death for any project.
The article states that Red Hat is specifically going after small to medium sized business, who don't see Oracle as a reasonable expense.
Oracle is expensive and charged on a per CPU (actually per Mhz) basis. So if you're building something that is expected to scale, you're looking at a lot of money.
For example, if you're building a cluster of web servers on stock x86 boxes, you'll find that the price of a single Oracle license on a single box will probably cost you in excess of five of those plain white boxes. For a small company, that is unacceptable.
Now it's been a while since I had that course on US/China in the Cold War, but if I recall correctly China works something like this.
Funny. I guess all the internet cafe owners I know in Beijing must be fake, since they were all private individuals trying to make a living. The only large chain I knew belonged to a guy well trained in western management philosophy. He wasn't a party member either.
China has changed a LOT since the cold war. Please don't base your assumptions on 20 year old data collected by scholars who have never set foot in the country.