That these words come out of the Minister of IT (a relatively new position created under former PM Taksin) deeply saddens me. Anyone who followed my postings or blogs while I was in Thailand knows that I was a big supporter of FLOSS there. The former ICT Ministers saw FLOSS (and Linux in particular) as a great way to develop the IT talent in Thailand and limit the country's dependence on foreign software while making software more useful to the average Thai. I guess that's all gone now.
http://opentle.org/, run by the government, used to be incredibly busy and promoted everywhere, but looking at their development forum, there are only four posts newer than 18 weeks old. My god! The project is virtually dead.
Translated from Taz's blog at the website (my Thai is not as good as it used to be, so I hope I got everything right):
Today, I overheard the guys at my lab talking about some news that some minister of some ministry. I asked what it was about, and they told me that I should go read about it in Blogone for myself.
So I went to read and found a good article at http://www.blognone.com/node/3355 and they had me go and read further at many newspapers such as Thai Rat and The Bangkok Post. Also, today it was posted on Slashdot. The whole deal is strange because he just got the position at the Ministry of ICT but immediately came out and said that Open Source is wrong and he sees Open Source as having no value for the country.
--Extended quote from the minister which is as reported in TFA--
I also saw reported in the interview that he doesn't like e-books, either, because they hurt his eyes and give him a headache. Oh Jord! (ed. No idea who Jord is) The Minister of ICT of Thailand reads hard-copy books instead of acting like a modern head of the ICT of Thailand should!
I've included the quote here for you "As for the next six months to a year, will there be a strategy for e-government? The minister answered 'We're really pushing for it because it has to happen' As for electronic transactions, the minister offer the opinion that the current law (bill?) is fine as it stands and he expects that it will pass the senate soon. Turning to e-society, he said that it's not really important, adding that he doesn't really like e-books because they ruin your eyesight and don't feel like a real book."
Will our little department home make it? My colleagues on Blogone commented that they want to write an open letter to the minister. It should be out soon.
My Snort logs show thousands of attacks a day, and they don't even show the failed SSH login attempts. I live in S. Korea, though. Nukes to the north, poop shoots to the south.
Man, I'm going to stop talking to you because looking at your posting history reveals a person with real anger issues and I don't think that talking more would make any difference. If you can't see my point even after I've thoroughly explained it (and others agreed with me), that's OK. You'd even be welcome to disagree with me if you did get my point. You are not welcome, however, to start personally insulting me when I am positively contributing to a forum of which I have been a member for almost ten years.
Looking at your former posts, you are obviously a strong supporter of OpenBSD and I appreciate that, but you tend to call people names without listening to their side first. Please realize that and moderate your tone a little.
Thanks for calling me retarded. The connection is that the RaLink driver is one of the only ones available without binary firmware. The driver is completely open, as opposed to Intel's driver/firmware pair which is not completely open. Therefore, the RaLink chipset is a better hardware choice right now, and purchasing it will put pressure on Intel to open their firmware. Fucking psycho. Start taking your meds again -- you're slipping.
I'm not claiming anything is perfect here, just that people who care about open drivers (what the article is about) should choose this card if they can, because it is completely open, with no binary firmware. If the community works on this one well enough, it will have all those "missing pieces" soon enough. Incidentally, WEP, WPA and WPA2 should be handled by the 2x00 Beta4, due out "real soon now."
While I actually think TFA is virtually useless, I understand that people want better wireless support for their various open source OS's. Intel's drivers for this are really quite open when compared to most others, but if you want drivers that are more open than Intel's, choose ones with the RT2400, RT2500, RT2570, and RT61 chipsets by RaLink. The drivers were open-sourced last year and have progressed quite well. Find more info at http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page and http://sourceforge.net/projects/rt2400.
Were you intentionally trying to juxtapose the last with the first two? I ask that because it's notably different (and not just by whom it was said). The first two take the undecideds and lump them with the enemy, while the statement attributed to JC takes the undecideds and puts them with with his side. The syntax is similar, but that's all.
It balances out all the "Why Digg is Great" and "Interview with the Secretary of Digg" stories that appear on the front page over there. Digg's self-promotion kind of makes me sick sometimes.
I don't know. I though BG was just a rich Harvard kid who had the right connections to make a deal with IBM before he even had the product he was selling. Once he leveraged MSDOS into near monopoly status, he introduced Windows and the monopoly was complete. Add convincing the U.S. military to standardize on MS Office, and the noose was tightened. No escape from a double monopoly.
I've been using Linux since 1997, so take the following statement as a true and honest feeling: I was always disappointed with the speed of the GUI until recently, but then I:
Wiped and installed Xubuntu,
Used EasyUbuntu to install all the codecs and etc. that I need to watch media,
Ran FasterDapper, which does prelinking and some other minor stuff, and
Enjoyed the speed of my laptop for the fist time in a long time.
I'm very happy with straight GTK without the Gnome libraries on top of it, though the file manager really needs a Samba share browser. It's coming up soon, though, so maybe I'll get one in Edgy.
Since my gal and I chatted online tonight and she told me that she can't view YouTube while she's visiting her brother because the plugin won't install properly on his WinXP machine, I think that Linux is not the only system which you have to bend over backwards for because some third-party plugin doesn't work properly. She can't wait to get back to her Ubuntu.
Come to think of it, that's the exact reason I left Windows after fighting for days to get the VIA 4-in-1 driver to work with the Creative sound card AND the ATI graphics card at the same time without hanging the whole machine. I never tried to search the internet for days to resolve that problem.... Jeez. Moving to Linux, even in the days of Redhat 5.0 was a breath of fresh air.
I worked for a CFO once who claimed that Excel was the only app anyone needs. She did her memos in it and I'm sure she would've written a book in it if that was on her todo list. F'ing amazing. I always just stared at her when she told me that, which was often.
What? Like Thailand a couple of years ago, with the gov't's own Linux on the fast track to becoming the national OS and the gov't requiring 90% use within two years? Oh, yeah, since MS offered the gov't a sweet deal, that software hasn't been updated. Last version was December 2004. In the lifespan of a Linux distro, that means that it's dead.
I'm still actually confused as to why also functions as a thin client system was even mentioned, since I saw nothing about a thin client system in the article. Since you appear to have figured it out, can you enlighten me?
I read the entire thread slowly from the beginning. Thank you.
Not something to be proud of? Here's an example for you; a man owns a store about a block away from my house. He's Korean and since the store belongs to his family, the only employees are himself, his wife and his daughter. The store stays open 24 hours a day, meaning they each have to work an 8 hour shift every day of the week (or, more likely, someone has to work quite a bit more than that).
Since the discussion was in the context of being a worker (working that much at a factory is not healthy and shouldn't be required), I just explained that being a business owner is not comparable. Virtually every entrepeneur works those kinds of hours no matter what culture he or she lives in, because property is involved. I called out your example as irrelevant, that's all.
I personally think that a work ethic is great (and enjoy working 50-60 hour weeks), but that requiring that ethic by setting the standard work week to 60 hours, to which half earned local minimum wage, 35% worked overtime, and 25% worked seven days a week, doesn't count as a positive cultural aspect. The employees pay structure was found to be (most likely) intentionally confusing to the employee so that grievances were difficult to file, and overtime was set up in a system which was easily disputed by the employer after the fact, undoubtably to hold cost down if necessary. Three of the employees' dorms don't even meet the exeptionally low standards set by Apple here.
In the context of this article's discussion, these employees are obviously being employed by Apple's contractor in conditions which would be unacceptable if Apple were the direct employer. It appears that the original photos and report on the conditions at the site were correct, and Apple's beating in the media was earned. I intend to let Apple know how I feel about this.
From my experience working in Korea, the workers often stay for mandatory unpaid overtime, and it is mostly due to reason c. Managers have no incentive to clean their shit up because the society says that everyone has to work overtime "for the good of the company." This is concept which didn't work out in America.
Working for your own business cannot be compared to working those same conditions for others. Every business owner works hours similar to those you've stated. I used to worh 3-4 months straight for my business. People who work convenience stores near me open at 7 and close 11 to midbight every day, seven days a week, with only the owner working. Obviously, they find it better for them than walking out and finding a job in the community, for whatever the motivation.
There are two main things to fixing poverty in the undeveloped world:
Really, though, Thailand is not that poor. Prime Minister Thaksin is himself worth something like US$600m, being a telcom baron and the richest man in the country. The rest of the country is fairly well developed when seen in comparison with other countries in the area. Try visiting Cambodia or Laos and then comparing the experience to Thailand.
When I originally read about this deployment of laptops last week, I wondered why Thailand was even on the list of countries which would receive donated laptops. The Thai Open Source team with the gov't NECTEC program just released a new version (7.0) of the School Internet Server which puts just about every school online and makes it easy for them to share Internet in a computer lab (computers likely provided by MS during their push to reduce piracy).
Thailand is NOT rich, and there are pockets of severe poverty (just as there are in most countries), but Thailand is not an underdeveloped country. It is generally regarded as developing.
I'm not in Seoul, but here in rural Korea, kids prefer playing games in "PC bangs" to playing them at home (even though they have computers there) because there is a certain social aspect to the PC bang and it makes LAN parties simple -- just get a bunch of friends from school together and head over to the game room to play StarCraft together.
For about US$1 an hour, I can't see how the places make money, but apparently they do. There is no shortage of kids waiting to play after school.
I know that much, since the driver page (http://www.winischhofer.net/sisdri.shtml) states clearly that "There is no DRI support for the SiS 315/550/650/651/740/661/741/760/330."
The chip sucks, for sure, but this page shows that the chip can certainly do better than it does now (I have virtually the same set as the benchmarked laptop).
I have an SiS 761 in my laptop, which is "supported" under xorg. The man who reversed the driver must be brilliant, because he basically wrote the whole SiS driver for 660-761 cards by himself, but the card (and the chipset, essentially, too) is crippled. We're talking a glxgears run where I can count the framerate by eye. This is a laptop, so I can't change out the video, and I'll never get then advantage of 3D in xorg. I wouldn't mind if SiS open sourced the drivers for the chips -- I might get up to 10 fps.
Slashdot Mirror
http://opentle.org/, run by the government, used to be incredibly busy and promoted everywhere, but looking at their development forum, there are only four posts newer than 18 weeks old. My god! The project is virtually dead.
Translated from Taz's blog at the website (my Thai is not as good as it used to be, so I hope I got everything right):
Read On Killing about eight or nine years ago and have been recommending it non-stop since then.
I think that's a great idea, but only if the distro is aimed at the home user.
My Snort logs show thousands of attacks a day, and they don't even show the failed SSH login attempts. I live in S. Korea, though. Nukes to the north, poop shoots to the south.
Man, I'm going to stop talking to you because looking at your posting history reveals a person with real anger issues and I don't think that talking more would make any difference. If you can't see my point even after I've thoroughly explained it (and others agreed with me), that's OK. You'd even be welcome to disagree with me if you did get my point. You are not welcome, however, to start personally insulting me when I am positively contributing to a forum of which I have been a member for almost ten years.
Looking at your former posts, you are obviously a strong supporter of OpenBSD and I appreciate that, but you tend to call people names without listening to their side first. Please realize that and moderate your tone a little.
Thanks for calling me retarded. The connection is that the RaLink driver is one of the only ones available without binary firmware. The driver is completely open, as opposed to Intel's driver/firmware pair which is not completely open. Therefore, the RaLink chipset is a better hardware choice right now, and purchasing it will put pressure on Intel to open their firmware. Fucking psycho. Start taking your meds again -- you're slipping.
I'm not claiming anything is perfect here, just that people who care about open drivers (what the article is about) should choose this card if they can, because it is completely open, with no binary firmware. If the community works on this one well enough, it will have all those "missing pieces" soon enough. Incidentally, WEP, WPA and WPA2 should be handled by the 2x00 Beta4, due out "real soon now."
While I actually think TFA is virtually useless, I understand that people want better wireless support for their various open source OS's. Intel's drivers for this are really quite open when compared to most others, but if you want drivers that are more open than Intel's, choose ones with the RT2400, RT2500, RT2570, and RT61 chipsets by RaLink. The drivers were open-sourced last year and have progressed quite well. Find more info at http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page and http://sourceforge.net/projects/rt2400.
Were you intentionally trying to juxtapose the last with the first two? I ask that because it's notably different (and not just by whom it was said). The first two take the undecideds and lump them with the enemy, while the statement attributed to JC takes the undecideds and puts them with with his side. The syntax is similar, but that's all.
It balances out all the "Why Digg is Great" and "Interview with the Secretary of Digg" stories that appear on the front page over there. Digg's self-promotion kind of makes me sick sometimes.
I don't know. I though BG was just a rich Harvard kid who had the right connections to make a deal with IBM before he even had the product he was selling. Once he leveraged MSDOS into near monopoly status, he introduced Windows and the monopoly was complete. Add convincing the U.S. military to standardize on MS Office, and the noose was tightened. No escape from a double monopoly.
- Wiped and installed Xubuntu,
- Used EasyUbuntu to install all the codecs and etc. that I need to watch media,
- Ran FasterDapper, which does prelinking and some other minor stuff, and
- Enjoyed the speed of my laptop for the fist time in a long time.
I'm very happy with straight GTK without the Gnome libraries on top of it, though the file manager really needs a Samba share browser. It's coming up soon, though, so maybe I'll get one in Edgy.Since my gal and I chatted online tonight and she told me that she can't view YouTube while she's visiting her brother because the plugin won't install properly on his WinXP machine, I think that Linux is not the only system which you have to bend over backwards for because some third-party plugin doesn't work properly. She can't wait to get back to her Ubuntu.
.... Jeez. Moving to Linux, even in the days of Redhat 5.0 was a breath of fresh air.
Come to think of it, that's the exact reason I left Windows after fighting for days to get the VIA 4-in-1 driver to work with the Creative sound card AND the ATI graphics card at the same time without hanging the whole machine. I never tried to search the internet for days to resolve that problem
I worked for a CFO once who claimed that Excel was the only app anyone needs. She did her memos in it and I'm sure she would've written a book in it if that was on her todo list. F'ing amazing. I always just stared at her when she told me that, which was often.
I was agreeing with him, although it doesn't really look that way. Preview, I gues ...
What? Like Thailand a couple of years ago, with the gov't's own Linux on the fast track to becoming the national OS and the gov't requiring 90% use within two years? Oh, yeah, since MS offered the gov't a sweet deal, that software hasn't been updated. Last version was December 2004. In the lifespan of a Linux distro, that means that it's dead.
I'm still actually confused as to why also functions as a thin client system was even mentioned, since I saw nothing about a thin client system in the article. Since you appear to have figured it out, can you enlighten me?
I read the entire thread slowly from the beginning. Thank you.
Not something to be proud of? Here's an example for you; a man owns a store about a block away from my house. He's Korean and since the store belongs to his family, the only employees are himself, his wife and his daughter. The store stays open 24 hours a day, meaning they each have to work an 8 hour shift every day of the week (or, more likely, someone has to work quite a bit more than that).
Since the discussion was in the context of being a worker (working that much at a factory is not healthy and shouldn't be required), I just explained that being a business owner is not comparable. Virtually every entrepeneur works those kinds of hours no matter what culture he or she lives in, because property is involved. I called out your example as irrelevant, that's all.
I personally think that a work ethic is great (and enjoy working 50-60 hour weeks), but that requiring that ethic by setting the standard work week to 60 hours, to which half earned local minimum wage, 35% worked overtime, and 25% worked seven days a week, doesn't count as a positive cultural aspect. The employees pay structure was found to be (most likely) intentionally confusing to the employee so that grievances were difficult to file, and overtime was set up in a system which was easily disputed by the employer after the fact, undoubtably to hold cost down if necessary. Three of the employees' dorms don't even meet the exeptionally low standards set by Apple here.
In the context of this article's discussion, these employees are obviously being employed by Apple's contractor in conditions which would be unacceptable if Apple were the direct employer. It appears that the original photos and report on the conditions at the site were correct, and Apple's beating in the media was earned. I intend to let Apple know how I feel about this.
From my experience working in Korea, the workers often stay for mandatory unpaid overtime, and it is mostly due to reason c. Managers have no incentive to clean their shit up because the society says that everyone has to work overtime "for the good of the company." This is concept which didn't work out in America.
Working for your own business cannot be compared to working those same conditions for others. Every business owner works hours similar to those you've stated. I used to worh 3-4 months straight for my business. People who work convenience stores near me open at 7 and close 11 to midbight every day, seven days a week, with only the owner working. Obviously, they find it better for them than walking out and finding a job in the community, for whatever the motivation.
There are two main things to fixing poverty in the undeveloped world:
Really, though, Thailand is not that poor. Prime Minister Thaksin is himself worth something like US$600m, being a telcom baron and the richest man in the country. The rest of the country is fairly well developed when seen in comparison with other countries in the area. Try visiting Cambodia or Laos and then comparing the experience to Thailand.
When I originally read about this deployment of laptops last week, I wondered why Thailand was even on the list of countries which would receive donated laptops. The Thai Open Source team with the gov't NECTEC program just released a new version (7.0) of the School Internet Server which puts just about every school online and makes it easy for them to share Internet in a computer lab (computers likely provided by MS during their push to reduce piracy).
Thailand is NOT rich, and there are pockets of severe poverty (just as there are in most countries), but Thailand is not an underdeveloped country. It is generally regarded as developing.
I'm not in Seoul, but here in rural Korea, kids prefer playing games in "PC bangs" to playing them at home (even though they have computers there) because there is a certain social aspect to the PC bang and it makes LAN parties simple -- just get a bunch of friends from school together and head over to the game room to play StarCraft together.
For about US$1 an hour, I can't see how the places make money, but apparently they do. There is no shortage of kids waiting to play after school.
I know that much, since the driver page (http://www.winischhofer.net/sisdri.shtml) states clearly that "There is no DRI support for the SiS 315/550/650/651/740/661/741/760/330."
The chip sucks, for sure, but this page shows that the chip can certainly do better than it does now (I have virtually the same set as the benchmarked laptop).
I have an SiS 761 in my laptop, which is "supported" under xorg. The man who reversed the driver must be brilliant, because he basically wrote the whole SiS driver for 660-761 cards by himself, but the card (and the chipset, essentially, too) is crippled. We're talking a glxgears run where I can count the framerate by eye. This is a laptop, so I can't change out the video, and I'll never get then advantage of 3D in xorg. I wouldn't mind if SiS open sourced the drivers for the chips -- I might get up to 10 fps.
Following the Korean model? So, what, Kart Rider is taking over the world? I can't wait ....