This is expected for GIMP 3.0, which isn't all that far away in the scheme of things. The main issue as of 2011 is not so much implementing high channel depths, it's porting the obscenely huge amount of existing tools and effects to use it. Someone long ago, in 2000, before I was allowed to drink, decided that the GIMP's core should be replaced by a high tech and elegant solution called GEGL which not only ups the bit depth and allows colour-space conversions but allows pixel's values to be re-calculated to what value they would be had a previous filter operation gone a different way, should the user wish to, in real time on enormous images. It also allows for filters to be implemented independently of colour depth and space.
The end result has been an absolute monstrosity (much like the GEGL logo) that has taken 12 years to build. But in theory, it's 90% done and does a lot of things rather well. 9 times out of 10, such a lofty and lengthy fork is doomed, but I have faith that they're possibly going to pull it off this time.
In response to your statement, they are working on it and have been for some time... I suppose it's faster to take several bites out of a doughnut rather than cramming it all in your mouth and trying to swallow it, but it gets down eventually.
I work for a Chinese company in China. If you think you can get software developed cheaper here you're a moron. Then again, most senior management these days are morons, so cool, keep on sending that money guys.
Want to know what's wrong with China? Talent pool is so over-utilised through insane investment that anyone who can implement Pac Man in C expects to be CTO, I myself am paid triple what a doctor with 20 years experience is paid. You can't get a team of more than 1 programmer who isn't a mouth breathing idiot because the second will inevitably have far better opportunities. China just doesn't have that pool of programmers who grew up coding and are eager to be paid for it, so they'll make do with what they have. I imagine India is the same. The west has an absolute glut of talent due to the sheer number of people born in the 70s and early 80s that grew up tinkering and couldn't imagine doing anything else, it's moronic not to exploit it, I imagine China will once it is even richer.
Medical forms yes, since a doctor must fill in maybe 50 a day, they come in a limited verity of forms and they need to be centrally archived, this would be the classic use-case of a relational database. Doctors should be using a database to manage records, otherwise information is disorganised and it is very unlikely that the patient would be receiving the same level of care as if they were.
Office forms? Who gives a shit, if the total time wasted on doing it in a word processor is not much more than what it takes to train the doctors how to do it in whatever tool they should be using, then just leave it.
And what do they really need a word processor for? Same things normal people use them for: writing letters, writing submissions to medical journals, office memos, whatever. You know, the thousand miscellaneous usecases that always fall through the miriad cracks of whatever office automation system that is supposed to handle everything.
Anyway, it's not such a huge problem since the doctors I know tend to be very computer focused. Probably it uses a similar part of the brain. My uncle who's a doctor seems to have his surgery database upgraded every two years or so and has gotten an IT department for a surgery with 6 doctors.
That's simply wrong, things with zero replacement cost like video games are still almost double the price in Australia to the US. Also the warentees they've tried to sell me in the US are far cheaper than the price difference between US and Australia for electrical goods.
If you want a internationally usable phone in China, just buy a standard WCDMA model from China Unicom and use it anywhere. If you insist on using China Mobile, just get a non-3G SIM and use GPRS to surf, hell, most people I know with an iPhone these days do just that, because Unicom signal is a little bit on the shitty side. If you buy a TDSCDMA phone in China and you are not firmly rooted in China then you are an idiot.
Tesla was extremely famous in his day. Then he wasted all his time and money on Wardenclyffe Tower, even though that at the time had no experimental or theoretical evidence to suggest it was ever going to work and now has bundles of theoretical and experemental results that prove that it was never going to. Funny how betting everything on something that is so wrong tends to ruin your reputation. I think he has gained in stature a lot over the last 20 years relative to Edison as incandecent lights and phonographs falls into antiquity while polyphase AC motors, high voltage AC transmission and radio remain as important as ever.
I saw a guy pissing on the street in Shanghai a month ago. If I did that in the west I'd end up with a truncheon up my arse. Freedom is a hard thing to quantify.
Half of the patients who walk into the doctors office are of below average intelligence, more than half because being smart promotes a healthy lifestyle. I'm assuming you are a programmer by your signature, don't you just hate it when you're talking to a coworker who has an interest in what you're doing and keeps pushing obviously incorrect assumptions and theories and not understanding your answer because they simply do not have enough grounding in the subject to really start forming ideas. Well, a doctor has to see many, many people who are far dumber than your collegue. People in this world believe that raping a virgin cures AIDS and others believe that vaccination causes autism. How do you reason with that?
I've never had a real problem with doctors treating me like an idiot, mainly because I've never walked into doctors surgery trying to push my own diagnosis. The main thing that reasonably inteligent people who dislike doctors don't understand is why they walk into the doctors surgery presenting all the symptoms of bowel cancer, the doctor is going to diagnose a bacterial infection and going to give you antibiotics. Why? Because 9/10 times it IS a bowel infection and if you're still bleeding out your arse after a week of pills, you're going to come back. Now you've read in a book that cancer presents that way, and that is 100% correct, but chances are: it's not; if it is, they'll find out when they get the endescope up you later (after they've tried everything else).
Maybe your doctor is a dick, many people are. But if he/she is just a regular person, just make sure you ask intelligent questions that show you are listening and don't put forward too many stupid ideas and you can generally be treated as an intelligent and rational human being. Don't come across as a douchebag though, because everyone hates dealing with douchebags at work.
Humans have been making mistakes for millenia: leaded petrol, tobacco, untreated industrial emissions, bloodletting, routine X-ray overdoses, CFCs, MRSA, feral cats/pigs/ferrets, dropping Agent Orange on forests, RMS Titanic, etc. We're stronger than ever for it.
You know what? I'm happy I'm not in a forest fighting bears, a farm tilling soil, a factory shovelling coal or any of the horrific lives that shortsighted morons at the time felt were good enough. I dearly hope my great great great grandchildren will be happy they don't live the shitty existence we have now. If some mad scientist accidently kills a few thousand people here or there to get there, so be it.
D is just the prefix of any long distance, high speed service in China, not a type of train. CRH1, the first generation of bullet trains in China can travel at up to 250kmh and frequently do.
If the company didn't want to bring a foreign worker to the U.S., they already would have outsourced the job.Thus all your points about how the company and/or H1-B employee are contributing "enough already" to the American economy are moot.
My points are certainly not moot since if the company had not been able to bring that Indian in, they would have outsourced to Bangalore and then they'd be contributing nothing to the American economy but the small amount spent by the outsourcing company in stateside "marketing", bribes and kickbacks. Silicon valley has a lot of tech companies who have a lot of needs and does not exactly have an unemployed but qualified worker waiting around wanting to fill every position. The enormous salaries for programmers in comparison to other developed countries like Canada, UK or Australia kind of suggests that there is not exactly a glut of surplus talent going on there. I'm not sure how companies like Intel would be able to survive at their current size without either hiring foreigners or moving development offshore.
I'd be okay with them eliminating the social security contribution if they replaced it with an equal tax on H1-B workers that contributed toward, for example, education for American workers. Either way the employer needs to pay it.
The employer should pay the same contribution, fine, that is fair as it puts everyone on the same level. But you want to give it to the American workers and not give it towards the welfare of the actual employee, exactly what Social Security is for in the first place. These companies are making 50% of their income or more selling on overseas markets, the people doing the work is 50% Indian or whatever, yet you believe that for some reason you are entitled to a >50% cut on account of where you were born. These Indian workers even pay rent to American landlords and buy American grown produce from American stores because of the location of the workplace. It seems that the US has already got a massive windfall out of this, now you're all just pushing your luck.
Oh, by the way, I'm a blue eyed white guy from a conservative protestant family who's been happily working as a programmer on a guest worker visa in China for the last two years, and the Chinese company that hired me pay me quite well. You can go to India if you like, plenty of tech companies, food is awesome, English is an official language (unlike China where you need to learn a hard new one) and your social position as a programmer is much, much higher. Also, I suspect it is like China where having a respectable job is more important than being charismatic for finding a beautiful girlfriend/wife.
You appear in a vast sunlit land, overlooked by a prominent Lord Juan statue wearing sunglasses and completely paved over with dead bodies to a great depth, a single "pine fresh" car deodorizer lies pitifully on the human carpet. The stench overcomes you. You are dead. Please transfer this thumb drive to the next player.
Well, the summery is misleading. Fact is that we've had the technology to make gelatin from human tissue for millennia. The new development here is that unlike the previous method, this does not require hacking up corpses and rendering them in a pot.
Tiananmen is a symbol of China and features on the Chinese national crest and is certainly not blocked. Tiananmen Square is where Chairman Mao's body rests and the site of a monument to the people's fallen heroes, it is not blocked either. There is however a particular date 22 years ago that if you mention in any way, the domain will be inaccessible for the next 10 minutes.
Weird, you say "you are right, it isn't the version numbers", when what the GP said was that it is the version numbers. Either he's right or it isn't the version numbers, both cannot be true.
Mozilla was stupid simply because they forgot that guys like you cannot get it through your skull that Firefox 5 is actually Firefox 4.1 with a different name and thus Firefox 4 is in fact still supported. But it isn't just you, it seems to be most people, so there you have it, Mozilla really shot themselves in the foot, not because they released, but because they wanted to act like a stud with a huge dic^H^H^H version number.
People like bitching about the GIMP, but neglect to consider how few man hours a week are spent on developing it. If you could get MBAs to build something as useful as the GIMP for close to $0 or even at a theoretical cost of the sum of hours invested by its developers, then I would be impressed.
I used to write a lot of open source, I did great things in 5 hours a week even though I was a 19 year old moron. So efficient, no schedule or deliverables, if you figure out how to do something useful, you just do it. Sure, we weren't giving every user what they needed, but we were giving some users, some of what they needed which was amazing considering the resources we had. This is GIMP, not even close to being as good as photoshop, but still useful for a good many tasks and completely free. Oh, and Photoshop's UI is a pig too, just the engineering is so impressive that artists are willing to spend months learning it.
In defense of sales guys, I know at least one who constantly pushes for beefing up the engineering team at the expense of the sales team. The mostly engineering based management pushes back. Why does he do this? Twofold.
More development makes for an easier product to sell and more commissions.
Less salesguys means less competition for him and more commissions.
Anyway, not every sales guys conflicts with engineering, only the shitty ones that don't know how to communicate and thus sell a product well.
And guess what: Chinese people don't even speak Chinese. Millions of them speak regional languages.
The ones your age who are not hick inbreds can all speak Mandarin, albeit sometimes heavily accented.
It was invented so that a giant country could have a dialect that could be used nationwide, a great advantage.
And yes, I agree with you about standardization, my ancestors spoke a mix of Gaelic dialects, until the English taught them English at gunpoint and honestly, it was for the best. I have friends in Zhejiang and Jiangsu in particular who, given the central location and economic importance of their provinces are having had their language (Wu) more aggressively replaced than in other areas and many feel very sad. But it sure is nice to be able to travel from Nanning to Harbin and only have to speak one language.
If you can read one, it's pretty trivial to read the other. Now with writing, you will have to re-learn over half of it, but I can't see why you would bother learn how to write either with IME being so damn convenient.
A good example of the difference and relative fluency would be here when this moron is frozen in ice and is trying to write 'calligraphy' to say 'long live the Chinese Communist Party' in Traditional characters but kind of screws up and writes the last 3 in simplified because if he wasn't an illiterate retard he would not be doing such a stupid thing in the first place. He got 4 of the characters right, which is lovely, but it's not as if he doesn't see the traditional form of the second last character like EVERY time he plays Mahjong.
And here's the thing, if you're fluent in Chinese, you can talk to guys like him, university graduates all can read and write fluently in English and can usually at least understand it most of the time, so it's not as important. It's an interesting language, but you do not _need_ to learn it unless you have an interest in learning a particularly difficult foreign language.
Besides, he said, Sina executives "understand the political baggage that comes with being a Chinese Internet company."
File some paper-work, take the sub-secretary of public information bureau out for abalone (first the seafood, then the other kind), get a list of words people cannot say in your product emailed to you then do some filtering. In exchange, you get your foreign competitors either blocked completely, or simply a story on CCTV1 every week about this competitor corrupting the minds of Chinese. And patents, copyright, trademarks? Well, that's all dealt with. Ah, to be a Chinese Internet company.
Well, I would hope very much that he is not doing the duel role of PM and UX _designer_, that would be a serious conflict of interest. Designers in particular need a lot of careful oversight and critique about whether what they are doing at least passes the coworker test in intuitiveness and ease of use. Having a project manager with an understanding of user experience is great in this case since it at least gives another person to review whether something is actually as intuitive as it is in the designer's mind.
Coding is extremely important to a good designer anyway. Not necessarily efficient or elegant code like a career programmer should write, but quick prototype code. Firstly, to express their vision in a very concrete way, if you can clarify and express your ideas in detail, writing code is pretty trivial. Secondly to allow an interface to be quickly _tested_ by coworkers and if they are lucky by focus groups of typical users. Frequently I have seen designers who consider what they do to be separate from coding tend to be limited to re-skinning what the programmers have designed rather than being able to design interactive experiences on the own.
Slashdot Mirror
This is expected for GIMP 3.0, which isn't all that far away in the scheme of things. The main issue as of 2011 is not so much implementing high channel depths, it's porting the obscenely huge amount of existing tools and effects to use it. Someone long ago, in 2000, before I was allowed to drink, decided that the GIMP's core should be replaced by a high tech and elegant solution called GEGL which not only ups the bit depth and allows colour-space conversions but allows pixel's values to be re-calculated to what value they would be had a previous filter operation gone a different way, should the user wish to, in real time on enormous images. It also allows for filters to be implemented independently of colour depth and space.
The end result has been an absolute monstrosity (much like the GEGL logo) that has taken 12 years to build. But in theory, it's 90% done and does a lot of things rather well. 9 times out of 10, such a lofty and lengthy fork is doomed, but I have faith that they're possibly going to pull it off this time.
In response to your statement, they are working on it and have been for some time... I suppose it's faster to take several bites out of a doughnut rather than cramming it all in your mouth and trying to swallow it, but it gets down eventually.
Sorry, replied to the wrong post. Meant to reply to the previous post.
I work for a Chinese company in China. If you think you can get software developed cheaper here you're a moron. Then again, most senior management these days are morons, so cool, keep on sending that money guys.
Want to know what's wrong with China? Talent pool is so over-utilised through insane investment that anyone who can implement Pac Man in C expects to be CTO, I myself am paid triple what a doctor with 20 years experience is paid. You can't get a team of more than 1 programmer who isn't a mouth breathing idiot because the second will inevitably have far better opportunities. China just doesn't have that pool of programmers who grew up coding and are eager to be paid for it, so they'll make do with what they have. I imagine India is the same. The west has an absolute glut of talent due to the sheer number of people born in the 70s and early 80s that grew up tinkering and couldn't imagine doing anything else, it's moronic not to exploit it, I imagine China will once it is even richer.
Medical forms yes, since a doctor must fill in maybe 50 a day, they come in a limited verity of forms and they need to be centrally archived, this would be the classic use-case of a relational database. Doctors should be using a database to manage records, otherwise information is disorganised and it is very unlikely that the patient would be receiving the same level of care as if they were.
Office forms? Who gives a shit, if the total time wasted on doing it in a word processor is not much more than what it takes to train the doctors how to do it in whatever tool they should be using, then just leave it.
And what do they really need a word processor for? Same things normal people use them for: writing letters, writing submissions to medical journals, office memos, whatever. You know, the thousand miscellaneous usecases that always fall through the miriad cracks of whatever office automation system that is supposed to handle everything.
Anyway, it's not such a huge problem since the doctors I know tend to be very computer focused. Probably it uses a similar part of the brain. My uncle who's a doctor seems to have his surgery database upgraded every two years or so and has gotten an IT department for a surgery with 6 doctors.
That's simply wrong, things with zero replacement cost like video games are still almost double the price in Australia to the US. Also the warentees they've tried to sell me in the US are far cheaper than the price difference between US and Australia for electrical goods.
If you want a internationally usable phone in China, just buy a standard WCDMA model from China Unicom and use it anywhere. If you insist on using China Mobile, just get a non-3G SIM and use GPRS to surf, hell, most people I know with an iPhone these days do just that, because Unicom signal is a little bit on the shitty side. If you buy a TDSCDMA phone in China and you are not firmly rooted in China then you are an idiot.
Tesla was extremely famous in his day. Then he wasted all his time and money on Wardenclyffe Tower, even though that at the time had no experimental or theoretical evidence to suggest it was ever going to work and now has bundles of theoretical and experemental results that prove that it was never going to. Funny how betting everything on something that is so wrong tends to ruin your reputation. I think he has gained in stature a lot over the last 20 years relative to Edison as incandecent lights and phonographs falls into antiquity while polyphase AC motors, high voltage AC transmission and radio remain as important as ever.
I saw a guy pissing on the street in Shanghai a month ago. If I did that in the west I'd end up with a truncheon up my arse. Freedom is a hard thing to quantify.
Half of the patients who walk into the doctors office are of below average intelligence, more than half because being smart promotes a healthy lifestyle. I'm assuming you are a programmer by your signature, don't you just hate it when you're talking to a coworker who has an interest in what you're doing and keeps pushing obviously incorrect assumptions and theories and not understanding your answer because they simply do not have enough grounding in the subject to really start forming ideas. Well, a doctor has to see many, many people who are far dumber than your collegue. People in this world believe that raping a virgin cures AIDS and others believe that vaccination causes autism. How do you reason with that?
I've never had a real problem with doctors treating me like an idiot, mainly because I've never walked into doctors surgery trying to push my own diagnosis. The main thing that reasonably inteligent people who dislike doctors don't understand is why they walk into the doctors surgery presenting all the symptoms of bowel cancer, the doctor is going to diagnose a bacterial infection and going to give you antibiotics. Why? Because 9/10 times it IS a bowel infection and if you're still bleeding out your arse after a week of pills, you're going to come back. Now you've read in a book that cancer presents that way, and that is 100% correct, but chances are: it's not; if it is, they'll find out when they get the endescope up you later (after they've tried everything else).
Maybe your doctor is a dick, many people are. But if he/she is just a regular person, just make sure you ask intelligent questions that show you are listening and don't put forward too many stupid ideas and you can generally be treated as an intelligent and rational human being. Don't come across as a douchebag though, because everyone hates dealing with douchebags at work.
Humans have been making mistakes for millenia: leaded petrol, tobacco, untreated industrial emissions, bloodletting, routine X-ray overdoses, CFCs, MRSA, feral cats/pigs/ferrets, dropping Agent Orange on forests, RMS Titanic, etc. We're stronger than ever for it. You know what? I'm happy I'm not in a forest fighting bears, a farm tilling soil, a factory shovelling coal or any of the horrific lives that shortsighted morons at the time felt were good enough. I dearly hope my great great great grandchildren will be happy they don't live the shitty existence we have now. If some mad scientist accidently kills a few thousand people here or there to get there, so be it.
D is just the prefix of any long distance, high speed service in China, not a type of train. CRH1, the first generation of bullet trains in China can travel at up to 250kmh and frequently do.
If the company didn't want to bring a foreign worker to the U.S., they already would have outsourced the job.Thus all your points about how the company and/or H1-B employee are contributing "enough already" to the American economy are moot.
My points are certainly not moot since if the company had not been able to bring that Indian in, they would have outsourced to Bangalore and then they'd be contributing nothing to the American economy but the small amount spent by the outsourcing company in stateside "marketing", bribes and kickbacks. Silicon valley has a lot of tech companies who have a lot of needs and does not exactly have an unemployed but qualified worker waiting around wanting to fill every position. The enormous salaries for programmers in comparison to other developed countries like Canada, UK or Australia kind of suggests that there is not exactly a glut of surplus talent going on there. I'm not sure how companies like Intel would be able to survive at their current size without either hiring foreigners or moving development offshore.
The employer should pay the same contribution, fine, that is fair as it puts everyone on the same level. But you want to give it to the American workers and not give it towards the welfare of the actual employee, exactly what Social Security is for in the first place. These companies are making 50% of their income or more selling on overseas markets, the people doing the work is 50% Indian or whatever, yet you believe that for some reason you are entitled to a >50% cut on account of where you were born. These Indian workers even pay rent to American landlords and buy American grown produce from American stores because of the location of the workplace. It seems that the US has already got a massive windfall out of this, now you're all just pushing your luck.
Oh, by the way, I'm a blue eyed white guy from a conservative protestant family who's been happily working as a programmer on a guest worker visa in China for the last two years, and the Chinese company that hired me pay me quite well. You can go to India if you like, plenty of tech companies, food is awesome, English is an official language (unlike China where you need to learn a hard new one) and your social position as a programmer is much, much higher. Also, I suspect it is like China where having a respectable job is more important than being charismatic for finding a beautiful girlfriend/wife.
AD 3100. You place the thumb drive in your PC.
You appear in a vast sunlit land, overlooked by a prominent Lord Juan statue wearing sunglasses and completely paved over with dead bodies to a great depth, a single "pine fresh" car deodorizer lies pitifully on the human carpet. The stench overcomes you. You are dead. Please transfer this thumb drive to the next player.
Well, the summery is misleading. Fact is that we've had the technology to make gelatin from human tissue for millennia. The new development here is that unlike the previous method, this does not require hacking up corpses and rendering them in a pot.
Tiananmen is a symbol of China and features on the Chinese national crest and is certainly not blocked. Tiananmen Square is where Chairman Mao's body rests and the site of a monument to the people's fallen heroes, it is not blocked either. There is however a particular date 22 years ago that if you mention in any way, the domain will be inaccessible for the next 10 minutes.
When I have flown first class there are two possible scenarios that numb the thrill:
Either way, I'm inevitably flying home on the cheapest ticket they can find. One time I flew out in first class and went back on a train (1100KM).
Weird, you say "you are right, it isn't the version numbers", when what the GP said was that it is the version numbers. Either he's right or it isn't the version numbers, both cannot be true.
Mozilla was stupid simply because they forgot that guys like you cannot get it through your skull that Firefox 5 is actually Firefox 4.1 with a different name and thus Firefox 4 is in fact still supported. But it isn't just you, it seems to be most people, so there you have it, Mozilla really shot themselves in the foot, not because they released, but because they wanted to act like a stud with a huge dic^H^H^H version number.
People like bitching about the GIMP, but neglect to consider how few man hours a week are spent on developing it. If you could get MBAs to build something as useful as the GIMP for close to $0 or even at a theoretical cost of the sum of hours invested by its developers, then I would be impressed.
I used to write a lot of open source, I did great things in 5 hours a week even though I was a 19 year old moron. So efficient, no schedule or deliverables, if you figure out how to do something useful, you just do it. Sure, we weren't giving every user what they needed, but we were giving some users, some of what they needed which was amazing considering the resources we had. This is GIMP, not even close to being as good as photoshop, but still useful for a good many tasks and completely free. Oh, and Photoshop's UI is a pig too, just the engineering is so impressive that artists are willing to spend months learning it.
In defense of sales guys, I know at least one who constantly pushes for beefing up the engineering team at the expense of the sales team. The mostly engineering based management pushes back. Why does he do this? Twofold.
Anyway, not every sales guys conflicts with engineering, only the shitty ones that don't know how to communicate and thus sell a product well.
The ones your age who are not hick inbreds can all speak Mandarin, albeit sometimes heavily accented.
And yes, I agree with you about standardization, my ancestors spoke a mix of Gaelic dialects, until the English taught them English at gunpoint and honestly, it was for the best. I have friends in Zhejiang and Jiangsu in particular who, given the central location and economic importance of their provinces are having had their language (Wu) more aggressively replaced than in other areas and many feel very sad. But it sure is nice to be able to travel from Nanning to Harbin and only have to speak one language.
If you can read one, it's pretty trivial to read the other. Now with writing, you will have to re-learn over half of it, but I can't see why you would bother learn how to write either with IME being so damn convenient.
A good example of the difference and relative fluency would be here when this moron is frozen in ice and is trying to write 'calligraphy' to say 'long live the Chinese Communist Party' in Traditional characters but kind of screws up and writes the last 3 in simplified because if he wasn't an illiterate retard he would not be doing such a stupid thing in the first place. He got 4 of the characters right, which is lovely, but it's not as if he doesn't see the traditional form of the second last character like EVERY time he plays Mahjong.
And here's the thing, if you're fluent in Chinese, you can talk to guys like him, university graduates all can read and write fluently in English and can usually at least understand it most of the time, so it's not as important. It's an interesting language, but you do not _need_ to learn it unless you have an interest in learning a particularly difficult foreign language.
Um, no? They've been using Core2 Duo and i5 for the last 4 series I think. Core Duo was just the first series of Intel Macbook.
Besides, he said, Sina executives "understand the political baggage that comes with being a Chinese Internet company."
File some paper-work, take the sub-secretary of public information bureau out for abalone (first the seafood, then the other kind), get a list of words people cannot say in your product emailed to you then do some filtering. In exchange, you get your foreign competitors either blocked completely, or simply a story on CCTV1 every week about this competitor corrupting the minds of Chinese. And patents, copyright, trademarks? Well, that's all dealt with. Ah, to be a Chinese Internet company.
Well, I would hope very much that he is not doing the duel role of PM and UX _designer_, that would be a serious conflict of interest. Designers in particular need a lot of careful oversight and critique about whether what they are doing at least passes the coworker test in intuitiveness and ease of use. Having a project manager with an understanding of user experience is great in this case since it at least gives another person to review whether something is actually as intuitive as it is in the designer's mind.
Coding is extremely important to a good designer anyway. Not necessarily efficient or elegant code like a career programmer should write, but quick prototype code. Firstly, to express their vision in a very concrete way, if you can clarify and express your ideas in detail, writing code is pretty trivial. Secondly to allow an interface to be quickly _tested_ by coworkers and if they are lucky by focus groups of typical users. Frequently I have seen designers who consider what they do to be separate from coding tend to be limited to re-skinning what the programmers have designed rather than being able to design interactive experiences on the own.