The Cline Center for Democracy at UIUC has been running a data mining project, scanning archives and contents of newspapers around the world for reports of political disturbances such as riots &tc. The project, a collaboration between the center and the UIUC CS department, is meant to facilitate research on domestic stability and the like. Currently it's focused primarily on English papers, but efficiency and completeness will dictate searches in other languages sooner or later.
Information can be suppressed or 'spun', but at least this will ensure that the data's available for such evaluations instead of paying some graduate student peanuts for years and years to put it together.
Of course it does mean that I'm sort of out of a job...
I checked in XiDan (huge shopping district in Beijing besides WangFuJing) for you. Price is current as of yesterday.
Tall: 23 RMB, Venti: 27 RMB.
Now, this translates to about 3-4 USD at most, but compared to the average salary in Beijing...well, you've got problems. According to official reports, average salary in the cities is ~9000 RMB per annum, and it's 2900 RMB per annum in the countryside (but this figure also includes the capital needed for seed for the next year). These are, of course, official, and unofficial estimates are higher and lower, depending on who you ask.
To give you another idea of how much things cost:
23 RMB will buy you (at least around the universities, prices current of yesterday):
2 1-kg package of dumplings
about 23 kg of bok choy
a 10 kg bag of rice
six bottles (500 mL size) of Coke
4 pirated DVDs (assuming an average price of 6 RMB per disc)
1-2 legal DVDs, depending on title (His Girl Friday was 12 RMB, and the legal boxset of La Femme Nikita, season 1 - 6 disks, was 130 RMB, prices both from yesterday)
35 Xia'r'bing - flatbreads about the size of an average adult palm, filled with a variety of veggies or meats
OR
seven issues of Reader's, a popular literary anthology magazine among Chinese readers.
The beauty of the censorship is that the government doesn't need to watch everything, and indeed, it doesn't have to. The regulations and the fear of consequences do most of the work for them. Yes, the government watches the most volatile subjects and censors a lot of it through keyword matching and IP blocking, and yes, they do monitor who gets online where to make sure that we're not doing anything so subversive (for example, I have to register with the authorities here when I signed up for internet), but they're not watching everything, we're doing it for them.
danwei.org posted this article a while back (http://www.danwei.org/archives/001505.html) about self-censorship on television. This applies also to everyday speech and also to the internet. I'm studying in Beijing for the year - and while I'm an expat and supposedly am protected against most wrongs - I still watch what I say, online and off. Why? Because I have friends here, because I have family here, and because I'm getting a Ph.D. on the region and it would really suck if the Public Security Bureau decides to never allow me back into the country again.
On the plus side, the Chinese (at the risk of generalizing. sorry.) are remarkably adept at reading between the lines. I've seen people read the People's Daily and came up with astoundingly penetrating conclusions about something simply by using the placement of a photo or the wording of the article. And news here travels fast - even without newspapers and television.
On the internet in general:
100 million people use the internet in China, but what percentage of those ventures into sensitive topics and participate in BBS discussions? Not that many. Internet access here is rather expensive too. Go to Starbucks to get coffee and free wireless, you say? Let's look at Starbucks prices in China and decide - let's not, I can put three more meals on the table for the price of one frappaccino.
The problem with China and censorship and democracy is - as several someone elses pointed out - is that the country isn't developed enough for full blown democracy. This isn't possible when the population is clearly divided into a relatively small group of those people who actually earn enough to enjoy the luxuries of life in the cities, a bigger group of people who are struggling to eke out a living in service to the above group, and the biggest group even farther out in the countryside still farming their lands. Not enough people have gotten to the point of having a comfortable enough existence (or used to having one) that they can worry about censorship and human rights at leisure. Hell, a lot of the subsistence farmers here struggle with sending their kids to a single year of elementary school. Internet? What's that? Sounds expensive.
I guess the point that I'm trying to make is that while this decree sucks - we're doing most of the moaning and the screaming for the people affected. The people inside don't think that they're all that affected by this new decree. There are always ways around it for me (i.e. bribing, going through proxies), and as long as I can get what I want, why should I care about your access and your rights? In the meantime, everyone else just finds some other way of talking around the topic, and life goes on.
Where was this questionnaire sent and who answered this stuff?
For Duke University, at least, several of the NOs should have been YESes.
Also, widespread computer does not equate to ease of computing. UNC-CH might be fifth, but it's a nightmare to try to get online (register, call their tech office, give them hardware address, etc) as opposed to Duke (first time on network? Give me your login and password, done, use network!).
I question the quality of this piece, as well as the asinine questions asked.
oh, I remember those days of the modem pool well...a pain to dial in and no guarantee that you'd be able to connect for hours. Now the entire modem pool is limited to 15 minutes.
What about the Duke population at large? All these solutions are by and large great for people who know their way around a VNC client or even SSH, but what about a general user who just wants to be able to check email or read news without having to wait five minutes to log in on the new OS X.blah boxes?
The reality is that while solutions are spilling over on slashdot, ordinary user exhibit A doesn't necessary want to know their IP or mess with their environment variables, they just want to read fark and print their homework on ePrint before class.
The wow factor is my explanation, not his (note the blatant I think. I, not he.), but yes, the pretty factor is of what you said, to encourage people to use it as opposed to a Zire, which would be useful, but would most likely encourage people to ignore it.
You can get a hard drive for less, but to get a hard drive that people actually want to use is an art in itself.
I have used AFS, which died three times on three or four computers that I owned the first two years I was at Duke (I've also been using DukeNet for about 10 years now, but that's another story). Saving to AFS is a pain. It's slow and inconvenient and more often than not, it's confusing for the users. Saving a word file to AFS at times can be a test of wills while you wait for it to write and discover that the pretty new IBM boxen has frozen. Granted, it works pretty well mostly, but sitting in Teer at 1 in the morning and realizing that the filesystem crashed utterly (files don't exist for this hour) is not really something you want to go through more than four times.
As for CVS, we pretty much gave up on it due to the fact that it never worked while we slogged through 104 and 108 (even 110, it might have worked, but then it was a choice of either track down whatever the hell it was or get some sleep).
All this information was almost certainly provided and was certainly received, but was it certainly put to use effectively? I'm guessing certainly not.
As someone whose friend was the student advisor to OIT (Duke's equivalent of the department that breaks computers on campus) on this monumental (and drool-worthy, click wheels...) project, I think that they made this decision based on several factors, including the "ooh, pretty!" factor.
Duke has reasonable coverage of computers everywhere, but their filesystem on campus is pretty esoteric (and a pain to navigate) if you want to transfer files back and forth. We're pretty much still stuck on Zips and transferring by email, etc etc. I think the latest stat was that 91% of kids on campus had one computer (at least). The thing is, though, you walk into a computer lab on campus and the bigger ones are almost always full of people, because it's a easy way to check email or do whatever without braving our really lame transportation system.
In the grand tradition of certain majors, too, we huddle in unix and windows labs at odd hours to program. Yes, we're still learning about OS using NACHOS. Duke's tried making us use CVS for stuff, but CVS is broken on our system and we have to resort to really weird measures in order to backup our files.
Sure, we could get a Zire, but how much would that cover with people carrying huge files back and forth? iPods are just hard drives anyways. I've seen some engineers (and computer science majors) hauling substantial fileage back and forth between dorm and class (and their Solaris lab, crappy as hell but comfy for all nighters).
At the same time, Duke's pretty much plastered with iPods already. A frosh class with ipods will just be the equivalent of previous frosh classes with their little Duke lanyards. A thousand or so more really won't make THAT much of a difference.
And let's face it, when you're talking 20000 for tuition, 4000 for an average crappy double, then 2500 or so for meals and way too much for books later, a few hundred for a white hard drive that your kid is going to phone home about in a few weeks and whine to get isn't going to hurt anymore than what you're already shelling out.
Besides, Duke's already raised the tuition for this year, even before the inclusion of the iPod. My firstborn is being auctioned on eBay as we speak.
Perhaps now is the time that someone does an analysis of where the great cursive copout is happening. When you've got a keyboard that's optimized (I know, I know, Dvorak's misrepresented, wah) for Latin alphabet based languages, of course it's somewhat easier to type than to write.
Of course, if you're looking at something like Chinese, or a complex script language that's not based on an alphabet (pinyin doesn't count), then it's a lot harder to express a coherent thought using the same keyboard. It takes more time to hunt for those characters that express exactly what you're trying to say.
Imagine if we had to type a pronounciation, then wait and hunt through a list that may or may not have exactly the word that you're looking for, as opposed to just writing it by hand on a piece of paper...I bet a lot more people would be learning cursive.
It's really a matter of practicality. Who wants to print out all these nasty letters when a few hits on the keyboard does the same thing?
:::The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots of new things that people are asking for.:::
Isn't this the same company that holds war sessions and decides which bugs get attention immediately and which get kicked to the next version to be fixed? (i.e. bugs get kicked to the next release/fix of XP because they're not worth fixing now?)
"Wait until the next version" isn't going to go away even if Gates decides that it's not. Hell, sometimes it's just easier to tell the customers that. And sometimes, we just need that little slice of hope that the next version won't turn out to be crap...
Slashdot Mirror
The Cline Center for Democracy at UIUC has been running a data mining project, scanning archives and contents of newspapers around the world for reports of political disturbances such as riots &tc. The project, a collaboration between the center and the UIUC CS department, is meant to facilitate research on domestic stability and the like. Currently it's focused primarily on English papers, but efficiency and completeness will dictate searches in other languages sooner or later.
Information can be suppressed or 'spun', but at least this will ensure that the data's available for such evaluations instead of paying some graduate student peanuts for years and years to put it together.
Of course it does mean that I'm sort of out of a job...
I checked in XiDan (huge shopping district in Beijing besides WangFuJing) for you. Price is current as of yesterday. Tall: 23 RMB, Venti: 27 RMB. Now, this translates to about 3-4 USD at most, but compared to the average salary in Beijing...well, you've got problems. According to official reports, average salary in the cities is ~9000 RMB per annum, and it's 2900 RMB per annum in the countryside (but this figure also includes the capital needed for seed for the next year). These are, of course, official, and unofficial estimates are higher and lower, depending on who you ask. To give you another idea of how much things cost: 23 RMB will buy you (at least around the universities, prices current of yesterday): 2 1-kg package of dumplings about 23 kg of bok choy a 10 kg bag of rice six bottles (500 mL size) of Coke 4 pirated DVDs (assuming an average price of 6 RMB per disc) 1-2 legal DVDs, depending on title (His Girl Friday was 12 RMB, and the legal boxset of La Femme Nikita, season 1 - 6 disks, was 130 RMB, prices both from yesterday) 35 Xia'r'bing - flatbreads about the size of an average adult palm, filled with a variety of veggies or meats OR seven issues of Reader's, a popular literary anthology magazine among Chinese readers.
On censorship:
The beauty of the censorship is that the government doesn't need to watch everything, and indeed, it doesn't have to. The regulations and the fear of consequences do most of the work for them. Yes, the government watches the most volatile subjects and censors a lot of it through keyword matching and IP blocking, and yes, they do monitor who gets online where to make sure that we're not doing anything so subversive (for example, I have to register with the authorities here when I signed up for internet), but they're not watching everything, we're doing it for them.
danwei.org posted this article a while back (http://www.danwei.org/archives/001505.html) about self-censorship on television. This applies also to everyday speech and also to the internet. I'm studying in Beijing for the year - and while I'm an expat and supposedly am protected against most wrongs - I still watch what I say, online and off. Why? Because I have friends here, because I have family here, and because I'm getting a Ph.D. on the region and it would really suck if the Public Security Bureau decides to never allow me back into the country again.
On the plus side, the Chinese (at the risk of generalizing. sorry.) are remarkably adept at reading between the lines. I've seen people read the People's Daily and came up with astoundingly penetrating conclusions about something simply by using the placement of a photo or the wording of the article. And news here travels fast - even without newspapers and television.
On the internet in general:
100 million people use the internet in China, but what percentage of those ventures into sensitive topics and participate in BBS discussions? Not that many. Internet access here is rather expensive too. Go to Starbucks to get coffee and free wireless, you say? Let's look at Starbucks prices in China and decide - let's not, I can put three more meals on the table for the price of one frappaccino.
The problem with China and censorship and democracy is - as several someone elses pointed out - is that the country isn't developed enough for full blown democracy. This isn't possible when the population is clearly divided into a relatively small group of those people who actually earn enough to enjoy the luxuries of life in the cities, a bigger group of people who are struggling to eke out a living in service to the above group, and the biggest group even farther out in the countryside still farming their lands. Not enough people have gotten to the point of having a comfortable enough existence (or used to having one) that they can worry about censorship and human rights at leisure. Hell, a lot of the subsistence farmers here struggle with sending their kids to a single year of elementary school. Internet? What's that? Sounds expensive.
I guess the point that I'm trying to make is that while this decree sucks - we're doing most of the moaning and the screaming for the people affected. The people inside don't think that they're all that affected by this new decree. There are always ways around it for me (i.e. bribing, going through proxies), and as long as I can get what I want, why should I care about your access and your rights? In the meantime, everyone else just finds some other way of talking around the topic, and life goes on.
Where was this questionnaire sent and who answered this stuff? For Duke University, at least, several of the NOs should have been YESes. Also, widespread computer does not equate to ease of computing. UNC-CH might be fifth, but it's a nightmare to try to get online (register, call their tech office, give them hardware address, etc) as opposed to Duke (first time on network? Give me your login and password, done, use network!). I question the quality of this piece, as well as the asinine questions asked.
oh, I remember those days of the modem pool well...a pain to dial in and no guarantee that you'd be able to connect for hours. Now the entire modem pool is limited to 15 minutes.
I'll take a look at my c2k matrix and let you know.
oh, wait, the matrix is no more. My reality has crashed.
What about the Duke population at large? All these solutions are by and large great for people who know their way around a VNC client or even SSH, but what about a general user who just wants to be able to check email or read news without having to wait five minutes to log in on the new OS X.blah boxes?
The reality is that while solutions are spilling over on slashdot, ordinary user exhibit A doesn't necessary want to know their IP or mess with their environment variables, they just want to read fark and print their homework on ePrint before class.
The wow factor is my explanation, not his (note the blatant I think. I, not he.), but yes, the pretty factor is of what you said, to encourage people to use it as opposed to a Zire, which would be useful, but would most likely encourage people to ignore it. You can get a hard drive for less, but to get a hard drive that people actually want to use is an art in itself.
in a secret meeting, Duke President Dick Brodhead (no, really) announced that he, for one, would like to welcome our new Apple overlords.
...Sell it to someone at UNC?
I have used AFS, which died three times on three or four computers that I owned the first two years I was at Duke (I've also been using DukeNet for about 10 years now, but that's another story). Saving to AFS is a pain. It's slow and inconvenient and more often than not, it's confusing for the users. Saving a word file to AFS at times can be a test of wills while you wait for it to write and discover that the pretty new IBM boxen has frozen. Granted, it works pretty well mostly, but sitting in Teer at 1 in the morning and realizing that the filesystem crashed utterly (files don't exist for this hour) is not really something you want to go through more than four times.
As for CVS, we pretty much gave up on it due to the fact that it never worked while we slogged through 104 and 108 (even 110, it might have worked, but then it was a choice of either track down whatever the hell it was or get some sleep).
All this information was almost certainly provided and was certainly received, but was it certainly put to use effectively? I'm guessing certainly not.
emi
CS, Trinity '05
I prefer to call them frat "islands", like the preserves that contain some of our precious endangered species...
What are the chances that the frosh starts the new upgrading craze on campus? from 3G to 4G? Maybe now's the time for a trade?
As someone whose friend was the student advisor to OIT (Duke's equivalent of the department that breaks computers on campus) on this monumental (and drool-worthy, click wheels...) project, I think that they made this decision based on several factors, including the "ooh, pretty!" factor.
Duke has reasonable coverage of computers everywhere, but their filesystem on campus is pretty esoteric (and a pain to navigate) if you want to transfer files back and forth. We're pretty much still stuck on Zips and transferring by email, etc etc. I think the latest stat was that 91% of kids on campus had one computer (at least). The thing is, though, you walk into a computer lab on campus and the bigger ones are almost always full of people, because it's a easy way to check email or do whatever without braving our really lame transportation system.
In the grand tradition of certain majors, too, we huddle in unix and windows labs at odd hours to program. Yes, we're still learning about OS using NACHOS. Duke's tried making us use CVS for stuff, but CVS is broken on our system and we have to resort to really weird measures in order to backup our files.
Sure, we could get a Zire, but how much would that cover with people carrying huge files back and forth? iPods are just hard drives anyways. I've seen some engineers (and computer science majors) hauling substantial fileage back and forth between dorm and class (and their Solaris lab, crappy as hell but comfy for all nighters).
At the same time, Duke's pretty much plastered with iPods already. A frosh class with ipods will just be the equivalent of previous frosh classes with their little Duke lanyards. A thousand or so more really won't make THAT much of a difference.
And let's face it, when you're talking 20000 for tuition, 4000 for an average crappy double, then 2500 or so for meals and way too much for books later, a few hundred for a white hard drive that your kid is going to phone home about in a few weeks and whine to get isn't going to hurt anymore than what you're already shelling out.
Besides, Duke's already raised the tuition for this year, even before the inclusion of the iPod. My firstborn is being auctioned on eBay as we speak.
Perhaps now is the time that someone does an analysis of where the great cursive copout is happening. When you've got a keyboard that's optimized (I know, I know, Dvorak's misrepresented, wah) for Latin alphabet based languages, of course it's somewhat easier to type than to write.
Of course, if you're looking at something like Chinese, or a complex script language that's not based on an alphabet (pinyin doesn't count), then it's a lot harder to express a coherent thought using the same keyboard. It takes more time to hunt for those characters that express exactly what you're trying to say.
Imagine if we had to type a pronounciation, then wait and hunt through a list that may or may not have exactly the word that you're looking for, as opposed to just writing it by hand on a piece of paper...I bet a lot more people would be learning cursive.
It's really a matter of practicality. Who wants to print out all these nasty letters when a few hits on the keyboard does the same thing?
From the article
:::The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots of new things that people are asking for.:::
Isn't this the same company that holds war sessions and decides which bugs get attention immediately and which get kicked to the next version to be fixed? (i.e. bugs get kicked to the next release/fix of XP because they're not worth fixing now?)
"Wait until the next version" isn't going to go away even if Gates decides that it's not. Hell, sometimes it's just easier to tell the customers that. And sometimes, we just need that little slice of hope that the next version won't turn out to be crap...