Microsoft will block all access to their updating site from your country. Or just like they've done with WinXP SP2, let you update but render your PCs unusable. Or even worse, let you update and let you continue to use the computers as normal but with extra functions.
Since we've made unrealistic assumptions, please allow me to exaggerate a bit.
Six weeks later, you'll find all your country's PC are infected with hundreds of trojans, worm and virii. Sensitive national security data will be in the hands of whom you fear most, probably via some secret backdoor designed into Windows.
Windows are overpriced as we all know it. But it doesn't worth it to pirate them for the money, your work and data worth more.
I agree that he might not mean to be offensive. But the word itself is derogatory. I know it, you know it and he quite probably know it too. My point is that such words should be avoided because of the offensive nature.
Words are not just symbols. They carries meanings that can't be ignored.
What I want to say is, even in Europe, where software patents have met such resistance among the people, and where democratic governments are supposed to listen to the people, the heads could change in favour of the patents in the last minute. Why? Doesn't that strike you a bit?
I'm not saying the US government and big corporations are evil. But countries outside europe, especially developing countries are surely more susceptible to the power of US and big corporations and very likely to give in in the end.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to have a strong US government exerting its power globaly. But the power is unchecked by all who it has a influence on, which is pretty bad in the sense of democracy.
This word is extremely derogatory and insulting to all Chinese. As a Chinese, I found it offensive and unacceptable. It is like calling a blackman N*gro.
The joke is good, in fact, quite true in the sense that many Chinese are very clever in spendings as well as doing business as individuals. But even in that joke, the phrase "Chinese man" is used instead of this C*man word.
Linux isn't as popular as in the west partly because pirated Microsoft products are so easy to get. For example, you can probably find a set of pirated WinXP + Office XP CDs for 8 RMB, or US$1. Almost everything you need for a Windows machine can be find at a low price. As far as I can remember, this has always been the case since the mid-90s. Rumors said that MS itself promoted pirating Windows and other its products secretly to boost its userbase and reap the profit later by intimedating corporate user into buying licenses through lawsuits.
The reason for MS to help pirating its own software is the price. While a typical Chinese family in Shanghai earns RMB4000, or US$500, a month. A copy of MS WinXP Home OEM(supposedly cheaper than non-OEM, the reason why OEM is for retail is beyond me) is labeled RMB 880http://www.federal.com.cn/shop/game/productintr oduce.asp?productno=10ABBMIC343, or about US$100. That's about one fifth of the family's income. And MS Office 2003 Standard Chinese Simplified costs RMB3000http://www.federal.com.cn/shop/soft/product introduce.asp?productno=10CBEMIC382, or US$370. These prices are from an online retailer. They used to be much higher when people earns much less in the mid-90s. Paying a month's earning for only the basic operating system sounds just insane. But this was, and largely still the case in China if you want to stay with MS leagally. And there is no alternative to MS, since MS has virtually destroyed everyone who dare to challenge them by every means possible, including promoting pirates.
I know Microsoft's practices are the same globaly, but it is extremely effective in locking in users of developing countries like China. Unlike the west, there was virtually no base of unix users. To most people, computer = PC = Windows. The shortage of unix gurus makes Linux extremely hard to approach in the early days.
Now the situation has changed somehow, but language barrier still exists. Good linux documentation and forums are almost all in English or more obscure languages to a common Chinese. One has to be fluent in English to master Linux. There're not many people can do so, even among the youth. Translation helps, but not much, partly because of the quality. The community-driven model itself demands users and developers to communicate in common language, and the core developers are, inevitably, mostly English speaking or prefer to communicate in English.
Having said that, I still believe Linux is the way to go for Chinese, not for some national security reasons, but the freedom and openness.
I totally agree that address space is the most important reason to migrate to 64bit. Why this is modded down is beyond me.
We all remember how cumbersome memory segmentation was when programming under DOS/Win16. 4GB(?) segments may be less a kludge than 64K ones, but what's the point to go down that route when you can code in flat space under x86-64?
The guy just missed the point. Sun's Solaris license is anything but free, as in freedom. Linux is gaining popularity not because of Redhat's support, but because of the freedom that comes with it.
Redhat/SuSE may feel the threat now that Sun has made Solaris free of charge, but I doubt it can cause real harm to these two commercial distros. Solaris works best on Sun's hardware, while Redhat/SuSE's support to a varity of PC hardware is tested over time. Linux also has a solid supporting community. Even with a true free license, it's still hard for Sun to play catch up.
The Alpha line was very advanced in terms of architecture and design. EV8, if only having a tiny fraction of resource from DEC/Compaq/HP as Itanic got from Intel, would be king of 64bit computing.
HP killed EV8 because they didn't want to anger Intel. It wasn't their project anyway. We all know the ill-fated Alpha was from the now demised DEC, acquired by now demised Compaq, acquired by... well, HP.
Being a small software company is always a risky business. I didn't say to opensource is a sure way to make money. But there are successful examples, like Bluefishhttp://bluefish.openoffice.nl/, among many others.
You'd probably say Bluefish is platform dependent on Linux. It certainly is. But that suits the niche market it targets.
And there are myriad small companies live on proprietary software products.
Therefore, the key isn't about how many platforms it runs on, nor opensource or not. It is how it fits into a niche market.
Unless you're targeting some niche market that no one else can do or want to do. You'll never know when your selling point is integrated into the next OS version.
Going platform-independent probably isn't the ultimate answer. Can opensource help?
And you shall get this:
mke2fs 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
dump is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y dump is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!
However, if you issue a # mkswap dump
You'll be happily notified:
Windows doesn't allow you do that, I'm afraid.
INT 13h calls will be intercepted by the system.
Of course, it's quite effective if you boot up with a dos floppy.
Knowing this is meant to be funny, I don't like the stereotypical notion behind it...
China promised not to use nuclear weapon first from the first day she has it. Neither the USSR nor the US made the similar promise. Given the unilaterism and the preemptive war logic of the Bush administration, the same words are more appropriate to the US I'm afriad.
The word itself is also new to Chinese. Actually you are quite right in the sense it's imported to the vast Chinese market.:)
As for Xinhua's report, I don't think they have any authority in this. Journalist from there is not likely to be confidently coin new English words, linguistically or politically, although they tend to give accidental new meaning to existing words and phrases, like all media do.:)
BTW, there are too common Chinese words for astronaut, yuhangyuan and taikongren, both in pinyin form. Yuhangyuan is more a written word while taikongren is gaining popularity over the former.
If the word is to die, it will. But I don't see the reason why it should.
In my opinion, the reason for the word taikonaut to exist is because it carries a Chinese background. You can say "Chinese astronaut", but it's too long and people don't like it when they can use one word. Also, "Chinese astronaut" could be confused with Chinese-American astronauts like Dr Leroy Chiaohttp://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/chiao.h tml.
As a Chinese speaker, I'm not satisfied with the word "taikonauts" either. It sounds wierd to a Chinese ear, especially when pronounced by a non-native English speaker like myself. But it is not possilbe to let the western people read Chinese characters. Even the original pinyin form "taikongren" would cause trouble to most English speakers. Since now people are using it more and more, I can only accept it. That's the way languages evolve.
Language is a living thing. An lively language like English can never be pure. If you want a pure language, there is Latin. But I'm afraid few nowadays know how to pronounce it. During the past centuries, English has absorbed words from Latin, Greek, Indian, Chinese, and many other languages to accommondate ideas from different cultures as well as the new things happening everyday. It can't be perfect in translating these ideas, but certainly it has so far done a good job.
I've heard of those OC experiments before. Like the one you've mentioned, they are very primitive applications of Peltier to me. I believe in more advanced cases, they have to be used with sophisticated control circuits to prevent condensing. I don't know much about Peltiers myself. But I speculate their efficiency varies over a range of factors such as the voltage, temp difference and so on. IMHO, it shouldn't be too difficult for AMD engineers to keep it working in the best conditions.
Therefore, my point is, Peltiers as a cpu cooling device may have shortcomings like efficiency and condensing, but nothing a careful design can't avoid.
AMD processors are already known for running hotter than most...
Another flamebait. Processors are getting hotter and hotter. Intel used to generally do better in power consumption than AMD. But that period has ended years ago when Willamette core P4 was out. Have you compared the heatsink size of Prescott core P4 and that of AMD64?
I'd be more worried about the heat coming from the other side. My case is hot enough as is, no need to add to it
RTFA. Which "other side" are you talking about?
According to the wikipedia article, peltier effect is "the creation of heat difference from an eletric voltage." Namely, a peltier moves heat from one point to the other with the help of a electric field.
In this case, the peltier moves heat away from one side, the processor, to the other side, the heat sink, and the later then extracts the heat away. It helps conducting heat when the temperature difference between the CPU surface and the heatsink is higher. Although as a semiconductor itself, the peltier also generate heat. That is far less than the heat it takes away from the core and that heat is in effect taken away as well. So I don't know what you mean by "adding heat to it".
I guess the WinCE is embedded on its mobo, so that users won't screw it up. Since there's no optical drive or fast network, reinstall the OS will be such a pain and due to Windows' susceptibility to virus, worms and other vulnerabilities in itself, a embedded os would be better to the average joe.
Still, I don't think this will be a viable thing. The processor's too slow for modern applications and it's networking ability is so limited.
Slashdot Mirror
Since we've made unrealistic assumptions, please allow me to exaggerate a bit.
Six weeks later, you'll find all your country's PC are infected with hundreds of trojans, worm and virii. Sensitive national security data will be in the hands of whom you fear most, probably via some secret backdoor designed into Windows.
Windows are overpriced as we all know it. But it doesn't worth it to pirate them for the money, your work and data worth more.
Seriously, on the security issue, I doubt it would make any difference when you're not pirating at all. See http://slashdot.org/it/04/11/13/1444232.shtml?tid= 201&tid=172&tid=218.
. So, the bottom line: switch to Linux or *BSD. Not only it will save your money, but it could save you a lot more.
If you'd like to challenge that claim, please feel free to take our flag down.
And then what? Will you start the WW4?
Words are not just symbols. They carries meanings that can't be ignored.
I'm not saying the US government and big corporations are evil. But countries outside europe, especially developing countries are surely more susceptible to the power of US and big corporations and very likely to give in in the end.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to have a strong US government exerting its power globaly. But the power is unchecked by all who it has a influence on, which is pretty bad in the sense of democracy.
The joke is good, in fact, quite true in the sense that many Chinese are very clever in spendings as well as doing business as individuals. But even in that joke, the phrase "Chinese man" is used instead of this C*man word.
Globalization has changed the context, like it or not.
Cultural and political factors aside, technically, it is sometimes easier to adapt existing solutions than build the whole thing ground up.
But with US's economic/military power and big companies' interests, sooner or later they are going to be globally enforcible.
Haven't you followed software patents in Europe lately?
The reason for MS to help pirating its own software is the price. While a typical Chinese family in Shanghai earns RMB4000, or US$500, a month. A copy of MS WinXP Home OEM(supposedly cheaper than non-OEM, the reason why OEM is for retail is beyond me) is labeled RMB 880http://www.federal.com.cn/shop/game/productintr oduce.asp?productno=10ABBMIC343, or about US$100. That's about one fifth of the family's income. And MS Office 2003 Standard Chinese Simplified costs RMB3000http://www.federal.com.cn/shop/soft/product introduce.asp?productno=10CBEMIC382, or US$370. These prices are from an online retailer. They used to be much higher when people earns much less in the mid-90s. Paying a month's earning for only the basic operating system sounds just insane. But this was, and largely still the case in China if you want to stay with MS leagally. And there is no alternative to MS, since MS has virtually destroyed everyone who dare to challenge them by every means possible, including promoting pirates.
I know Microsoft's practices are the same globaly, but it is extremely effective in locking in users of developing countries like China. Unlike the west, there was virtually no base of unix users. To most people, computer = PC = Windows. The shortage of unix gurus makes Linux extremely hard to approach in the early days.
Now the situation has changed somehow, but language barrier still exists. Good linux documentation and forums are almost all in English or more obscure languages to a common Chinese. One has to be fluent in English to master Linux. There're not many people can do so, even among the youth. Translation helps, but not much, partly because of the quality. The community-driven model itself demands users and developers to communicate in common language, and the core developers are, inevitably, mostly English speaking or prefer to communicate in English.
Having said that, I still believe Linux is the way to go for Chinese, not for some national security reasons, but the freedom and openness.
We all remember how cumbersome memory segmentation was when programming under DOS/Win16. 4GB(?) segments may be less a kludge than 64K ones, but what's the point to go down that route when you can code in flat space under x86-64?
Redhat/SuSE may feel the threat now that Sun has made Solaris free of charge, but I doubt it can cause real harm to these two commercial distros. Solaris works best on Sun's hardware, while Redhat/SuSE's support to a varity of PC hardware is tested over time. Linux also has a solid supporting community. Even with a true free license, it's still hard for Sun to play catch up.
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RW T121300000000
The Alpha line was very advanced in terms of architecture and design. EV8, if only having a tiny fraction of resource from DEC/Compaq/HP as Itanic got from Intel, would be king of 64bit computing.
HP killed EV8 because they didn't want to anger Intel. It wasn't their project anyway. We all know the ill-fated Alpha was from the now demised DEC, acquired by now demised Compaq, acquired by ... well, HP.
It's not a good idea to bet all future processors on x86-64.
But it's also a rotten old joke since it's used in the movie The Itaian Job http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317740/.
You'd probably say Bluefish is platform dependent on Linux. It certainly is. But that suits the niche market it targets. And there are myriad small companies live on proprietary software products.
Therefore, the key isn't about how many platforms it runs on, nor opensource or not. It is how it fits into a niche market.
Unless you're targeting some niche market that no one else can do or want to do. You'll never know when your selling point is integrated into the next OS version.
Going platform-independent probably isn't the ultimate answer. Can opensource help?
To verify this, try the following as root. Don't worry, this is safe.
# dd if=/dev/zero of=dump bs=512 count=1000
# mke2fs dump
# mkdir dumpdir
# mount -o loop dump dumpdir
# mke2fs dump
And you shall get this:
mke2fs 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
dump is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
dump is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!
However, if you issue a
# mkswap dump
You'll be happily notified:
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 507 kB
Done. ;)
Windows doesn't allow you do that, I'm afraid. INT 13h calls will be intercepted by the system. Of course, it's quite effective if you boot up with a dos floppy.
China promised not to use nuclear weapon first from the first day she has it. Neither the USSR nor the US made the similar promise. Given the unilaterism and the preemptive war logic of the Bush administration, the same words are more appropriate to the US I'm afriad.
The word itself is also new to Chinese. Actually you are quite right in the sense it's imported to the vast Chinese market. :)
As for Xinhua's report, I don't think they have any authority in this. Journalist from there is not likely to be confidently coin new English words, linguistically or politically, although they tend to give accidental new meaning to existing words and phrases, like all media do. :)
BTW, there are too common Chinese words for astronaut, yuhangyuan and taikongren, both in pinyin form. Yuhangyuan is more a written word while taikongren is gaining popularity over the former.
In my opinion, the reason for the word taikonaut to exist is because it carries a Chinese background. You can say "Chinese astronaut", but it's too long and people don't like it when they can use one word. Also, "Chinese astronaut" could be confused with Chinese-American astronauts like Dr Leroy Chiaohttp://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/chiao.h tml.
As a Chinese speaker, I'm not satisfied with the word "taikonauts" either. It sounds wierd to a Chinese ear, especially when pronounced by a non-native English speaker like myself. But it is not possilbe to let the western people read Chinese characters. Even the original pinyin form "taikongren" would cause trouble to most English speakers. Since now people are using it more and more, I can only accept it. That's the way languages evolve.
Language is a living thing. An lively language like English can never be pure. If you want a pure language, there is Latin. But I'm afraid few nowadays know how to pronounce it. During the past centuries, English has absorbed words from Latin, Greek, Indian, Chinese, and many other languages to accommondate ideas from different cultures as well as the new things happening everyday. It can't be perfect in translating these ideas, but certainly it has so far done a good job.
Therefore, my point is, Peltiers as a cpu cooling device may have shortcomings like efficiency and condensing, but nothing a careful design can't avoid.
Freddie
Another flamebait. Processors are getting hotter and hotter. Intel used to generally do better in power consumption than AMD. But that period has ended years ago when Willamette core P4 was out. Have you compared the heatsink size of Prescott core P4 and that of AMD64?
I'd be more worried about the heat coming from the other side. My case is hot enough as is, no need to add to it
RTFA. Which "other side" are you talking about?
According to the wikipedia article, peltier effect is "the creation of heat difference from an eletric voltage." Namely, a peltier moves heat from one point to the other with the help of a electric field.
In this case, the peltier moves heat away from one side, the processor, to the other side, the heat sink, and the later then extracts the heat away. It helps conducting heat when the temperature difference between the CPU surface and the heatsink is higher. Although as a semiconductor itself, the peltier also generate heat. That is far less than the heat it takes away from the core and that heat is in effect taken away as well. So I don't know what you mean by "adding heat to it".
Still, I don't think this will be a viable thing. The processor's too slow for modern applications and it's networking ability is so limited.
Excuse me. But... with a 56k modem?