In my recent experience, I found lectures presented off of long web pages to be very annoying. It was hard to figure out the position on the page, and it just bothered me. Don't know how to explain it.
We also had a presentation/book that was based off of some framemarker something-or-other, and it was excellent...
This is one of the best books on how to code well that I've ever seen. Things like Knuth, or SICP, or Patterns books may be good for the more advanced, but if some kid stumbles on code complete, he'll be set. (I don't think most kids would really use Knuth).
For a technical/programming specific manual that is relatively timeless, it can't be beat!
Must be gearing up for the Sunday slowdown, trying to get some passionate hits/add impressions.
As an AC pointed out, this has been discussed several times before. It might be an interesting point for discussion, but I can't imagine it getting to far before people starting flaming each other.
cheers!
There is a service called "Radio Free Asia" that is somewhat parallel to RFE.
Beware that uncensored does not always mean "unbiased" -- I'm sure the RFA people have their own goals.
If you want to help with the internet, I think setting up some type of proxy server would probably be your best bet. Tunneling, encrypted, etc, it'd be convenient. There used to be a service at CND that let you type in URLs like http://proxy.cnd.org/www.cnn.com and it'd give you cnn. Good stuff.
For example, simply being/PERCIEVED/ as homosexual in Beijing could land you in a state reprogramming center. You are labeled a deviant, and unfit to be in public. Nevermind that you might not actually BE homosexual..
Maybe it was different in YOUR part of Beijing, but...
* There are gay bars in Beijing. Specifically "jin ba wang" and "hudie" ( I think those are the names). One has a sign outside it that says "tongzhi jiu ba" (comrade ("gay") bar). Another place "ban meng" is/was (heard it closed down) a trendy place whose proprietoress was a well known transgender dancer.
* More than once, in clubs in Beijing, I was approached by men who wanted to dance,etc. I am male.
* Near Peking University (across the street from Tu shu cheng) there is a large famous male brothel (or so it is rumurored). There is also supposed to be a lot of cruising at a park outside the west gate of Peking University
The government doesn't have an ax to grind with homosexuals.
Things aren't very free. Making out with your boyfriend in public is asking for trouble.
Things are much free-er in the US/San Francisco.
BUT, it seems quite a stretch to say simply being/PERCIEVED/ as homosexual in Beijing could land you in a state reprogramming center.
Can you tell me where you get this information? It seems that there is a good deal of bad information on China out there -- and since everyone believes or wants to believe that China is the evil empire, the rumors spread fast. (regardless of the truth either way). Maybe things have changed since I've been in Beijing.
(I posted some of this a long time ago, but it was at the bottom of an article, so nobody read it).
Feiyu One of the biggest internet cafes I've seen -- it's located on the south end of Peking University. I haven't been back in more than a year, but I think it's pretty much taken control of the entire street. (it's a good location, too). (some of it was recently torn down for new construction or something).
the about-us page Remember to bring a grain or two of salt, but translated, some of the interesting things are:
They have 1800 computers (started with 25)
They have 20Mbit connectivity (DDN direct line?)
16,000 users/daily
open 24 hours
have trained 1,800 people
have been reported on by 2300 different media organizations.
What people do at them
I remember the most common activity was playing games. Lots of folks playing some weird sniper game and starcraft. At night, always a fool or two in the back flipping between tasks/peeping porno.
Lots of BBS/bulletin board action now, I hear...
Hmmm lastly, last time I checked, the graduate student dorms (and possibly some of the undergrad dorms) at Peking University had ethernet that connected to a internal China network. People sometimes use a program called ProxyHunter to find ways out of the internal network.
Damn, when I first came in 1998, Feiyu was a crappy little place where there were 25 computers and a not-so-knowledgable staff. Things have changed, I guess.
Do you think they will block at hotmail or yahoo? Hell no -- many, many chinese people use these services. A good number of the blocked sites aren't things that the majority of the athletes will want to access, and those that are (i.e. LA times used to be blocked), people will either just make do without.
Sites that are intentionally "subsersive" or pose "direct threat" (i.e. "falungong.com" or whatever) are probably not that popular with foreigners anyway.
I think you might want to check this site out -- it has some interesting material about some of the quotes you brought up. (mostly quotes from books)
It seems that oftentimes quotations are thrown around without much knowledge to the context or the author's real-life beliefs. In any case...
Here are a couple of interesting sections...
- The founding fathers may have read the Bible, but explicit references to Scripture or Christian principles are conspicuously absent in the political discussions of the nation's early history. Biblical texts do not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the new state charters. Moreover, conscious reference to Biblical or Christian themes is also almost entirely absent from the places where it might be expected -- the pamphlet literature advocating independence, the various stated debates over the Constitution, and the political disputes of the 1790s. In short, the political spokesmen who read the Bible in private rarely, if ever, betrayed that acquaintance openly in public.... The American Revolution was led by men who were not very religious: At best, the founding fathers only passively believed in organized Christianity and at worst they scorned and ridiculed it. So long as religion supported political harmony, few of them were all that concerned with what a person believed. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, had no use for a particular evangelical clergyman because "he wanted to make persons good Presbyterians rather than good citizens." (The Search for Christian America, pp. 81-107.)
- Marshalling an impressive array of census statistics, they [the authors] argue that, contrary to popular misconception, religiosity was fairly weak in Colonial America. About 17% of the colonists belonged to churches. If this proposition is true, then the oft-repeated claim that our forefathers were religious believers, is simply untrue. Moreover, the claim that moral purity accompanied religious piety at the founding of this nation is a myth. Nor were so-called traditional family values in dominance. For example, the authors cite data that one in three births from 1761-1800 occurred within less than nine months of marriage, despite harsh laws against fornication. They also say that the taverns in Boston were more jammed on Saturday night than the churches were on Sunday morning. [The Church in America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (1992).]
Oh, Java APPLETS crash all of the time. And any college that'll try to teach computer programming is going to try to do it with applets, at least partially.
UC Berkeley uses Java for its 2nd semester core CS class (data structures) (and now, also for upper division OS design). Berkeley never used applets.
Personally, I think using applets would be a horrible mistake -- they are crash-ridden, full of extra garbage and syntax, etc. Personally, I love writing in Java, and I love doing internals -- stuff that never links to graphics code, and only provides "answers" or runs systems.
At the time that I took data structures, I had already been programming for over three years (incl. 2 AP years in high school). Although lots of the material was old, I found that Java worked really well in teaching data structures, and included lots of good habits _built_in_ to the language (like a good documentation system, easy modules with packages, type-checking, etc.).
Python may be whatever Python is, but it is relatively obscure. You may know someone who needs python programmers, but I think that lots of the geeks I know don't know it, or haven't really looked at it. That's not to say it's bad, but wouldn't it be nice to pick a langauge where there are many, many good books out there? Wouldn't it be nice to have a language that can get a student a summer job? (theory is very, very important, and so is work experience).
Maybe it takes 2.5-3.5 years to get a night-time MBA, but a PhD takes 5 years full time (or at least that's what I've seen at UC Berkeley), and sometimes it takes even longer.
In a class I took at Peking University, titled "The Study of Modern Chinese Characters" we covered this stuff.
In a study by Zhou Youguang published in "Zhongguo Yuwen Zongheng Tan" in 1992, he gives the following stats:
number frequency
100090.0 00%
240099.0 00%
380099.9 00%
520099.9 90%
660099.9 99%
There we go, that's the facts on frequency.
The other thing is that there are currently two different systems for writing Chinese on the net -- GB (guobiao) from mainland China and Big5 (dawu) from Taiwan.
Using the results of frequency studies, the GB format was made to only include a certain set -- 7237, I believe. This is what almost every Chinese from mainland China uses right now, and it's working pretty damn well.
Big5 has something like 1X,000 characters, and that seemes to work just fine as well.
If you ask me, the largest problem that folks can face is that they receive email with scrambled codes or don't have a Big5 converter or something, not that there aren't enough codes for folks to adequetly express themselves.
(I haven't read the article, but I believe that before they planned to use escape sequences to make these more un-used characters -- and I'll betcha 99.99999% of users will never run into them, and not need the fonts, etc.)
(that class was boring as all hell -- can't believe it came in useful on/.)
(note: my second language is Chinese, which is a bit "more foreign" to English speakers than French, etc.)
I've found that getting pronunciation right from the start is one of the most important things that you can do -- I know people who've been studying Chinese for over 8 years, and they sound awful (people cringe when they hear them) -- because they did not start with good pronunciation.
The problem is, it's a pain in the ass to get good pronunciation, and nearly impossible to get it from "static resources" like books or tapes. My advice :
1. listen to the language a lot. You want to study Japanese? listen to Japanese music or sitcoms -- just so that you can get used to hearing the sounds.
2. don't go it alone -- books and tapes can get you a hamburger and lots of cheap compliments, but probably not "fluency" or skillz. Take a class (a good one) or get a tutor.
3. travel. study abroad (they have these for people over college age).
4. Make friends who speak the langauge. Also, although I don't recommend doing it on purpose, if you happen to go out with somebody who speaks the language (and if that's the only language you use) you'll learn very quickly.
5. Don't forget culture -- langauge is a lot more than just words and patterns. If you don't understand the history, literature, art, etc. you can't really understand the langauge.
(then again, I've got high standards for fluency -- I've still got a long way myself)
Good luck!
I think a nice solution for the original poster would be to try FreeBSD -- it's relatively close security-wise, and has good docs, ports, and a very ordered development process. Plus, it just makes me feel good. Try it.;)
I think oftentimes "america" and "american" are brand names -- and things from foreign countries have a special cachet or appeal.
This might not fit for self-righteous EU folks, but I've seen a lot of things advertised as American in China -- i.e.
"American Taste" (on a type of bread)
"California Beef Noodles" (too bad CA doesn't export beef noodles)
"Texas/Kentucky Fried Chicken" (the non KFC stuff doesn't really look like KFC, but the name sells)
Especially with something as "American" as online access (OK, it's not American, but Silicon Valley, Cerf, Metcalf, MIT, Berkeley, etc. (even that linux guy lives here)) -- wouldn't American be an appealing brand name?
re: anti-American sentiment
I think it's pretty complex -- the difference between feelings towards America (the US of A government), US citizens, US corporations, and US culture/sports are many. EP-3 is not the sum of sino-us relations on a personal scale.
Yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
We also had a presentation/book that was based off of some framemarker something-or-other, and it was excellent...
For a technical/programming specific manual that is relatively timeless, it can't be beat!
As an AC pointed out, this has been discussed several times before. It might be an interesting point for discussion, but I can't imagine it getting to far before people starting flaming each other.
cheers!
Beware that uncensored does not always mean "unbiased" -- I'm sure the RFA people have their own goals.
If you want to help with the internet, I think setting up some type of proxy server would probably be your best bet. Tunneling, encrypted, etc, it'd be convenient. There used to be a service at CND that let you type in URLs like http://proxy.cnd.org/www.cnn.com and it'd give you cnn. Good stuff.
Maybe it was different in YOUR part of Beijing, but...
* There are gay bars in Beijing. Specifically "jin ba wang" and "hudie" ( I think those are the names). One has a sign outside it that says "tongzhi jiu ba" (comrade ("gay") bar). Another place "ban meng" is/was (heard it closed down) a trendy place whose proprietoress was a well known transgender dancer.
* More than once, in clubs in Beijing, I was approached by men who wanted to dance,etc. I am male.
* Near Peking University (across the street from Tu shu cheng) there is a large famous male brothel (or so it is rumurored). There is also supposed to be a lot of cruising at a park outside the west gate of Peking University
The government doesn't have an ax to grind with homosexuals. /PERCIEVED/ as homosexual in Beijing could land you in a state reprogramming center.
Things aren't very free. Making out with your boyfriend in public is asking for trouble.
Things are much free-er in the US/San Francisco.
BUT, it seems quite a stretch to say simply being
Can you tell me where you get this information? It seems that there is a good deal of bad information on China out there -- and since everyone believes or wants to believe that China is the evil empire, the rumors spread fast. (regardless of the truth either way). Maybe things have changed since I've been in Beijing.
One of the biggest internet cafes I've seen -- it's located on the south end of Peking University. I haven't been back in more than a year, but I think it's pretty much taken control of the entire street. (it's a good location, too). (some of it was recently torn down for new construction or something).
A page of pictures
more pictures
the about-us page :
Remember to bring a grain or two of salt, but translated, some of the interesting things are
They have 1800 computers (started with 25)
They have 20Mbit connectivity (DDN direct line?)
16,000 users/daily
open 24 hours
have trained 1,800 people
have been reported on by 2300 different media organizations.
What people do at them
I remember the most common activity was playing games. Lots of folks playing some weird sniper game and starcraft. At night, always a fool or two in the back flipping between tasks/peeping porno.
Lots of BBS/bulletin board action now, I hear...
Hmmm lastly, last time I checked, the graduate student dorms (and possibly some of the undergrad dorms) at Peking University had ethernet that connected to a internal China network. People sometimes use a program called ProxyHunter to find ways out of the internal network.
Damn, when I first came in 1998, Feiyu was a crappy little place where there were 25 computers and a not-so-knowledgable staff. Things have changed, I guess.
Sites that are intentionally "subsersive" or pose "direct threat" (i.e. "falungong.com" or whatever) are probably not that popular with foreigners anyway.
It seems that oftentimes quotations are thrown around without much knowledge to the context or the author's real-life beliefs. In any case...
Here are a couple of interesting sections...
- The founding fathers may have read the Bible, but explicit references to Scripture or Christian principles are conspicuously absent in the political discussions of the nation's early history. Biblical texts do not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the new state charters. Moreover, conscious reference to Biblical or Christian themes is also almost entirely absent from the places where it might be expected -- the pamphlet literature advocating independence, the various stated debates over the Constitution, and the political disputes of the 1790s. In short, the political spokesmen who read the Bible in private rarely, if ever, betrayed that acquaintance openly in public. ... The American Revolution was led by men who were not very religious: At best, the founding fathers only passively believed in organized Christianity and at worst they scorned and ridiculed it. So long as religion supported political harmony, few of them were all that concerned with what a person believed. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, had no use for a particular evangelical clergyman because "he wanted to make persons good Presbyterians rather than good citizens." (The Search for Christian America, pp. 81-107.)
- Marshalling an impressive array of census statistics, they [the authors] argue that, contrary to popular misconception, religiosity was fairly weak in Colonial America. About 17% of the colonists belonged to churches. If this proposition is true, then the oft-repeated claim that our forefathers were religious believers, is simply untrue. Moreover, the claim that moral purity accompanied religious piety at the founding of this nation is a myth. Nor were so-called traditional family values in dominance. For example, the authors cite data that one in three births from 1761-1800 occurred within less than nine months of marriage, despite harsh laws against fornication. They also say that the taverns in Boston were more jammed on Saturday night than the churches were on Sunday morning. [The Church in America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (1992).]
happy reading!
It's funny what people believe they actually have a right to.
UC Berkeley uses Java for its 2nd semester core CS class (data structures) (and now, also for upper division OS design). Berkeley never used applets.
Personally, I think using applets would be a horrible mistake -- they are crash-ridden, full of extra garbage and syntax, etc. Personally, I love writing in Java, and I love doing internals -- stuff that never links to graphics code, and only provides "answers" or runs systems.
At the time that I took data structures, I had already been programming for over three years (incl. 2 AP years in high school). Although lots of the material was old, I found that Java worked really well in teaching data structures, and included lots of good habits _built_in_ to the language (like a good documentation system, easy modules with packages, type-checking, etc.).
(oh filter, please do not mark my comment at 0 because of the short length --)
after posting this, I "remembered" that I've done very little looking into encrypted SMTP. Please take my above comments as unresearched, etc.
In a study by Zhou Youguang published in "Zhongguo Yuwen Zongheng Tan" in 1992, he gives the following stats:
number frequency
100090.0 00%
240099.0 00%
380099.9 00%
520099.9 90%
660099.9 99%
There we go, that's the facts on frequency.
The other thing is that there are currently two different systems for writing Chinese on the net -- GB (guobiao) from mainland China and Big5 (dawu) from Taiwan.
Using the results of frequency studies, the GB format was made to only include a certain set -- 7237, I believe. This is what almost every Chinese from mainland China uses right now, and it's working pretty damn well.
Big5 has something like 1X,000 characters, and that seemes to work just fine as well.
If you ask me, the largest problem that folks can face is that they receive email with scrambled codes or don't have a Big5 converter or something, not that there aren't enough codes for folks to adequetly express themselves.
(I haven't read the article, but I believe that before they planned to use escape sequences to make these more un-used characters -- and I'll betcha 99.99999% of users will never run into them, and not need the fonts, etc.) /.)
(that class was boring as all hell -- can't believe it came in useful on
I've found that getting pronunciation right from the start is one of the most important things that you can do -- I know people who've been studying Chinese for over 8 years, and they sound awful (people cringe when they hear them) -- because they did not start with good pronunciation.
The problem is, it's a pain in the ass to get good pronunciation, and nearly impossible to get it from "static resources" like books or tapes. My advice :
1. listen to the language a lot. You want to study Japanese? listen to Japanese music or sitcoms -- just so that you can get used to hearing the sounds.
2. don't go it alone -- books and tapes can get you a hamburger and lots of cheap compliments, but probably not "fluency" or skillz. Take a class (a good one) or get a tutor.
3. travel. study abroad (they have these for people over college age).
4. Make friends who speak the langauge. Also, although I don't recommend doing it on purpose, if you happen to go out with somebody who speaks the language (and if that's the only language you use) you'll learn very quickly.
5. Don't forget culture -- langauge is a lot more than just words and patterns. If you don't understand the history, literature, art, etc. you can't really understand the langauge.
(then again, I've got high standards for fluency -- I've still got a long way myself)
Good luck!
This might not fit for self-righteous EU folks, but I've seen a lot of things advertised as American in China -- i.e.
"American Taste" (on a type of bread)
"California Beef Noodles" (too bad CA doesn't export beef noodles)
"Texas/Kentucky Fried Chicken" (the non KFC stuff doesn't really look like KFC, but the name sells)
Especially with something as "American" as online access (OK, it's not American, but Silicon Valley, Cerf, Metcalf, MIT, Berkeley, etc. (even that linux guy lives here)) -- wouldn't American be an appealing brand name?
re: anti-American sentiment
I think it's pretty complex -- the difference between feelings towards America (the US of A government), US citizens, US corporations, and US culture/sports are many. EP-3 is not the sum of sino-us relations on a personal scale.
Yeah.