Yeah, very few people I talk to say "dianzi youjian" -- it's just too clunky. Not to many people say "yimei" either -- mainly because people who get email tend to be educated enough to have some English skills, and can say "e-mail" (or some l-ish sounding ending). Maybe it's just me filling in that last sound or something.
It's also interesting how people say "ni you ta de email ma?" -- making email mean "email address". I guess this happens to some extent in English as well ("do you have my email?") but it doesn't seem as natural.
You sound like you have lots of experience working with investment bank IT -- can you tell me a bit about it?
I recently accepted an offer to work for Morgan Stanley as a equity trading systems developer, and I'm wondering how stuff is going to be once I start.
Thanks a lot!
When you get a diff from two text files, you can look through it and see what's different by hand. This is a meaninful diff.
If you have a diff in two MS word documents, will you be able to tell that the only change is an italics tag and a left-centering? Probably not, or at least not without opening BOTH, and looking them over for changes.
This is a pretty good post -- at least it doesn't deserve OFFTOPIC. I found it relatively informative.
I found the comment it was replying to was, uh, sub-optimal, though.
I know that Prentice Hill (sp) makes a lot of international version of their books -- (Chinese and English, I think some Indian languages as well). -- you might want to check them out.
My best advice is to get the students up to speed in technical English. It might be hard, but the advantages are HUGE. Language encoding issues, MAN pages, new books, tech news, cooporation with other third world nationals.... it's all in English (from what I've seen, admitedly(sp) not much)
Yeah, after coding too long I'd have dreams that I was an object, or that my essays were written in compiled form. The worst was when my father tried to wake me up, and I kept thinking that I didn't have that willis.wakeUp() didn't exist.
I guess the question to ask is if the experience as a whole has any redeeming value
I'm about to start a job that's long hours/some travel (devel. at an investment bank), and I am pretty much aware of what's going to happen when I'm there... But I think that some exposure to the environment will be a good experience, and lord knows that I don't want to be doing it when I'm 30.
So what do you think? is the experience valuable? ("value" doesn't specifically imply "worth money")
(note: these are only my opinions, IANACN/I am not a Chinese national)
So, having read the above random background info, where are we in our understanding of China?
College students/protests
The reason that college students are usually the lead protesters when something happens (i.e. the embassy bombing, Tiananmen, the Democracy Wall) is because of a long-standing tradition. On (or around) 5.4.1919, students had demonstrations around the country for the new literature movement (thereafter known as the May 4th Movement). Ever since then (probably before, as well), students have been given a privledged position in society -- to speak out. Since Tiananmen, I think the authorities finally really understand this, and they do there best to control things on college campuses.
Around 5.8.1999, when Nato/America bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the government encouraged the students to protest, but made sure they could control the momementum of the movement. (they had to -- it was close to the 10th year anniv. of Tiananmen, the 70th of the May 4th, and the 50th of the founding of the PRC -- tensions were high). This time (with the recon. plane), the people were angered by the press, but the government refrained from letting the students hit the street (in a way, it showed the relative importance of the event in the eyes of the government, I think).
Nationalism
I believe that Nationalism is the current leading ideology, and the only one that can hold together China at this time. With the economic liberalisation (and subsequent creation of the wealthy/middle class) and the disappearance of the "iron rice bowl" (state provided gainful employment), Socialism/Communism is now relatively defunct as a rallying call.
This puts the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) in a bad place -- their old mandate to rule was based on the creation of a Communist state. Now that they are driving changes progressively LESS communist, they have recast themselves as the leaders of the Chinese Nation, and promote a kind of Nationalism to give them legitimacy.
This leads to a weird phenomina(?), a sort of top-down nationalism. People are really nationalist because of nationalist propaganda put out by the government, and not because (IMHO) of their own patriotism. (Granted, this is true in most nations). In America, for example, things are reversed. The government doesn't go around making so many heroes and using saturated state-owned media to make people nationalist, but there are lots of people who put up flags in their front yards and who are fiercely nationalist (this a bottom-up nationalism).
Reforms
80s: Political/economic
90s: just economic. I think it's a result of the Tiananmen thing (too much political reform) and a real fear of the problems that messed up Russia. When I spoke to people about political reform, lots of them pointed to Russia and said that's what happens when you concentrate on politics before economics.
Chinese political self-mythologizing
This is one my latest pet theory. For the last 5000 years, the Chinese have been oppressed by somebody (i.e. the government or outsiders), and for the last 150 years, they've been accutely aware of it (anti-colonialism). In the a lot of the popular literature in China, the downtroden were placed as heroes and martyrs, struggling against a much larger oppressor. Now it's a cultural reflex for Chinese to heroicize China by placing it as the oppressed (and thus right and good), and sometimes they use the US as the oppressor. (this is similar to how the US needs peer-enemies, and is trying to create an enemy with China to fill the void left by Russia/USSR).
Lastly, another word to slashdot china-haters
Dude, like I said last time, China has lots of problems. The government is not so stable (low-grade power struggle in progress), and the economics are in a somewhat fragile situation. Lots of people are getting jacked, and they could easily break out and do something big. The CCP is scared of Falun Gong because it's a structure that looks as if it could challenge their leadership. The CCP censors because it doesn't want a new protest movement, etc. These things are bad, yes. The alternative, a China that has a civil war, etc. could be much worse. I think that working within the system is probably the best way to benefit the most people in China. Stepwise refinement, you could say.
(sorry for posting in seperate posts, things occur to me over time).
(all links are in GB chinese)
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).
A page of pictures the about-us page 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.
Damn, when I first came in 1998, it was a crappy little place where there were 25 computers and a not-so-knowledgable staff. Things have changed, I guess.
(disclosure, IANACN (I am not a Chinese national))
There's a lot of stuff going on in China right now, a lot.
Xiagang (off of post)
Tons of people have been laid off by SOE (state owned enterprises), and don't have a viable source of income. This people are were the bulk of the current unrest is coming from (protests in small cities, usually not heard of in the western media).
Liumin (migrant workers)
Lots of people are moving from the countryside to find work in the big cities/coastal areas. They live in pretty crappy situations, and work crazy hours at construction sites or in factories.
wang ba (internet "bar"/cafe)
When I last visited (a bit more than a year ago), even relatively small cities (on the order of Portland or Omaha(?)) had a good chance of having an internet bar. Lots of college students had web access (although often just access to internal Chinese sites -- because it costs more money to access international lines). China has 1.x billion people, most are in the coutryside. Most don't use computers. Even with 15 million internet users, that's hardly more than a percent or 2. Thing will change fast, but I don't think that the average farmer is going to be surfing for a long, long time.
News sites
Voices of Chinese has China headlines from lots of newspapers both US and Chinese.
River Town talks about a man's experiences in teaching English in rural China. Very, very insightful stuff about what the non-big city/coastal life is like.
Damn, I'll probably post more later on tonight -- I didn't get into what I think the Chinese are thinking about, etc, but I'll get to it.
Lastly: I'm really sick of china-haters on slashdot. There's a lot of problems about China, but there are really no easy solutions.
Freeamp makes an explorer-like tree based on the ID3 tags of your MP3 files. It's not the most elegant solution, but it's pretty handy if you have a few gigs and you're looking for something (or you want to change, say, the album name or artist name for EVERY work from a single artist.).
I'm sure I won't be the most popular guy on the
block for suggesting this, but:
You don't need a different server for each
server daemon.
It's cool to have lots of computers, and it's fun
to play around with new OSes, and it's nice to
have backup computers (so if the file server goes
down, the web server is still OK), but I think
most of the time it's just overkill.
A decent server should be able to handle
file/web/print/DNS/whatever, and maybe computer
#2 can be for testing/desktop/playing around.
Maybe you could have one desktop and one testbed.
A firewall can be added if you're paranoid or
it's needed (I feel fine running BSD without
inetd).
Although we can argue about what's causing the
power crisis in california, etc, limiting your
own resource consumption is almost always a
good thing.
note: it is fun to get random hardware to work though -- I guess you've just got to think about consequences. Don't mean to bust your high.
I thought that while the bandwidth is huge, there are some latency issues with fibre -- copper is faster when bandwidth is not big but latency requirements are strict... Right?
Pico isn't a part of "BSD" per se -- VI is the standard editor. Pico comes from the Univerisity of Washington (I believe) and is usually installed as a part of PINE. However, it IS much easier to learn than VI, and might be good for people who don't have the time to deal with VI or EMACS.
I'm pretty sure most places use switches for this type of environment -- meaning that ethernet packets destined for your machine won't get sent to any others.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also interesting how people say "ni you ta de email ma?" -- making email mean "email address". I guess this happens to some extent in English as well ("do you have my email?") but it doesn't seem as natural.
or something like that.
(couldn't resist fp)
You sound like you have lots of experience working with investment bank IT -- can you tell me a bit about it?
I recently accepted an offer to work for Morgan Stanley as a equity trading systems developer, and I'm wondering how stuff is going to be once I start.
Thanks a lot!
willis/
Thanks for posting.
When you get a diff from two text files, you can look through it and see what's different by hand. This is a meaninful diff.
If you have a diff in two MS word documents, will you be able to tell that the only change is an italics tag and a left-centering? Probably not, or at least not without opening BOTH, and looking them over for changes.
Yeah.
I found the comment it was replying to was, uh, sub-optimal, though.
willis.
My best advice is to get the students up to speed in technical English. It might be hard, but the advantages are HUGE. Language encoding issues, MAN pages, new books, tech news, cooporation with other third world nationals.... it's all in English (from what I've seen, admitedly(sp) not much)
willis.
I'm about to start a job that's long hours/some travel (devel. at an investment bank), and I am pretty much aware of what's going to happen when I'm there... But I think that some exposure to the environment will be a good experience, and lord knows that I don't want to be doing it when I'm 30.
So what do you think? is the experience valuable? ("value" doesn't specifically imply "worth money")
College students/protests
The reason that college students are usually the lead protesters when something happens (i.e. the embassy bombing, Tiananmen, the Democracy Wall) is because of a long-standing tradition. On (or around) 5.4.1919, students had demonstrations around the country for the new literature movement (thereafter known as the May 4th Movement). Ever since then (probably before, as well), students have been given a privledged position in society -- to speak out. Since Tiananmen, I think the authorities finally really understand this, and they do there best to control things on college campuses.
Around 5.8.1999, when Nato/America bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the government encouraged the students to protest, but made sure they could control the momementum of the movement. (they had to -- it was close to the 10th year anniv. of Tiananmen, the 70th of the May 4th, and the 50th of the founding of the PRC -- tensions were high). This time (with the recon. plane), the people were angered by the press, but the government refrained from letting the students hit the street (in a way, it showed the relative importance of the event in the eyes of the government, I think).
Nationalism
I believe that Nationalism is the current leading ideology, and the only one that can hold together China at this time. With the economic liberalisation (and subsequent creation of the wealthy/middle class) and the disappearance of the "iron rice bowl" (state provided gainful employment), Socialism/Communism is now relatively defunct as a rallying call.
This puts the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) in a bad place -- their old mandate to rule was based on the creation of a Communist state. Now that they are driving changes progressively LESS communist, they have recast themselves as the leaders of the Chinese Nation, and promote a kind of Nationalism to give them legitimacy.
This leads to a weird phenomina(?), a sort of top-down nationalism. People are really nationalist because of nationalist propaganda put out by the government, and not because (IMHO) of their own patriotism. (Granted, this is true in most nations). In America, for example, things are reversed. The government doesn't go around making so many heroes and using saturated state-owned media to make people nationalist, but there are lots of people who put up flags in their front yards and who are fiercely nationalist (this a bottom-up nationalism).
Reforms
80s: Political/economic
90s: just economic. I think it's a result of the Tiananmen thing (too much political reform) and a real fear of the problems that messed up Russia. When I spoke to people about political reform, lots of them pointed to Russia and said that's what happens when you concentrate on politics before economics.
Chinese political self-mythologizing
This is one my latest pet theory. For the last 5000 years, the Chinese have been oppressed by somebody (i.e. the government or outsiders), and for the last 150 years, they've been accutely aware of it (anti-colonialism). In the a lot of the popular literature in China, the downtroden were placed as heroes and martyrs, struggling against a much larger oppressor. Now it's a cultural reflex for Chinese to heroicize China by placing it as the oppressed (and thus right and good), and sometimes they use the US as the oppressor. (this is similar to how the US needs peer-enemies, and is trying to create an enemy with China to fill the void left by Russia/USSR).
Lastly, another word to slashdot china-haters
Dude, like I said last time, China has lots of problems. The government is not so stable (low-grade power struggle in progress), and the economics are in a somewhat fragile situation. Lots of people are getting jacked, and they could easily break out and do something big. The CCP is scared of Falun Gong because it's a structure that looks as if it could challenge their leadership. The CCP censors because it doesn't want a new protest movement, etc. These things are bad, yes. The alternative, a China that has a civil war, etc. could be much worse. I think that working within the system is probably the best way to benefit the most people in China. Stepwise refinement, you could say.
willis.
(all links are in GB chinese)
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).
A page of pictures :
the about-us page 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.
Damn, when I first came in 1998, it was a crappy little place where there were 25 computers and a not-so-knowledgable staff. Things have changed, I guess.
There's a lot of stuff going on in China right now, a lot.
Xiagang (off of post)
Tons of people have been laid off by SOE (state owned enterprises), and don't have a viable source of income. This people are were the bulk of the current unrest is coming from (protests in small cities, usually not heard of in the western media).
Liumin (migrant workers)
Lots of people are moving from the countryside to find work in the big cities/coastal areas. They live in pretty crappy situations, and work crazy hours at construction sites or in factories.
wang ba (internet "bar"/cafe)
When I last visited (a bit more than a year ago), even relatively small cities (on the order of Portland or Omaha(?)) had a good chance of having an internet bar. Lots of college students had web access (although often just access to internal Chinese sites -- because it costs more money to access international lines). China has 1.x billion people, most are in the coutryside. Most don't use computers. Even with 15 million internet users, that's hardly more than a percent or 2. Thing will change fast, but I don't think that the average farmer is going to be surfing for a long, long time.
News sites
Voices of Chinese has China headlines from lots of newspapers both US and Chinese.
China News Digest an old volunteer run news site.
China Online mainly economic/finance news.
Inside China political news
Good book
River Town talks about a man's experiences in teaching English in rural China. Very, very insightful stuff about what the non-big city/coastal life is like.
Damn, I'll probably post more later on tonight -- I didn't get into what I think the Chinese are thinking about, etc, but I'll get to it.
Lastly: I'm really sick of china-haters on slashdot. There's a lot of problems about China, but there are really no easy solutions.
I mean, if you can read the page the link is on, then you can read the resume as well. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Freeamp makes an explorer-like tree based on the ID3 tags of your MP3 files. It's not the most elegant solution, but it's pretty handy if you have a few gigs and you're looking for something (or you want to change, say, the album name or artist name for EVERY work from a single artist.).
I thought it was Fucked Up Data... (when people kept talking about the mindcraft shit, it made sense).
I'd say that number has to be at least 20%, with 20% non-porn media in addition.
block for suggesting this, but:
You don't need a different server for each
server daemon.
It's cool to have lots of computers, and it's fun
to play around with new OSes, and it's nice to
have backup computers (so if the file server goes
down, the web server is still OK), but I think
most of the time it's just overkill.
A decent server should be able to handle
file/web/print/DNS/whatever, and maybe computer
#2 can be for testing/desktop/playing around.
Maybe you could have one desktop and one testbed.
A firewall can be added if you're paranoid or
it's needed (I feel fine running BSD without
inetd).
Although we can argue about what's causing the
power crisis in california, etc, limiting your
own resource consumption is almost always a
good thing.
note: it is fun to get random hardware to work though -- I guess you've just got to think about consequences. Don't mean to bust your high.
willis/
www.urbanentertainment.com
Excellent post.
Lameness filters can be a pain in the ass.
willis/
willis
willis.
Thanks for pointing that out -- that is pretty damn funny...
Pico isn't a part of "BSD" per se -- VI is the standard editor. Pico comes from the Univerisity of Washington (I believe) and is usually installed as a part of PINE.
However, it IS much easier to learn than VI, and might be good for people who don't have the time to deal with VI or EMACS.
willis/
I'm pretty sure most places use switches for this type of environment -- meaning that ethernet packets destined for your machine won't get sent to any others.
willis/