The BJ Olympic is pretty much a face project. That's why the opening ceremony is held at 2008/08/08 08;08:08pm, rather than on a mid-September day when the weather is cooler and air quality better. But the top officials just don't bother to remember that nowaday nobody in the world undermines China's economic prowess and nobody looks them down because they are a third world country. Everybody agrees that Beijing and Shanghai have some of the most modern infrastructure hardware. People inside and out disgrace and fear China because of other small issues like environment irresponsibility, greedy business practices, widest income/wealth gap, social injustice, corruption, and of course that little human right thing in the eyes of Westerners.
All in all, while China is busy putting pretty make-up on their face, people instead stare at their ass.
The term will be hidden in the small prints of the Service Agreement and so nobody will complain (well... except the lawyers in where class lawsuits are allowed.) If get sued by such lawyers, pay the lawyers a million bucks and give out a free pay-per-view pass, unless you opt-out. No other benefits for you.
Apart from that, your long rant about the joys of free markets is totally off base - nothing prevents a socialist community from utilizing markets to optimize allocation of resources as an alternative to planning. The issue is not market mechanisms, but creating markets that rewards the right behavior. That stalinist semi-feudal regimes chose to use outdated planning methods proves only that those planning methods didn't work or were poorly executed.
The issue is market-mechanism. If you leave it to a few central planners and top leaders in the government, it will slip into totalitarian system. Even if you try to entrust a democratic voting system, it won't work because people don't vote responsibly. If you leave the decisions to the market, you will only end up with a capitalistic system -- and some people will bound to exploit the weakness of others. Communism fails to work not because it is evil but because it is too idealistic. Capitalism works better not because it is altruistic but because it suits human nature better. But don't expect altruistic system ever exists, that's dictated by human nature.
In the real world, it is always somewhere in the middle and the pendulum swings back and forth.
China sues Microsoft for exactly the same real reason as US and EU -- Microsoft has tons of money. You know, when you get rich, you'll be followed after by lawyers, tax man, regulators, police or the gangsters.
The GP claimed that Chinese citizens have no real ability to question the government. The link I post shows the contrary -- they are actively blaming their government -- in fact, I feel more so than US citizens
After 5 years of biased coverage over China, you have no real ability to question the media. (And definitely, no ability to read Chinese; otherwise, you can read these 1,873,610+ comments related to the stock tumbling of the last two days, even though government shouldn't really be blamed for it at all.)
Maybe their machines are full of porns and they can just preemptively deny their responsibility of download porns by claiming it is uploaded in there by the Chinese government.
China's government today is trying to juggle a growing nationalism among younger Chinese, a nationalism that is not friendly toward the West and the U.S. in particular, despite our close economic ties. They have fostered a hostile attitude toward the U.S. through years of propaganda, and this, too, the Americans have ignored in the interests of making money.
Your theory would be true if it were 1970's now. I have not heard much anti-West or anti-US propaganda from the government since then. As you said, the Chinese enterprises, many are state-owned or creating lot of jobs, have been profiting from US-China trades. Why would smart business organizations like the Chines government kill their golden goose?
Rather, the new trend of anti-West nationalism seems triggered by Western media from CNN to Slashdot -- the Chinese are just pissed off by the seeming biased and inaccurate coverages of those media outlets. Why are these coverage bias? Just read the TFA. How can any reasonable person blame, or even hint, that in the era of email spam and malwares, some unknown hacking from an IP address within China as state-sponsor "activities" while there are many many other possibilities? And not to mention, we have read these unprovable accusations every other week for the past 3 years.
History? I just remembered some Floridans got fooled by the false promise of some retirement benefits and propelled George W. Bush to the White House despite Al Gore won the majority of the votes.
And now 8 years later, some Floridan politician violated their party's own rules and propelled Barack Obama to the nomination despite Hillary Clinton have won the majority in the primaries.
Why Florida again? Are Floridans just a bunch fools? Or something fishy going on there?
I have been involved with software companies in China. What you described is simply just your own wishful thinking. Chinese customers, private or government, mostly don't care if your products is OOS or MS or what. The large and rich organization will pay for the MS license (just to avoid copyright lawsuits, and yes, there are lawyers in China suing companies for copyright violation.) The poor ones just use pirated copies.
And "national security" is never in mind for most customers, nor affecting any purchase decision. In fact, I got to know an officer in the PLA army working on IT and he said they just bought Sun servers and use.
Teachers were (of course) worried that the children wouldn't pass the exams, so they concentrated their efforts on teaching how to pass the maths exam, rather than teaching maths. Schools across China, India, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore have been practicing these exam-driven for decades (or even centuries.) On one hand, this way of education does nothing but to remove the creativity and incentive for 99% of the students. On the other hand, they have produced large number of engineers and PhDs. So I don't know if this is good or bad.
It hasn't worked (well, the government's agency sets the exams, and makes them slightly easier every year, so they say it's worked.) This has not been the problem for the above mentioned countries with the same system. Maybe UK's officials have a lower ethical standard or just try to look good so they can get re-elected? (but the officials in those other countries will have to look good to please their superiors as well.)
The ranking of schools isn't useful anyway -- schools in poor areas do worse, schools in rich areas do better, it's extremely difficult to do anything about that.
So is everywhere else in the world! In US, good schools are now a benchmark of good neighborhood (and vice versa.) House prices in good school district is at premium and holds stead even in this time of sub-prime market bubble. Bad schools is synonymous to bad neighborhood with higher crimes.
Mass education needs to be scalable and measurable mechanically but good education can never be scaled nor measured mechanically. That's just another truth that people don't want to face.
That's what I understood. Maybe you can be very creative and use very complicate way to avoid contentions except a few independent shared variable updates -- and then you scale your algorithm to hundreds or thousands of CPUs, you will eventually hit the memory bus / communication overhead as usual. MPP supercomputers have been trying all tricks to minimize this overhead but still a bottleneck. I just don't see what this project has achieved but to create maybe a faster concurrent hash map (or the likes) -- it sounds like there were some sort of fundamental breakthrough in computer science -- that's not the case. So it is more like a marketing bluff.
Well... if I remember what I learned from OS and hardware classes right. LL/SC and CAS operations do involve locks at the hardware level. These operations may need no OS system call, may use no explicit semaphore or lock, but the memory bus has to be locked briefly -- especially to guarantee all CPUs seeing the same updated value, it has to do a write-through and cannot just update the values in cache local to the CPU. And when you have large number of CPU cores running, the memory bus becomes the bottleneck by itself.
So I fail to see anything radically new in this project. It is not lock-free at all. It sounds more like bogus marketing pitch to me.
Of course some are valid criticisms, but they are far and few between. Some are good intentioned criticisms, but are nonetheless flawed by the lack of deep understanding of the situation in China. And some are just... bashing China for the sake of it.
This may be improving. As I noticed, the recent coverages of China earthquake in the Western media are more balance and say some good things about what the government does. This is likely the results of exposing their bias coverage over the Tibet violence by the Chinese netizens.
Unfortunately, slashdot editors still seem to stuck their heads in the sands. Any story with slight positive attitude toward the core issues (freedom, human rights, etc.) I submitted to/. got rejected, while the negative ones I posted got through.
As I lived in China for the past few years, I notice that China is a much less law-abiding place. In the U.S., if there is a law -- like paying tax, then for most normal people -- no matter how much you dislike the law, you would obey it somehow. The ones who try to deliberately avoid it would do it very carefully -- finding loophole or un-approvability before they evade a law.
In China, people just bluntly ignore the law and fabricate false evidence outright. For example, the Chinese tax law accounts for a sale if an official receipt (known as Fa Piao issued by the tax bureau); the buyer can use that to deduct expense and the seller pays tax. Sounds simple. But in many places, the Fa Piao you got is fake because the business just acquire a whole bunch from the black market. So you have to check the authenticity of the Fa Piao as you check the money.
There are plenty of examples from daily live, labor and business practice, to birth control policy, where everybody just break the laws regularly and never even feel nervous about doing that. Criminal laws (outright steal, robbery, murder) are one the few regular people obey -- probably due to better enforcement.
Yet at the same time, people do not like a lawless society and they often blame ineffective government enforcement. I think that's why 85% people are OK with government control with the Internet -- they just want others to obey rules, not themselves.
That's why people never worry too much about censorship or government regulation in general and are quite free. Only we in the West worry about these laws.
Oh... they have instituted a Social Security system a few years ago. Unfortunately, they model it after the failing U.S. social security.
And now they are on track to create a public health system, after public outcry over a case in which the patiet was charged 5 million Yuan (US$400K) over a 5 month stay in the hospital before dying. Just hope they don't model it after the U.S. system again.
This news sounds bogus to me, exactly because the Chinese government is already doing the censoring:
The Great Firewall already blocks contents they don't like. So why would installing another filter at the hotel would work differently?
If they want to censor incoming/outgoing traffic, they can just do so right at the hotel's Internet service provider. That would be more effective, simpler and more reliable.
The hotel must have already logged each room's Internet activities. Why? If someone uses the hotel's connection to conduct frauds and criminal activities, the hotel must shield itself from liability anyway.
While I dislike China's censorship, I think this type of news looks bogus, attempts to get media attention, and has the exact purpose of exaggerating the situation.
After the SARS outbreaks in 2003, China has been much more open on reporting outbreaks of transmissive diseases. The suppression of SARS taught them that openness would not cause panic but solve it. We just hope they apply the lesson during the Olympics and to other areas of governing.
The Olympics exists for two purposes - to allow athletes to compete against others around the world for sport and to promote the idea of international competition taking the form of athletic events instead of warfare. To promote sport and to promote peace.
Wrong. The Olympics now exists for only one purpose -- a venue for the advertisers. Don't overrate it.
Ever wonder why open source is so popular in Brazil and other BRIC nations?
This is simply not true. It is just a myth spread by open source advocates. Go check out who actually Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox in those countries by yourself.
In the eyes of non-geeks, the real benefits of open source is just the price and nothing else. When one can get a DVD with Windows and MS Office for $0 (download) to $1 (buy one at the street corner,) nobody will have the incentive to use Linux and Firefox. Period.
First, Yahoo does not operate in China but "Yahoo China," which is a Chinese company partly owned by Yahoo through some very complicate arrangement setup by the lawyers, operates in China. Yahoo inc. and other big websites have to do that to work around Chinese laws regarding publishing and foreign ownership. Yahoo Inc. is just a shareholder and domain name owner. And I'm absolutely sure, without looking in intricacies of this new law, that an U.S. lawyer can easily draw the line between the two entities should the China subsidiary get caught.
The Chinese prosecutors can just submit the evidences as if it were collect from the person's computer or from the Great Firewall log. How do you prove Yahoo Inc. actually give out anything to the prosecutor?
There are laws written for easier reading. For example, I'm not a lawyer and my Chinese is just average (below high school) but I find their laws, like this Corporation Law rather easier to read compared to the U.S. laws that I have read.
Their laws have much less technicalities. but this ambiguity also gives too much power to various level of governments to impose arbitrary restriction or questionable relaxation of the laws. And it also allows greater amount of corruption in the legal system.
In the U.S. system, on the other hand, lawyers can easily abuse the laws based on technicalities. And it allows very profitable lobbying for the law makers.
The GP is right about human nature: different systems, same results -- someone will find ways to abuse the systems.
Slashdot Mirror
on the positive side, may this push down the price of pork and petro, amid their 10% inflation?
The BJ Olympic is pretty much a face project. That's why the opening ceremony is held at 2008/08/08 08;08:08pm, rather than on a mid-September day when the weather is cooler and air quality better. But the top officials just don't bother to remember that nowaday nobody in the world undermines China's economic prowess and nobody looks them down because they are a third world country. Everybody agrees that Beijing and Shanghai have some of the most modern infrastructure hardware. People inside and out disgrace and fear China because of other small issues like environment irresponsibility, greedy business practices, widest income/wealth gap, social injustice, corruption, and of course that little human right thing in the eyes of Westerners.
All in all, while China is busy putting pretty make-up on their face, people instead stare at their ass.
The term will be hidden in the small prints of the Service Agreement and so nobody will complain (well... except the lawyers in where class lawsuits are allowed.) If get sued by such lawyers, pay the lawyers a million bucks and give out a free pay-per-view pass, unless you opt-out. No other benefits for you.
Apart from that, your long rant about the joys of free markets is totally off base - nothing prevents a socialist community from utilizing markets to optimize allocation of resources as an alternative to planning. The issue is not market mechanisms, but creating markets that rewards the right behavior. That stalinist semi-feudal regimes chose to use outdated planning methods proves only that those planning methods didn't work or were poorly executed.
The issue is market-mechanism. If you leave it to a few central planners and top leaders in the government, it will slip into totalitarian system. Even if you try to entrust a democratic voting system, it won't work because people don't vote responsibly. If you leave the decisions to the market, you will only end up with a capitalistic system -- and some people will bound to exploit the weakness of others. Communism fails to work not because it is evil but because it is too idealistic. Capitalism works better not because it is altruistic but because it suits human nature better. But don't expect altruistic system ever exists, that's dictated by human nature.
In the real world, it is always somewhere in the middle and the pendulum swings back and forth.
China sues Microsoft for exactly the same real reason as US and EU -- Microsoft has tons of money. You know, when you get rich, you'll be followed after by lawyers, tax man, regulators, police or the gangsters.
The GP claimed that Chinese citizens have no real ability to question the government. The link I post shows the contrary -- they are actively blaming their government -- in fact, I feel more so than US citizens
After 5 years of biased coverage over China, you have no real ability to question the media. (And definitely, no ability to read Chinese; otherwise, you can read these 1,873,610+ comments related to the stock tumbling of the last two days, even though government shouldn't really be blamed for it at all.)
Maybe their machines are full of porns and they can just preemptively deny their responsibility of download porns by claiming it is uploaded in there by the Chinese government.
"Lies repeated one hundred times would become 'the truth'." - Conventional Wisdom
Your theory would be true if it were 1970's now. I have not heard much anti-West or anti-US propaganda from the government since then. As you said, the Chinese enterprises, many are state-owned or creating lot of jobs, have been profiting from US-China trades. Why would smart business organizations like the Chines government kill their golden goose?
Rather, the new trend of anti-West nationalism seems triggered by Western media from CNN to Slashdot -- the Chinese are just pissed off by the seeming biased and inaccurate coverages of those media outlets. Why are these coverage bias? Just read the TFA. How can any reasonable person blame, or even hint, that in the era of email spam and malwares, some unknown hacking from an IP address within China as state-sponsor "activities" while there are many many other possibilities? And not to mention, we have read these unprovable accusations every other week for the past 3 years.
History? I just remembered some Floridans got fooled by the false promise of some retirement benefits and propelled George W. Bush to the White House despite Al Gore won the majority of the votes.
And now 8 years later, some Floridan politician violated their party's own rules and propelled Barack Obama to the nomination despite Hillary Clinton have won the majority in the primaries.
Why Florida again? Are Floridans just a bunch fools? Or something fishy going on there?
It is time to learn from History!
I have been involved with software companies in China. What you described is simply just your own wishful thinking. Chinese customers, private or government, mostly don't care if your products is OOS or MS or what. The large and rich organization will pay for the MS license (just to avoid copyright lawsuits, and yes, there are lawyers in China suing companies for copyright violation.) The poor ones just use pirated copies.
And "national security" is never in mind for most customers, nor affecting any purchase decision. In fact, I got to know an officer in the PLA army working on IT and he said they just bought Sun servers and use.
So is everywhere else in the world! In US, good schools are now a benchmark of good neighborhood (and vice versa.) House prices in good school district is at premium and holds stead even in this time of sub-prime market bubble. Bad schools is synonymous to bad neighborhood with higher crimes.
Mass education needs to be scalable and measurable mechanically but good education can never be scaled nor measured mechanically. That's just another truth that people don't want to face.
That's what I understood. Maybe you can be very creative and use very complicate way to avoid contentions except a few independent shared variable updates -- and then you scale your algorithm to hundreds or thousands of CPUs, you will eventually hit the memory bus / communication overhead as usual. MPP supercomputers have been trying all tricks to minimize this overhead but still a bottleneck. I just don't see what this project has achieved but to create maybe a faster concurrent hash map (or the likes) -- it sounds like there were some sort of fundamental breakthrough in computer science -- that's not the case. So it is more like a marketing bluff.
Well... if I remember what I learned from OS and hardware classes right. LL/SC and CAS operations do involve locks at the hardware level. These operations may need no OS system call, may use no explicit semaphore or lock, but the memory bus has to be locked briefly -- especially to guarantee all CPUs seeing the same updated value, it has to do a write-through and cannot just update the values in cache local to the CPU. And when you have large number of CPU cores running, the memory bus becomes the bottleneck by itself.
So I fail to see anything radically new in this project. It is not lock-free at all. It sounds more like bogus marketing pitch to me.
Can someone correct or explain to me?
This one may be more effective.
This may be improving. As I noticed, the recent coverages of China earthquake in the Western media are more balance and say some good things about what the government does. This is likely the results of exposing their bias coverage over the Tibet violence by the Chinese netizens.
Unfortunately, slashdot editors still seem to stuck their heads in the sands. Any story with slight positive attitude toward the core issues (freedom, human rights, etc.) I submitted to /. got rejected, while the negative ones I posted got through.
As I lived in China for the past few years, I notice that China is a much less law-abiding place. In the U.S., if there is a law -- like paying tax, then for most normal people -- no matter how much you dislike the law, you would obey it somehow. The ones who try to deliberately avoid it would do it very carefully -- finding loophole or un-approvability before they evade a law.
In China, people just bluntly ignore the law and fabricate false evidence outright. For example, the Chinese tax law accounts for a sale if an official receipt (known as Fa Piao issued by the tax bureau); the buyer can use that to deduct expense and the seller pays tax. Sounds simple. But in many places, the Fa Piao you got is fake because the business just acquire a whole bunch from the black market. So you have to check the authenticity of the Fa Piao as you check the money.
There are plenty of examples from daily live, labor and business practice, to birth control policy, where everybody just break the laws regularly and never even feel nervous about doing that. Criminal laws (outright steal, robbery, murder) are one the few regular people obey -- probably due to better enforcement.
Yet at the same time, people do not like a lawless society and they often blame ineffective government enforcement. I think that's why 85% people are OK with government control with the Internet -- they just want others to obey rules, not themselves.
That's why people never worry too much about censorship or government regulation in general and are quite free. Only we in the West worry about these laws.
Oh... they have instituted a Social Security system a few years ago. Unfortunately, they model it after the failing U.S. social security.
And now they are on track to create a public health system, after public outcry over a case in which the patiet was charged 5 million Yuan (US$400K) over a 5 month stay in the hospital before dying. Just hope they don't model it after the U.S. system again.
This news sounds bogus to me, exactly because the Chinese government is already doing the censoring:
While I dislike China's censorship, I think this type of news looks bogus, attempts to get media attention, and has the exact purpose of exaggerating the situation.
After the SARS outbreaks in 2003, China has been much more open on reporting outbreaks of transmissive diseases. The suppression of SARS taught them that openness would not cause panic but solve it. We just hope they apply the lesson during the Olympics and to other areas of governing.
Wrong. The Olympics now exists for only one purpose -- a venue for the advertisers. Don't overrate it.
This is simply not true. It is just a myth spread by open source advocates. Go check out who actually Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox in those countries by yourself.
In the eyes of non-geeks, the real benefits of open source is just the price and nothing else. When one can get a DVD with Windows and MS Office for $0 (download) to $1 (buy one at the street corner,) nobody will have the incentive to use Linux and Firefox. Period.
First, Yahoo does not operate in China but "Yahoo China," which is a Chinese company partly owned by Yahoo through some very complicate arrangement setup by the lawyers, operates in China. Yahoo inc. and other big websites have to do that to work around Chinese laws regarding publishing and foreign ownership. Yahoo Inc. is just a shareholder and domain name owner. And I'm absolutely sure, without looking in intricacies of this new law, that an U.S. lawyer can easily draw the line between the two entities should the China subsidiary get caught.
The Chinese prosecutors can just submit the evidences as if it were collect from the person's computer or from the Great Firewall log. How do you prove Yahoo Inc. actually give out anything to the prosecutor?
There are laws written for easier reading. For example, I'm not a lawyer and my Chinese is just average (below high school) but I find their laws, like this Corporation Law rather easier to read compared to the U.S. laws that I have read.
Their laws have much less technicalities. but this ambiguity also gives too much power to various level of governments to impose arbitrary restriction or questionable relaxation of the laws. And it also allows greater amount of corruption in the legal system.
In the U.S. system, on the other hand, lawyers can easily abuse the laws based on technicalities. And it allows very profitable lobbying for the law makers.
The GP is right about human nature: different systems, same results -- someone will find ways to abuse the systems.