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Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#81

Post by scarmig »

cobrausn wrote: post #67
coldtea wrote: post #37

I take offense with the following part of the article: "Other repressive nations that have developed local versions of Linux include North Korea, which built the KDE-based Red Star OS to help wean it as a nation off of an unfortunate dependence on Windows made by the capitalists over at Microsoft." China is a "repressive nation"? Says who? Britain, the leader in colonialist aggressions, mass slavery and blatant inter…

Your first two complaints about Britain might have been true a couple hundred years ago. In the meantime, China still has Gulags. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-21822684

What makes something a gulag? Throwing people in prison for petty crimes like drugs or prostitution? Forcing them to labor?

The developed English-speaking countries have far more people imprisoned for those kinds of offenses than does China, despite having a fraction of the population. Does that make English-speaking countries repressive? (My answer would be yes, for the record, for both.)

Or is it the political imprisonment? That's even more disturbing, but the lines about hundreds of thousands of prisoners really don't apply to them: it's closer to the hundreds or the thousands. Far, far too many (too many = >0), but let's not lose perspective, here.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#82

Post by scarmig »

staticfish wrote: post #65
coldtea wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, Britain hasn't been repressive in this sense for at least the last ~250 years 250 years? They had colonies all over the world until merely 50 years ago. Doing stuff from direct slavery to mass executions, to fighting natives asking for freedom with submachine guns. And they still interfere in their ex-colonies politics (not to mention being the US lackeys and partners in all kinds of invasions). They even che…

There is no comparison to China's Taiwan: "That should be China's attitude". Also Tibet. Clearly not a Chinese country but of course that doesn't stop them.

The government of Taiwan also thinks Taiwan is part of China... it's a dispute over which government is the rightful ruler of the geographic entity comprised of Taiwan plus the mainland.

China also never killed, directly or indirectly, millions of people in Taiwan. Britain can't say the same thing about India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#83

Post by cobrausn »

scarmig wrote: post #81
cobrausn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first two complaints about Britain might have been true a couple hundred years ago. In the meantime, China still has Gulags. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-21822684

What makes something a gulag? Throwing people in prison for petty crimes like drugs or prostitution? Forcing them to labor? The developed English-speaking countries have far more people imprisoned for those kinds of offenses than does China, despite having a fraction of the population. Does that make English-speaking countries repressive? (My answer would be yes, for the record, for both.) Or is it the political impr…

Allowing local bureaucrats unchecked decision making abilities when it comes to who gets locked up where. Last I checked, that's pretty hard to pull off in the West, despite all the rest of our problems. And when it does happen, it's an outrage when we find out.

You are right - let's not lose perspective here.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#84

Post by tomrod »

sukuriant wrote: post #79
kyllo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop programs are an issue, but they can be ported. The biggest problem is all the websites that serve ActiveX plugins. Web apps are supposed to be platform-independent, that's one of their biggest advantages, but Microsoft sabotaged that with ActiveX. Microsoft did a tremendous amount of harm to internet users by producing so much platform-dependent web software.

Did you really just say that it's easier to write a large number of windows-only programs than it is to either: a) fix the websites that have ActiveX dependencies b) modify a single web-browser to support ActiveX like IE6 used to If true, ... wow.

Depends on the costs involved. Network externalities are a killer.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#85

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

fatjokes wrote: post #43
cs702 wrote: post #11

Leaving aside the normal concerns about collaboration with an authoritarian government, this looks like a really big deal: Ubuntu is now the "reference architecture for standard operating systems" in China. [1] If I understand correctly, this means a flavor of Ubuntu (and Unity, according to the press release) will be used by hundreds of millions of people within the next decade, far surpassing the worldwide market s…

Unlikely. Most people in China use pirated versions of Windows, so they'll keep doing that. Maybe the governments will require the use of this brand of Ubuntu, but that's it.

Yeah. Even North Korea, which has its own Linux variant, seems to use Windows XP extensively.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#86

Post by stcredzero »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #48
analyst74 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're over-estimating the amount of control the party has or tries to enforce in China. Inside Chinese border, the amount of people who fear the party is probably in line with those who trust it -- not many.

I will happily defer to those with real knowledge of China, however the basic issue seems true - the vast, "make mockery of all that has gone before" economic growth has been exclusively driven from democratic/free nations. If you want some of that growth, it seems logical you need to allow freedom. How much? How soon? How to stop it descending into anarchy? With a billion + lives on the line ... well I have a lot of…

> If you want some of that growth, it seems logical you need to allow freedom.

Singapore.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#87

Post by stcredzero »

cheapsteak wrote: post #18
cs702 wrote: post #11

Leaving aside the normal concerns about collaboration with an authoritarian government, this looks like a really big deal: Ubuntu is now the "reference architecture for standard operating systems" in China. [1] If I understand correctly, this means a flavor of Ubuntu (and Unity, according to the press release) will be used by hundreds of millions of people within the next decade, far surpassing the worldwide market s…

Apple is incredibly popular among Chinese international university students, but the first thing everyone does when they get a new Macbook is to install bootcamp and never boot into OSX again. If even the brightest and more malleable of the people don't want to use anything except Windows, I don't see the average person switching to Ubuntu at all.

> Apple is incredibly popular among Chinese international university students, but the first thing everyone does when they get a new Macbook is to install bootcamp and never boot into OSX again.

Is Chinese support in Windows dramatically better than in OS X? I found the level of stylus support in Windows to be head and shoulders higher in quality than Apple's. Perhaps it is the same with languages.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#88

Post by stcredzero »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #52
kyllo wrote: post #22

This is a great idea. Now one and a half billion Chinese can get their free OS'es completely legally instead of using pirated, possibly malware-tainted copies of Windows XP. And Microsoft can stop crying about the hypothetical lost revenue due to piracy when everyone switches to a better, free product. Not that they couldn't switch before, but perhaps the official government endorsement of Ubuntu will jump-start the…

This assumes that the new OS will be better than WinXP/Win7/Win8. (Well, let's just not talk about Win8.) If "better" means more compatible with existing apps, more stable, easier to use, more standard... not sure you can make an argument for that. Maybe in a few years when the desktop is just a portal for web apps. Plus... China's currently only 1.34 billion. They've got a ways to go to get to 1.5B.

> If "better" means more compatible with existing apps, more stable, easier to use, more standard... not sure you can make an argument for that. Maybe in a few years when the desktop is just a portal for web apps.

WINE has made some big strides. If the Chinese government properly got behind it, a properly outfitted Ubuntu with really well integrated WINE might be a defacto Windows replacement in China.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#89

Post by scarmig »

staticfish wrote: post #66
coldtea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not going to win friends here, but it's much like talking with an Israeli. Or an American, for that matter. Americans still believe they are a "progressive" and model nation for freedom. Segregation was merely 40 years ago. People go to jail for decades for procession of marijuana. They execute teenagers. They execute (period -- almost all western countries have stopped this shit). People still are told (and ..…

>Americans still believe they are a "progressive" and model nation for freedom. Not all Americans. Look at HN or any semi-educated social circle. A lot of your points just bring up tit-for-tat historical talking points. Yes a lot of countries have done a lot of terrible things throughout history, especially the west, but we're talking about now. 2013. Today I just read an article describing how the Chinese have just…

But the tit-for-tat is totally relevant! At least for things happening in the present day. Most people's countries are doing things you disagree with: but within a country, even if you oppose someone doing something, you can usually sympathize with the rationale behind it. When the media deflects attention to those evil people with different color skin across the ocean, it's very easy to simplify things.

Case in point: those escaped North Koreans weren't merely refugees but defecting soldiers who had shot their superior officer. Do you think China liked being in that situation? You can either cause a major international row with a nuclear-equipped rabid dog who for historical reasons is sitting a couple hundred miles away from your capital, or you can send a rebellious military unit back for certain execution.

What would you have done? And let's make this sharper: what would your country's military bureaucracy have done?

Why not let people who have actual local knowledge and care about changing things focus on what local people's actual priorities are and the real pain points for human wellbeing?

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#90

Post by stcredzero »

staticfish wrote: post #63
coldtea wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tiananmen square. Murders against any form of civil disobedience. Kent state shootings. And lots of similar actions, from the Wounded Knee incident to the Wako siege. > Secret and non-secret alliances with North Korea. Secret and non-secret alliances with Pinochet, Videla, Saudi Arabia and pretty much every corrupted government and dictatorship on earth. > Occasional acts of aggression on Japan. Constant acts of ag…

Wait, I'm British. You were talking about Britain. Why did we suddenly switch to the USA? Also, half of your rebuttals are inaccurate and half are not comparable in the slightest. No, there is no western version of the horrors of "Tank Man". A lot of the Chinese i've spoken to do not even know this happened, and the other half refuse to see it as a problem. You're a textbook example. The USA isn't the greatest countr…

> Also, half of your rebuttals are inaccurate and half are not comparable in the slightest.

Sounds comparable to me.

> A lot of the Chinese i've spoken to do not even know this happened, and the other half refuse to see it as a problem.

There's a fair bit of obliviousness in the US as well.

> There is no suppression of readily available information (blocked search queries, etc).

Wikileaks? Alteration of Google Earth & Maps.

(Powerful National Government) * (Military Industrial Complex) = (Some Unsavory Stuff Goes On)

It's pretty universal.

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