megaduck

25 ms·

241.
by megaduck 17y ago
Many good points, but I have a few quibbles. While I agree that things are getting better, I'm increasingly mistrustful of the "progress" being made on the regulatory front. There's a lot of new rules on the books, but I don't see a lot o
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by megaduck 17y ago
Bingo. I think it's widely unappreciated (even in China) that China's entire educational system is only thirty years old. During Mao's rule, all the schools were shut down while teachers and intellectuals were denounced, sent to labor camp
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by megaduck 17y ago
You've hit the nail on the head. This is the first time that China's really HAD much of a middle class. Most of this newly minted middle class has moved from being poor peasants to decently paid professionals, and they're quite happy with
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by megaduck 18y ago
It's great to see 802.15 getting a little bit of press. It's fantastically low power, got pretty good range, and the throughput isn't bad. Far better than 802.11 for these kinds of devices. For anyone who wants to play with 802.15, I stro
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by megaduck 18y ago
Actually, you can blame this one directly on political fear. Recently, video footage of Chinese police savagely beating prone Tibetan protesters got posted onto YouTube. Next thing you know, WHAM! Blocked. There's a lot of precedent for t
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by megaduck 18y ago
Spot on. Sometimes I get the feeling that China isn't one country, but a loose confederacy stitched together by military and propaganda. Taiwan might as well be another planet. I've only spent a little bit of time in Shanghai, but I belie
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by megaduck 18y ago
China has well over a billion people. You'll find a lot of ANYTHING in China, including entrepreneurialism. However, in my experience, most Chinese don't believe that starting a business is the best way to wealth. Of course, I'm a white A
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by megaduck 18y ago
Gosh, that attitude couldn't be more different in Beijing. Here in the PRC, business owners and entrepreneurs are viewed with some suspicion, a holdover from the revolutionary days. For example, Li Ning was a national sports hero, and he
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by megaduck 18y ago
Thanks for the link, rms. It's a good summary of the situation. For the Americans here, you can get a quick "gut" feeling for the hukou system by thinking about the illegal Mexican immigrants in the U.S. Sure, they can go to any city and
250.
by megaduck 18y ago
Full disclosure: I'm an American attending Beijing Normal University, but I have friends (both foreign and Chinese) at Tsinghua and Beida (Beijing University). I'll agree with you that most people, everywhere, are incurious. That's not a
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by megaduck 18y ago
< I have to wonder why that, culturally, seems to be linked to Asians? I can't speak for other Asian countries, but I know China. From what you wrote, your experience and the experience of Zhang Rui (the high school student) couldn't b
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by megaduck 18y ago
Your point is well taken, but "creative, effortful practice" also requires a foundation of creative and critical thinking. Like physics, critical thinking is a skill that should be learned and practiced, preferably from a young age and alo
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by megaduck 18y ago
I'd say the middle name is the place for common-ness. My first name is unusual (Lon), but my middle name is as common as dirt (David). The first name is a hassle sometimes, but I can always go by my middle name if I want. It also gives me
254.
by megaduck 18y ago
Agreed, there's nothing special about Lisp. He could have been talking about the future of scripting languages, or the future of statically-typed languages, or anything. However, one thing is clear: The future of languages is definitely V
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by megaduck 18y ago
Been there. A number of years ago, I worked for a largeish company as a contractor, supplementing their full-time staff. We all did the exact same job, doing second/third level helpdesk stuff. Kind of mindless, but it was the best work I
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by megaduck 18y ago
Wow. Flashback to 9th grade. Glad I'm not there anymore.
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by megaduck 18y ago
No kidding. J2EE is an abomination, and is almost single-handedly responsible for destroying Java's reputation with a lot of programmers. Spring is a giant leap forward. Grails is basically Spring MVC, wrapped in dynamic language goodness
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by megaduck 18y ago
Sorry to hear that you don't like Hibernate. I'm using it for a project right now, and I greatly prefer it to ActiveRecord. The trick is to use a framework (yes, a framework!) like Grails to autogenerate a lot of the configuration crap fo
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by megaduck 18y ago
I wince everytime I see something like this pop up. The JVM is an awesome piece of technology, and the Java language is a good replacement for C++ in a lot of cases. There's also a neat little ecosystem of alternative JVM languages sprout