The asian market XBox will be manufactured in China. Like TabletPC and PocketPCmanufacturing,the Chinese/Taiwanese-led high-tech groups are maturing very quickly to be independent of (and maybe superior to) their U.S.-controlled mentors.
Financial Express in India writes about the development of a similarly promising local expertise. India and China have very different sets of pros/cons, but both are clearly in a position todevelop intotwo of the most formidable domestic high-tech industries in the world soon.
Charles Cooper is rightwhen he says that officials in China are worried about the Windows because of fears that the U.S. government may have inserted back doors into Chinese stuff. He should have read my long-ago post on this exact topic— this is a real issue. His article seems to conclude that this is good news, though, so he seems to have missed the part where I explain that this means they will equally mistrust any non-domestic Linux. This is the whole reason that Red Flag Linux (which is not Red Hat) was created. And Red Flag might as well not be Linux, because Charles Cooper can’t do anything with it. Chinese government is behaving in a manner consistent with history and their perception of national security, and like my original post pointed out; with good reason. To read any more into things than that, as some Linux advocates seem to be doing, is wishful thinking.
(Honestly, I would love to see FSF try to sue China for source code to changes the central planning committe authorizes to domestic Red Flag copies. This would be one of the funniest ironies of a lifetime.)
Cooper does a good job raisinganother point;computer “state of art” is still pretty lousy. Software is only achieving 1% of what it should be doing for people, and unlocking just a small bit of that 99% potential can keep us busy for many years. Nobody in this industry should ever be worried about lack of opportunity or scarcity of ideas.
The example of McNealy and the Russian woman he uses to illustrate a pointseems very suspicious, though. I have heard that same anecdote since 20 years ago in a number of other contexts completely independent of Mr. McNealy as well, so it is likely that McNealy was simply relaying the anecdote and Cooper confused it for being a personal tale — or maybe McNealy forgot whether he had heard it or experienced it — who knows? In any case, I don’t think Russian women cry in supermarkets anymore (if they even did when I was 8 years old). And some of McNealy’s best employees are Russian women (and men), so he should really be more careful and retire the silly old anecdote already. I have visited at least three supermarkets in Beijing that were bigger than any I’ve seen in the U.S., but that is no reason to cry — itis just because nobody in China wants to shop some place that is not grandiose (in other words, small niche botiques are not considered “upscale” there; they are considered crummy alternatives to the superstores).
MSFT Server Market Share increases. No big surprise that Linux is cannibalizing other versions of Unix more than windows. Scott McNealy weighs in on why Dell should be selling Sun, but won’t. The interviewer is pretty persistent, and McNealy is very direct in his answers. The interviewgivesreally great insight into the market position that Sun is facing right now. Even with all of those challenges though, Sun gave $6 billion of profits on altruistic donations of software. Seems like some fuzzy accounting going on there, though — one wonders why they didn’t just go for bust on the tax breaks and shoot for 12 billion by donating twice as many copies.
Curious that ZDNet filed under “eBusiness” a story about “U.S. raids online date-rape drug sellers“. But sadly not surprising that they continue to propagate misconceptions. GHB was sold in health-food stores as an antidepressant and bodybuilding supplementup until the last decade, and gammabutyrolactone is widely used in industry for purposes other than manufacture of GHB. I can only assume that the other chemical they list is now being used as a precursor to GBL or GHB now that GBL is highly restricted.