Chinese internet is like the rest of internet. Chinese people don't care about censorship of external sites, because they don't care about them, the same way you don't care about youku, weibo, kaixin, taobao, etc.. you use youtube, they use youku.
And whoever want to bypass censorship can buy a vpn (they're easy to find and reliable).
The only thing that can be said about internet in china is that it's dead slow for a foreigner, but that's due to bad overseas connections and L7 filtering. If you go on chinese sites, it's totally ok.
I stayed 3 years in china, and was 24/7 on vpn.
That seems like the entire point: China's firewall tries to create a Chinese internet consisting of people in China browsing sites in China. The internet doesn't work that way. While sites with country-specific audiences do exist, for the most part everyone browses the same Internet. Sites like Baidu, Youku (a YouTube clone), Weibo (a Twitter clone), and other sites hosted in China benefit greatly from the firewall. Without the firewall, those sites would still have an audience, but they'd compete heavily with the much larger audiences on the sites they cloned.
There are multiple facets to the GWF's raison d'être. Most touched on in this thread. One area not given much voice is China's desire to handle legal issues in its domain. If you want a web site in China, you have to have a person (usually through a company) that is the agent responsible for the site. This person must be a Chinese national. That person is the one that has to show up in court if the site/company gets sued. If China is serious about nurturing its legal system, its a perfectly valid approach that parties conducting business in China be required to answer to the legal system when required. This means that if Facebook wants to serve up to Chinese people, they need a Chinese company and agree to be subject to Chinese law for what they serve up in China. Many may not agree with the restrictions on what you can serve up, but this is a different aspect of the GWF.
I don't consider that a "perfectly valid approach". It precisely matches what the US wants to do with SOPA: regulate foreign sites in absentia and block them if they don't comply.
I've always perceived the Great Firewall as a protectionist measure rather than censorship (I guess it's a bit of both). It's also been my experience that Chinese people don't care about censorship. Regarding VPNs, it seems they have been cracking down on non authorized VPN vendors lately (my VPN recently stopped working over 3G and some ISPs). (been living there for over a year)
Well, his account was probably sold in china, it's common (at least it still was a few months ago) on taobao (the chinese ebay), they sell you "gift cards" to be used within 12h after purchase, it's in fact accounts. I guess that's why Apple started to ask CCV for purchases.
There's also a practice in China to use apps as a kind of fraud, or maybe money laundering. I've seen once a chinese wallpaper app, with each wallpaper for sale at $99, making thousands on the appstore.. when you think about it, it's easy to post an wallpaper app, set the price, and you get money through Apple, without any traces.
What I really hate about all this is that Apple still force you (or make it very difficult not to) to have a CC linked to your itunes account, even though you plan to never buy anything.
I like paid directory submissions, doing guest posts on blogs, building high quality Squidoo lenses (which include a link to your site), and paid reviews.
If you want the passive income badly enough, you will figure it out. If you don't want it badly enough, you don't deserve it.
too bad there's not so much said about optimizing latency, serving a lot of traffic is not that difficult, but getting the best latency to serve your files 50ms faster can make a big difference
This is an inaccurate comparison to VMWare Fusion. There are many features, e.g. Bootcamp partition virtualization, that virtualbox either forgot to mention or purposely excluded.
VirtualBox can actually do physical-partition virtualization, but you have to produce a VMDK file that points to the partition you want, and use that as the virtual disk. (Oh, and run VBox as root.) Conveniently, I've written some code to produce such a file: https://github.com/vasi/vmdk-raw-parts . Enjoy!
Aha, cloned! Thanks for this. I had to make my VMWare vmdk for my GPT partition by hand :-). I've been dreading the day when my disk changes and I have to recreate it. Now I will not.
Yup, it's using the physical partition, so all changes are preserved. Whether you want that or not.
I suppose you could use a snapshot VMDK to put the FS changes into a file, which you could then keep or discard. No idea if VBox or even VMWare actually supports this behaviour. Nor can I think of any particularly good use for it!
You can set up VirtualBox to use a physical (ie. Bootcamp) partition or disk. It's not as easy as in Parallels, but it isn't difficult and is explained well in the manual.
In the case of a free product like VirtualBox where you're not paying for tech support, there isn't a difference.
Unless you mean that there is a difference between what merely happens to work and what the developers strive to ensure works. In this case, VirtualBox definitely "supports" using physical disks and partitions (though they describe it as an "advanced" feature).
Because most things you would want to do with parallel port that actually work through all the layers of virtualization and emulation (ie. connecting a printer) can be done equally well with emulated serial port.
To me the former is not being fluent, it's just knowing basics, the later is being fluent. But then there's being bilingual which is a completely different level, much more difficult to reach than being fluent IMO.
They're so far behind because they're dedicated to release only when they think it's bug-free enough (for all packages, including all dependencies), which can be long after they freeze versions and features.
Another thing is they release the same distrib version on 9 different architectures, not only i386/amd64.
Considering this, and the fact they're volunteers, I don't think they're that far behind.
I use dropbox forever, was in the closed beta, and at that time I was using win. And until today I never heard about syncplicity, even though I know and tried similar services.
It's not about features, platforms, or whatever. I've seen the worst product succeed only because of marketing.
With most of dedicated server providers now, you can get any server with a 1 month contract, no strings attached, for a fraction of the price of an equivalent ec2 instance, and good IO as a bonus. And good providers usually delivers within 24h.
I love aws services and use them myself, but for ec2, but I doubt most users have such volatile needs. The main advantage I see, for aws users (non ec2) is to have everything in the same place.
> With most of dedicated server providers now, you can get any server with a 1 month contract
Still not really the point. You're going to have to buy enough servers in advance to handle your peak load every month. And then you're going to have to forecast ahead at the end of the month and cancel all the ones you don't need. It might be theoretically possible but in practice it is ridiculous. EC2 brings the contract interval to 1 hour and lets you control it with API calls.
I would love it if you could provide a link to your cheaper for more service providers. I've not found anything comparable for less $. Also, if you're comparing lock-in prices, compare them against the EC2 reserved instance prices.
I used to use serverbeach. They are definitely not cheaper if you compare RAM to RAM (just under 2x the cost of EC2 reserved), but of course they're dedicated not VPS, which is a better offering... not sure how much more their cheapest dedicated boxes are worth in comparison to an ec2 small instance though.
How about research uses? That kind of computing power is almost entirely un-buyable at the short terms many research needs have. You buy a month, or you buy nothing. EC2: you buy a minute, if that's all you need.
