Showing posts with label Soviet Union. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soviet Union. Show all posts

Sunday, October 28, 2012

China Churning


China is at a stage where it can no longer expect dramatic growth without some serious political reform.

China's ruling families: Torrent of scandal
Mr Xi needs to venture deep into political reform, including setting a timetable for the direct election of government leaders as Deng Xiaoping once suggested should be possible.
China’s new leadership: Vaunting the best, fearing the worst
The China he is preparing to rule is becoming cynical and anxious as growth slows and social and political stresses mount. ..... a quadrupling of China’s economy since he took over in 2002, he has reason to crow. In the same period China has grown from the world’s fifth-largest exporter to its biggest. ...... During the past ten years fees and taxes imposed on farmers, once a big cause of rural unrest, have been scrapped; government-subsidised health insurance has been rolled out in the countryside, so that 97% of farmers (up from 20% a decade ago) now have rudimentary cover; and a pension scheme, albeit with tiny benefits, has been rapidly extended to all rural residents. Tuition fees at government schools were abolished in 2007 in the countryside for children aged between six and 15, and in cities the following year (though complaints abound about other charges levied by schools). ....... huge government investment in affordable housing. A building spree launched in 2010 aims to produce 36m such units by 2015 at what China’s state-controlled media say could be a cost of more than $800 billion. ...... 95% of all Chinese now have at least some degree of health cover, up from less than 15% in 2000 ...... Its influence is now evident in places where it was hardly felt a decade ago, from African countries that supply it with minerals, to European ones that see China’s spending power and its mountain of foreign currency as bulwarks against their own economic ruin. It is even planning to land a man on the moon. ....... the rapid development of social media: services similar to Twitter and Facebook (both of which are blocked in China) that have achieved extraordinary penetration into the lives of Chinese of all social strata, especially the new middle class ...... The government tries strenuously to censor dissenting opinion online, but the digital media offer too many loopholes. ........ In September photographs circulated by microbloggers of a local bureaucrat smiling at the scene of a fatal traffic accident, and wearing expensive watches, led to his dismissal. ........ Many of the most widely circulated comments on microblogs share a common tone: one of profound mistrust of the party and its officials. Classified digests of online opinion are distributed among Chinese leaders. They pay close attention. ....... Even in the official media, articles occasionally appear describing the next ten years as unusually tough ones for China, economically and politically. ....... growing numbers of people losing hope and linking up with like-minded folk through the internet. It said these problems could, if mishandled, cause “a chain reaction that results in social turmoil or violent revolution”. ...... The next ten years, argued Mr Yuan, offered the “last chance” for economic reforms that could prevent China from sliding into a “middle-income trap” of fast growth followed by prolonged stagnation. ....... Leftists worry that the party will implode, like its counterparts in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, because it has embraced capitalism too wholeheartedly and forgotten its professed mission to serve the people. Rightists worry that China’s economic reforms have not gone nearly far enough and that political liberalisation is needed to prevent an explosion of public resentment. ...... Hu Xingdou of the Beijing Institute of Technology says it has become common among intellectuals to wonder whether 70 years is about the maximum a single party can remain in power, based on the records set by the Soviet Communist Party and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party. China’s party will have done 70 years in 2019. ........ most agree that the heady double-digit days of much of the past ten years are over. ... His late father, some note, had liberal leanings. The Dalai Lama once gave a watch to the elder Mr Xi, who wore it long after the Tibetan leader had fled into exile. This has fuelled speculation that Xi Jinping might be conciliatory to Tibetans. Wishful thinking abounds
Xi Jinping: The man who must change China
Across the world, China is seen as second in status and influence only to America. ..... China is “unstable at the grass roots, dejected at the middle strata and out of control at the top”. ...... Complaints that would once have remained local are now debated nationwide. ...... Last week Qiushi , the party’s main theoretical journal, called on the government to “press ahead with restructuring of the political system”. ....... Mr Xi could start by giving a little more power to China’s people. Rural land, now collectively owned, should be privatised and given to the peasants; the judicial system should offer people an answer to their grievances; the household-registration, or hukou, system should be phased out to allow families of rural migrants access to properly funded health care and education in cities. At the same time, he should start to loosen the party’s grip. China’s cosseted state-owned banks should be exposed to the rigours of competition; financial markets should respond to economic signals, not official controls; a free press would be a vital ally in the battle against corruption. ...... in the 1980s no less a man than Deng spoke of China having a directly elected central leadership after 2050 ...... political reform would make the party answerable to the courts and, as the purest expression of this, free political prisoners. It would scrap party-membership requirements for official positions and abolish party committees in ministries. It would curb the power of the propaganda department to impose censorship and scrap the central military commission, which commits the People’s Liberation Army to defend the party, not just the country. ....... Independent candidates should be encouraged to stand for people’s congresses, the local parliaments that operate at all levels of government, and they should have the freedom to let voters know what they think. A timetable should also be set for directly electing government leaders, starting with townships in the countryside and districts in the cities, perhaps allowing five years for those experiments to settle in, before taking direct elections up to the county level in rural areas, then prefectures and later provinces, leading all the way to competitive elections for national leaders
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Monday, July 30, 2012

The Red Hot Mobile Space

The official online color is: #A4C639 . 한국어: 공...
The official online color is: #A4C639 . 한국어: 공식 온라인 색은: #A4C639 . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Funny how Windows and the Mac operating system never went to war like this. HP and Dell should have been at loggerheads back in the days.

Apple vs. Samsung: Shaping the Mobile Battlefield
On July 9, a British judge named Colin Birss ruled that Samsung’s tablet computers were unlikely to be confused with Apple’s iPad because they’re “not as cool.” ..... a globe-spanning courtroom free-for-all over who invented what in smartphones and tablets .... the struggle for domination in the booming $312 billion mobile device market ..... Google’s open approach threatens Apple’s pitch to consumers that its exclusive, “walled garden” offerings are different and better. ..... a marathon bout, or perhaps cage match. Having fought over the past two years on four continents ..... Apple will try to convince jurors of one essential idea: Samsung is a copycat. .... Android phones manufactured by Samsung and other companies—all of which Apple has also serially sued in numerous forums worldwide—offer consumers a more flexible, open operating system with greater product choices at a variety of price points as an alternative to Apple’s single, expensive, and closed-system devices. ...... Samsung’s filings indicate that it will acknowledge that it closely studies its rival’s products. ..... Samsung said in its pretrial filing that Apple must prove that an ordinary consumer would be “deceived” into buying a Samsung tablet or phone, thinking that it was made by Apple. .... Apple’s Cook and Choi Gee Sung, the former CEO of Samsung, had tried and failed to settle the case in court-ordered mediation. ..... Samsung being one of Apple’s main suppliers of flash memory chips, display screens, and other components.
This reminds me of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. This fight is a waste of the two companies' resources.


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The Real Reason Apple Is Suing



Apple is a closed system, kind of like the Soviet Union was. And closed systems have huge disadvantages compared to open systems when it comes to innovation. Closed systems are destined to lose.

Apple is not going to become open. And so it is going to lose. It already has lost the smartphone war.

And so it has resorted to the tactic used by non innovators. You go to court. You sue.
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Sunday, February 12, 2012

Apple Is Being Unreasonable

Apple Inc.Apple Inc. (Photo credit: marcopako )FOSS Patents: Apple requests U.S. preliminary injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Nexus based on four high-power patents
The Verge: Apple seeks to ban Samsung's Galaxy Nexus, but it's really going after Android 4.0
CNet: Apple seeks U.S. ban on Galaxy Nexus
The Next Web: Apple moves to ban the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the U.S., attacking Android 4.0 with 4 tough patents
Electronista: Apple's new Samsung lawsuit targets Siri-like search, more
Phandroid: Apple at it again, file injunction request against Galaxy Nexus

This reminds me of the Cold War. The Soviets would threaten to obliterate America. The Americans would threaten to obliterate the Soviet Union. They went back and forth for decades. Finally they came to their senses and started talks to dismantle their nuclear weapons, much of them. But first they achieved Mutually Assured Destruction. As in, both would disappear if either carried out the threat.

Instead of the big companies engaging in such Cold War style drama it would make sense for them to come together and take the lead on software patent reform. Things in that department have been crazy for a while. And the big companies themselves have suffered much. Patent trolls have milked the big companies over long years.

For Apple to get offended by Siri like services would be equal to Google saying the search box is theirs and theirs alone. No, it isn't.

Apple right now is acting Soviet.

Software patent wars are energy that needs to go into innovation. There is plenty of work for the industry to do.