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Is CentOS ready for the enterprise desktop? As a product, yes.

You will also end some RED Hat Linux licenses so you can call someone for support.

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Crunch myth about China's military threat

(Xinhua)

Updated: 2011-06-13 11:06

BEIJING - A deadly killer jet that can take on the most advanced military fighters of the world's sole superpower.

A behemoth "ship" under construction that will project the military power of the "Middle Kingdom" further off its coast. 

An army of cyber hackers ready to do all the havoc on the Internet.

These days, news stories by some Western media about China's military strength tend to play up its increasing size and menacing potential. Some Western observers have tried to hint to readers that something "big and evil" is fast evolving in China.

It turns out that the killer jet is just a stealth fighter yet to complete its test flight. By comparison, the US military has put their own stealth fighters, the F22s, into active service for many years.

The behemoth "ship" is an aircraft carrier under construction, but it  hardly makes a splash because not only traditional military powers like the United States and Russia have aircraft carriers, but even lesser powers, such as Thailand and Argentina, have their own carriers as well.

As for cyber hackers, they could be a bunch of web-savvy young people anxious to show off their skills, who have nothing to do with the Chinese military.

Myths about China's military like this are not hard to find in the West and elsewhere. 

It underlines the fact that some countries are growing increasingly uneasy about China's military capabilities as the country, supported by a booming economy, has loomed larger and larger on the world stage.

To get a true overall picture of China's military, one needs to take a close look at real strategy and capabilities of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Any attempt to mystify its real strength and intention can get one nowhere.

Chinese political and military leaders have availed themselves every opportunity to reiterate to outsiders China's unswerving commitment to "peaceful development." 

They do it so often that their remarks fall flat on some foreign ears, but the key message they try to get across has remained the same: China doesn't want war; China needs peace.

With more than 1.3 billion people to feed and tough internal challenges like the widening income gaps and great strains on energy and environment by rapid economic growth, 

China has little choice but to make the most of a largely peaceful environment and seek business opportunities rather than make enemies with other countries.

For example, according to one estimate, China has to create some 20 million jobs a year in the next 20 years to keep tens of millions of migrant workers and college graduates employed. That is roughly one-third of Britain's overall population.

Chinese Defense Minister Liang Guanglie has recently said that the key to judging whether a country is a threat to world peace does not lie in the strength of its economy or military, but indeed the practical domestic and foreign policy it pursues.

Late last year, after a crucial meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Dai Bingguo, Chinese state councilor in charge of foreign policy, has expounded on several occasions China's strategy of peaceful development.

In a long and detailed article under the title of Commitment to Peaceful Development, Dai said China believes win-win cooperation with other countries, instead of expansionism or hegemony, serves its national interests better.

In his words, China's commitment to peaceful development "will not change in 100 or 1,000 years."

Despite all the hype about China's military strength, China's defense spending, in proportion to its gross domestic product (GDP), has remained fairly low, compared to the world's major developed countries.

China's military spending is some $80 billion in 2010, roughly 1.4 percent of its GDP, while that of the major countries is around 3 percent to 4 percent, the Chinese government figures show.

Many Western observers assume a much higher spending for China's military than official figures indicate, and some put the figure as much as some $150 billion. However, even that wild guess pales when compared with the staggering US figure of $729 billion.

In terms of real capabilities, China's military is still regional in nature rather than global.

In contrast with the United States, the world's uncontested sole military superpower, China lags far behind when it comes to global reach of military forces and the ability for their rapid deployment around the world.

PLA Chief of the General Staff Chen Bingde, in a recent US tour, said China's military strength is 20 years behind the United States.

For China, widespread myth about its military power underscores a need  to communicate more often and more effectively with other countries on the issue. 

The increasingly frequent overseas tours of its top military officials probably herald China's greater efforts for that end.

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Comments on the Linux face off article between Red hat and Ubuntu

by Wirehead

Paul W. Frields said...
Fedora does indeed have the Pan newsreader available. You can use the Package Kit installer to install it, or do 'yum install pan'. There are third-party repos such as rpmfusion that carry the Nvidia drivers, and installation is point-and-click simple.

Finally, there's even a flash page on the Fedora wiki that tells you how to make flash work perfectly. (Google "Fedora Flash" -- pretty easy!) :-)
July 27, 2009 9:00 AM

Bob said...
You apparently did not read enough to know that Fedora is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), which means you'd have to enable RPMFusion to gain the Third party drivers for audio and video. That Totem plug-in and Pan is available; I'm looking at it.

And in Fedora, as in most distros, you'd use a root password (su or su-) to handle installing packages. It's considered more secure than having an open sudo. Remember that Linux is all about security. Of course, if you prefer, It's very easy to set up sudo on Fedora as it is on any other Linux distro. Keep in mind that under the hood, they're all Linux.

As to ClamAV, yes, it will update just fine, if you read enough to know to add 'freshclam'. That's what 'manual' pages are for, my friend.

Fedora's a US distro and Ubuntu's a S. African distro. Different laws apply. Remember reading that disclaimer on not using copyrighted codecs if you're in the US?

There's tons of info available if you take the time to look and read, rather than jump in without research.

I hope that anyone reading your blog will realize that millions of people have success where you've fallen short.
July 27, 2009 9:24 AM

Tom said...
Nice post. You are totally right. Ubuntu is way easier than Fedora (although they can be equally buggy. Debian beats them hands down in the stability department.)
July 27, 2009 10:00 AM

Bob said...
One additional comment: next time you install it, use AutoTen: http://www.dnmouse.org/autoten.html to add many of the things you've been confused about.

Tom's right about Debian and stability. The packages are older, but rock-solid. Fedora's a testing distro and cutting-edge breakage must be expected.
July 27, 2009 11:32 AM

Sid said...
I resorted to Fedora 11 KDE because Kubuntu had so many problems. But Fedora 11 has the screen resolution problem, it can find automatically fix the resolution to 1280x1024. I have to do it every time manually using "display". Then finally yum was so totally screwed that I could not fix it. I tried the help from the Fedora forums but everything failed.

Even a humble distro like PARDUS can do things better than mighty Leonidas of Fedora. I had only bad experiences with Fedora all the time. Now I think I will be back to buggy Kubuntu because at least Kubuntu has fixes that work. Fedora is broken beyond fixing.
July 27, 2009 8:00 PM

In summary, if you are a Linux savant, Red Hat may be the way to go. I usually don't read the manual until I run into a problem. If you are a noob or newbie, Ubuntu may be the kinder, gentler way to go. I do plan to try Debian Linux that Ubuntu is based upon the next time I have to reload.

I resolved the video problem by removing the the Nvidia video card and replacing with an ATI PCI Express card. An ATI Catalyst Control Center appeared on the menu when I rebooted.

Regardless of what Linux distro you choose, Linux is a smarter and more economical way to go than Windows 7. You do need a little more technical skill than the average Microsoft Windows bear. Give it a whirl and Rightardia hopes that some of the reader comments will help you with your next Linux install.

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Face off with Fedora and Ubuntu Linux

by Wirehead

While I was working, the screen froze up and I noticed the hard drive thrashing away. After powering the PC down, I noticed it could not find a a working Linux image to boot off of. I had trouble restoring Ubuntu Linux 9.04 so I loaded a copy of Fedora which is the open source version of Red Hat Linux.

After working with Fedora 11, code named Leonidas, I started to notice some idiosyncrasies. First there was no third party driver for my Nvidia PCI video card. The Ubuntu driver didn't work perfectly because I had to reset the video resolution to 1600 x 1200 dpi every time I rebooted. In the case of Fedora, there was no third party driver at all. I even looked for one on the Nvidea Linux page but there was only a .bin driver that Fedora couldn't use. So I was stuck in 1024 x 786 dpi resolution.

I also noticed that Fedora had a CD-burner but it was buried in Places | Computer rather than as an Accessory. The Take Screenshot (print screen utility) was crippled in Fedora. I could grab the entire desktop or current screen in the foreground, but I could not grab a selected area by framing it. When you publish a blog, this is an essential function because tables and graphics can be easily copied. That was a real bummer.

When I tired to download a third party application from the command line using the Terminal function, the command would not run because it did not consider my user name to be an administrator. I ran into this problem months ago and there is a work around, but you have to edit a file and change permissions to fix it. This was bummer number 2.

I also post my best articles in a couple of Usenet conferences. Again , when I tired to use Yum Package Manager to download the Pan newsreader, the application was not available. I searched on the web for Pan but there was no download in the .RPM format that Fedora uses. This was bummer number three. I was never able to get any news reader to work on Fedora although I found some alternative newsreader aps. None showed up in the Fedora menus, however.

Having some background in network security, I tried to download the CLAMAV antivirus/malware utility and its front end, CLAMTK. I was able to download both, but I could never upgrade the CLAMAV antivirus signature, even after a reboot. This was bummer number 4.

However, the Fedora firewall front end for IPTables was a nice surprise because Ubuntu dos not come with a a firewall front end. I have to download GUFW using the Synaptic Package Manager for the AV front end in Ubuntu. So chalk up one kudo for Fedora.

I also ran into problem playing You Tube videos with Fedora. A Totem movie player plug in was missing that could not be downloaded. In Ubuntu, you are prompted to download Flash to see the You Tube videos. I embed videos in my blog and the Flash download worked fine for viewing videos.

Printing was also problematic with Red Hat. It was missing Canon PIXMA drivers that Ubuntu provides that was bummer number 5. I also notice that themes, backgrounds (wallpaper) and OpenGL screensavers were missing in Fedora. I was able to download OpenGL screensavers using YUM. I would venture to say that Red Hat probably dumbs down Fedora because it is the free version of it it commercial product, Red Hat Linux. I have used Red Hat in the past and it is more robust. It also comes with technical support for one year when you purchase it.

After continuing to play with Fedora for a couple of days, I backed up my data and reinstalled Ubuntu. Clearly Ubuntu has an edge over Fedora. Ubuntu supports third party video drivers, the screenshot utility is not crippled, The administrator account works when you login for the first time, the package manger provides an excellent newsreader that can be downloaded, the antiivirus utility didn't not work in Fedora and I could not view Flash online videos. The Canon Pixma printers are very popular because of the print quality and the low cost of ink jet cartridges. The missing print drivers were really irritating.

It is possible that over time I could have fixed many of the problems with Fedora. But why waste the time since Ubuntu had all of these problems resolved.

If you are going to try Linux, Rightardia recommends Ubuntu. You will get up to speed faster with Ubuntu.  

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Windows 7 is the same as Ubuntu?

Editor's Note: I liked this article because it asks a fundamental question: Is Windows 7 good enough to pay for. In my opinion, it has few new features that Ubuntu or Red Hat (Fedora) do not have already. Once you have invested $100 plus dollars in Windows 7, you will also have to update Microsoft Office and and your Windows utilities such as Nero Burning ROM which allows you to burn DVDs and CDs. Linux comes with free DVD/CD burner software.

Eventually, you will also need an an anti-virus and malware scanner, but Microsoft is now providing a free one. Over time the Microsoft OS nickels and dimes you. You have to upgrade to specialized applications and utilities. Oh, I hope you never have to swap the hard drive out. You will have to call Microsoft to reactivate the OS.

In Linux, you can upgrade your OS and the applications during the the same free upgrade. Open Office is free. I don't need to purchase the latest version of Microsoft Office any more. In the life cycle of the OS, I am saving hundreds of dollars with Linux.

Obviously, this isn’t true. Their underlying architectures [of Linux and Windows] are quite a bit different, Gnome looks different than the [Windows] 7 User Interface, but to an average 17-year-old, there just wasn’t any meaningful difference between the two operating systems.

The other day, I posted a blog titled “Windows 7: Good enough to pay for?” I described how I’d installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate on my son’s computer for his take on the OS after living with Ubuntu 9.04 (and 8.10 before that) for a few months. It’s summer break, so he basically spends every waking moment when he’s not actually interacting face-to-face with friends on the computer. No better time to have a kid do some serious testing, right?

I asked him last night about his initial impressions of Windows 7 and, in typical teenage fashion, as he was bouncing between Meebo windows and browser tabs, he said it was “nice.” I managed to extract from him that his favorite feature was that he was able to use his Zune with it, something that had never worked terribly well with Ubuntu. Otherwise, he said,

“Windows 7 is the same as Ubuntu; there just really isn’t anything different about them.”


Of course there isn’t. He lives in a web browser. The underlying OS is irrelevant. He has no need for Office 2007 and I expect his next portable music player will be platform independent.

For some, Windows 7 may, indeed, be good enough to pay for, especially if they are power-users of Windows-only software. For my oldest son, if he gravitates to any machine, it’s to my Mac because it’s so easy for him to create and share video content. For the average student, though, the old Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux debate may finally be dead. For someone who “hated Linux” a year ago to now happily switch between Windows 7 and Ubuntu in a completely transparent way certainly signals an end to that age-old flame war.

Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.

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