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中国完善的儒家民主将超越世界
孙中山缘何走上反清道路?—青年社会学视角的考察
交之道
网格争论不休
争论不是坏事。“真理越辩越明。”也正是有了在网格概念、商用进程、硬件体系结构等方面的争论,才使网格计算的发展逐步向前,被更多的人所认识、了解。
概念之争
尽管网格计算是目前的一个热点,但它的确切含义以及其外延仍旧没有统一。网格应该是什么样、有什么标准,目前仍旧没有定论。
美国Globus项目的负责人Ian Foster:网格就是在动态变化的多个虚拟机构间共享资源和协同解决问题,并且需要同时满足三个条件:(1) 在非集中控制的环境中协同使用资源;(2)使用标准的、开放的和通用的协议和接口(目前仅有Globus才算是标准协议);(3) 提供非平凡的服务。
中科院计算所李国杰院士:网格不同于Internet 2或下一代Internet,它可以称作是第三代Internet,其主要特点是不只包括计算机和网页,且包括各种信息资源,例如数据库、软件以及各种信息获取设备等,它们都连接成一个整体,整个网络如同一台巨大的计算机,向每个用户提供一体化服务。
ChinaGrid专家组组长金海博士:任何虚拟组织之间的协同问题求解和资源共享都可以叫做网格。也就是说,网格概念的外延非常大。我们经常听到的存储网格、计算网格只是其中的一部分,也是其中最重要的部分。
国内知名学者屈延文:网格是一种框架,把计算机软硬件等放在这个框架中,能够产生群体效应,它能够完成所有的个体以及个体的集合不能完成的工作。
商用进程之争
目前,网格计算领域已被具体划分成计算网格、数据网格、信息网格、服务网格、语义网格等等。其中,计算网格相对研究得最早,全球目前的网格项目中,绝大多数都是计算网格。那么,网格应用什么时候才能普及呢?从不同的立场,各个公司、各个学者都给出了自己的看法。
国防科技大学任浩博士:大概在2005年,可以开始出现一些可以实际应用的Web Services(网络服务)和相应的服务管理平台,2007~2008年会是Web Services(网络服务)蓬勃发展的时期,这个预测是针对美国欧洲这样的信息化发达的国家,中国的进程应该还会落后一些。
英特尔中国有限公司业务发展经理王克:从目前来看,网格计算在企业当中的应用还远没有进入成熟阶段,现在谈企业当中的网格应用还比较遥远。尽管目前在企业当中可能已经有了一些网格应用,但网格应用什么时候能够达到完全符合商业应用的成熟标准还不好预测。
BEA公司中国区首席技术推广程朝晖:目前,网格技术走向商用的外部环境还不够成熟,这不是某个厂商、某个产品就能决定的,它需要包括开发商在内的众多业内厂商提供给客户实际运用的领域。如果仅仅是在产品上有些与网格相关的技术,未必能够真正给客户带来什么好处。
联想公司郝沁汾博士:网格计算肯定是发展趋势,但在什么时候能够大规模地在企业中普及网格应用,目前的局势还不明朗,可能是5年,也可能是10年甚至更长。
硬件体系结构之争
桌面PC的出现敲响了小型机的丧钟。而在曙光公司看来,网格计算将会催生出一种新的硬件体系架构。但是,并不是所有人都如此认为。
曙光公司曾宇博士:目前的硬件体系架构并不完全适合于在网格环境下应用,甚至需要出现一种新的硬件体系架构。例如,常规服务器设计了南桥北桥,其中南桥接低速设备。但在网格时代,这些低速设备就可以通过网格服务器随机访问互联网当中的网格终端、网格存储器等等。这个架构曙光已经提出来了,现在处于研究阶段。可以说,围绕网格的体系架构的研究是曙光公司的一个重点。
联想公司郝沁汾博士:现在的硬件更重要的是设定模式,它与目前的计算架构相适应。在未来,也许会出现适应网格的构建或者网格的特征的专门硬件,但也可能不会。
ChinaGrid专家组组长金海博士:网格计算机属于前沿研究,目前我们还没看到服务器等产品需要在硬件体系结构上进行改变来适应网格计算。目前的计算模型仍旧是最初的冯·诺依曼结构模型,还是采用输入、存储的这种方式。只有模型改变了,计算机的体系结构才可能改变。而计算机模型也是必然需要研究的课题。
英特尔中国有限公司业务发展经理王克:在网格计算的发展上,硬件属于非常重要的组成部分。从英特尔公司的立场来看,目前的计算机仍旧是按照冯·诺依曼架构来构成。同时,如果没有处理器的发展,也很难看到网格现在的发展。
网格相关知识
Globus网格项目是由美国Argonne国家实验室等科研单位共同研发,是目前国际上最有影响的网格计算项目之一。它发起于20世纪90年代,其最初目的是希望把美国境内的各个高性能计算中心通过高性能网络连接起来,方便美国的大学和研究机构使用,提高高性能计算机的使用效率。Globus项目组认为,大型应用项目应该由许多组织协同完成,这些组织通过网格计算环境形成一个统一的“虚拟组织”,网格计算环境中的用户、成员、资源可随时加入这种虚拟组织。各个组织拥有的各种资源都可被虚拟组织中的成员共享,并且各成员可以方便地协同完成各种分布式应用和工作。Globus项目组对信息安全、资源管理、信息服务、数据管理及应用开发环境等网格计算的关键理论和技术进行了广泛的研究,开发出能在多种平台上运行的网格计算工具包软件(Globus Toolkits)。Globus工具包的源码向公众开放,任何人都可以从其网站下载。
Web服务(Web Service)描述了一种新的重要的分布式计算方式,与DCE、CORBA、JAVA RMI等方法不同,它更强调基于单个Internet标准(XML)来解决异构分布计算的问题。Web服务定义了一种技术,用于描述被访问的软件组件、访问组件的方法以及找到相关服务提供者的发现方法,它并不倾向于特定的编程语言、编程模型以及系统软件。
朝鲜战争真相
不看欧洲的历史,你便不知道什么是真正的买国
学者甘阳劝言中国不能重蹈土耳其覆辙――避免“自宫式”的现代化
屠城的背后――换一个角度看南京大屠杀
"约会高手"是这样炼成的
文革真的是动乱吗?
自由主义与霸权
野蛮的没落----蒙古帝国的启示
蒙古大军攻克欧洲的秘诀
经典沟通原则15条
The struggle of the champions
THE
floor of the darkened room is strewn with mattresses and scattered
shoes. Sleeping bodies stir under duvets. Nearby, others nap at their
desks, heads on arms. It is a Friday afternoon at the headquarters of
Huawei—one of China's most dynamic and ambitious companies and one of a
handful, alongside Haier in white goods, Lenovo in personal computers,
TCL in televisions and steelmaker Baosteel, whose names are starting to
be heard around the world.
The
scene is reminiscent of a place on the other side of the globe: Silicon
Valley at its most breathless, when programmers on the go “24/7”
collapsed with exhaustion at their workstations. Huawei's astonishing
campus on the outskirts of the southern city of Shenzhen is straight
out of the technology bubble too, with four football fields, swimming
pools, apartments for 3,000 families and a fantastical Disney-esque
research centre with doric pillars and marbled interior.
The
hubris at Huawei, which makes telecoms equipment like routers and
switches, is also vintage 1990s America. Hu Yong, a vice-president, is
proud of being in more than 70 countries, that over 3,000 of the
group's 24,000 employees are overseas nationals and that two-fifths of
its more than $5 billion revenues in 2004 will be made outside China.
“Are we a global player? Fortune magazine says that is when international sales exceed 20% of your total,” he says. “So the answer is yes.”
Huawei
is also stating to impress abroad. François Paulus, head of the
network division at Neuf Telecom, a French firm that uses Huawei's
optical transmission equipment to sell voice, data and video services,
says: “When we first saw Huawei we couldn't believe a Chinese company
could match an occidental one—we were wrong. Their technology was
better and they were 30% cheaper.” Nigel Pitcher at Fibernet, a British
telecoms firm that uses Huawei's ethernet equipment, calls the company
“world class”. Huawei is spending millions of dollars building a global
brand—its print ads lyrically recount how its engineers toiled in the
Algerian Sahara to install mobile-phone base stations “ahead of
schedule and under budget”.
Yet
the true extent of Huawei's international reach is hard to gauge. Much
of its overseas business is in emerging markets where there is little
competition. Though it is pushing into Europe, it lacks the muscle of
rivals. In France it has only around 80 support staff compared with
Alcatel's thousands. Mr Paulus worries that rivals are catching up with
Huawei's technology. And while Huawei has won contracts in the growth
area of third-generation mobile networks—the latest is in the
Netherlands—many are in minor markets. That Cisco, the industry leader,
successfully sued Huawei for intellectual-property theft suggests
weaknesses in its technological base.
Back
home in Shenzhen, Huawei is just as opaque. Its ornate buildings on
campus are oddly deserted and Huawei is vague about what they are all
for. While it insists that it is a private company owned by its
employees, Ren Zhengfei, one of its founders, was an officer in the
People's Liberation Army. The company denies, but admits it cannot
shake, speculation that it is really controlled by the military. It
denies even more hotly rumours that its overseas offices, some run from
Chinese consulates, spy for China. William Xu, another vice-president,
insists Huawei has no government links. Yet its multi-billion-yuan
campus, lavish marketing and relentless expansion overseas are hard to
square with it being a private company that made just $300m of profits
last year. Nor is it clear why Huawei has not yet gone public (as some
rivals have).
The
contradictions at Huawei are mirrored to some degree by all of the
country's emerging multinationals and ultimately reflect those of China
itself. The economy is still in transition between dirigisme and free
markets. Its political system can harness enormous resources, but
ultimately undermines its own objectives in a paranoid desire to retain
control.
That
China intends to create world-class companies is indisputable. Appalled
by the speed of western development and, rightly, attributing much of
that to the success of western corporations, the central government
decided some years ago that 30-50 of its best state firms should be
built into “national champions” or “globally competitive”
multinationals by 2010. At home, these companies would enjoy tax
breaks, cheap land and virtually free funding via the state-owned
banks. Abroad, the government would help them to secure contracts or
exploration rights.
This
has prompted fears that the Chinese, like the Japanese in the 1980s,
are about to out-compete and to buy up the rest of the world. And
undoubtedly a small group of Chinese companies has become bigger, more
efficient and internationally acquisitive in the past several years.
But this also raises questions about what kind of companies China is
fit to build. Arthur Kroeber, managing editor of the China Economic Quarterly,
argues that China's “unique combination of first world infrastructure
and third world labour costs” and its focus on capacity building rather
than technological innovation mean that corporate successes are more
likely to be component manufacturers or processors of intermediate
goods than global consumer brands such as South Korea's Samsung.
China's
best companies bear this out. The most impressive are the resources
groups. Three big oil companies, PetroChina, Sinopec and CNOOC, are
aggressively buying overseas and building pipelines across central Asia
to satisfy China's fuel demands. They are in more than a dozen
countries: CNOOC, for example, is Indonesia's largest offshore oil
producer.
Shanghai-based Baosteel, China's top steel producer, already sits on the Fortune 500 list of the largest global companies by sales. It will more than double capacity by 2010 to become the world's number three producer. In Brazil it is negotiating the biggest overseas investment ever made by a Chinese company.

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Like
Baosteel, Chalco, China's leading aluminium group, and Yanzhou Coal,
the largest listed coal producer, are relatively new companies created
to consolidate fragmented domestic industries and then to expand
internationally. China Minmetals, the biggest base metals company, has
gone further with its recent approach to buy Noranda, a Canadian copper
and nickel miner, for a reported $7 billion. And in components
Wanxiang, an auto parts group started by a farmer's son as a bicycle
repair shop, has $2 billion of annual sales in 40 countries and owns
research assets in America.
By
contrast, China's consumer-brand and technology companies are
struggling. The latest to grab the headlines is Lenovo, China's top
PC-maker which in December bought IBM's personal computer business,
three times its size, for almost $2 billion. Having failed to turn its
own marque into a global brand—the reason it changed its name from
Legend—it bought an international business, but one that even IBM could
not make consistently profitable, to prop up its overseas sales. In
China, Lenovo's profits from PCs are rising by just 1% per year and its
market share is being squeezed as Dell makes inroads in expensive
computers and private-label firms undercut prices on basic machines.
Far from being world-class, Lenovo is less efficient than its domestic
peers, says Joe Zhang, an analyst at UBS in Hong Kong. Some put its
early success down to good government connections—it is majority-owned
by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Another
much-heralded company is Qingdao-based Haier. Having built up
commanding domestic market shares of 20-70% for most home appliances,
the group has offices in more than 100 countries and overseas revenues
of over $1 billion. However, most of its international sales are in
niche markets, and Haier lacks the cost control, production discipline,
market dominance and sales support it needs to compete with foreign
rivals outside China. Even at home it has had to resort to price wars
to regain market share lost to better foreign products.
In
cars, Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp (SAIC) aims to be among the
world's top six car companies by 2020. In October it trumped a domestic
rival to buy Ssangyong Motors, South Korea's fourth largest carmaker,
and it is also in talks to rescue MG Rover in Britain. Yet these are
defensive acquisitions of technologies and design skills to catch two
nimbler rivals, Chery and Geely, which already make own-brand cars at
home (Chery plans to launch models in America by 2007). Domestic
joint-ventures with General Motors and Volkswagen have constrained SAIC
and made it uncompetitive, says Paul Gao of McKinsey.
TCL
has made a better fist of things. At home it remains the most
profitable TV producer. Internationally, buying the TV business of
France's Thomson in early 2004 turned it into the world's biggest
volume TV maker. “Our goal is to be a Chinese Sony or Samsung,” says
the chairman, Li Dong Sheng. Despite the boast, at home TCL is
depending on Thomson's rear-projection technology to make thinner sets
to defend itself against Samsung. And in mature markets it does not
intend to use TCL's brand at all, but is trying to revive Thomson's
ailing RCA marque. Vincent Yan, managing director of TCL International,
admits that, “no Chinese company is ready to build a global brand. You
need technology and products. Just spending money on ads without good
products doesn't make sense.”
Over the past decade, then, China has created some quite large companies. More than a dozen are in the Fortune
500 list, though almost all of those are domestic monopolies or
near-monopolies, such as telecom operators or big commodity producers.
A handful of others are starting to compete internationally, though
mostly in niche markets and on price rather than with technology or
brands.
But
the global footprint of Chinese companies is still rather faint. Their
outward foreign direct investment was just $2.9 billion in 2003,
compared with the more than $50 billion that flowed into the mainland.
China's stock of outward FDI amounts to $33 billion, less than half a
percent of accumulated world FDI. These facts have led some long-term
observers of the Chinese economy to the conclusion that China's
industrial policy since the early 1980s essentially has failed. That
might turn out to be premature. But one contrast is revealing: 20 years
after the start of its rapid economic development a decade earlier,
South Korea had built successful heavy industry groups and was
beginning to lay the foundations for the technology and consumer brands
people know today.
If
anything, the gap between Chinese and foreign firms is widening, as the
latter merge, reinvest the profits yielded by their scale economies and
continually hone their management systems. One only has to think back
to China's first crop of potential champions. A decade ago, Zhurong was
hailed as the original Huawei. Both Founder and Stone were well ahead
of Lenovo in the PC market and Yuchai, a diesel engines maker, and
Kunming Machine Tool were seen as the next big technology plays.
D'Long, a conglomerate spanning food and financial services, was lauded
as a smart operator that bought tired foreign brands for a song and cut
costs by taking manufacturing to China—until last year when it
collapsed with huge debts.
These
companies all had access to capital, cheap labour and a big domestic
market. George Gilboy, an affiliate researcher at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and for the past decade a senior manager at a
multinational firm in Beijing, says they failed not because of poor
products, but because of organisation and business strategy: “The
issues that plagued them are still very much present.” These issues are
grounded in China's political and economic system and they lie in wait
to trip up today's aspirants to world-class status.
Whereas
policymakers in Japan and South Korea deliberately nurtured strong
private companies (albeit often with close political ties), the Chinese
government, deeply afraid of a politically independent private sector,
implemented reforms that have given state firms privileged access to
capital, technology and markets. But in order for the economy to grow
faster, the central government has allowed foreign companies into China
at a much earlier stage of its development and these now control the
bulk of the country's industrial exports, have increasingly strong
positions in its domestic markets and retain ownership of almost all
technology. The result is a corporate landscape of a few big private
companies such as Huawei, a mass of lumbering state-owned firms and
increasingly powerful foreign multinationals.
China's unreformed political system has a second unintended consequence. Like the bosses of South Korea's chaebol
before them, Chinese managers respond to regulatory inconsistency and
opacity by pursuing short-term returns and excessive diversification
rather than by investing in long-term technological development. Most
are unwilling to develop “horizontal” networks with customers,
suppliers and trade bodies—which in other countries establish
technology standards and foster confidence in long-term research. In
China, a company's best defence against corruption and the direct
political linkages that benefit rivals is often to avoid business
collaboration entirely and instead build vertical links up the
Communist Party hierarchy and curry favour with local bureaucrats.
The
power of officials to change policy at a moment's notice (suddenly
appointing a successful boss as governor of a province, for example) or
implement it in different ways for different firms, combined with the
impossibility of achieving economies of scale through mergers because
targets enjoy political patronage, together explain why Chinese
managers tend to leap from one opportunity to the next, trying to grab
a profit before the rules and the competition catch up. A year ago
mobile phones were hot—Lenovo, TCL and Haier all invested, with little
success, against Motorola and Nokia. Sun Jianmin, a management
professor at Beijing's People's University, notes a cultural bias for
financial services over “mere” manufacturing. Haier, TCL and even
Baosteel all have subsidiaries in banking or insurance. “How can a
long-term company emerge in such a short-term environment?” asks Mr
Gilboy.
Nowhere
is this more obvious than in technology. In recent years China has
averaged a $12 billion annual trade deficit in electronic goods,
components and machinery, according to the Ministry of Commerce. Most
of its “high-tech” manufacturing is actually low-value-added assembly.
The really smart bits, such as integrated circuits, are imported. The
government continues to direct research spending, focusing on risky
“big bang” projects (like sending a man into space). Indeed, China's
low wages actually provide a disincentive to such investment, since
Chinese firms can often boost short-run profits by replacing capital
with additional labour.
Not
surprisingly, therefore, foreign companies control virtually all the
intellectual property in China and account for 85% of its technology
exports. No wonder that Lenovo lacks Dell's ability to innovate and
that Huawei tried to catch up with Cisco by bending the rules. Haier's
furious product development—15,100 specifications across 96 categories,
including a washing machine that also cleans sweet potatoes—typifies
the lack of focus that is evident at many Chinese firms. As J.P. Huang,
who runs JPI, a mergers & acquisitions boutique, puts it: “We
Chinese like the romance of memorising Confucius. The discipline of the
laboratory is not in our blood.”
Nor,
yet, is modern management thinking. Chinese companies struggle with
challenges such as negotiating a cross-border partnership or exiting a
loss-making activity, argues Gordon Orr at McKinsey in Shanghai. While
multinationals import their most sophisticated business systems to
China, improving productivity by 15% a year, Chinese companies still
resort to “brute force”—throwing more labour and capital at problems,
rather than thinking about new processes. Unless they improve, they do
not stand a chance against world-class competitors, either outside
their borders and soon not even on their home turf, warns Mr Orr.
China
has so far failed to build world-class companies. Even the natural
monopolies and resources companies are mostly just big rather than
particularly efficient. In manufacturing, technology and consumer
areas, a few companies are groping towards international
competitiveness, but none are there yet. Nor will China necessarily
produce a Sony or a Samsung. “People assume it is just a matter of time
before China develops world-class brands,” says Mr Gilboy. “But Chinese
firms may not develop like Japanese or Korean ones did. China may be
building a distinct model of capitalism with distinct firms.” While
American firms broadly excel at breakthrough innovations, and Japanese
ones at process and incremental innovations, “China capitalism may
simply be best at making things a lot cheaper.” If so, China might do
well to focus on building no-name component suppliers as Taiwan has,
rather than home-grown brands as in Japan and South Korea.
For unless China institutes far-reaching political and structural reforms that give Chinese managers the confidence to invest in long-term technological development, it cannot readily build a globally competitive corporate sector. Those sleeping employees at Huawei might just have been working too hard. But perhaps they had little better to do. Workers napping on the job are nothing new at a Chinese company.
日本究竟是如何崛起的
中国为什么落后——中国社会的八大无用功
什么是自恋症?
引自: http://www.yculblog.com/trackback/4/664790
自恋症按照精神分析的解释,起源于一种源于自卑感的压抑的防御心理,自我由于不能以正常方式满足成就动机,采取了封闭的过度关注自我的外在评价的种种
虚幻形式,如名气、赞美、点击率,有时会把是否得到他人的关注视为行动的唯一理由。自恋者经常会没有理由的关注比自己名气大的人,暗地里形成一种和偶像结
为一体的虚幻感,当这种感觉遭到否定(或者是追星行为遭到打击,或是偶像遭遇丑闻失去可攀附的理由)就会转为对偶像的极度仇恨乃至人身攻击。
当社会转向一个推崇个人成就感、吹捧“成功人士”的泛商品化的时代,自恋症可以成为一种普遍现象,人们把自爱混同于自恋的结果是,生活的意
义就在于名利场的厮混,成功与失败成了一个人唯一关注的东西。如果为了成功和所谓名气可以不择手段,只要争得眼球就行,甚至对罪恶滔天的恶行也会啧啧称
许。
自恋者从来难以领会真实的不同意见,因为真实的批评作为不同的声音往往打破了自恋者的封闭圈子,让其意识到泡沫之外的社会世界作为自我的背
景并不就是自我本身能够视而不见的影子,但自恋者宁愿不去正视这种不受限制的视域而和自己的影子搏斗,寻找曲解歪曲真实批评的借口。
一个社会陷入自恋文化就会是非颠倒,陷入普遍的失范状态,人与人也失去信任,法律成了黑吃黑的游戏规则,大乱将至也浑然不觉。个人的自恋则强化了压抑,剥夺了自我面对种种挑战的勇气,沉溺在自我陶醉自我吹捧的圈子里不思创新。
由此我想到blog。在某些自称blogger的人看来:blogger难道不正是一种自传式写作,自恋者的聚会?要不怎么找到每天更新的理
由?如果blog不关注自己和圈子里的鸡毛蒜皮似乎就是不真实的?
在我看来,这种自恋式的解释恰恰搞坏了blog的风气。Blog是一种新型的交流方式,也是一种机会,但并非是自恋式的放纵。Blog会留下很多个人的痕
迹,但这并非是很多人选择它来交流的理由,blog的内容才是关键。在那种不正常的风气下,blog成了名人秀,剽窃转贴者赚取眼球的天堂,我觉是十分
可悲的。
Blog和一切交流形式首先是满足个人的需要,但个人的需要并非就是像某些人那样整天引导人们关注他自己得到多少关注。诚然,社会性网络技术方便人们发展人际网络,并不能改变交流者及其所处的社会氛围本身的自恋文化,但这并非是唯一的选择。