T100

Cell phone of course is no good keeper of secret. There is a case in Hong Kong where a couple has filmed something personal with their cell phone but sell it over the internet. The buyer get the phone and upload that personal short clip over the net. And the clip become hugely popular. There is another case with an artist, lost her phone on in a cab, gets backmailed by the man who got the phone, for there is a clip of her changing clothes in the phone. The man is caught and sentenced to prison. But still, the clip gets spread out. Don't keep secrets in your phones.

I think Irwin has died of his own courage and his own profession. It is really dangerous to feel too good about oneself. When you are in his position, you may as well feel too confident about yourself, living in the praise of others and under the limelight. It is a tragedy created by his personality and circumstances.

Yahoo is faster than google. I agree with this. I have been noticing that Yahoo is much more diligent with their search bots than google too. The Yahoo Slurp crawls my site every day, but google just crawls occasionally. As a matter of fact, I think Yahoo updates their search results much more quicker than google. But strangely, google seems to yield better results and smarter caching than yahoo. Yahoo seems to be still weak with algorithms.

It doesn't work that way. Software privacy has been there for more than 20 years. Ever since the Internet was made, there are simply no ways to stop people from trading software online. The earliest scene was run on BBS boards on CompuServe, and people are trading cracked software on an early version email system at AOL. And then groups like Razor1911 began to surface. And they become so legendary that people from all around the world are taking part in cracking and reverse engineering. There are reverse engineers from Australia to Scandinavia, from America to China, and the tools they develop are getting more and more powerful. People are now using ollydbg and IDAPro to look at the codes directly and tools like softice are extremely user friendly to coders now. There are magazines and books teaching people the art in China and people are picking up the skill much quicker. On the other hand, boardband has become much more popular and it is not unusual to download an 8.5GB DVD-9 for about 3-4 hours. Software is much smaller compared to a DVD and so it gets transferred by BT easily. There are no ways that these two trends can be stopped easily. People are no longer checking for search engines for pirated software. They now tend to go more underground, by taking part in P2P forums which require log in and sharing for points before you can take part in downloading. The scene just becomes more accessible to non-elite users, as many people are setting up their FTP on the web easily. While it may help if those software companies check over nforce more frequently, the scene is just now so strong that it will continue to live with the Internet for the future to come. Just imagine, even software giants like Microsoft gets their codes reverse engineered and their ecliptic function encryption for keys cracked. The reverse engineers at the scene are just so talented.

I think console games are no longer better in graphics than computer games. In computer games, you get 1280x1024 easily with today's SLI graphic cards and CPU. But even an XBox 360 can get to only about 720 sth. Not at all comparable with PC games. In general, the performance is not always better. A first person shooting game can be of 60 fps with newer graphics card, while a TV set with NTSC standards gets only 25 fps. PC games is now much better than console games.

PSP is expensive because it is technically challenging to put so many electronic gadgets in a console of the size slightly larger than the palm. The PSP comes with a high standard LCD panel from Sharp too, an LCD panel is always expensive. PSP and PS2 target different markets. PSP targets with younger kids and commuters. In Asian countries like Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong, most people travel to work and to school by public transport and they commute a lot. As they don?t drive, they have to find some entertainment on their journey, and a PSP is much better than a newspaper or a book in the new age. PS2, on the other hand, target home gaming. The gamers are usually younger kids. The PS2 market is quite infested with piracy too. That?s why Sony is investing on a different media on PSP. There is still no piracy on PSP yet, and so I think PSP is still a worthwhile investment for Sony.

I have seen this in the news in my city. Dell is now recalling the battery. The news report said that they may be the largest case of battery recall in history. Of course, i am not at all interested in whether this will become history, as history always change. But I am puzzled when the news report said that those batteries are produced by Sony. I thought Sony is so big a company and will some many experience with miniature batteries, such an incident should not have occurred. I remember that my first Li battery was one from my MD walkman, produced by Sony in Japan about 10 years ago. Sony might have moved its plant to third world countries, causing the deterioration in standards and quality. But I think this will definitely be Sony?s largest scandal if those batteries are really from them.

I guess this is a move to counteract Microsoft's recent promotion of Microsoft Live. Microsoft is upgrading its services too, renovating spaces to an extent that it integretes most of the services it is now poviding to a portal type of services. Yahoo 360 is doing similar things too. So it is a natural move for google to follow suit. After all, xanga is making its xanga video. So, video, blogging and friends network will be all in one soon.

Most of the ids i want are already taken when I got a Gmail invitation. I tried in frustration to apply for many similar ids, but they are simply all gone and unavailable. I wonder how come so many people are in Gmail that time since it is launched not long ago. Since I cannot get a good id, I don't think my first Gmail experience is a pleasant one. I am jealous of people, like my sis, how gets a wonderful id because her name is not as common as mine! Gmail looks cruder those days, without the chat function and picture preview and online scanning thing. But as it gets better, I think it is now offering service not rivaled by similar free mail service, like yahoo and hotmail. But my occupancy of the mailbox actually gets rocketed up quite soon. I am wondering whether I will have to delete messages later, contrary to Gmail propose.

Actually, sites of this sort are difficult to maintain when they got popular. Either they will have to promote some sort of VIP services, like unlimited download and higher speed, or they will have to reduce their upload limits. Most of the time they are doing both. As long as the discrepancy between paid and free services widen, there bound to be some loss in the number of free users and some increase of paid users. Rapidshare and Clubbox is going both direction. Megaupload is actually a variant of Rapidshare and YouSendIt. It is not surprising that it is going towards such direction. I like BT more than these upload and download servers. Although BT is more time dependent, it is generally much faster than these services.

I think Microsoft does not have competitive edge over sonny and Nintendo for portable gaming. After all, Sony is the company that established itself by miniature electronic products. It still has certain edge making small and compact things like PSP. Nintendo has a long history of developing game boy, so NDS is just a natural sequel to game boy. These two companies, together with the peculiar Japanese market, which always has the crave for small things, make their place in portable gaming market quite irreplaceable. Microsoft shouldn?t be foolish enough to take a plunge in this market, at least for the time being.

I don?t like Blu-Ray. I think Sony is putting its money on something that will not yield a good return. Blu_ray may have a slight technological advantaged when compared to HD DVD, but it is not backward compatible. It must also come with a case, because its recording layer is too close to the disc surface. The case of the blu ray makes it very clumsy indeed. And the necessity to purchase a new DVD writer makes it very unattractive when compared to the less technologically advanced but more compatible HD DVD. I don?t know why Sony is still pushing for Blu ray. Sony can bundle them with Play Station 3, but it risks putting all its stacks on one product. I think it is quite unwise to do so. I will support HD DVD, instead of Blu Ray.

I like this piece of software too. It is a freeware, but it is not under GPL, so I am still not too sure whether this is a software in the beta phase, and the author is intending to commercialize it in the future, or will be a piece of software that remains free for quite a long time. 7 zip is really better then WinRar, as far as compression rate is concerned. WinRAR is in turn better then Winzip. So 7 zip, i think, is one of the best of archivers. But its compression speed is a bit slow and the graphic user interface is still not very good. 7 zip and WinRAR both use LZH algorithm and so the difference in performance is actually not that great. Winrar now supports decompression of 7zip files. I will stick to Winrar cause it is more stable and more popular.

I dont like this type of upconvertor. They artificially add line to the graphics to make it HD and the effect is not native. I think you can do that with DVDs on your computer with software like ffdshow too. But the effect of it is actually not good and I wonder why they want to do it with PS2 games. I know there are some built in up converters with DVD players and unless you are very keen on HD, I don't think it is a good idea to spend extra money on this.

That was ages ago. I think not many people know who is Ken and who is Ryu in the newer generation. Actually Ken and Ryu are the two most similar fighters in street fighters. I don't know why the game created created these two people which have such similar background. But I think Ryu is more appealing to the gamers in general because he is more characteristic than Ken. I like the slogan behind Ryu too. It is a classical slogan adopted by the legendary shogun Toyotomi Hideyori from the Chinese Sun Tsz. I love that slogan a lot. And that's why i have a perference over Ryu.