T100

It is surprising to see a fan of Full metal Alchemist, Gundam and Macross who likes Azumanga Daioh. I must admit that the three series of animations are really classic, but sometimes I think they are too serious for me. I watch animes mainly for entertainment, an epic that lasts too long is simply not suitable for me. Full metal Alchemist is in 41 chapters, while Gundam and Macross are in many chapters more. Azumanga Daioh, on the contrary, is in short chapters. Even if missing one of them doesn?t really matter. Azumanga Daioh is a very relaxing animations. It reminds me of the days I was in high school. That?s why I like it a lot.My choice of animation is a very ?childish?. Say, I love DG Charat, an animation which I sometimes even find too ?idiotic?. My latest favorite is Kamichu, an animation now aired in Asahi TV. The story is about a middle school girl turned into a Kamisama (Goddess) one night and then she began to engage in fascinating adventures. The graphics are stunning and the story is quite relaxing too. The city where the story is based in, onomichi, is a charming city and I am sure that if you like Azumanga Daioh, you will love Kamichu.

I am not so sure about this. In my opinion, the heydays of Disney are gone already. There is not an animation from Disney better than Beauty and the Beast, which was produced many years ago. I think the question is here not how real the characters look, but how real the characters are. Disney movies are failing to portray the uniqueness in personality with characters for a long time.

I think the only answer to this question is that the nuclear powers don?t want others to threaten them. Their mission to stop the so-called nuclear proliferation is carried out in the name of peace, but I think this is simply hypocritical to stop others from testing it while running supercomputer simulated nuclear tests secretly. Also, many of the nuclear powers are not so-called democratic countries. Russia, China and Pakistan own their nuclear arsenals and the nukes at their hands are actually as dangerous as in Iran and N. Korea. Another thing is that nuclear fission technology is something developed 50 years ago and when developing countries like Pakistan can have their own A bombs, there is no reason why others countries who are already researching nuclear fusion technology for so long cannot build a nuclear bomb easily. So it is just a hypocritical game trying make other countries give up their nuclear plan. It is also stupid to do so.

I still don?t understand why smokers would have to get into such an irritating habit if all they want is just nicotine in the cigarettes. Why can?t they get a nicotine pill or a nicotine sticker or injection if they really like the chemical so much? Plus, you won?t give out the annoying smell with the smoke and bring hazards to the health of others. I don?t like all kind of smoke, no matter it is cigarettes, cigar or pipes. They are smell horrible. But many people smell horrible anyway and I am not as intolerant to tell as to hate them simply because of the smell. One thing highly arguable is whether we should provide government subsidized healthcare service to the smokers. Of course nearly all of the smokers know the effect of smoking to health, but they are not only harming the health of themselves. With the lung cancers and chronic pulmonary obstruction disease, they are also putting a burden on the healthcare system. Of course, we have to respects their rights to smoke, but subsidizing them in a roundabout way is another matter.

Why can't I edit my own post in this board? It is so inconvenient.

I also disagree on the charge that the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitute a war crime. I wont say the Japanese deserve it and I dont think we are in the position to judge who deserves what. Say, we wont put a man to death even if he has stolen a magazine from a supermarket. The Japanese invasion is, of course, wrong, but I really doubt whether other countries in the region are that innocent. Russia is one of those countries invading China during the early 1900s, and the US took the Philippines and China has a long history of annexation of the Korea peninsula and Tibet, while it is still threatening to invade Taiwan. Military expansion has been a major theme in history and none of the involved countries are punished justly by a tribunal or alike. The Americans took the land from the Indians and the Australian took the continent from the Aboriginals, can we say they are also guilty of invasion and deserve the A-Bomb? I have been to Hiroshima. You must visit the museum there if you plan to stop at the city. Although I was not impressed with the deliberate downplaying of invasion in the museum, I would agree that the A-Bomb was a tragedy, if not an atrocity. The bombs, though, saved Japan from being attacked by the Soviet from the north and thus luckily avoided the evil Communists (look at Poland and N. Korea). This is, perhaps, the only good thing that the A-Bomb has brought about the country.

Uptime actually depends on the features that host provides to you. My experience is that hosts that provide php + mysql are more likely to be down then php only hosts and php only hosts are more likely to fail then html only host. Some big hosts have separate servers for apache, mysql and DNS. These sites are most susceptible to failure. I now can tell how a server fails by looking at the error message. Sometimes it is the php module, sometimes it is the SQL server and sometimes it is the DNS and even the Apache server (least likely). Xisto has a very high uptime. The admins have put great efforts in maintaining the servers.

There is an automated installation function in Windows XP (I think it is somewhere in the resource kit), and I have read articles teaching people to generate the script for reinstallation immediately upon a clean installation is done. The function is actually for admins which may have to install software on tens to hundreds of computers, but since Windows is notorious for poor security and instability, the automated installation function may offer valuable help when the OS fails. I don't think the procedure witll be complicated, just that you have to move some files to the i386 directory of the installation disc and you got to have programs like UltraISO or Nero for the job.Alternatively, you may ghost your clean installation using Norton Ghost or even Nero Harddisk backup. You will save yourself much time for a reinstallation. (Hopefully, this won't happen again!)

Around 6% of the 2000MB Gmail account and 2% of the 250MB hotmail account. Actually, I am phasing out the hotmail account since I don?t think hotmail is providing me good service. The GUI of Gmail is also better than that of hotmail and the way Gmail sorts mails into conversation is why I am sticking to it now. I have 140MB of things on the gmail account, which is quite a lot, since I like to share photos with my friends. And when I share photos, I share the original one with them so that they can print that out. 2000GB is not that much if you send photos and clips occasionally.

Your IP on the tracker then will be a faked one with you just proxy tracker connection and other peers cannot connect to you directly. That's exactly the case with a firewall prohibiting incoming connection. And in this way, the BT download will be very slow. I don't think it works. I dont know whether you are from but my advice is if you are so worried about IP being broadcast on the trackers, you shouldn't use BT at all. Try other anonymous BT programs running in nodes, say Share and WinNY from Japan. Or simply the old way of XDCC and PUB.

I really wonder what you mean. Java is mainly a client side technology, you may simply embed your .class file into the html code and it should run with no problems. If you are experiencing problems, then you should check your virtual machine. Win XP comes with a M$ Java VM, and it sucks, you should install Java Runtime Environment from Sun (I think it is in version 1.5 or something now). If you are talking about server side technology like JavaBean and JSP, then it is another matter. I dont think Xisto supports JSP at the moment. You may have to apply for another webhost for that.

Well, I don?t think it is in anyway comparable to Google Earth. I have installed Google earth and I am quite impressed by the satellite image from Google earth that even shows the rooftop of the building I am living in. Although Google earth is not performing that well in the realm of locating buildings on the streets, it can be improved fairly easily in later versions. Another bad thing about Google earth is that the images of some cities, e.g. Melbourne, are composed of two or more satellite images of different resolution. This gives the interesting result of showing the eastern part of the city in lower resolution then the western part. Anyway, M$ has always been a copycat as far as technology is concerned. Look at Wallop, Space, MSN messenger, MSN.com, Jscript, ASP and you see why this company is always providing second-rated service at a first rate price.

My dad has one, but I don?t think it is very useful. Many computers at my school are installed with N in 1 card readers now, and so my SD card can be used for temporary storage. I think cards like SD card and CF cards are more flexible, since you can use them on digital cameras and personal digital agents. I have a DC and a PDA, so I like SD cards more. Moreover, most of the computers nowadays are wired to the Internet. You may as well upload your files to Internet mailboxes like Gmail or any FTP server and download them to the computer when you need them. There are free web hosts like Yousendit, clubbox and ChinaMoFile for this purpose too, though their uploading speed is astonishingly slow.

This is exactly the same problem I had with my previous hard disk before it finally failed. I got event ID7, 9 as well as 51 and soon I lost the partition. The warnings that you have on the event log are highly indicative that the "health" of your hard disk is rapidly deteriorating. You should back up your hard disk as soon as possible (usually you are ahead the ultimate failure by a few days), though you may find the back-uping process painstakingly slow. Then you should unmount your hard disk and ask for a replacement. The agent will then do a surface test on the hard disk and I think they can find the bad sectors on the disk. As for me, they got me a new hard disk within a week.

My advice is that you should re-install Windows after futile attempts to restore the operating system to normal. I don?t mean that those anti-spyware software do not work, ad-aware and spybot are quite good to start with, Norton Internet Security 2005 now has an anti-spyware edition and McAfee also offers similar products (the one from M$ really sucks, it puts famous spyware like Gator on the ignore list). These software may remove the spyware from your computer if you are lucky, but they won?t restore the changes those spyware made to your system. There may be traces of the spyware in the registry and suspicious .dll dynamic link libraries left at your windows root, which are not good things to have. They may also affect performance. So if I were you, I will reinstall windows from scratch to make sure everything is fine. The next thing then is to have a good anti spyware software on your machine. Norton?s newly released Norton Internet Security 2005 Anti Spyware Edition is a good one, although it takes up huge amount of system resources. Then you have to install Firefox / Mozilla, disable Java and xpi installation and pop-ups and make sure that you never touch the stupid Internet Explorer again except during Windows update. By these two measures alone, you can stop 99% of spyware from entering your computer. Also, your browsing habit may have to change a little bit. Usually sites plagued with spyware are those warez sites or pornographic sites. If you really want to visit those sites, make sure your are fully armored. Hope that your system will recover soon?

JSP, ASP, CHM and PHP are all server side technology which enables users to perform complicated operation at the web interface, like querying the database. It also enables a dynamic page which can be customized according to users, contrary to static html page. The other technology you mentioned, the js, is a client side technology which animates certain components of the webpage (e.g. buttons) and performs certain browser operations, something essentially different from what the makers of JSP and PHP want to do. PHP is run usually by installing a php module for the web server you are using (e.g. IIS or Apache). It has the merit of being free (GNU actually) and it has arguably the largest community on the internet that makes seeking support easy. JSP can be run on Tomcat, but I think certain servers (e.g. websphere) have built-in support for it. It is, however, generally run much slower then PHP scripts and ASP scripts (don?t know why). I think if you would like to learn server side scripting, php is a good place to start with. You may use Zend Studio to develop the scripts. As for CSS and Flash support, these are things mainly to do with html, which would be ?generated? by the server from php or jsp scripts. They make no difference here.

I share with you my strong objection to the war in Iraq, which I think was a war of injustice, but I don?t really share your compassion with the people of Africa. I must admit that poverty, to some extent is an outcome of social injustice or international injustice, but I think the main reason for the poverty in Africa is that of poor administration and continuing social and political unrests, which are things reversible. I am now living in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a place where there are no natural resources, no land and it does not even have enough water supply. However the people somehow managed to lift the dismal island to a decent city and I think this shows that the lack of natural resources should not be an excuse for stagnation of development. If you look at Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, you will wonder why hunger strikes certain countries, but not others. The problem of Africa is that it has never established an enlightened government and the civil war and racial problems plagued it more than natural disaster like droughts (Australia also suffers from droughts, but it has better birth control and better technology). Dumping money into Africa does not solve the political problems. So while people are protesting against a very ill-defined idea called poverty, I would be more skeptical about the so-called relief for the African country.

I am using wordpress at the moment and I am quite satisfied with it, despite the recent security vulnerabilities that are found from time to time ever since the launch of the new version, 1.5. One function that is lacking is the verification code for comments. Since there is none, it is quite susceptible to spamming. Version 1.5 has actually made improvements on this aspect, banning users for repeated commenting at a short time. But it is still not enough. A blog is not a diary. I think people blog for (at least) three reasons. 1) Peeking into others? lives, 2) Speaking ill of others freely and 3) showing off. I put up my blog mainly for reason 2 and 3. (You won?t show off in your diary, right?) I have actually witnessed the power of blogging when a certain rumor spread in my school simply because a certain blogger put it purposefully on her blog. You will notice the difference once you switch from diary to blog. There are far too many things that you will hesitate to put on the public domain. For me, the diary is much hardcore, containing things that would make me blush. In the blogs, people pretend to be humorous, funny and talkative. You will start portraying yourself as another character in your blog. Blogs are therefore never sincere. They serve important social function though and are likely to play more important role in people?s lives. I won?t recommend xanga and space. The day will come when they will actually charge you for blogging and you will find that you cannot move your articles elsewhere. Whereas if you blog by wordpress, you can import and export the database freely through phpmyadmin.

I totally agree with you. The layout of xanga is simply stupid, and the company is even charging you for ?advanced editing tools?. You cannot link to other blogs not in xanga and you cannot comment as an anonymous user either. I wonder why you want to build a blog if you don?t like incoming comments. Anyway, xanga is for those people who have troubles with information technology. Theses are the people who think that WWW is synonymous to the Internet, and they have problems even using FTP. The only networking application they use may include the most stupid browser, several messenger, a P2P software and a BT client. They are the people who will yell when BT speed becomes slow (they never try to figure out why) and when their browser cannot work, they will reinstall the OS. They will think that you are god when you tell them you build a site with PHP. I am often amazed but the appalling number of such kind of people. And that?s the reason why many simple products (e.g. iPod, Paypal) can survive in the market, because the people in the market are really simple.

Not interested at all. I am always skeptical with Microsoft?s products that I usually let other people try it out first and become the martyrs before I install it. Win XP is a good example of bad software engineering. Remember the Blaster worm and the Sassor worm. There must be plenty of security holes in a new OS. I only installed XP until SP1 was at the corner. Microsoft?s OSes are also notorious for resource hungry. Win 2000 takes only 64MB RAM, while Win XP about 128MB, SP2 about 256MB. Longhorn may take about 512MB. Although I have 1GB RAM, which allows me to run Longhorn smoothly, I am not convinced it is a good use of resource. Last but not least, people are actually quite fed up with M$ new OSes. Many are still using Win 98. Although XP has been around for more then 4 years (right?), I still don?t see any reason for upgrading.

Intel has its 64 bit platform for a long time. IA-64 platform, which was out in 2001 and mainly serves as a server and workstation CPU, is an example. It is just that Intel previously did not aim to migrate to 64 bit platforms for PC users. AMD starts the 64 bit line and become quite successful due to its lower cost and forces Intel to enter the market. Yes, Intel is a little bit slow in reaction. But their EM64T technology which is now built in their 6xx series CPUs, is an authentic 64-bit technology. Actually, I think Intel generally has higher clock speed, better FSB and higher L2 cache, theses are the things that really make a CPU faster and I wonder why AMD fails to keep abreast with Intel in this aspect and try to fool its customers by misleading benchmarks like 3000+ (I really hate this label). The duel core thing is also an issue (forget about hyperthreading, which only makes a 10% difference in CPU performance). AMD?s technology is good in this aspect, but it now try to target the high-end market, which I think is a mistake. Pentium D will get a bigger market share and AMD previous victory over 64-bit CPU will be over. Perhaps AMD is now falling into the same trap as IA-64.

It?s an open secret that Microsoft aims to make the users of other better browsers inconvenient. Say, their website for Windows update is accessible by the stupid Internet Explorer only. When you enter hotmail and blank out the user-agent, the system would pop up a window asking you to get their stupid browser. More outrageously, Microsoft often uses the security-nightmare, ActiveX in their webpage and so alternative browsers often have problem accessing them. I think the most foolish thing is that some web developers only have Internet Explorer in mind. Say, the online teaching software of my university, WebCT only accepts Internet Explorer. This is outrageous. Microsoft stole many technologies form others. The JavaScript and Jscript, the Java and the dot Net platform. In my opinion, the only thing that Microsoft is still not able to copy is Macromedia?s Flash. The Flash player has become such a success that Microsoft is still not able to come up with something equivalent. If Firefox is to survive and re-colonize the market, perhaps some sites should make themselves Firefox only.

I like Japanese animations a lot. I am brought up with classical titles like Doraemon, Dragon Ball, and those by Miyazaki like Laputa, the Castle in the Sky, Naucita and the very cute ToToRo. Anime has gone through many generations. In terms of color, Laputa used only 400 something colors while the latest movie by Miyazaki, Howl?s moving castle uses many more, in combination with stunning computer graphics. In terms of stories, the animation industry has also introduced topics other then robots, fair tales and future wars. Say, You Are Arrested tells a story of traffic cops and is a very good anime. Anzu Manga Daiho, a recent one, is a story about friendship among high schools girls. These animation dealing everyday lives are, in my opinion, more touching and therefore they are my favorite. In terms of graphics, I think the film last year, Appleseed, is the pinnacle of Japanese animation. Though the plot is bad, you must watch this film for the computer graphics.

I play the piano. Just proficient enough to play some pieces by Chopin. Have to struggle with many Sonatas by Beethoven. Honestly, I know that I am far from being a musician. My friends who are really good at the piano are talking about styles. I just can?t tell the subtle difference between those players. Better with orchestral works. Karajan is really marvelous. But piano ? Ashkenezy and Previn are not much different to me. I still play the piano off work. The instrument is really useful in birthday parties and social occasions. Perhaps this is the real purpose of music, right?