T100

Here is what I read from IHT. Frankly, I think the heyday of IBM and Apple in the personal computer market is over already. What saved Apple these two years? It is ipod, a surprisingly low tech gadget readily make in any electronic plant in China. It is really sad that Apple has gone to this dead end. Look inside am iMAC computer still running DDR333 of the old stone age. We dont buy a computer simply because it looks smart, right? The personal computer section of IBM is also gone to a computer in China. These two companies are not making much contribution to PC anyway. Thats why they are losing out in the market.

I agree with you that religion is outdated, but I dont think it needs to be updated. I am now living in an Asian city where over 90% of the population has no religion. People here live a fruitful and meaningful life without the burden of religion. People are really much more open minded without religion. I think it is sad that some people simply cannot live without other people telling them what to do with their lives. One of the commonest misunderstandings is that the ancient people had wisdom. But I think the only place you can find wisdom is in science, the only field where knowledge can accumulate to become wisdom. Modern people (probably except the Americans) have much boarder exposure in a globalized world and I dont think those crappy ancient texts can ever tell us anything about how to deal with modern lives. My comment is: Dont bother with updating religion. Scrap it.

I have never run an enterprise type of hardware firewall, but I think I have some experience using hardware firewalls that may worth sharing here. I am using a wireless router for my home which has 5 computers in the LAN. There is a built in firewall in the device. There was absolutely no problem with the firewall in the Old Stone Age, which was about 2 years ago before BT gets really popular. However, ever since I got into Bit Torrent, I often have to open 1300+ sockets with about 100+ half open sockets. With this number of connection, my firewall starts to drag. At the beginning, I didn?t realize that it was the problem with the firewall. However, after some investigations, I think the problem lies in the so-called stateful firewall. The firewall analyses into the protocols and so it has to put data in its built-in memory. With a lot of connections, the firewall simply runs out of memory and CPU resources and so the connection gets stunningly slow. So if you really want to buy a firewall, I would suggest that you buy one with a lot of memory and a sound CPU. Otherwise, the bottleneck will be at the firewall.

I am afraid that I am using the worst media player on the world, Windows Media Player 9. It does not have built in DVD support, meaning that you have to get to codec from elsewhere, say Nero or WinDVD, and it offers no adjustment for contrast, sharpness and even brightness. It does not support newer formats like ogm and mkv. I am using WinDVD to play DVDs, and DVDs only, since it takes some time to load even on my P4 3.0GHz with 1GB DDR2 RAM computer. WinDVD offers more advanced options, but I really don?t like the bookmark function of it. The reason that I am still using Windows Media Player 9 is because of its bad compatibility, which means that if I can play a movie with it, I can play it in all players. That?s one of the methods I use to check whether a movie is a good or not. I install ffdshow, a very versatile DirectShow filters for formats like DivX, Xvid, 3ivx, MSPG4 version 2 and many other MPEG-4 encoding system. I found it quite useful in playing movies. Also I have got the mkv package, the real alternative package and the quicktime package, so I can now play every format with the worst player on Earth. If you look for a good player, I may suggest that you use KMplayer, a free player developed by the Koreans. It can play almost every format without the need of installing many Codecs. I don?t like those codec packs as they tend to ruin my computer. KMplayer is quite popular in Asia.

Gmail is quite good. The GUI is simple and you get POP3 support for free. The search in mail is also quite good. It now offers more then 2G of storage, something being exploited by p2peers using software like peer2mail, DSLlite etc, but it is quite enough that I don?t need to delete emails in the near future.Hotmail is from the Old Stone Age. But it is a ?legacy? thing that we simply cannot kick off easily, like ICQ. Unfortunately, I have so many stored contacts in hotmail and I still hesitate to shed them. Many of my friends may only know my hotmail address. Too bad. Hotmail also has a short inactivity period. Your mailbox get banned if you don?t check it and be forced to watch their ads if you don?t open it for 2 months. hotmail is an annoyance.

Two years ago when I was considering whether to buy a Palm or a PPC, I looked at many of Sony?s products. However, I chose PPC finally, since the (pirated?) software support was better. I played Age of Empire and Simcity 2000 on my PPC and I amazed all my friends then. But then the problems of PPC gradually emerged. Because it was using Intel?s ARM processor, the battery usage is huge. It went out in 2 hours under full loading (say, playing AOE) and I have lost my data four times due to battery reasons. The must hateful thing about PPC is the stupid ActiveSYNC, in which the partnership system simply creates such a hassle when reinstalling. After the honeymoon with my PPC, my PPC is now only an advanced electronic digital organizer of the millennium, which probably weighs heavier then the Old Stone Age one.

I am not surprised. Many releases actually get on the scene before the actual release. If my memory did not fail me, Warcraft III and the Matrix were released before their debut on the market. The one on the scene is only a workprint, released by a group called VISA and fixed by IND, which is only 1.2GB in size. The size itself is dubious. I wonder whether it contains the whole movie or not, or whether the bitrate is adjusted to a very low level. The DVD version will get out very soon. Perhaps as an Asian silver or something.

Just wonder? what do you mean by a ?real mouse?? You mean those whose nemesis is the cat? Anyway? I have a ball mouse, a simple ball mouse, without Bluetooth, 802.11b etc, attached by a PS/2 cord. I used to have a Logitech mouse. But after 3 years of good service, it retired. So I am now using a very cheap mouse. It comes in a box with a keyboard and a speaker, the whole combo costing no more than USD$ 4. If it decides to retire early, I will simple get a new one.

You may have to check whether your communication port is working. Most modems work via the parallel lpt interface, if the lpt is not working, your modem may not work. I have experience with this before, the lpt port of my computer is simply malfunctioning, so I can?t detect the modem with my hardware manager in win XP. Do you have any printer using the lpt? You may check whether it is the problem of the port by using the printer?

Well, I think that?s exactly why we have to flush the cache after each time we browse. Caching is one of the most insecure things in the computer world. For example, you can often found ?snapshot? webpage on different search engines which you don?t like (say, a authorized page that you forbid visitors from visiting after the search engines have cached it on there servers, and you can?t delete them or their servers!). The only thing that you can do to prevent this is to do a User Agent block, or setup a robot.txt. But if a visitor is giving away its credentials to any Adware or Spyware, as the administrator, there is not much that you can do. Perhaps the old trick works here. Many browsers toolbar like Hotbar, Yahoo Bar or Google Tools will embed there name in the User Agent, and thus can be blocked there. But if they become popular, you may block a lot of visitors there....

The website I visit most frequently is hardly my favorite. I have the shortcut button on the top left corner of my browser and I click it very often --- well, it is google. Sites other then google that I mostly visit are mainly P2P sharing forums. There are plenty of them actually, and they come and gone like snowballs in hell. God knows why they can?t stay. There was one that I liked a lot, but vanished from the Internet few months ago. And then some new sites pop up and get as popular as the vanished one. If there is anything that Internet has taught me about life, I think it is the fact that many things don?t last forever. Anyway, there are some that I would call home, say HKP2P. A forum is a place where many people meet, and if you like the community, you will stay there. (Of course, the server and the bandwidth are both important)

I have a DIY computer similar to yours. I don?t like the light so I seldom turn it on. But the fans on the box are important. You won?t have those fans on a computer from Dell or HP. I have four fans, two for cooling down the 2 hard disks and 2 for ventilation. There are dust problem, however, with the fans. I used an ASUS motherboard and it allows me to use the AI overclocking option. I get overclock my 3G to 3.2G quite easily. That?s why the fans become essential. I don?t have a front panel, though, which I think is quite useful for overclocking users.

I would name a very ?big? book. Bertrand Russell?s History of Western Philosophy. Bertrand Russell is really one of the very few wise men I knew in my life (of course, I am too young to know him personally). Reading the book brings tremendous pleasure, especially the first two parts of the book, which are very well written. You?d feel as if you drove a tank into the jungle, and you became much superior then the philosophers you looked upon. Russell is well beyond all those philosopher and the book shows that he knew the strengths and weakness of each of them very well. He also demonstrated to me how to think critically and to tackle very complex philosophic questions (and even ethical questions) in an analytic way. Russell is my teacher, in that his book changed the way I think. I was very lucky to read the book when I was still very young (around 18 then), and I found his advice useful. I would strongly recommend this book. Readers will feel they are promoted to a higher intellectual level after reading the book.

I am using two flash album creators. (I am not making advertisement here. I have no association with those two companies) One from dreamingsoft and one from firmtools. The one from firmtools is definitely better. You may take a look at the samples they offer at the official websites. The one from Firmtools, besides generating flash albums, also creates html webpage. But the html webpage is not far better then that offered by macromedia in their development kit for dreamweaver. They are both based on templates, though, which means that you cannot hack the codes through to create a customized webpage. For the one from Firmtools, you may buy additional templates. You site wont be too unique anyway. http://www.dreamingsoft.com/flashalbumcreator/index.htm http://albumcreator.firmtools.com/ If you are doing it for a webpage design project, I would recommend that you use the Dreamwaver one, and try to hack through the codes to get something you want. You will impress other then. If you are just creating something personal, I would say coppermine and gallery are better solutions. I am using both of them and they are really good

I am not very picky as to what meals to have. Of course, if I was sent to a desolate island, it would be another story. Can I choose a multi-course meal? I know it would be a sort of cheating here Well, there are a lot of small dishes in a traditional Korean meals and an imperial course of Chinese consists of about 15 of such small courses. If I were to be sent to an island, then it would surely be my first choice. I think you have to consider the nutrition too. If you are on steak for too long, you will lack carbohydrates and fibres and you may die of ketosis. So think twice I like curry too. Just wonder what it would be like if one was served curry for a year. Will he or she lost all the senses he/she have?

I have been using Mozilla from 1.3 or something and the only thing I found that would make mozilla freeze is when you open a very large webpage and you scroll the middle wheel of your mouse too quickly. It freezes most of time when you do this. The other thing that would make mozilla freeze is when there are some strange scripts that are not compatible with the engine of mozilla on the site you are browsing. Mozilla would respond with a lock-up. But such sites are rare and I would experience this only once in about 300 webpages I browse. When you restart mozilla after a freeze up, the program would take some time to rebuild its cache and there would be no icon and no menu in the mozilla window, making it look like an epileptic attack. When the cache is refreshed, mozilla is ready to go again. If you are experiencing freeze up with mozilla, I would recommend that you delete your profile in Documents and Setting directory and try to start it up again.

I hate Internet Explorer too, but I wont go so far as to remove it from my system. I dont think it is a good idea to remove this rubbish from the OS for you will need it in Windows Update, as well as certain web applications. Say, the online tutorial system my school used, WebCT, would not support browsers other then Internet Explorer. Of course, you can send a faked user agent through you Firefox / Mozilla browser with Mutizilla, but Internet Explorer is not fully W3C html compliant and it is not using the DOM model either, so you will have errors with the syntax occasionally. Actually, there are quite a lot of rubbish php scripts that do not take into consideration the use of alternate browsers. Certain functions of these poorly written forums could not be used with browsers other then Internet Explorer. So I strongly recommend that you keep Internet Explorer in your system. You can just use it during Windows Updates and the numerous flaws with the poor browser would not bother you then

I think you are mixing things up in thinking that we criticized the mob in China because we love Japan. It is not an emotional issue. If we are behaving emotionally on such an important matter as the history, we are no better then the Anti-Japan mob in China. I think, most of us agree that the anti-Japan mob is overreacting. The reason behind such a comment is that we dont think China has shown a greater respect for the truth then its neighbor. I criticized the Asians obsession with face (to use a Chinese word) and I think that the Japanese textbook writers are certainly wrong in glossing over their war past for this reason. However, I think that the Chinese are covering up many things for the same reason, say, they are covering up the outbreak of SARS (which no Chinese official has apologized), they are covering up their brutal treatment of Falun Gong members, and they are still covering up their atrocities committed in Tibet. Thats why I think that the Anti-Japan movement in China is fuelled not by a love of truth, a respect of history, but rather a blind hatred, fanatical chauvinism and as an outcome of brain washing by the state media and state controlled education system. If the Chinese were really true to history, they should have been equally angry with their government for covering up facts in Korea and in their Civil war with Kuomingtang and in the June Fourth Massacre. Mao, the founder of PRC, once thanked the Japanese for invading China, undermining the Army of Kuomingtang, so that the Communist could seize power after the war. Thats why I think that the Communists are more interested in seizing power then anything else. This is also true in the recent shows of madness. The Chinese government has been manipulating the so called nationalism of its people. Sometimes, it shuts down the Anti-Japan website and censors certain keywords in search engines and in other times, it allows them to let out Anti-Japan sentiments and thus orchestrating the whole show. This smacks of the N. Korea nuclear plan. When N. Korea needs food, it publicizes their advancement in atomic physics. For the Chinese government, letting out the Anti-Japan mob gives it more power in bargaining with Japan over issues like natural gas and recognition of fulfillment WTO requirement. But the show really did not impress me.

I am not Chinese. I am not Japanese either. I hope I am not biased against any of these countries. Yet, the movies I saw on TV reminded me of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China, a part of modern Chinese history which the Chinese are still too reluctant to face squarely. The Chinese government is also glossing over the June Fourth Massacre in Tiananmen, where the Army killed 5000 students. I therefore think that the Chinese are actually not in a good position to protest the Japanese misinterpretation of history. I think the problem with the Asians is that they are too afraid of losing face (see http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/). The Chinese covered up the SARS outbreak, the Kyoto farmers covered up outbreak of avian flu, the disgraced Korean businessmen, having found involved in some financial scandals, would rather commit suicide then to face the tribunal. They take their reputation too seriously to the extent of becoming notorious. Thats why there are a lot of chauvinists in the Asian countries. If you dare to criticize their countries, they will be crossed. History, however, is not for the patriots or the chauvinists. It is a scientific study of the past. That's where the problem is.

A quote from a book called Google Hacks, from O really: You may also want to know about PageRank, the algorithm behind Google's ranking. Just do a web search about that. From my experience, Google has the worst web craweler among the big 3. Yahoo Slurp and MSN bot visit my site almost every day. While Google bot visits only once per month. Notice from snlildude87: Use quote tags when you did not think of the article

I think the best thing about XP is that it has been around for quite a long time. Unlike previous OSes Win 98, Win 2000, and the short lived Win ME the product cycle is significantly longer this time so people don?t have to switch to new ones and have to combat all those compatibility issues. The kernel of XP is reasonably stable then Win 98/ME, after all the Win NT/2000/XP series are built on a more decent kernel, keeping applications and debuggers further away from Ring 0, and thus provided better stability. However, in comparison with Win 2000 and the Linux Kernel, the XP kernel is not much superior, but the size of RAM it uses is much larger then those two OSes. Also, the XP kernel, like the 2000 kernel, reserves 1GB of RAM for internal use, even the kernel needs not such a large amount of RAM and so leaving only 3GB RAM at most for applications. This is one of the many defects of the Windows XP. The XP is solely built to run Intel and AMD CPUs, its compatibility is not as good as Linux. Unlike Knoppix, you can?t run XP on a Compact Disc. XP huge size is formidable. XP also does not offer options for different run levels. Either you are at the recovery mode, or you are at the safe mode, or the normal mode. You cannot choose which level you want to use and so is not as safe as Linux. It can only be installed on disc 1 (if you have two harddisks), unlike Linux. Anyway, I think the graphical user interface of XP is pleasing to the eyes. The built in technology like DirectX is indispensable for 3D games and video. It has a good library of drivers and good hardware support. It is a fool proof OS that dummies will enjoy using.

I really like your joke about S. A. Kids get more comfortable with S. A. this way, euh? I am, though, not as cynical about this as others. I worked in the medical field and the shorthand people use are just as cryptic as those used by internet users. Say, a standard history would have C/O, HPC, MH, FSH and alike, a blood picture will have HCT, MCV, WBC, MCH etc and we will write in the record R/V in 2/52, Rx, paracetamol, 500mg q.i.d ./I or ../II p. r. n. These are as unintelligible as internet language. They share the same grave defect: they are only not universal. A may use a set of abbreviations completely different from B, and this causes a lot of problems.

Anyone of you using Gmail might have noticed the amazing counter that keeps counting up for more storage space, as of this writing, it is something like 2050M already. Meaning, every acoount now gets about 2GB of storage. Of course as a normal user, I may not use up all of them in the near future, but I am just interested to know how Google is kicking out the abusers if it is providing such a huge amount of storage. You know, there are already plenty of software letting you use Gmail has a network storage, network dump, or network drive or alike. Does Google stop their accounts? Anyone has any experience being ?rejected? by Gmail? Also, I notice that more and more people are using Gmail as their peer to peer file sharing dump. They do this quite tactfully. Gmail enables POP and that?s how they exploit Gmail?s service just as they exploited free web services on the web. They will encrypt the username and password and let people use a piece of specially designed downloading software to get the files. I have seen people sharing movies and software this way. How can Gmail will defend itself, when it is providing more and more storage?

I am currently using wordpress for blogging. There are always some annoying spammers who would use some anonymous proxies for spamming. They must have been bots for even at one time I mistakenly hid the commenting box due to some errors with the php script, they still manage to spam on my site. Of course, I can turn off commenting or specify that all comments be moderated, but I would also like my blog to be as ?free? as possible. I have been using blacklist, but it seems to be quite reactive instead of proactive. Do you have any other means to fight blog spammers?

Yes, indeed they can. If you are using Flash 2004 MX Professional, like me, there are some built-in media playing components that you can use. Just do a search on Macromedia website and they will tell you how to use them. There is even a time bar and a "media player". If you are looking for more professional scripts, you may also use winpy mp3 player, which is built on php and Flash. It is not free, however.