Archives - Technology
05/26/2005
Reuters reported:
Software giant Microsoft today launched MSN China, a Chinese-language portal with content provided by Chinese partners, The portal will offer much more communication, information and content than available through MSN’s other services, including Hotmail and Messenger, that are already available in China. Messenger has around seven million users there.
Nothing new on MSN China, the site are pretty much Chinese-style. No wonder that the portal are running through Shanghai MSN network Communications Ltd., a joint venture media company with government-operated Chinese firm Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd.
Keso point out that MSN China didn’t support Firefox browser which makes their layout totally massed up. He criticize the new launches of MSN is a bad move in China: no innovation, no new ideas, even no informative contents.
Chinese Government restrict solely foreign company to apply for a ICP license which forced Microsoft to establish a joint venture company in order to obtain a content provider license. From the starting point, MSN China will provide their major web services such as MSN messenger, MSN spaces, Hotmail in Chinese language. Microsoft also said it would buy assets from Chinese mobile phone software provider TSSX to offer MSN-based services to China’s 340 million mobile phone users. One thing strange is MSN China didn’t integrate their own MSN search but licensed Yahoo owned Chinese search engine “3721”.
Tags: china, internet
39 Comments
01/11/2005
According to today's NY Times news, IBM announced a plan to gives open Source Developer free access to 500 patents. Wow, this is the significant movement from giant technology corporation who are starting to give Open Source backbone support.
The move comes after a lengthy internal review by I.B.M., the world's largest patent holder, of its strategy toward intellectual property. I.B.M. executives said the patent donation today would be the first of several such steps.
John Kelly, the senior vice president for technology and intellectual property, called the patent contribution "the beginning of a new era in how I.B.M. will manage intellectual property."
Technology Reviews has a small piece of description of Open source software and the Philosophy:
Open source software is a spectrum of programs, the best known of them the Linux operating system, that are not under the lock and key of a single company but are developed by the communal efforts of volunteers who often start with little more than a common interest.
The philosophy behind open source: Grant a free license to users, include the software blueprints and let anyone make improvements with as few restrictions as possible.
After sold PC division to Chinese PC maker Levono, IBM's business strategy will give more forces on Enterprise market, from software to hardware, services to solutions. At the same time, for the rival of Microsoft, IBM absolutely will try to sell it's business clients on using more open source software. We will see that this year will be the big year for Open source.
127 Comments
06/ 8/2004
Google indexes more than 4.2 billion webpages,
Google spend $173m on maintain date centres and is expecting to spend about $250m in 2004
Google datacentres range from 10.000 to 80,000, concentration of computer power could be addressing more than 6,000 terabytes of data.
1164 Comments
02/ 7/2004
Basecamp released their online project management system.
Basecamp is a simple, hosted web-based service that lets you manage projects and quickly create client/project extranets. It lets you and your clients (or just you and your own internal team) keep your conversations, ideas, schedules, to-do lists, and more in one password-protected central location.
It seems the whole system actually developed based on content management system conception. Some of features could be integrated to our project.
7 Comments
What is Metadata:
metadata would be a machine understandable set of standards for describing data. This would enable Web functions like ratings and comparison shopping. Music retailers, for example, could create a standard set of HTTP queries for searching all music databases on the Web.The World Wide Web Consortium heads up several metadata efforts, such as the PICS project for labeling content and the Digital Signature Initiative.
Chinese definition:
"Meta Data" 指的是描述資料本身特性的資料，在全球資訊網上，它指的是讓機器看得懂的、描述資訊內容的所有相關資訊，例如描述資訊的所有權、著作權、流通權、隱私維護政策等，這可以幫助上網者更方便使用資訊。由於網路上對於這些相關資訊的需求愈來愈大，我們正在設計各種方法，將電腦能夠了解、辨認的資訊放上網路。目前以ＨＴＭＬ編寫的網頁，基本上是為了讓人類閱讀而設計的。將來，有一部份的網頁將會以所謂「資源描述結構 (Resource Description Framework,RDF)」寫成，由電腦軟體負責閱讀，幫助人類組織所有的資料。〞
Metadata Resource:
Frequently-asked questions on metadata
A review of metadata
Metadata for the masses
Metadata and Resource Description (W3C)
Metadata Information Day, Lund, October 11, 1996
Schoolnet Metadata Consultation
Metadata初探
15 Comments
01/ 7/2004
Xgird, apple's advanced computing group.
Xgrid turns a group of Macs into a supercomputer, so they can work on problems greater than each individually could solve. You can let Xgrid operate in screensaver mode, so whenever you aren’t working, your Mac can crunch away at some data set. Or if you have a group of Macs dedicated to the task, Xgrid makes it easy to set up a cluster that works around the clock, every day of the year
The newest Mac desktop G5 almost the fastest computer in the world, Xgrid should be most powerful supercompuer on Grid computing field.
5 Comments
01/ 3/2004
The Guardian new Digital Editions is in testing, The Register has a review on it "Guardian’s digital edition raises stakes" by Kieren McCarthy.
213 Comments
01/ 2/2004
Google buys search engine - PageRank RIP? New post on The Register
Google has bought Kaltix, a three-month-old, three-man Stanford startup that's working on personalized and context-sensitive search.
Actually Jeremy Zawodny's point that
PageRank is dead long time agao, MetaFilter's
Matt Haughey and web designer
Jason Kottke have acknowledged the problem
5 Comments
11/29/2003
Nine Reasons NOT To Use MS Access To Power A DB-Driven Website: This guy makes a lot of valid points, but he misses the biggest reason people are going to still use Access: it usually doesn't cost anything extra. For someone with a simple site, they're more interested in limiting their costs. SQL Server accounts can add up.
77 Comments
11/26/2003
I know a famous IBM project Grid Computing. How about Grid Blogging! Via Radio Free Blogistan
6 Comments
11/24/2003
What should I do if internet goes down?, This emergency Manual shows me ten thing I can DO after Internet down
198 Comments
10/28/2003
MS next generation operating system Longhorn Developer Center. They also offered RSS Feed
212 Comments
10/14/2003
Excited news from infoworld: China Grid project announce go live, it's mean a dozen unversitites work on grid project that will connect up to 200,000 students in 100 schools across the country.
Reference: IBM Grid Computing
6 Comments
10/12/2003
A new article was published yesterday at news.com,Developers gripe about IE standards inaction. This latest article by Paul Festa
includes interviews with Microsoft’s lead product manager Greg Sullivan, Web Standards Project’s co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman, CSS guru Eric Meyer, and usability expert Jakob Nielsen. This article is worth reading word-for-word, as there’s lots packed into it.
(via
Brainstorms and Raves)
0 Comments
10/10/2003
Microsoft announced a change to internet Explorer which means most site will start seeing a popup error reports around January 2004. We're going to be seeing millions of web pages changing in the next few months.
Why MS announed this change?? In early augest 2003, Microsoft loses $521 million verdict over browser.
"A federal jury in Chicago awarded the University of California and a browser technology company $521 million after finding that their patents were infringed by Microsoft Corp."
OK, here is a big problem come with this Eolas patent ruling.(via
zeldman. Technically, rich media is now no longer allow to play antomatically in browser window which means that flash clips cannot start without uset intervention.
"Besides paying over half a billion dollars to the patent holder, Microsoft is supposed to cripple its market-leading browser so that IE/Windows will no longer seamlessly play Flash, Quicktime, RealVideo, or Adobe Acrobat files, Java applets, and other rich media formats. Once the company does this, any site that uses these technologies will no longer work in the browser most people use."
Seriously, the workround Microsoft could be proposing is to insert a dialog box that pops up and asks the user, "Would you like me to satrt this Flash movie?" They are in that much of bind here. Are you kidding!
After a month, the Eloas Patent decision has spawned the this dreaded update.
"Developers who build ActiveX controls, Web developers who use ActiveX and Java Applets on their Web sites, and developers who host the Web Browser OC or MSHTML should consult this documentation to understand how the user experience is changing, and also how to modify their pages to manage the user experience for their content."
I saw a article via anil's blog, seems like an opportunity comes to tidy for activX
"there's an opportunity here, if you're committed to web standards and want to make a real impact. Start working with HTML Tidy and make a version with a simplified UI, which creates valid markup and fixes OBJECT tags in one fell swoop."
For web developer should advocate user-centered design and usability, that's called User experience. Jakob Nielsen and Donald A. Norman both are pionners in the filed. see Nielsen Norman Group
1076 Comments
10/ 7/2003
No such thing as a free lunch? not really. a good free ASP library. Cool!
1 Comments
09/12/2003
WIRED：世界上第三最大计算机公司Sun Microsystems的创始人之一Bill Joy周二宣布将离开他亲手帮助创办的公司。48岁的Joy是计算机软件设计历史上的奇才。在25年前他在Berkeley加州大学期间就发明了 Berkeley Unix，虽然是AT&T Unix的一个学术性变体，但是这个免费的操作系统却是现在使用的最广泛的操作系统，他是许多当代Unix的前身，也是FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD和Linux这些OpenSource软件的先行者。
21年前（1982年）Bill Joy和斯坦福的三位学生，Adndreas Bechtolsheim，Scott McNealy和Vinod Khosla创办了Sun。在90年代后期的Internet和电信高潮期间Sun迅速发展，使几位创始人都已经成为了富翁。然而近期的经济衰退使得 Sun已经落后于IBM和HP，而且连续9个季度收入下降。
Bill Joy在Sun期间担任首席科学家的职位。他领导开发了Solaris操作系统和SPARC处理器。更加重要的是，他是Java语言的关键人物之一，经过他的长时间的潜心研究和努力推广，Java终于被应用到了从手机到家用电器的多个领域。Joy同时也是一个“电子环境保护主义者”，他反对人类社会过高地依赖于电子设施。他在Wired杂志上发表地封面文章：“为什么未来不需要我们”，引发了大范围的伦理讨论。文章的小标题：“我们最强大的21世纪的技术－机器人，基因工程和纳米技术－正在危险到人类成为一个濒危物种”。
天才的人物要离开天才的公司去另外找寻其他的挑战了。
摘自Digiblog
7 Comments
09/11/2003
Amazon RSS Feed
LockerGnome推出了分类的Amazon.com新产品的RSS源，人们可以通过订阅自己感兴趣类别的RSS，及时了解Amazon.com上的产品动态。
类别详细齐全，对常去Amazon的人很有帮助
9 Comments
08/29/2003
history flow provides answers at a glance to questions like, Has a community contributed to the text or has it been mostly written by a single author? How much has a particular contributor influenced the current version of the document? Is the text's evolution marked by spurts of intense revision activity or does it reflect a smooth transition from its beginning to the present?
IBM History Flow
17 Comments