Joseph E. Stiglitz on capitalist fools: About Us: vanityfair.com: "Capitalist Fools Behind the debate over remaking U.S. financial policy will be a debate over who’s to blame. It’s crucial to get the history right, writes a Nobel-laureate economist, identifying five key mistakes—under Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II—and one national delusion."
Going to China by surface is full of uncertainty.
We thought it's more time saving and cost effective to travel to China through Kinmen and Xiamen since there's less hurdle than to go through the international route. We used to have to go to CKS international airport where is about 1 hours away from Taipei, waited for one hour, fly to HK, change plan and then finally fly to China. It takes almost one day to complete the journey.
It used to be that only Kinmen born people are allowed to travel to Xiamen (China) by sea due to political tension between China and Taiwan. The new president came to rein and new regulation is in place. Now this route is opened to ordinary Taiwanese. We tried it out.
From Taipei to Xiamen, we have to take a domestic flight from Taipei airport to Kinmen. Then there's a shuttle bus to take us from Kinmen airport to the ferry harbor. We registered ourselves at the shuttle bus counter, they gave us a box of snacks.
The ferry boat is nothing special. It's a rather cheap communication vehicle for local people. It can accommodate a couple of hundred passengers and is run by Chinese (not Taiwanese) people. There's so such thing called "service" at all. It's just a mean of crossing the sea.
The ferry trip takes about 1 hour, then we landed at Xiamen "international cruise center". The building is much newer and bigger than the one in Kinmen. There are many new building construction work going on just right out of the harbor.
It's all very fine on our way to Xiamen by sea. We got into troubles on our way back.
We flew from Nanjing to Xiamen to take the ferry on our way back to Taiwan. The travel agency was so ignorant that they didn't leave enough time for us to travel from Xiamen airport to the harbor, which takes about 20 minutes. We missed our ferry at 12:30.
Ferry from Xiamen to Kinmen leaves per every one hour. We had to standby for the 1:30 one. At 1:00, we were told the 1:30 ferry was canceled due to the rough sea condition and we had to wait for 2:30 one. At 2:00, we were told again the boat at 2:30 would not leave either. We waited again. It was about 3:00 when they announced all the afternoon ferries were canceled. We ended up spending a night at Xiamen.
The problem resides on that once your boat/flight is canceled, you fall into the category of "seat-unbooked" passenger type. We had to get up earlier to go to the ferry port to standby the next day. We arrived at 8:30 to wait for the 9:30 ferry. It didn't take too long to make us start panicking. The 9:30 ferry was full and we weren't able to get on. Every ferry was booked out in the morning. We had no idea and no information to know if we could get on any of them. Even we got on boat, we were not sure whether we could get on plane to Taipei at Kinmen. Fushing airline ground staffs were complete lack of information of what is going to happen next. They just told us to wait. There were many passengers waiting, uncertainly like us at the waiting hall.
Finally we were lucky enough to take 3 seats on the 10:30 boat. The return trip was rough. The sea was not as peaceful as the one we came. The boat was full of passengers benefiting this cheap option traveling between two countries. Some of them got really sea sick during the trip. The boat was really full and we were very glad to be able to get on.
We spent two good days to come back from China with lots of waitings and uncertainties. It's not a perfect route for business travelers at all. We could have missed our appointment with customers if the problems had happened on our way to China. There were many problems for this route. There was almost no possibilty to complain and the major reason is that the route is opperated by Chinese people who don't care much about service quality.
Eventually we all got back to Taipei through a small plane from Kinmen, after going through two days hassel.
自從用了Macbook之後，一直有個問題同事用exchange server發過來的outlook 邀請函，收到iCal中後時間都會錯亂。一直以來的解決方式都是把它收下來之後，再新增一個事件copy到正確的時間。 今天決定把這個問題撤底解決，以下是從surgical diversions 借用過來的方法：
~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail／”
Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, presides over one of the world’s richest minerals treasures, the Great Dyke region, which cuts a geological swath across the entire land from northeast to southwest. The real background to the pious concerns of the Bush Administration for human rights in Zimbabwe in the past several years is not Mugabe’s possible election fraud or his expropriation of white settler farms. It is the fact that Mr. Mugabe has been quietly doing business, a lot of it, with the one country which has virtually unlimited need of strategic raw materials Zimbabwe can provide—China. Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is, along with Sudan, on the central stage of the new war over control of strategic minerals of Africa between Washington and Beijing, with Moscow playing a supporting role in the drama. The stakes are huge.Mugabe’s Biggest Sin
Getting Around Online FirewallsFor its part, Reporters Without Borders is already advising reporters unfamiliar with China how to get around the government's censors. The first item on its to-do list: Install programs such as Tor, Psiphon, or Proxify that circumvent firewalls and protect communication. "The international version of Skype (EBAY) is recommended, rather than the one available in China, which is not secure," suggests the group. "It is also advisable to encrypt e-mails with PGP."NGOs: China Is Breaking Olympics Promises
An article in July 21th Forbes Asia tells this story of "Dark Journalism" or "Black Journalism" in China. The major incomes of Chinese journalists come from extortion or payoff to cover or uncover the reported target.This might also happens/happened in other countries. Restaurant owners payoff journalists in all sorts of different ways for getting a good review. However it seems to go beyond the extreme of protocol. But who's protocol is it?
Dark Journalism - Forbes.com
Censorship isn't the only thing wrong with Chinese reporting. The other one is a current of corruption
"There are many mines that have their own media consultant," says journalist Wang Keqin, who has investigated illegal mines in Shanxi. "Once the mine has an accident, all the reporters come, and the mine's media consultant would give red envelopes based on what kind of media you are. CCTV might get 50,000 to 100,000 [yuan, or $7,250 to $14,500], Xinhua might get 50,000. For provincial level media, it could be 30,000, and for small newspapers it could be a couple thousand to 20,000. This money is called the 'make-you-shut-up fee,' and it's also called the 'media public relations fee.'" Xinhua, for its part, denies having had any case of corruption in recent years and says it would fire a journalist found to have taken hush money.
Pro-China candidate wins Taiwan election | World news | guardian.co.uk: "A Ma victory looks likely to usher in a more relaxed regional environment. But its impact on Taiwan's still-young democracy is less sure. Having already won a landslide victory in January's legislative elections, Ma's party - which ran a dictatorship less than 20 years ago - once again has formidable power to pursue its agenda."
Center for Immigration Studies: "The United States does not formally recognize dual citizenship, but neither does it take any stand, politically or legally, against it. No American citizen can lose their citizenship by undertaking the responsibilities of citizenship in one or more other countries."
High Earth Orbit » Blog Archive » Geo search in Leopard Spotlight: "Spotlight has been in Mac OS X for quite awhile now, but in general, I haven’t found it very useful. However, when this tip came across at Mac OSX Hints on how to use operators for ranges in Spotlight metadata I got some ideas about doing geo-searches on my desktop machines. To summarize, Spotlight is a system-wide metadata storage engine. Mac OS X provides a nominal vocabulary of metadata you can store, but you can also extend this to add your own metadata. Various applications like Yojimbo add metadata keys to store tags and other info with files. What’s especially great is that by applications using Spotlight, it means you can tie into this underlying metadata without having to use the application itself. Using simple command-line parameters, you can do search for words, or specific metadata such as file type:"
Geotagging is now quite a popular "exercise" for people use on line album to share their photos. With an additional meta data of geo location, photo album can be organized in a new way.
However the more interesting thing is how this geolocation technology to let people see the world from different aspects and with more details. When I logged on to Flicrk, I could see 38 million photos with location information.
There are not many cameras equipped with geotagging capability. The easiest way to do it is to use a "GPS data logger". I use AGL 3080 since it uses generic USB interface which doesn't require special driver installation to retrieve route data. Once I started my trip, I started route logging. It record travel route automatically in the device.
Then comes the question of how to match geolocation data with the photos you take. The trick is the gps logger logs your travel routes and time simultaneously. Standard digital cameras store some meta data, such as when the photo is taken, settings of the camera, picture resolution, ISO value, and so one, of pictures you take. You need a software to sync both picture and coordinates by time information.
JetPhoto is a free software to allow you do such things. It has a quite well designed mac version. Download and install it to your macbook. After you come back from the trip, just do the following:
While reading Stephen Wellman's article "the top 5 reasons Nokia Should bid on Yahoo" , I found a guest comment to oppose these argument more interesting.
Five reasons Wellman listed for Nokia to bid on Yahoo:
1. Nokia wants a stronger desktop presence if Nokia wants to be a web company.
2. Navteg+Yahoo=Nokia's dominance of mobile location
3. Nokia needs to grow its U.S. market share and Yahoo is a brand that could help it.
4. Nokia is a mobile ad company that needs to grow its share of onine advertising
5. Nokia cannot afford to let Microsoft or Google gain any more online market share.
Comments from one of the guests read this blog:
1. Nokia doesn't need a desktop presence. Destops are dinosours. (I agree on this point. I would think a paradigm shift is what Nokia should make to allow mobile become a digital information/media platform. It should just bypass desktops)
2. Nokia can manage well without Yahoo. It owns the end devices.
3. Nokia's care of US market is less than $45bn. The far east and developing nations is where the mobile growth is.
4. Why would they spend that money trying to shoehorn themselves into an already saturated market, that has such a dominant encumbent?
5. Adding Yahoo to Google is just a blip on their revnue sheet and Microsoft is not even dominant in thir home.
I really think that Nokia (or anyone else) should focus on a paradigm shift of digital world. It's just like my first feeling to hold on OLPC. Why should we chose a costly "laptop computer" (even though it's already under US200) to bridge digital divide in the developing world? Mobile platfrom with multiple function capability can do a lot now adays and iit's gonna be a lot easier to have it close to $100. What would be more important is how the content is deployed to the device.
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Google 公司網站裏的「Google發現的十個真相」中有一項：「Democracy on the web works」。 延續對梅田望夫的「網路巨變元年」一書讀後的思考，與I最近的「紀錄片的熱門」一文中稍稍觸及的媒體問題，不禁有這樣的思考：能在網路上用某種方式體現的民主，要如何走出電腦的框架，進入到大部份人們的生活當中？ 我想到我們之前開車上班的路上，總是收聽某一個電台，因為似乎只有那一個電台，才「偶爾」有些知性的資訊，適合在不能閱讀的情境下收聽。但因為該台的報導或是主持人的立場過於單一，常讓我們聽不下去。後來比較多的狀況是用podcast下載BBC的新聞，或是Itunes U的演講。但也因此少了了解國內動態的機會。 從一個對網路資訊革命後知後覺的一般人，慢慢轉變受到它的某個「民主」程度的影響的我，常常會有一個感受，「要是每個人都可以參與這場在網路上進行的盛會，也許力量會更大呢！」（例如，Wireless Data 低價與普及後，人們就可以訂閱自已有興趣的網路新聞頻道，然後透過語音的方式將訂閱的新聞播報出來，這樣是不是可以在某種程度上把網路上的媒體自由帶進沒有電腦的生活情境中呢？） 讓IT從電腦裏走出到生活的每個角落，看來除了技術的突破，持續的低價革命與新的商業模式，才能讓資訊革命的力量延申出去吧。
Blogged with Flock
關於網際網路的發展與帶來的知識革命，一直有一個模糊的視野，最近讀了梅田望夫的「網路巨變元年」，視野慢慢清楚了起來。
梅田望夫清楚地指出一個正在發生的巨大革命：接近無限大 x 接近無 ＝ 某種價值，貫穿全書的精髓「不特定的多數」再次陳述「長尾理論」指出的現象。網路、低價、部落格把眾多原本可能不具意義、微小的個人智慧或行動集結起來之後，可以形成「某種價值」。
透過部落格，我得到最大的收獲就是，「無法變現的資訊或創意，與其自已囤積起來，不如免費分享出來，可以得到（無形的）很大的利益。
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BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click Online | Open source turns money-spinner: "Karl Fogel, from software distributor CollabNet, said: 'We now have a world that has distribution costs of zero. We have just built a world-wide copying machine called the internet."
