That's why a third player is needed.

I just browsed through 2 degrees mobile's pricing plan,  it's clear that they are targeting  low volume users just like me for now, and the pricing is very impressive in most areas, although there is still a gap to catch up with the rest of the world, but hey, somebody has to make a start.

The only downside is the expensive data charge, 50cents/mb. However, I would expect a data plan to come out pretty soon. Before that I'll keep two numbers.

I ordered the  promotional free SIM with $5, and can't wait to have it now.

BTW, The Herald has compiled an excellent table showing duopoly at work(PDF).

It is significantly improved, according to many sources. A copyright tribunal is proposed to deal with the judicial and punishment issues, and alhtough the three strikes policy is still there, the details are quite different now. I've reduced it two three steps, for details, see the excellent analysis from the Creative Freedom Foundation.

Phase 1 - First Infringement and Cease and Desist Notice Procedure

Phase 2 - Obtain Copyright Tribunal Order to get infringer's details

Phase 3 - Copyright Tribunal decision

Creation of the copyright tribunal significantly improves the fairness of the whole process, however, I am still very disappointed that termination of Internet access remained as a punishment.

Access to Internet, in my opinion, is a fundamental human right in this digital age, people who lacks the full and free Internet access will be significantly disadvantaged in the society.Internet access should be regarded as part of the freedom of communication, which is a concept in many written constitutions.

Such termination is not in the spirit of a free, democratic society - This is why we are so against Internet censorship, especially the Great Firewall. The termination is even worse than that, which the citizens' right to communicate is not just being impeded, but denied in full.

The document is open for consultation, submissions are open until 5pm Friday 7 August.

Parents should be prosecuted for allowing their children to play age-restricted video games, the chief censor says.

Current laws allow punishments of up to three months jail or a $10,000 fine for those caught supplying R-18 games to children. While there have been no prosecutions so far, chief censor Bill Hastings told the Dominion Post the laws should be enforced to help prevent the effects of repeat exposure to violence and sexual violence on young people. (via New Zealand Herald)

Well the first thing I started to wonder is how they are going to enforce that law. Sure that lousy TV3 programme called Target can hire under aged actors to buy restricted games, but unlike illegal selling of tobacco, distribution of games, especially compute games, does not work that way. Today's kids are pretty clever, much cleverer than what we use to. 10 years ago no parental control software can lock me away from computer, today, I recently heard a story from China,  a 14 year old kid is now spying on their parents' activities on computer.

That's a very unique case but most young people do know how to download pirated stuffs online - parents will also be responsible for this if S92A came to force last month (luckily it hasn't) as the Internet access is under the name of a parent. If this happens, I mean, is this really a fault of parents? They tried their best, education, use parental control software, lock out the computer ... but parents aren't nannies, even a nanny cannot watch with children 24/7.

There's a difference of wording, "allowing" or "supplying". Supply is a process that you handed out something that you know it is illegal, allowing can mean you simply don't know. Sure if a parent buys a clearly labelled r-18 games for their children then it is a offence, but if you simply don't know, and don't have access to information on what your children is playing?

Yes; I respond by saying that I am mindful of the concerns that have been expressed by the public in relation to this provision coming into force. As the member will be aware, industry representatives are currently working on a code of practice to help implement this law, which was passed by the previous Labour Government.

For me, this means that the government is not going to delay the implementation or abolish 92A, but rather leave the job of fixing problems to the "Code of Practice".

I talked about that "Code of  Practice" before, I was quite happy on the draft version but that code is not in concrete yet. It is still open to public submission so to copyright holder submissions as well. This submission is now far more important than blackout your facebook page or write a letter to your local MP. I'm preparing my own submission.

I also checked responses from ISPs, here are the  extracts:

Orcon:

There will be a fee for rights holders lodging infringement notices to offset the work that we will have to undertake in order to process the alleged infringement.  There will be no additional fees or charges for customers.

I hope Orcon charges them a good price. ISPs shouldn't get abused by copyright terrorists as well. I also think ISPs should cut the internet of any copyright holder who have made 3 false accusations  - it's more than fair.

Telecom New Zealand (via twitter):

We recognise the importance of protecting individuals' copyright. However we don't believe #s92 in its current form is the best solution.

I certainly agree, I'm not endorsing piracy, but this society should not giving up its liberty and undermining its justice system to protect the profits of some.

Vodafone didn't got a lot to say, but they already finished the work on the format of infringement notice(PDF).

I'll keep you updated. I can't tell the full effect of s92a at the moment, but believe me, this thing is not going to work -for real and serious infringer, there are plenty of ways to get around this law  -  I removed the way to get around the S92A here as I realise that I'm attracting real infringers here.

a dangerous world(click for full image)

I was searching stuffs for my essay this morning, and suddenly this happened. In fact, every single result was flagged by Google as a site with "malwares". The glitches lasted for about half an hour.

Google fixed and explained what was hapened quite fast. According their blog, when they were updating the blacklist, the value " / " was accidentally checked as an identifier for sites with malwares, and of course, every URL got that slash.

They've done something like this back in sometime around 2001 ... if my memory serves me right.  But I do remember the winner, it was Horsehead Nebula. As the result of that, Hubble produced an astonishingly detailed photograph.

BTW, for those who are interested, I recommend you to put this site in your RSS reader.

The whole list can be found here(in Chinese).

The interesting thing about this list is that it covered majority of the most popular websites in China. Google was ranked number one "vulgar" site, followed by Baidu and Sina. I'm very confident that every Chinese netizen have visited at least one of such vulgar websites, myself included. So after being diagnosed as psychotic under the Chinese guideline because I need to work on my computer for too long,  I'm now also officially a vulgar and unhealthy person because I have visited at least 75% of the websites listed.

Most of the Chinese netizens are very familiar with such Internet Cleansing campaign as it was repeated many times in the past decade. Despite that most of the cleansing was justified under the banner of "please think of the children"(which itself is a logical fallacy) ,it's usually the adult internet users who are most affected.

Have these campaigns worked, anyway? Well, the funny thing is, thanks to the new Xinhua Search engine, an official search engine intended to censor vulgar information,  if you know the right keyword, you can find as many "vulgar" information as you can expect to find in most commercial websites. I can list you an endless list of examples of vulgar information that can be found on Chinese official news websites like the Xinhua Net: this, this, this ,or this, and the list goes on,  and yet they were never criticised by anyone.

It's a common sense that it is impossible to censor out all those "unhealthy" stuffs if somebody really wants to find them, as there is a market for it.

As a regular user of the most vulgar website (Google), I cannot recall not even once that Google returns me "unhealthy" information, unless I deliberately searched for it (I admit it, haha) - not to mention Google has a optional filter that censors images and texts, which is very effective in my opinion. Therefore it is hard for me not jump to the conclusion that the accusation of search engines means that creators of the list, themselves deliberately searched "vulgar" information in order to produce the list.

So now who's unhealthy and vulgar?

In my idea, protect the future generation probably wasn't the original purpose of all those internet cleansing campaigns, and the campaigns themselves, are kind of the ridiculous - find me another country on this planet which labels the absolutely majority of its netizen population as "internet addicted" and "vulgar"?

Most of the Chinese parents, including mine, are not as tech-savvy as their children, some don't even use the internet, TV and newspaper are still their major sources of information, which are still largely controlled by the state. Strangely, they are in fact the targeted audience of such campaign.

So it's not surprising that I have met too many Chinese parents who didn't hesitate to use corporal punishment to their children just because they logged onto the Internet without parents' knowledge, because deeply in their mind, the word "internet" means "evil". Sounds shocking but luckily, as the post 80's generation are gradually becoming parents themselves, use of such corporal punishment are now less common.

However, for the older generation, although their children are now grown up and corporal punishment won't work on them any more, but bear in mind that they are now the most powerful generation in China, in 40-50s(or even older), financially stable; and as they usually have the directorial positions in organisations or their work places, this group is also potentially a powerful political force.

Now the long demonisation of the Internet is starting to make sense to me.

I think its time to go off topic a bit. What I usually do in my Chinese blog is to dig up some video clips from youtube, and introduce them here. I tend to turn my attention to the ads on TV ... for no apparent reasons.

------

First one is a promo from National Geographic Channel Australia. If you watch other versions of the channel, the chance is, you have never seen the following clip before as it is for the Australian version only.

This is the most beautiful, in fact, most elegant piece of art I've ever seen on all the television channels you can get in New Zealand. But sadly, as a lot of wonderful things in New Zealand, this promo is also made in Aussie.

Second one is an ad of gorilla drumming and trying to sell you ... Cadbury Chocolate.

I understand this "gorilla campaign" débuted in the United Kingdom some time in 2007, and New Zealanders saw this ad on their tellies a year later. The ad was a huge success in the UK and it was so prominent, there is even a Wikipedia article for it. In New Zealand, the ad helped the song in the ad (Phil Collins, "In the Air Tonight") re-enter the NZ singles chart and briefly reached #1.

However, I am still having difficulty of understanding how this ad is suppose to work. What's the connection between a gorilla drumming and chocolates? This ad appeared on TV many times but I still cannot recall which brand the ad is for before the brand name appears at the end.

Third one is a Kiwi classic - "we don't know how lucky we are". I doubt if there is need for me to introduce this song to New Zealand audiences.

This is a remake version as no original version is available on youtube at the moment. Sadly, again, as a lot of good things in New Zealand, they are either made in Australia, or become Australian later like John Clarke.

The last one is an example of how not to do your TV ads. It's in Chinese so I'll explain it a bit later.

If you were suspecting your computer crashed like how a video tape jams a player, you are far from alone. It's in Chinese, and there are basically three parts:

恒源祥，北京奥运会赞助商，龙龙龙！

Heng Yuan Xiang, sponsor of the Beijing Olympics, dragon dragon dragon !

First part is the brand name, second part is very self explanatory. The phrase has been repeated 12 times in the ad, and only the last part is different in every loop. Like in the example, the ad went on to read every Chinese zodiac animal three times in every 'loop". Hardly innovative, but highly annoying. When this ad first appeared on Chinese TV, most people I know got up from their couch and had a very close inspection of their TV just to make sure it is still working.

There were also people who went further and called their local TV Stations, besought the station to take off the ad. I wasn't in China at the time but I understand for the business, it was a huge campaign and the ad appeared in almost all channels.

Well, I checked my home, not bad, you cannot see anything apart from my fence.

If you live in centres like Auckland or Wellington, I urge you to check your home here to see whether your privacy is at any kind of risk, like this one ... you can make a complaint to google.

Actually the coverage is quite good, except some west coast roads down south and Stewart Island, rest of the New Zealand is pretty much covered.

This must be very helpful for a computer science student, but I have only found University of Auckland, and Canterbury on the able to get it list.

The only software in the DreamSpark program I've really used so far is the Visual Web Developer. Deleted soon after the installation - simply too hard for a beginner.

You may discard this message now,thanks.

Bear's Blog Chinese, my Chinese blog is currently under maintenance. It starts from NZST 9.00pm or 5.00pm CST.  The maintenance is expected to take about an hour to complete. All visits to that blog are redirected to this page.

Bear's Blog Chinese正在维护当中。任何访问这个blog的请求都会被重定向到这个页面。维护从新西兰时间9pm，北京时间5pm开始，将会持续大约一个小时左右。

The main object of this maintenance is to move the blog from /blog2 to the root. And(possibly) update the wordpress version to 2.6. You need to update your bookmark accordingly, but if you are a RSS suscriber, you don't have to anything.

维护的目的是将中文blog从/blog2的目录下移动到根目录下，也许还会将wordpress升级到2.6版。你需要在维护后更换你收藏夹里的地址。不过如果你是rss种子的订户，你不需要做任何改动。

I apologise for any inconveniences this may has caused. If you need to access my blog contents immediately, I suggest you to use this site specified  google search plus key words to check whether there is a google Cache of that page available.

我对这次维护对您带来的任何不便感到抱歉。如果你需要马上访问我的blog内容，请在这条google搜索命令后加上关键词，查询是否有Google快照存在。

If you've encountered any bugs after the change, please tell me so I can "try" to fix them.

There's one weird problem, however as you can see in the picture.

It turns out that wordpress automatically convert some punctuations to UTF-8 compatible codes. For example, (') and (...) would become (’)[’] and (…)[…], which look like fullwidth form punctuations in CJK characters. We use them in Chinese, but that curly apostrophe looks just terribly ugly in English.

I was quite surprised that I didn't realise this problem before. That little apostrophe appeared fine in IE 6-7 and FX 2-3, I guess that's because they are not really up to that mysterious "the standard".

But if IE 8 keeps this "standard" in the final version, that little apostrophe would become a headache for  wordpress based UTF-8 coded blogs. WordPress should consider at least put this somewhere in the settings that allows people to disable this converstion easily.

After consulting with Google,  I understand there are two solutions. One, if you know what you are doing, get into the /wp-includes/formatting.php file, and kill the conversions that have offended you in wptexturize function.

Or there is a plug-in called Quotmarks Replacer that solves this problem. What it does is to disable(or should I say filter) the wptexturize function altogether, so all the punctions will appear as the same as the ones you actually typed.

About just 20 years or bit more time ago, Microsoft is still a relatively not very well-known company, starting to sell MS-DOS. The success of MS-DOS made the company possible to go IPO, and created billionaires and thousands of Millionaires we see today.

Twenty years after, Microsoft maintains a total domination over desktop OS market, despite the rise of open source Linux.

Bill Gates and his Microsoft influenced nearly every aspect of our life, and today, he is finally saying good bye.

For me, he defined the standard of excellence in many fields from software developing to business marketing. He has the vision of what future will be look like and work on that vision to make it come true - so I can type this blog in a windows based computer.

His retirement sets another standard of excellence for all the rich people out there. He donated all his fortune to his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a foundation which is to combat extreme poverty worldwide.

He is truly the role model for many of us, and the legend of our time.

Also, I personally feel bit guilty to Mr Bill Gates. China, today, still has one of the highest piracy rate in the world. Some of us, have been the loyal Microsoft software users from MS-DOS to windows 3.2, 95, 98 ... to today's vista, and yet those people never paid a single cent to Microsoft. Those people can afford a 6000 yuan computer, but not a 1000 yuan Microsoft Windows Vista.

the Corporation may did evil things occasionally, but it does not mean that we have the right to steal.

Finally, a  fun video clip that marks his retirement.

oh, here's another one.

Google Apps is a service most of ordinary users never heard of, but yet it is so popular that some of small site owners just cannot live without it. It provides an integrated solution for small site owners, provide the Google services like Google Chat, Gmail and Google Canlendar to users of those sites, free of charge.

I'm not a very tech savvy person so the Google Apps saved me from all the hassles like manage emails. If somebody is more unsavvy than me, they can even build a whole simple site by using Google Sites.

Compare with old university 100mb storage  (1mb maximum attachment) email system, the Gmail service is just too generous, and it was free in the form of Gmail for quite a long time now. And even better, it is free.

There's only one down side:there will be usual google ads in it. Oh maybe two, another one being the administrators have little control on storages(I think all your emails are now stored on Gmail server）.

I thought people paid enough tuition fee to fund an email service that has no ads on it.  I didn't expect to see this kind of time and money save move on New Zelaand's largest universiy.

It's bit worrying that corporations are becoming more involved in the process of educating our future generation.  I wonder what kind of effect would have on the people who get their business degree in "Fisher and Paykel Appliances Auditorium".

Another worrying bit for more self is that my other bit of life online is now just fell into the hands of Google, yet again. I'm already dependent on lots of google services like Gmail, Google Reader, Calender, Apps, Docs ... they are all good but you just feel you cannot put all your stuff in the hands of one giant corporation.

It may not doing the evil today, but who knows what will happen tomorrow?

Other source says that the market share of Firefox 3 reached 4% at end of the day. Quite amazing, really.

However, the firefox team still needs to keep up with the updates. I've also heard many complaints saying that it crashes regularly or incompatible to Silverlight.

Non of those happened to me, yet. What I see is a huge improvement on reducing memory leak and faster rendering speed. The only problem is, firebug plugin has yet to release a Firefox 3 compatible version.

Overall, I would highly recommend this version for people still on Firefox 2 or IE.

It's around 9.40 NZST at the moment. The Firefox download day has just started about 4 hours ago. I checked the stats:

Total Downloads Region Downloads

1,423,547

New Zealand

3,628

Seems the 1.5 million Firefox 2 download record will be easily passed. I expect the number to rise rapidly in few hours as the sun rises in Asian countries such as China and Japan.

I'm in my work place so I don't have the privilege to install it now , but would definitely recommend the network administrator to upgrade Firefox on everyone's computer later.

1.4 million, that's definitely a huge number for just 4 hours' download. Friends in China who waited the download to start says the website was totally crashed before anyone can start.

Wonder if this would also set another world record: largest scale of DDOS attack in the world.

It's fine now, I downloaded it in less than half a minute.

Join us to crash the server, it's not too late.The download will end in 3.16am (UTC+8) if you are in China, or 7.16am tomorrow (NZST, UTC +12) if you are in New Zealand.

The latest near-real time download time can be found herehere

]]> http://www.arctosia.com/blog/archives/209/feed 0 http://www.arctosia.com/blog/archives/207 http://www.arctosia.com/blog/archives/207#comments Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:05:04 +0000 Arctosia http://www.arctosia.com/blog/?p=207 The long expected Firefox 3, will be officially released on 17 June 2008, which is ... tomorrow night or early Wednesday in NZ.

There were several beta and RC versions available. I did not try it since I'm not that kind of guinea pig type software enthusiast. However, from other people's comments, I expect the Firefox 3 to be something worth you to download, and have a try (if you never used firefox before...)

I'm a long time Netscape - Firefox user. I enjoyed Firefox with its high flexibility - you can almost add any function you can imagine to your browser by simply install a plug-in.

Another reason is just do my small bit to prevent a monopoly. Netscape has been put down by AOl, which is a sad story. However, it's legacy, and the <blink> tag, continued in Firefox.

Of all the visitors to my Chinese and this blog, roughly 25% of them are using Firefox. It's a high percentage considering that Internet Explorer had a several year monopoly over the market.

The Firefox 3 release also got something quite special ... It will attempt to become "the most downloaded software in 24 hours" in Guinness World Record. 1.3 million people worldwide have pleaded that they will become part of this "download day".

Great idea to increase Firefox's publicity.

It's not a rover and cannot move. It landed in the Mar's north polar region, where scientists thought to be relatively uniform and has no need to move around. I don't quite agree with this though - you never know what you would see out there.

The mission object is quite clear, dig up the soil there to see if any form of water, either solid or liquid, is present.

Quite excited to see what kind of stuffs Phoenix would find.

More on NASA's project site or Wikipedia.

By the way, Spirit and Opportunity Rover, both launched in 2004, exceeded far beyond their expected 90 sol days functional period, and still working quite well at the moment.

So I adapted this new look, made by the same person of the old one, but with several improvements like drop down menus and a improved search function. You can download the theme in the link at the end of this page.

However the theme I'm talking is not exactly the same theme I'm using. I did some changes on the original theme to suit my taste, the most apparent you will notice is removal of one column.

I'm not an expert in this. I never read a book or property learn anything on php, or even html, so I'm quite unsure on that whether my changes created bugs. If you ever find one, please tell me so I'll at least "try" to fix it.

I'm not professional but I still have my principles when designing a website. quite simple:

• Simple to use, a good website only requires minimal clicks for a visitor to get what he or she looking for.
• I won't have patients to thoroughly read anything that's more than 5 web pages in 1280 x 1080 solution screen - if there is a blog entry that's more than 5 pages long (I doubt that I will ever produce one), then divide it into twoconsecutive blog entries, give readers a break.
• Keep the pictures on the page minimal to what it is needed to make the website to function.
• Light coloured.

That's all I can think...

Another bothered quite a long time is how wide the body should be. I used 980px wide as I gaved up people who still works on 800 x 600 solution monitor very long time ago.

Those people are only 2.6% of my total visitor, but...  they are people and I think they deserve a fair treatment. And unfortunately, I got one of my friends who is still unwilling to put his bucks on a better monitor.

The width of this new look is still 980px wide to suit the majority of my visitors (56.6%) who use 1024 x 768 screen resolution, but I'm also  considering develop a separate CSS sheet to just serve the 2.6% out there, but I quite affraid that I do not have ability to do so since ... I don't even know how at this moment.

You'll also receive a certificate for this:)

Nasa's News Release

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Project page