Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

End of an era

Chairman and co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates is retiring today to devote more of his time in his foundation to combat poverty. Read more

Auckland University switching to Google Apps

Auckland University's email services will be switching to Google Apps next month.

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?

8 million

That's the number of total download in yesterday's "firefox 3 download day".

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.

wow

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

Tomorrow is the day!

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.

Phoenix Spacecraft sucessfully landed on Mars

Phoenix is quite different than Opportunity or Spirit Rover landed in 2004.

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.