opinion – Page 4 – Vinko’s Thoughts On…

November 10, 2008

Microsoft’s Ballmer considers using WebKit within IE

Recently during a developer conference in Sydney Australia, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the idea of using WebKit as the rendering engine within its web browser was “interesting” and added “we may look at that.”

I hope this is true, but one must always take anything Ballmer says with a grain of salt. He often speaks without thinking and without any background knowledge of what Microsoft is actually doing with regards to the subject in question.

Of course, if this is really true, it will not be the first time Microsoft admit defeat with regards to their bloated browser, Internet Explorer. When Microsoft released 7.0 version and announced 8.0 version of it Internet Explorer, they admitted that their approach in the past had been wrong and they promise to do a better job to comply with Standards; established by W3C. With IE 8.0 that compliancy is starting to take shape, but it is still far from the compliant status of its competitors: Apple Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera’s Opera, etc. Therefore, the adoption of WebKit as its engine for future version of IE will accelerate its compliance to Standards and gaining the capabilities of the current fastest Javascript engine in the Internet world.

Most of all it will cause all those lazy web developers who only code their web site to work on IE’s quirky mode to finally wake up and start to follow the W3C standards.

I call upon all web developers to not wait for Microsoft and start coding to the W3C standards and then make exceptions for IE, and not the other way around. This is because even if Microsoft does not adopt WedKit its IE 8.0 will be more compliant to W3C and will be must less lenient to web sites that are not compliant, causing these web sites to just FAIL.

Street Washer

Originally uploaded by Vinko T.

Like many other metropolitan cities around the world, you will also see street washers and street washing trucks on Hong Kong streets, which come around either early in the morning or very late in the evening.

This is a blessing for many of these streets, because being selfish is one of the worst traits for citizens of Hong Kong. Unfortunately, there are either not enough of them or not enough funding to cover all the streets that need washing.

City hygiene is a community efforts, we all have a role to play and cannot simply rely on a handful of individuals to clean up after you. So, I scream loudly to anyone who reads my posts and lives in Hong Kong, please do your part and help keep our crowded streets clean.

November 8, 2008

Street Washer

Originally uploaded by Vinko T.

October 28, 2008

HK Jockey Club Assisting the Arts

Today the Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) announced the allocation of HKD7.5 million towards the Jockey Club Performing Arts Venue Subsidy Scheme. This scheme will offer rent-free venues to local art groups and individuals. This will enable local art groups a venue for them to hold performance or art installations. At the moment this scheme is only for the Blackbox Theatre venue, which is the theatre in the newly opened Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre (JCCA) in Shek Kip Mei. Where HKJC’s funding enabled the conversion of a vacated industrial building into a art center.

This is a move in the right direction for Hong Kong, as arts and culture is not that prevalent in Hong Kong. There are talks and much discussions about the West Kowloon and Kai Tak projects relating to arts and culture, but both of these projects are years away. Whether these projects will turn out as the government had intended, we will need to wait and see. In the past projects similar in intent had failed drastically, case in point is Cyberport.

I believe more of the Hong Kong arts and culture venues should similar charity programs for local budding artists and performers.

October 21, 2008

Advertising Tactics

Apparently Apple and Microsoft have took on the tactics that Coca Cola vs. Pepsi, and McDonald’s vs. Burger King used back in the 80’s.

To be fair the first shot over the bow with their “Get a Mac” TVCs. Microsoft this year decided to spend USD300 millions on an advertising campaign to savage the poor image of Windows, brought on by the negative press towards its latest version of Windows named “Vista”.

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October 21, 2008

Emoticons for Life

Some of you may not heard of the term “Lifestreaming”, but it is the term coined to refer to the streaming of ones daily and often hourly events to followers.

Currently the more popular Lifestream networks are: Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and Plurk. All of these services impose the same 140 characters limit to each message. This originated from the ability to use SMS to post to these services, and SMS message has a 140 characters limit.

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October 19, 2008

How Has Modern Day Communications Changed?

A friend of mine wrote a post about Social Networking in her blog. I could not help but comment on her post. Instead of simply commenting on her post in her blog, I’ve decided to write a post of my own.

There are an appropriate use of the various online communities, like Facebook, whether it is Social Networks, Instant Messaging (IM), Life Streams or Blogs. Each one of these community has its respective use in personal or enterprise context. For the companies who are up with modern trends, will recognize these are just different communications means.

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October 15, 2008

My Views on the New Late 2008 MacBooks

MacBook		MacBook Air		MacBook Pro
2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB DDR3 Memory 160GB 5400rpm Hard Drive Super Drive NVIDIA GeForce 9400M video card	2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB DDR3 Memory 250GB 5400rpm Hard Drive Super Drive NVIDIA GeForce 9400M video	1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB DDR3 Memory 120GB 4200rpm Hard Drive NVIDIA GeForce 9400M video card	1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB DDR3 Memory 128GB SSD Hard Drive NVIDIA GeForce 9400M video card	2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB DDR3 Memory Super Drive 250GB 5400rpm Hard Drive NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 256MB video card	2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB DDR3 Memory 320GB 5400rpm Hard Drive Super Drive NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 512MB video card
$10,200.00	$12,500.00	$13,900.00	$19,200.00	$15,400.00	$19,200.00

* All currency in HKD

This new line of Macintosh notebooks cause me to be indecisive about my justification to upgrade my current MacBook Pro (October 2006, Glossy Screen), 2GB of RAM, 2Hz Intel Core Duo, 100GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive. Let me get into the details so you can decide whether you have the same issues.

These new MacBooks have many technical advancement in terms of manufacturing and user interface. There are hardware in the Mac that the upcoming Mac OS X (10.6) will be able to take advantage and make these efficiencies available to all applications running on the new Mac OS X.

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October 11, 2008

American Principals

Having lived in North America for over 20 years; almost half of my life thus far, with 99% of it during what is often referred to as the most influential period of an individual. Therefore, I am familiar with the “western believes” and “western culture”.

Today New York Times published an article about an “U.S. Study Is Said to Warn of Crisis in Afghanistan“. It is not that I do not believe that these people who conducted the study believe in what they’ve found, but I do believe that some times one cannot impose ones believe onto others.

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