January 2010
10 posts
iPad's Traditional Chinese Question
Many Taiwanese users, and I believe many Hong Kong users too, will wonder how iPad could be a useful device at all. Apple states on its tech specs that the initially supported languages include English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Russian. There is no Traditional Chinese.
Language support is a topic on its own in modern operating system. It is mainly...
World Average Number of Days to Start a Business:...
And Taiwan’s average is 23 days. Its overall economic freedom is ranked at the 27th in the world.
This via the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom.
I currently run my own company (as a corporation as defined in Taiwan business code) and have experience of having started a partnership (later helped its conversion to corporation). All small businesses (or “micro” businesses if using...
You use nil, I use NULL
It’s just zero, it’s just naught
But if you think a 0 is a NULL, you never heard something called SQL
The Remote Desktop Envy
For all the advantages of Mac OS X over Windows, there is one thing that my IT friends always sneer at: That OS X has the inferior remote desktop protocol.
Apple makes remote management quite easy. Its Apple Remote Desktop, although expensive, has great user interface and is indispensable if you manage over a bunch of machines. Since OS X 10.5, it has become even easier and cheaper if you just...
That Reblogging Thing
Tumblr’s reblogging design says a lot of its peculiarity.
I find it fun reading my Tumblr dashboard everyday, in an age where blog seems done and RSS in decline—established media and writers make it a norm, whereas the rest of us have moved on to “microblogging”. I find truly insightful writings and excellent blogs on Tumblr. It has a light mix of social network, like the...
Judgment of Plagiarism
I’m at the beginning of Richard Posner’s “The Little Book of Plagiarism” and I ran into this passage (locations 138-145 of the book1, emphasis original):
A judgment of plagiarism requires that the copying […] induce reliance by [the intended readers]. By this I mean that the reader does something because he thinks the plagiarizing work original that he would not have...
Logo in the Age of Instant Communication
Ignacio Vasallo, on logo and branding in our age:
It was the first time any country had created an abstract logo to brand itself but today everybody thinks that all you need to do to rebrand a country is make a logo.
I think that’s out of date. Logos are old fashioned. These days, you can communicate almost instantly with the world. And the internet means that message has got to be...