Wall-E. I finally watched it today. Has been expecting this since Ratatouille. It is an amazing movie. With so little dialogs in this movie, it successful became the best Robot movie ever made, IMO. If you want a moving, touching Robot movie, look no further, A.I. or I, Robot are not comparable.
Aside from everything that’s great, the human plot is the weakest. I often felt it ruined some of the good about this movie. And it is not really convincing. However, an happy ending is always expected for such kind of movie. If only there is an artistic version of Wall-E may we see alternative ending. But I cannot really blame.
So apparently, Ratatouille is probably the best rat movie. Now introducing the best robot movie.
And, to some extend, this movie is indeed, sort of, an Apple commercial.
Oh, I think the soundtrack is nice too. Although sometimes I dislike some reprising at some scenes.
Today Apple announced that they have sold 5 billion songs. And now they sell or rent over 50,000 movies per day.
A while ago it is said that Netflix has 8 million subscribers. I believe many of those subscribers are not subscribed to unlimited plan. So a conservative estimation is, every customer rents 3 movies a month. That’s 24 million movies per month.
However, Apple sells/rents 50,000 movies a day. That’s 150,000 movies a month. iTunes has a market of 1/160 the size of Netflix. And that’s when iTunes has just started, and iTunes has only a little over 2000 movies, compared to about 100,000 titles of Netflix which is about 50 time bigger. Note that both of them have some quite old titles, so the selection of new titles is not a major issue. That is to say, Apple uses 1/50 of Netflix’s collection, and get 1/160 of Netflix’s rent amount. That’s impressive for a young service.
I used to subscribe to Netflix or Blockbuster. But they are not flexible, as I HAVE to rent a certain amount of movies so that my money is well worth it. Now I don’t have to . I just need iTunes to rent movie when I really need it. With better selection, iTunes will ultimately be a better choice for people who don’t want to watch a certain amount of movies a month.
And yes, Netflix is in trouble. Blockbuster has been in trouble for a long time because of Netflix.
Default fonts for Chinese Simplified: Arial Unicode still??? NONE of the fonts for Simplified Chinese on Mac OS X is recognized by Opera. How long is it going to take for Opera to fix such a smaller problem? And they are going to release 9.5? The performance of 9.5 is already surpassed by Safari and Firefox. Sad!
Time capsule, a combination of hard drive and airport extreme is a sweet idea. The hard drive is server grade, meaning it is much less likely to fail. However, Time Capsule is expensive, and cannot be easily expanded or upgraded.
Luckily Apple made Airport Disk compatible with Time Machine since Mac OS X 10.5.2, although it is an unsupported feature. But anyone who is budget sensitive can enjoy wireless whole system backup.
The problem is, many people like me have been using Time Machine with external hard drive for a while now. We don’t want to lose our older backups. However, Apple has not provided us a tool to migrate our backups from these external hard drives to Time Capsule or Airport Extreme Base Station’s Airport Disk. We cannot simply copy these files to Airport Disk, because of hard links. And Apple uses folders to store backups when the hard drive is attached to the computer. But sparse bundle disk image is used on Time Capsule or Airport Disk.
I searched online and could not find a tutorial to solve this migration problem. After doing some research, I have solved this problem, so I am sharing my experience with you, with the following tutorial I believe is easy enough for anyone to do it.
She is such a b*tch. You know, then, when you think about what kind of friends Dalai Lama has…
知道她是达赖的好便宜，但是，是好朋友也不代表道德可以败坏到这种程度，个人素质可以低到如此让人发指。She said she was going to cry? WOW. Honestly, when I heard what she said, I felt like I was going to cry. I was simply too sad to see celebrities so morally degraded and deranged.
Update:
It was reported that Dior claimed that Stone’s comments has nothing to do with the company. Also western mainstream media basically kept silent on this. And you know why.
And of course, her transcript, when asked whether she has heard about the earthquake in China.
Of course I have. Well you know at first I thought I’m not happy with the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans … and I’ve been concerned with should we have the Olympics because they’re not being nice to the Dalai Lama who’s a good friend of mine.
And then all this earthquake and stuff happened and I thought, ‘Is that Karma, when you’re not nice and the bad things happen to you?’
Update 2:
After a couple of days of lag, western mainstream media finally reported this, probably due to the high exposure of this matter among Chinese people.
From this video. This Indian living in Singapore said the following, shows intelligence.
I’m delighted to see there is such a disagreement of views here, because in many ways this program of yours makes me understand why a book like mine had to be written. Because you have to balance what I called this self-referential dialogue, that go in the west about Asia, China, and so on so forth. Here’s a quick word about Tibet, the issue of the day. Everybody’ve been talking about thousands of people protesting against Chinese government. You know what happened in Tibet? Hundreds of millions of Chinese have come together on the question of Tibet. Not just, by the way, Chinese on mainland, (but also) the liberal, western educated overseas Chinese. You watch the demonstrations of Chinese overseas, it shows you, that there is something happening within the Chinese nation, that is larger than the Chinese Communist Party, larger than all these problems. A new civilization is being reborn in China.That’s a much, much bigger story that the west doesn’t get, that you focus on all the details.
Yesterday, over 500 hundred Chinese people, citizen of China and also United States, held a rally at the Capital Hill in Washington DC. The spot assigned to them was Upper Senate Park, a place very few people would walk pass by. It was a peaceful 4-hour long rally. No major US media reported this rally, as expected, because no reporters from any mainstream US media were there. Organizers said they notified many western mainstream media about this event, including CBS, Fox, ABC, Reuters, Associated Press, BBC, The Washington Post and The Washington Diplomat.
At the same time, about 30 people from National Socialist Movement, a self-claimed Neo-Nazi group, was able to march at important places in DC, including the National Mall. They denounced illegal immigration, and said white Americans don’t want those illegal immigrants here in the US.
After China and Chinese Americans and Chinese legal immigrants and students in the US demanded apology from CNN and Jack Cafferty for his comments. Yesterday many Chinese Americans and Chinese people protested in Los Angles. However, the US media tried to label those Chinese people as pro-Chinese government, because Jack Cafferty called “Chinese government goons and thugs”.
However, only in CNN’s statement they interpret Jack Cafferty’s comments that way. In his original transcript, he did not mention “Chinese government” but only “Chinese” and “they”. Even if that is really what he meant, many US media failed to inform readers that maybe Chinese people misinterpreted his comments. US media intentionally doctrine their viewers that these Chinese people are protesting because “their Chinese government” was criticized. For example:
AP reported:
Protesters are also lashing out at the CNN TV network over its commentator Jack Cafferty, who caused outrage last week when he called the Beijing leadership “goons and thugs” and slammed the quality of Chinese exports.
Chinese Americans rallied outside CNN’s Hollywood office on Saturday to demand the firing of commentator Jack Cafferty for calling China’s goods “junk” and its leaders a “bunch of goons and thugs.”
Abstract for this news:
Chinese Americans protest commentator who called China’s goods “junk” and its leaders a “bunch of goons and thugs.”
Protesters are also lashing out at the CNN TV network over its commentator Jack Cafferty, who caused outrage last week when he called the Beijing leadership “goons and thugs” and slammed the quality of Chinese exports.
More neutral reports such as on Los Angles Times, did not use “Chinese government” but “China” as the subject of “goons and thugs”.
What Jack Cafferty actually said:
I don’t know if China is any different, but our relationship with China is certainly different. We’re in hock to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing. They’re holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper. We are also running hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of trade deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we’re buying from Wal-Mart.
So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed. I think they’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.
From this transcript and using my naive English, I think it is absolutely not clear he was talking about “Chinese government”. Maybe he did not mean “Chinese people” but at least he meant “China”. Even if he meant “Chinese government”, there are at least two major problems:
1) Chinese government don’t produce these lead toy and poisoned pet food. Those products are not Chinese government’s property, but Jack said “their junk with lead paint… poisoned pet food”.
2) He said “places where you can pay workers a dollar a month”. This place is not China because China is not THAT cheap. And he totally missed the target. The real target is the capital in the US want to make more money by outsourcing these manufacturing jobs. The main problem is exactly within US; not in China, not the Chinese people, and not the Chinese government.
So apparently CNN and Jack Nasty is trying to excuse themselves for saying something inappropriate and insulting and even racist. And some US media are trying to “help” and infuriate other Americans by labeling those protesting Chinese Americans as supporting “Chinese government”. This is pathetic.
By the way, quality of many Chinese products are probably not top quality, but they are worth the import price. Wal-mart and such made a fortune buying those Chinese products at unbeatable prices and sell many times more the import price. Also, China is a developing industrial country. If China can produce everything the quality US would, it probably wouldn’t be US who is bullying China now, right? And from my experience with some Made in USA products, I don’t think they worth their prices. Sometimes the quality is also… unsatisfactory.
Considering this context, China’s treatment of its minorities has been exemplary compared to what the Western world has done to its minorities. After thousands of years of Chinese dominance, there still are more than 50 minorities in China. After a few hundred years of European dominance in North and South America, the original minority cultures have been exterminated, damaged, or diminished.
Chinese currency carries five languages: Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uigur, and Zhuang. In comparison, Canadian currency carries English and French, but no Cree or Inuktitut. If the USA were as considerate of ethnic minorities as is China, then the greenback would be written in English, Spanish, Cherokee and Hawaiian.
In China, ethnic minorities begin their primary schooling in their own language, in a school administered by one of their own community. Chinese language instruction is not introduced until age 10 or later. This is in sharp contrast to a history of coerced linguistic assimilation in most Western nations. The Australian government recently apologized to the Aboriginal minority for taking children from their families, forcing them to speak English, beating them if they spoke their mother tongue. China has no need to make such apology to Tibetans or to other minorities.
China’s one-child-policy seems oppressive to Westerners, but it has not applied to minorities, only to the Han Chinese. Tibetans can have as many children as they choose. If Han people have more than one child, they are punished.
There is a similar preference given to minorities when it comes to admission to universities. For example, Tibetan students enter China’s elite Peking University with lower exam scores than Han Chinese students.
China is not a perfect nation, but on matters of minority rights, it has been better than most Western nations. And China achieved this in the historical context of restoring itself and recovering from 200 years of continual crisis and foreign invasion.
The flag of Tibet was reintroduced in 1912 by the 13th Dalai Lama, who united the army flags of various provinces to design the present one. Since then, it served as the all-Tibet military flag until 1950[1]. It remains the emblem of the Central Tibetan Administration headquartered in Dharamsala, India. As a symbol of the Tibetan independence movement, it is banned [1] in the People’s Republic of China, including the Tibet Autonomous Region which corresponds to the former area of control of the Tibetan government at Lhasa, as well as other areas in greater Tibet.
During the era between 9th and 18th century, Tibet did not have an official army. In late 18th century, after Qing government defended Tibet from outside invasion, they created a twenty-nine points resolution called “Imperial decree of protective procedures for Tibet”. The fourth clause of this decree stated “The lack of official military in the region of Tibet has lead to emergency drafts in time of crisis, which has proven to be harmful to the Tibetan people. The emperor has approved for Tibet to form a official troop of three thousand men. One thousand each will be stationed in front and back Tibet, five hundred in Jiangzi and five hundred in Dingri.” These three thousand troops became what is commonly known as the Tibetan Infantry. Considering that a military flag is a necessity for the daily training of this army, the central Qing government approved the “snow lion flag” as official military flag of Tibet.
This tradition is continued down to present day, where the Tibetan government in exile still uses the “snow lion flag” as their official representation.
“I think this is one of the turning points of Chinese history, and I want to be part of it,” she said, emphasizing that she does not support Tibetan independence.
The student said there have also been consequences for her actions in China.
“I know that I am on the Chinese government blacklist because of this,” she said, explaining that she had been informed of this by sources she declined to name. “It just means I can never go back to China if I care about my security. If I go back I might end up in jail forever.”
Wall-E. I finally watched it today. Has been expecting this since Ratatouille. It is an amazing movie. With so little dialogs in this movie, it successful became the best Robot movie ever made, IMO. If you want a moving, touching Robot movie, look no further, A.I. or I, Robot are not comparable.
