Results tagged “computers”

Well, one can always hope.

Gizmodo said that this new Apple Store, which incorporates certain elements of traditional Chinese architectural style, will be opening in Shanghai. However, most of the reports in the Chinese media are saying this is Beijing's second official Apple Store. It seems that the architect is American Benjamin Wood (the man behind the various 'tiandi' projects around China and who lives here in Shanghai). An Apple store—is it really necessary? There are plenty of places to buy Macs here and there are official repair stores that have genius bars. On the other hand, there's a certain convenience for the consumer to have a one-stop shop. Plus, you can always exchange knowing winks with other fanbois and grlz as you congratulate yourselves for choosing the world's most advanced operating system for your computing needs. We've always wanted to get a job at the Apple Store—the Beijing store offers classes and demonstrations of Apple software and systems, just like in the rest of the world.

Most of the time when you read stories about the much reviled Chinese hacker it's in the context of some cyberattack perpetrated on some website that has stupidly dared to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. But really, what are Chinese hackers doing most of the time: well, duh, same thing everybody else is: trying to make some moolah.

Hot on the heels of the Asus eeePC and the meteoric rise of the netbook, Tencent has leaked that it is planning to launch a "lightweight, long-life notebook computer" next year. JLM Pacific Epoch says that it will be themed on the instant messaging tool. Our guess is that it will just be another ultra-light netbook with a penguin sticker on it.

Chinese hackers have "penetrated the White House computer network on multiple occasions, and obtained e-mails between government officials", said a senior US official to the Financial Times:

On each occasion, the cyber attackers accessed the White House computer system for brief periods, allowing them enough time to steal information before US computer experts patched the system.

Continue reading "US says attacks on White House, Obama and McCain networks came from China"

Eric Hu points us to this great TV ad by Chinese PC maker Lenovo entitled "Grandma-proof" that's getting forwarded around by his colleagues. We're not sure where this ad was aired but it does make us wonder why they don't run similarly ingenious ads back on their home turf in China?

As mentioned before, US expatriates are, for the first time, able to vote in a global primary, meaning that they get their own set of delegates during the primaries, which decide each party's respective presidential candidate. This particular event, held on Tuesday at the ecologically sound and coolly designed URBN hotel, was well attended. Computers were set up to help people register, liquor and hors d'ouevres helped people mingle, and Barack Obama's victory speech from the South Carolina primary was played on a big screen. Melanie McGanney was there and wrote about it on the Huffington Post. Youtube has a video of the speech here, and you can see some more of our photos here.

Yes, in the old days it was a national centre. The Jing Wu school was fully running before 1920 in Zhabei. Huo Yuan Jia was the most famous, although many people think he’s fictional these days. You can’t compare now to then but you can still find a lot of Bau Gua Zhang, Taiji and Xinyi, for example.

Two weeks ago, when we told you that China's new labour law was going to be a big, big thing, we had no idea it would also be the cause of some serious blood-letting. Local gangs and triads have been attacking the Shenzhen Dagongzhe Migrant Worker Centre which has been instrumental in providing legal advice for rural migrant workers and informing them about their rights under the new labour law. In separate attacks, they shattered...

Baidu has released its video search report, and Kaiser Kuo of the Ogilvy China Digital Watch translates and summarises some of the key findings. Interestingly, “adult-related” search terms account for 34.14% of daily search volume, followed by celebrity-related (14.74%), TV serial related (12.48%), and animation-related (12.21%) searches. Google is reportedly under investigation in China for tax evasion, says Paul Midler of The China Game.Chinese Skype users now exceed 25% of the global total.While venture capital...

We got a last minute heads up on a electronica duo playing at Mao tonight that should get early evening blog readers off the computers and into the club. Hailing from Japan, and named Miami, they are bringing an interesting 8-bit electro/violin mix to Shanghai. Tickets are 50rmb and include a free drink....doors at 9pm. Mao - 46 Yueyang Lu, near Dongping Lu, 岳阳路46号，近东平路 Abe Deyo is Shanghaiist's Music Editor. Email tips, recommendations, news and...

Over the week-long National Day holiday:
• Total airline passenger numbers climbed a quarter on the year-earlier period to 3.75 million people, with the record of 540,000 was set on September 30 - the highest number of people to be flying on a single day.
• One million computers were infected with various computer viruses, and 118,000 computers crashed on one day alone.
• Retail sales of consumer goods in China rose 16 percent year-on-year to almost 350 billion yuan.

In other Shanghaiist news, our favourite media blog Danwei has offered your correspondent a very special Toilet Bowl Award as part of their recent Model Worker's Awards for "posting regularly about news that no one else is finding, and translating some of the more interesting stuff on the Chinese Internet". We have also been singled out for our "excellent contribution to the toilet sector, for the posts Shanghai artist's Nike poo, and especially for the video displayed at this page: New bidet that doubles as enema and colon cleanser." We wish we could take all the credit for it but the first story came in as a tip while the second one was a quite a boo-boo on our part. We've actually since unpublished the post (but somehow it still appears), reason being, one of our colleagues already wrote about it earlier this year. Anyhow, we shall graciously accept our toilet bowl and promise to polish it religiously.

Gosh. With the third allegation of hacking by the Chinese military into government computers in Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom surfacing within two weeks, the guys at the Foreign Ministry have been kept busy! Fons Tuinstra points to past cases of bored teenagers who have successfully hacked into other governments and surmised that the German government could not have said that they had an issue with millions of bored Chinese teenagers! Richard Spencer made the erudite argument that if the "US and other western governments are busy infiltrating the computer systems of foreign governments... it is disingenuous to complain too vigorously when those same foreign governments become good at doing it back". Hmm...

Not content with making cars and computers for the world, China is now on to its next big thing -- aircraft. The long-awaited ARJ-21 (pictured here) is China's very first homegrown commercial aircraft and has been launched amid much fanfare by the aircraft maker AVIC I. Now only a name is lacking, and if you can come up with a creative Chinese name of between two and four Chinese characters before September 28, RMB50,000 will be yours! (Sorry apparently English names are worth nothing).

China should be an obvious beneficiary of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Scheme, which seeks to provide robust $100 portable Internet computers to children in developing countries. Behind the headlines of double digit growth and urban prosperity, two thirds of Chinese still live in the countryside and two hundred million people earn less than a dollar a day. Still, the Chinese government has not signed up to this project.

This is a little old, but we have a feeling many of you haven't seen it yet. From what we have read and seen (front row last month at Yunfeng Theater) of ?uestlove, drummer for The Roots, we always thought the man also known as Ahmir-Khalib Thompson would be a pretty cool guy to hang out with. And then someone told us to check out his blog on MySpace and now our new goal in life is get invited to one of ?uestlove's cookouts should we ever leave Shanghai and move back to rockin' Conshohocken. His blog is an entertaining and honest glimpse into the life of a celebrity, although it seems as though he's not really sure if he feels like a celebrity yet.

• Rumor: Chinese Xbox 360 in "next few months" - Joystiq
  Microsoft is in talks with Chinese internet providers and government ministries for a possible Chinese New Year launch.
  (tags: Microsoft Xbox360 games gaming internet computers China)
• Foreigners working in Shanghai might get new government health care service
  The city government is considering offering health insurance to foreigners working in Shanghai, alleviating problems for those whose work does not offer health insurance or who are temporarily unemployed.
  (tags: healthinsurance China Shanghai health hospital medical foreigners)
• Stores to close during Metro work -- Shanghai Daily | 上海日报 -- English Window to China News
  Stores in the Xujiahui stop maybe closed for as long as a year.
  (tags: Xujiahui Shanghai metro subway stops fashion stores construction)
• Police net heroin and suspects after stakeout -- Shanghai Daily | 上海日报 -- English Window to China News
  One kilogram of high-grade heroin seized in Minhang. There are going to be some pissed off junkies out there tonight.
  (tags: heroin minhang drugs shanghai police)
• Fears over culture survey -- Shanghai Daily | 上海日报 -- English Window to China News
  Chinese people are turning their back on Chinese! English more popular than Chinese among students! The soul of China is the David fighting against the merciless Goliath of Western cultural imperalism!
  (tags: Shanghai China english culture west language learning)
• Winter is the season when the "tree barbers" get to work
  You've probably noticed people cutting off branches of the trees along the side of the road.
  (tags: trees Shanghai winter)
• Explosion at hotel, several injured, journalists and bystanders attacked.
  Gas leak causes explosion in Shanghai. Journalists attempting to report are harrassed, attacked. One bystander, an old man, also gets slapped up by hotel staff.
  (tags: hotel shanghai explosion media journalists)
• Shanghai residents earned most in 2006
  "Shanghai residents' salaries rose by 7.7 percent on average in 2006, ranking at the top of all Chinese cities in terms of salary growth."
  (tags: shanghai china salaries income)
• All Roads Lead To China » Are Chinese Exporter’s Really Suffering?
  "What the author failed to consider is the fact that a hat manufacturer has little in terms of barriers to entry, lots of competitors, and with 4 million units sold, I would have a hard time believing they are able to convince anyone to pay more than a co
  (tags: china export exporters yuan RMB)
• Pacific Epoch - Popular Blogging Actress To Launch E-magazine
  "Chinese actress, director and blogger Xu Jinglei will release a biweekly electronic magazine called Kai La, reports Shanghai Youth Daily quoting Xu's agent Liu Xuan."
  (tags: china internet blog blogging xujinglei)
• Quake prompts tsunami fears -- Shanghai Daily
  "A TINY tsunami lapped Shanghai's coastal areas on Saturday night after a massive earthquake off Japan trigged fears of tidal waves across the Pacific." Tiny tsunami?
  (tags: china shanghai weather tsunami earthquake)
• Provincial bigwig gets death, two-year reprieve -- Shanghai Daily
  "A FORMER high-ranking provincial official in east China's Anhui Province has been sentenced to death for corruption, according to media reports."
  (tags: china anhui corruption)

As we all know, there is no internet censorship in China. However, if you've attempted to access one of the estimated 19,032 websites that are inaccessible in China, then you may have experienced some frustration to that end. It's not simply those of you who have been deemed a cultist, separatists, splittist, or attempt to read illicit material from rogue, upstart news organizations, but China's filtration system is a dynamic, evolving beast that smothers forbidden material faster than Prozac.

Have you ever considered the question: Are our children learning from that great resource of information that is the internet? If in some of the poorer countries the answer is a resounding no, that's mostly because computers are expensive and the last thing on the minds of people who are struggling under circumstances of poverty and deprivation. Nonetheless, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Nicholas Negroponte had the idea of decreasing the digital divide by making cheap laptops that cost about $100 to make and selling these to poor countries. This became a UN backed non-profit called One Laptop Per Child.

This week’s editions of SH and City Weekend, summerviewed. (That’s a combination of summary and review. Look it up.)

The pedestrian experience in Shanghai is an interesting one, and by “interesting” we of course mean near fatal. Drivers don’t seem to have a lot of respect for traffic laws (in so far that they exist). Getting from point A to point B in the shortest amount of time possible is the only rule that applies. Anyone who dares stand in the way is, well, expendable. It’s like that game Crazy Taxi, except it’s not a game and you aren’t sitting in the driver’s seat.

For those that think "electronic music" and "live music" are mutually contradictory, you might want to check out C's Antidote night -- August 31st -- when underground techno duo Shanghai Ultra (aka Shanghaiist contributor Cameron Wilson) and Shanghainese DJ MHP bring you a night of old school live electronic music.

Shanghaiist only recently mastered the ins and outs of computer-based blogging and we'll be damned if there aren't already newer, hipper things come to replace it. Video blogging, or "vidblogging" as it's sometimes known, is pretty cool, and we've seen people using video-sharing sites to this end or else just embedding their videos into their blogs. China Mobile is now trying to get into mobile blogging, also known as "moblogging," where your mobile phone becomes the tool with which you update and submit content to your blog. This site explains the concept well, and Blogger, which is no longer grounded by the Internet nanny, has a moblogging service which allows you to submit photos, video, and text to a moblog they host. The moblog can either be stand-alone or else be embedded into a pre-existing blog by cutting and pasting the appropriate javascript.

When the US State Department’s purchase of 16,000 desktop PCs from Chinese manufacturer Lenovo ran into a chorus of naysayers in the Congress, Shanghaiist chimed in.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the growing phenomenon of "team shopping" in China:

Photo by CaptainVideo taken from the Shanghaiist photos page. To see your photos on our photos page, use Flickr and tag your photos "shanghaiist". Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

There are a few Microsoft fanbois (or is that fanboys?) among Shanghaiist staff. (Emphasis on few.) And not even they (well, notably this contributor) would deny that the glory days of the original MS-DOS came and went long ago, along with our snappy 286 computer and dazzling EGA monitor. But, maybe we're all wrong. What’s old is new again, and DOS is making a comeback, along with bell bottom jeans and throwback jerseys. Walk around Beijing’s Bainaohui/百脑汇 (means “where a hundred brain/computer meets” .. clever, eh?) computer market, and you would find the latest engineering marvels, courtesy of folks at Intel and AMD, running on -- you guessed it -- MS-DOS.

Shanghaiist found itself out at the Qi Zhong Tennis Stadium yesterday, clutching a media pass for the final day of competition in the FINA 8th World Short Course Swimming Championships. Outside, the rain pelted down in sheets and the parking lots were awash with water. This seemed rather apt, considering that the organizers had taken the ATP Masters tennis court and turned it into a 25-metre pool. If only they'd turned the forlorn "Media Snacks Centre" into a Burger King.