Why I am not participating in Earth Hour.

One word: Pointless. If the local gov is geniue in promoting one hour, totally switch off all power plants for one solid hour. The main point is to raise awarness only. The whole act does no sh*t to the enviroment, here, we get our electricity via burning of natural gas. No mater how they put it is a "greener" alternative, it is not, burn(oxygen, natural gas) = heat + green house gas. To maintain that heat to convert to steam that drives the turbines, in turn drives the generators, it has to be run 24hrs a day, 365 days a year non-stop.

Believe me, they are not going to shut down a power plant for one full hour then face the headache of turning it back on again, u basically has to relit the furnace, then wait for steam, then for steam to turn the turbine, then wait for turbine to get up to the required RPM, u shut down for an hour, u going to need 4 to 5 hours to get it back going again. Remember the last black out we had where the gas supply was cut? Why was that so much complain about it? Why can people just take it as an "Earth Hour extended"?

So tonight when people starts turning off their switches, remember, the power stations are still churning out CO2 in that one hour, regardless tens of thousand switch off their electrical devices. In fact, it will cause the power station to run less efficiently, those in the power electronics/electrical field will know wat I am blabbering about, basically power stations has to adjust loading condition of the grid during usage to provide optimal loading to allow power stations to run more efficiently, there are also peak usage, example, heavy load in the evening. So smart ass comes along and suggest earth hour, in fact will be causing more harm than good in the end.

As I said earlier: Pointless.

Google Leaving China (my 2 cents worth)

Not really. Search maybe leaving but I think the company would stay for Android. The main reason I would speculate (*note speculate = means I am just plain making an educated guess) for leaving the search business in China would be it can really can't win over the Chinese search giants i.e baidu, etc. this boils down literally meaning $$$$, if you aren't sleeping under a rock all this while, you would know Google makes its income via advertisement. Unable to gain a foothold would means unsustainable income,etc, etc.

So search gone for good? No really either, I am speculating (again) that it would make a come back via Android. Android is fast becoming a force to be reckon with in the mobile space. It a short period of time, it has gained phenomenal market share. If Android becomes a leader in the mobile space in China, Google can sneak back search back into China. Why? Look at the Google model in doing business, their main model is services, more people use their services, the better. That's why you see gmail, google talk, google map, goggles, youtube etc all tied in with Android. More people uses their services means more people accessing their content means $$$$$.

Moral of the story: $$$$$ is not evil (pun intended) :-D

Moving to Apple.

My Core i7 PC would be my last working primary PC based computer I would be using, don't get me wrong, I will still be building PC but most likely as a secondary computer, most likely on a longer timescale (most likely once every 2-3 years), out of cheap AMD parts from now on. The next primary machine would be Mac Pro, proably Xeon based machine.

So why the move? One word: Experience. Apple just provide a more well-rounded experience on their platform, the OS is written for the hardware, the hardware is meant for the software, in this way, you get performance for the same hardware compared to a (N-1T-1) machine. I sometimes even forget my Macbook just contains a small 2GHz core2 processor, even so it becomes my first machine that I ever own that I have nothing to rant about since purchase!!!

In operation, the UI suits me perfectly, colour scheme is rendered properly (unlike some OS I come across, even to their 7th edition liao still cannot render their colour scheme properly), an intuitive approach to desktop icons in the form of  dock, application list, etc. Good ideas like Spaces/Expose to manage opened applications, etc.

Even removing programs is as simple as dragging the program into the trash can (no more uninstall dialogs, no more useless pointless "are you sure?", "are you for sure?", "are you confirmed for sure" "YES, I'M F**KING CONFIRMED CHOPPED GUARANTEE SURE, WHY THE H*LL DO YOU THINK I CLICK UNINSTALL FOR!")

Design. Maybe I am currently in the HCI field (Human-Computer Interaction), design becomes one thing I look for. Apple seems to get it, however, for some other OS, as I said, it is their 7th edition already, they still don't seems to get it.

Lastly, Games. Mac uses Intel x86/64, not a problem anymore with boot camp.

Of course, I'm not a total Mac fanboy yet, I still have gripe on Mac too: The single vendor lockin, software development, Upgrading is abit of headache, even on a Mac Pro, you can't change the motherboard, etc. The reasons are getting less obvious now as my upgrading timescale is not as frequent as before, as I gradually shift my computer needs from gaming to productivity. So who knows what the future holds.

Blog Reboot. After letting this blog rot and my laziness to maintain my own site, I decided to take an even more lazy way out: I decided to combined both so I only need to maintain one (yes, I'm a lazy man). Another change in style would be I decided to make this blog slightly more towards ranting on technology, unboxing and even in the future I would make youtube videos!!!

So cheers to a fresh start!

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