Good bye Rio (the MP3 player pioneer)

See "Death bells ring for Rio as they are cut up and sold to SigmaTel"

It's sad 'coz I still believe among all competitors of Apple iPod, Rio Karma has the best features, design and UI, in fact, even better than iPod. This is based on my experience of owning one for 2 weeks (returned for battery life issue)

So, once again it proves that it takes more a good feature set to win in the consumer electronics business. You'd need marketing, marketing, marketing (yes, it's so important that I have to repeat it again and again), quality control and customer service as well. This is reinforced by my recent good (surprise!) experience with getting my iPod fixed (the headphone jack has bad connectivity) at an Apple store (BTW, there was no service dept at Apple store. Apple named it "Genius Bar." The name is a bit too arrogant and exaggerated but that's Steve's call, not mine. The service rep was actually a very helpful gentleman. He looked at my iPod and found that the remote control was the culprit. He simply swapped it with a new one.)

If fixing my Rio was this easy, I would have kept it and won't even consider iPod! Apple opening all these retail stores over the country turned out wasn't such a bad move.

RIP Jean Charles de Menezes

Mr. de Menezes was shot and killed by London police as a bombing suspect last week but London police later on admitted he was innocent.

You probably recall his killing made front page news. However, the fact that he was innocent didn't. It wasn't even appear as headline on http://news.yahoo.com/ !

This is very sad 'coz not only his life was lost for nothing but also his innocence was complete ignored.

Forget about justice but where is the conscience of the media now?

Hawk attacked Dove

So you think this is an analogy of what happens in politics today.

Well, symbolism turned reality. it actually happened in Hong Kong yesterday!

The result? Both dead. (Cause of death: bone fracture. Suspected both collided into a building during the chase.)

Politicians out there should learn something from this.

Good advice? Bad advice?

Dunno how accurate this is but according to Apple Daily (a Chinese newspaper from Hong Kong, no link) Professor Paul Chu, president of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, appeared in a young student IT challenge award ceremony as guest of honor. He said he's happy to see that today's kids are so fluent in computer skills and they will have a bright future working in the IT industry.

Well, I'm not sure if he really meant what he said. Following the current offshoring trend, when these kids are old enough to work, IT jobs would have been offshored from China to other countries with even cheaper labors! This reminds me of Bill Gates encouraging young people in US to study computer science. (See my take in a previous comment) They either need a reality check or stop BS-ing!

(BTW, the winner is a 6th grader. She made her own e-card using Flash and built website that educate people about giant panda as an endangered specie. Good for her!)