As I observed some of the famous websites in China, there are a tendency of using number in their domain name. Some notable sites in China, e.g. China’s first search engine, i.e. 3721.com; a famous China social networking site, i.e. 51.com, and my favorite sites in China, i.e. hao123.net and 163.com, they all have numbers in their domain name.

I wonder this is due to cultural or language (pronoun) localization? Or all these site owners tend to believe using numbering technique in their sites, their sites would get a better ranking in China’s search engine such as Baidu.com or Qihoo.com?

In my previous post, I mentioned that I was going to attend the Windows Vista Preview, when I arrived there, surprisingly there are not much people attended the Technical Preview as I expected. As I attended one of the session entitled,”Vista and AMD”, there are fewer than 100 people at that seminar room.

During the Technical Preview, few issues really surprised me:

1) One of the speaker stated the Vista version will require at least 1G of RAM in order to support the Aero interface, a lot of people know that, however, he stated this particular 1G of RAM must be in 1 piece, there are not in any case like this, 4 pieces of 256MB (4 X 256 RAM). In my case, my PC come with 2 pieces of Kingston 256 RAM, it would not work well if I buy another two (2) 256 RAM and stick these addition RAMs into my PC to make it 1G of RAM in total.

2) BitLocker’s recovery mode is really look cool. But this feature will only available in Vista Ultimate version.

3) There are far too many different version of Vista when it officially launched in the market, i.e. Vista Basic, Vista Business, Vista Ultimate, Vista Enterprise. For Office 2007, there are available in eight (8) versions when I looked at its leaflet. For a lot of people out there, I wonder they all know how to differentiate the Office 2007 suite, i.e. Office Standard 2007, Basic 2007, Professional 2007, Professional Plus 2007, Home and Student 2007, Ultimate 2007, Small Business 2007, and lastly Enterprise 2007 when they purchase it from the retail store?

4) Vista looked too many security advancements. For myself, i just want to have a reliable operating system, and enabled me to run some applications. But with Vista, I need to switch from “Standard User” to “Administrator” each time when I install a new program. I can imagine it would really annoying in this kind of situation.

5) I believed Microsoft have already made this Vista “looked” very powerful. When I looked at the Demo on the screen, there is a myth that Vista was so secure it might be possible to run this operating system without any anti-virus program installed.

6) The tagging feature really cool when I first saw it from the Demo, but frankly is there a need to have the tagging (categorized) feature in Vista? If one want to tag a picture, he/she can install a third-party software and run it. Is this strongly implied that Microsoft want to develop an operating system that could cater all the users’ needs and wants?

7) Windows Vista cannot be considered as a upgrade version of Windows XP, both of them look differently in terms of performance and feature. Thus, it’s no longer an operating system that we familiar with.

Bottom Line: Windows Vista no doubt looked powerful, but I urge all the potential buyers to have a second-look preview before they upgrade their Windows XP to Vista.

I am going to attend a sneak preview of Windows Vista in Asia South, i.e. Kuala Lumpur this afternoon. Most of my close IT friends were not fascinated about the new Windows operating system (OS), asked them whether they going to upgrade their Windows OS to Vista yesterday evening, they are more concerning about the compatibility issues.

I just read an interesting news from Yahoo!, this article stated for Microsoft, getting Vista out the door was a enormous milestone, critical to the star-crossed OS’s expected release to businesses later this month, and then to consumers in January. But with enterprises cautious about compatibility issues, and buzz already shifting to Web-based applications and service-based software, Vista may fall short of the mark set by predecessors Windows 95 and XP.

I agreed.

I just read an interesting article on the web, entitled,”To Blog or Not to Blog: Report from the Front.” This article starts off by talking about a rising blogosphere:

About 57 million American adults — or 39% of Internet users — read individually authored web logs, or “blogs,” according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which does surveys to track Internet use. About 12 million American adults, or 8% of Internet users, keep a blog. They do so for a number of reasons — to share professional or personal ideas and opinions, crack jokes, air political views, or comment on current events.

I found the section of the different views on blogging on the web by several Wharton’s faculty staff particularly interesting:

It’s a bunch of people writing their opinions, and those people have no credibility. The information content is very low. Established media outlets, such as newspapers and magazines, have standards and fact checkers to help guarantee accuracy,…but “anybody can print a blog and say, ‘Hey, I’m an expert. Let me tell you about this.’

However, there are many such blogs to choose from, so I find it difficult to distinguish between genuinely useful ones and those merely exchanging or relating social experiences.

I urge you to read this article because it does provide food for thought on blogging.

Well. I received a call from my friend just a moment ago. He decided to host his site with Media Temple (MT). In fact, I told him a lot of good stuff that offered by MT. He really like what MT offer, although I have to mention that US$20 per month is quite pricey, but their support is great, as according to my friend. He even received call from MT when he sign-up for the web hosting program. (He just activated his MT account for one day). For an Asian, it is important that the customer service is superior as the web hosting provider is not being located in Asia. I do not know what happen inside a web hosting company, or I do not need to know, but if you choose a web hosting company, you definitely pleased someone there to call you whether the service is good, how user-friendly the control panel is, etc.

In this information age, I strongly believed the golden rule in conducting business is still the same as the old days, CUSTOMER SERVICE is really important!!!

Update: I moved my blog to Media Temple as well.

According to netcraft, there are more than 100 million sites on Internet now. I believed the number is still growing everyday because it is very easy to create a website nowadays. With less than $10 you can get a domain name, and cheap web hosting plans (some are as low as $7 per month) available on the web, one can start create and maintain a website on the web. I as well now thinking of get a domain name and host my blog at a web hosting company. On the other hand, with so many sites now, it’s become harder for a particular new site to create the visitors’ loyalty and some sort of Google page rank stuff. I’m wonder how people can search my blog by simply key in kenny, or IT or blog type of keywords.

It has been five years since Windows XP was released on the market. Now Microsoft has set the date for their newest release Windows Vista. November 30th 2006 for corporate customers and January 30th 2007 for the public. However, I’m not excited for Windows Vista nor planning of going for an upgrade. Major reasons are: A friend of mine in fact has experienced several difficulties in installing Windows Vista Beta. And my advice here is before considering a switch to Windows Vista, check for the compatibility. Moreover, I’m really surprise inside the Microsoft’s Vista End User License Agreement (EULA). There are some limitations we should be aware to if we planned for an upgrade or buy. On the other hand, I wonder how this licensing restrictions will affect the sales of Windows Vista. After reading thoroughly this article, I’m also starting to understand why a lot of people thinking of a switch to Ubuntu.

For me, if I am seriously doing to switch from Windows to Ubuntu, I will definitely try a dual boot system first…that allows me to run Windows and Ubuntu next to each other on my PC. I know I’m not the type of people to go that far and conclude Windows operating system is not good at this moment.