Mozilla in Asia

Popular avatar-based virtual community Habbo Hotel has closed their China site.

Dear visitors:
unfortunately we have some bad news for you: since August 24, 2007 Habbo.cn has been closed at least temporarily, and possibly for a long time. Our Habbo Staff is currently working hard to find a way to continue the service in the future – you will be informed about the situation as soon as we know. We are really sorry about this. Meanwhile you can choose to visit other Habbo services all over the world.

Billsdue says that this is because Shockwave never took off in China. Such is the fickle nature of proprietary browser plugins.

Mozilla is working on better compatibility with non-English fonts in Firefox 3 for the Macintosh platform (changing defaults) and would love some help/feedback.

We have been told that the current default serif font for Mac “Song” is actually not widely installed (it looks like a MS font actually.)  If you use the simplified Chinese version of Firefox on the Mac, what we call the zh-CN version, could you:

a) confirm (in the comments) if the font “Song” is a default font

b) if “Song” is not a default serif font, could you let me know what you would recommend for a Simplified Chinese serif font that is default to the Mac platform?

Thank you in advance!
Gen

The Japan Times reports that the Japanese Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications, Yoshihide Suga, has announced an 8 billion yen ($70 mil.) project to “develop the next Internet.”

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, who developed TCP/IP in the early 197os have yet to have their protocol replaced with something better. 8 billion yen is either way too little or way too much for something to replace TCP/IP.

Count me skeptical.

On the other hand, I’m very interested in which businesses will be getting the bulk of this cash outlay from the Japanese government. This seems to me to be merely pork to pass out to willing “research” agencies who have no serious plan or ability to create something that would eventually replace the Internet.

via httpAsia

I’d prefer to see the study first-hand but it ‘feels’ accurate to me. Japanese youth spend more time on their cellphones and less time on PCs.

Chinese youth spend nearly five hours a day on a computer, double the amount of computer-use for Japanese youth, reports Beijing Youth Daily quoting data from China’s Tsinghua University and Japan’s news agency Nikkei Inc (Japan Business News). The data is based on Tsinghua University and Nikkei’s joint survey of 1,200 youths in Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo and Osaka. According to the survey, 92 percent of Chinese youth use search engines and a 65.8 percent chat online.

Pacific Epoch – Study: Chinese Youths PC Usage Double That Of Japanese Counterparts

Just for a laugh, why don’t we compare the release notes between two popular desktop applications, Firefox  2.0.0.6 (yes, I am biased here of course) and iTunes 7.3.2.

I am a Mac user, but this ‘one sentence release note’ is unacceptable.

via Daring Fireball

OMG LOL – Breaking New [Onion News Network]

The Foxkeh August wallpapers are now available for download from Foxkeh’s blog.

Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly writes about the settlement of the landmark EOLAS patent, which he was personally involved in as an expert witness previously. The EOLAS patent is a critical one for everyone on the Internet because it forced Microsoft to change the way Active-X worked in the browser, which ended up affecting millions of Internet users all over the world and especially all the web users of South Korea, (not to mention that the judgment awarded to the EOLAS patent holder was a not-insignificant $521M.)  The fact that there is information about prior art, and that Microsoft may be settling out of court, is troubling.