Back in the early 90's whilst playing our Atari Lynx -- friendless and alone, of course -- we couldn't have imagined that a second-rate spinoff of the popular Gauntlet franchise would unlock the secrets behind the birth of Google's Android OS. But, lo and behold, what has one of our faithful tipsters found down here, amongst the ruins of Gauntlet: The Third Encounter? That's right, nearly irrefutable proof that the Android team (or at least its graphic designers) have plumbed the depths of Epyx's not-quite-masterpiece for the iconic droid logo we've come to know and love. Sure, the top-down scroller provided all kinds of new character classes like the "Nerd," "Punkrocker," and "Pirate," but only one of these fresh faces would provide the blueprint for Android's public face. It's hard to argue that there isn't some level of appropriation here, given the multiple similarities between the two pieces of art, right down to the antennae, dotted eyes, general size and shape, and even the strip which cuts across the midsection of the bot. Oh yeah, and the character is named Android. We personally would like to hear what Google has to say for themselves in regards to this blatant theft of intellectual property, and as for the Epyx artists who slaved over a hot Amiga to bring this image to life -- the taste of sweet justice is yours. Gallery: Android / Android transformation

[Thanks, Davey]Continue reading Shocker! Google's Android logo boosted from Atari Lynx title 'Gauntlet: The Third Encounter'Shocker! Google's Android logo boosted from Atari Lynx title 'Gauntlet: The Third Encounter' originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Dave Nadig over at Index Universe has a really good post this week about the pricing of exchange traded funds with respe

Foreign companies are losing market share in China across a broad range of industries because of discriminatory treatme Notes: 天朝王法~

I was alone in the center of a small Chinese town, the weakly glowing streetlights hardly illuminating the streets. The silence was heavy and absolute. It was different from the eternal light and sound of Shenzhen, and the high elevation gave the air an unusual taste. Things were not the same up here in the mountains, and this strangeness seemed a bit menacing. The roads had been tarred, courtesy of the rich central government who gave special attention to the Chinese minorities, but the villages up here in the mountains of Yunnan province did not have many cars to wear down the roads. So they felt incomplete, and leaves lay about, their crushing beneath my feet giving my walk a strange soundtrack. A group of men sat in a doorway smoking tobacco from a big bong, watching me walk past with impassive faces. I hurried a bit. What I was looking for was near, I knew. I turned a corner into a small side street, and saw it – the red and blue glow of the humming fluorescent lights, the pictures of the scantily clad lady with big breasts. I had found the local internet cafe. I walked in through the narrow doorway, squeezing past a young teenage couple holding hands and staring out of the door. The guy had a scar across his forehead, I wondered idly what their story was, it may have been an amazing love story, it could have been endlessly tragic, perhaps they were completely boring. I’ll never know, because I walked into that room and was hit by the combined glow of hundreds of computer screens, different figures danced across many screens in some dance dance revolution clone, colourful websites reflected off the eyes of engrossed guys, smoking men scrolled through the news, cliques of teens starred together at a screen and shouted and laughed. The room was huge and it was filled with people surfing the internet and playing games. The internet cafe, long thought to be dead, had simply retreated here into the mountains, and it fed the local population with all the entertainment they could not afford to have at home. After the necessary registration with my passport at the counter, I bought an entire night of internet surfing, starting off by checking what was new at techcrunch. I went through the usual schedule of websites I read, skipping only facebook and twitter, as they don’t work here. Being the only foreigner in there, I was getting a lot of looks, giggles and yelled out “HELLOs” from the kids around. I expected them to come talk to me at some point, so when someone tapped my shoulder, I was suprised that rather than some spiky haired teenager, it was a somewhat middle-aged smiling man with a cigarette dangling from his lip. He introduced himself with the sentence: “TechCrunch is my favorite website, too”. His english was heavily accented, but good. I simply looked up at him, unsure what to reply. I didn’t need to say anything, because he started talking to me about the last few articles he had read on TechCrunch. I got only a few sentences in, mostly in agreement with his somewhat unusual but pretty insightful opinions about what they wrote. He spoke as if he had never spoken to anyone about TechCrunch, and needed to get all his thoughts out. After 30 minutes of mostly listening, he invited me out to have a drink with him and his friends. He excitedly made phone calls in the local dialect and we went out. We walked over to some local food place, and sat outside on plastic chairs, several beers quickly appearing on the table. Soon, several of his friends popped in a shinily new BYD car, and they joined me. He told me what he does: he sells software. And he sells a lot of software. Every month, he makes more than $5000, which is more than 50 times the average salary where he lives. He told me how he does it, and it’s a bit unusual. He had learnt how to program from a friend of his. They had both moved to Kunming and started working, but when his dad got sick, he had to go home and farm to keep the family alive. His dad was sick for close to a year, and they needed money. Unable to travel, he had started looking for jobs on Odesk, Rentacoder and such sites based on recommendation from his friend. After writing some software for a client, he noticed something important: - If he simply looked at the list of software projects available for jobs, he would have ideas on what software to develop. He did this, and rather than making software for clients, he created his own software products, which he put on the internet. He said that 3 days after he copied a simple idea from the rentacoder list on his website, he was making 2 sales a day. $20 per day, which basically doubled his monthly earnings as a farmer. He continued working on more products and copying more ideas, and soon he had 10 different software that he was selling. Sales were low at the start, but even then for him it was a lot of money. He kept doing this, cloning software he found that people wanted by looking at open projects on rentacoder, most of his software being related to video encoding. Additionally, he would take open source software, change the way it looked and sell it online. He said he’d get a few refunds, but most people would purchase it without complaining. He said he tried selling Firefox for a while, but sales were very low due to the free competition. At the moment he’s making more than $5000 a month, and he’s been making it for more than 4 years already. He’s one of the bigger players in the video encoding software market. As I left, he dropped me off at the local hotel where my friends were. He shook my hand enthusiastically and said he would email me, but that he had to sleep now, because he had to go to the farm early the next morning. Surprised, I asked him why he still farmed. He shrugged and lifted his palms in that typical smiling manner that the villagers there have. “No why!” he said. “I enjoy farming”. — Follow me on twitter if you’re interested in making money using software.

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为你的朋友订阅墙外博客：《译者》。We Are Together.使用GREADER到这里在墙内订阅《译者》：http://is.gd/e1Mwd （用https打开）译者精华杂志版下载大全参与译者的多种方式：http://zxc9.com/2z0001原文：China Faces a Difficult Economic Transition - CEIP译文：卡内基和平基金会：中国面临着艰难的经济转型作者：Michael Pettis发表时间：2010年8月25日译者：Fuge校对：@xiaomi2020中国增长模式是亚洲增长模式的加强版，它与其它的“奇迹”增长期（包括1960年代和1970年代的巴西）的发展战略有一些相同的基本特点。在形成巨大增长的同时，它也不可避免地产生了严重的经济失衡。中国似乎早已跨过了拐点，也许正在处于调整为不同的增长模式这一艰难转变的边缘。中国增长模式的核心是家庭收入对制造业和投资的补贴。在一些情况下，比如说1960年代和1970年代的巴西，家庭收入成本是很明显的——巴西政府对国民收入课以重税，然后投资到制造业和基础建设之中。亚洲的区别是依靠不那么明显的机制来达到这个目标。 亚洲模式使用三个主要的机制来确保国民为投资买单。第一，工资的增长水平被限制在远低于工人生产力的增长水平之下，迫使工人补贴老板；第二，汇率被低估。通过提高进口成本，同时在可售商品领域补贴制造企业，减少了工资的真实价值。第三，也是最强有力的机制，就是金融抑制。在这些国家，大多数存款都变成了银行储蓄，而银行又被货币管理机构控制。货币监管机构可以决定信贷投放、贷款风险让整个社会承担、设定借款和储蓄利率。极低的借款和储蓄利率创造出一个强大的机制，这个机制用家庭存款来促进增长，大笔地补贴了资金成本。中国的情况是，通过把家庭存款转移给银行，借款者再从银行以被压低的利率获得贷款的形式实现了每年5% -10%的惊人GDP增长率。资本的低成本也解释了看似矛盾的中国资本密集型，而非劳动密集型的增长——人工也许很便宜，但是资本几乎是免费的。这个巨大成功模式导致了相当多由投资驱动的增长，创造了就业机会，即使家庭存款被大规模转移，但是家庭收入仍然激增。过去10年，在中国以每年10%-12%的稳定增长率发展的时候，中国人的家庭收入，还有家庭消费，也以每年8%-9%的速度在增长。但是这个模式至少有两大羁绊。在初期，当投资规模比较低，转移的家庭财富投资在了产能和基础设施上的时候，也许在经济上还算有效。但是当补贴投资延续得越 久，资金成本就变得越低，也就越有可能投资在浪费型的项目中，而信贷风险却转嫁给了全社会。从某一点上来说，资金使用人是在破坏财富，而非创造财富。但是，只要从家庭收入中转移的资金超过了被浪费的投资产生的损失，账面上就仍然有利润。第二，迫使家庭补贴增长的政策，有可能产生消费增长赶不上生产增长的情况——家庭收入增长的一个重大功能就是家庭消费的增长。在这种情况下，就需要大量而且不断增长的贸易顺差来吸收过剩产能。这就是中国在过去10年发生的事情。而且只要世界上其它国家——主要是美国和有贸易逆差的欧洲国家——能继续吸收不断增长的贸易顺差，中国国内市场可以消费的产能在不断下降也就无关紧要了。但是，在2007年，中国的贸易顺差占全球GDP的份额创造了100年内（也许是有史以来）的最高纪录，而其它国家发现自己已经无力吸收更多的贸易顺差。更糟糕的是，全球金融危机极大地削弱了其它国家哪怕只是维持目前贸易逆差的能力和意愿。中国已经被这两大羁绊勒住了——资本也许在以前所未有的规模被浪费，而其它国家发现，要消化中国的过剩产能已经越来越困难。尽管中国过去创造了辉煌的成就，但是现在它亟须抛弃这一发展模式。中国越早做出改变，转变的痛苦就会越轻——但是无论如何，这个过程将是艰难的。中国必须提高工人工资和利息，并使货币升值，但是如果这个过程走得太快，那些 严重依赖补贴的企业和项目受到的资金压力会相当沉重。结果是，当中国在海外的竞争力衰退，失业率就会增加，这也会导致消费下滑。如果中国调整得慢了，那它 就需要其它国家来适应这种缓慢调整的步伐，但是，世界上其它国家，最主要是美国和欧洲，是否会允许他们的贸易逆差缓慢下降？这尚不清楚。进行过这种调整的历史先例并不是那么鼓舞人心，而中国要采取的措施得让前人都相形见绌。不管愿不愿意，中国必须改变自己的增长模式。在许多年中，它进行调整的速度都将会影响到全球的增长。相关阅读：《金融时报》上同作者专栏金融时报：注意中国的沿海地区，而不是汇率《未来100年》节译 第五章 2020 纸老虎来源说明：本文原文来自文中标明的出版公司，译文1.0版本来源译者团队。收录说明：本文已经收录到“译者文集”中，同时进入“译者频道—经济风云”、“译者频道—中国经济”、“Michael Pettis”、“译者Fuge”索引。本文版权属于原出版公司及作者所有。©译者遵守CC协议2.5您可以自由复制、发行、展览、表演、放映、广播或通过信息网络传播，创作演绎本作品。惟须遵守下列条件：署名，非商业性使用，相同方式共享。

So it seems that Dell may have won out in the most frenzied bidding war we've seen in recent times, after the US compute Notes: a sixfold sales increase in five years, not to mention spectacular profitability

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大胆猜想，9月1日所谓$99的iTV其实是软件意义上的实现~ 而这个未发布的产品其实已经运行在你的mac和ios硬件上了~

All sorts of buzz in the blogosphere this afternoon after Plex, makers of a respected Mac-based digital media center application updated their blog with a cryptic hint that seems to point to next Wednesday's Apple event.

Plex provides a centralized way to access your media library from a simple TV interface -- think FrontRow on steroids. Many Mac mini-based media centers have been built around Plex.

So does Plex's post add weight to "Apple TV" refresh rumors? It certainly tantalizes.

Thanks, RobertTUAWOh, Plex. You tease! originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Spain: Though one of Europe’s most troubled economies appears to have escaped the worst fears of speculators and world l Notes: Still pain in Spain