Best Buy is closing down its mainline China stores. From GizChina –
The U.S electronics giant Best Buy has announced today that they will close all 9 of its stores on the Chinese mainland.
A press release issued by the company stated that all current operations will be merged in to its sister company, Five Star Appliance Company, based in Nanjing.
Must be hard trying to sell name brand stuff when half of the electronic market there is knock offs.
Or more appropriately, ya got the $150k to be on the bidder list? –
Buy This Satellite says it’ll take $150,000 in contributions to place a successful bid on the orphaned Terrestar-1, at which point its orbit will be moved in order to supply a connection to countries in need—for free. The group also plans to manufacture and distribute cheap satellite modems to get people hooked up on the ground. A lot of financial and bureaucratic trudging will have to be accomplished between cash raised and internet unleashed, but it’s a wonderfully daring plan, and a noble one at at that. Countries like Papua New Guinea—which has an open orbital “slot” which the Terrestar-1 could move into—has internet access for only 2.1% of its population. A bus-sized router for the world’s poor and internet-less could do a whole lot of good
gizmodo
Nothing against an undeserved part of the planet get this high tech tool. But it would be even more fun for a while to slide that porker over to a NA geo sync for a couple of years just to poke it in the eye of the Comm Majors. Free sat links while they last. Then move over to a permanent slot situated in the SW Pacific. Just the pirate in me I guess.
The Russian Federation is moving to a Linux based platform choice for most government office uses –
The government is hoping to launch the first version of a “national operating system” for its computers as early as next year, a senior Communications and Press Ministry official said Thursday.
The operating system, for use on the computer systems of government agencies and state-run companies, will be 90 percent based on the open-source Linux operating system, Deputy Communications and Press Minister Ilya Massukh said.
He said use of the operating system would be optional for all agencies.
The operating system is part of the Information Society program, which the government is planning to implement from September. The program will receive 10 billion rubles ($330 million) in funding per year and includes other technology-related projects such as the creation of an “electronic government.”
The national operating system “may be one of the first targeted programs from the new raft that the government is going to approve,” Massukh said.
143m Russians using Linux? Maybe.
… Of lawyering — Know your facts before you make your case. Which pretty much sinks the Australian Internet censorship law. –
South Australia’s thin-skinned candy-ass politicians passed a law prohibiting any anonymous political commentary on blogs (but not “real” news-sources) prior to elections on penalty of a fine of AU$1250. Defending the measure, South Australia’s Attorney General, Michael Atkinson claimed that a poster on AdelaideNow, Aaron Fornarino, was a fictional construct created by his political opponents to smear him. Turns out that Mr Fornarino lives just down the street from Atkinson’s office. Humiliated, Atkinson rescinded the censorship law: “From the feedback we’ve received through AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law supported by all MPs and all political parties is unduly restrictive. I have listened. I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively… It may be humiliating for me, but that’s politics in a democracy and I’ll take my lumps.”
The major foopah? Atkinson, the regional AG made the claim that the person posting on an Internet site lambasting him was not a real person but fictitious, made up by the opposition party. Problem? Yeah, the person exists and there are pictures to prove it. Much to Atkinson’s credit, he will move for repeal of the law after the major embarrassment.
… In Hungary? Yeah I know, Ole Tux is just an OS. That is what I thought too. Still do by the way. But in Hungary a political party — Jobbik — has sprung up.:
We are going to implement open standards in the public sector and will promote the spread of open source solutions among the general public and among businesses. Under these directives, government and public sector documents can be stored only, in open document formats, on systems running open standards applications.
We are going to develop open standard interfaces, in order to encourage municipalities, the tax department, the banking sector and public offices to use open source solutions.
We are going to supply government funded and developed applications for municipalities, nation wide, to eliminate parallel and wasteful developments.
When both proprietary and open source software will be available with the equal functionality to accomplish a particular task, we will make the use of open source solutions, mandatory.
We are going to implement open standards in the school system and will introduce open source computing as a subject in schools, under the discipline of computer sciences.
That ladies and gentlemen is the Jobbik party platform. Sound wild? Well I will just direct you to Sweden where the Pirate Party has a foothold in Parliment after raising petitions and funds on the Pirate Bay file sharing suit. They now have over a dozen affiliated Pirate parties in the world. So it would not be far fetched at all.
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