Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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  • Out of touch

    Margaret Chan has been chosen as the new head of the World Health Organization, and the media here has predictably been celebrating this as a great honour for Hong Kong.  Yeah, right. 

    If you speak to ordinary people in Hong Kong they still remember what happened with SARS, and regard Margaret Chan as at least partially responsible for the deaths (particularly in Amoy Gardens).   They are amazed that she could be given this prestigious job and be lauded as an expert on Bird Flu and SARS. 

    The English newspapers have rather grudgingly reported some concerns, but only as a footnote to the story.  Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that they are so out of touch with what people in Hong Kong really think.

  • The wrong way round

    Wasn’t the “plug’n’play” concept supposed to make it easy to install hardware?  Whatever happened to that idea?

    I recently purchased an HP Printer, which came with some software has that has to be installed before the printer is connected to the computer (the documentation contains a solemn warning that you must not connect the printer before installing the software).  Well, not just “some” software but several hundred megabytes of it.  I remember when PCs only had 100mb of disk, and now HP insist I need 500mb just to install the software to control a printer?  The world’s gone mad.

    Now, it happens that I do have a few gigabytes of space, but just not on the ‘C’ drive (which has Windows on it).  The space is on the ‘F’ drive, so that’s where I wish to install the software.  Shouldn’t be a problem, right?   Wrong.

    On my first attempt, Mr HP insisted that I install his bloatware on the C drive because he had found older versions of the software there, so I had to remove them first (probably a good idea anyway) and start again.  Then on the second attempt I got a message to say that there wasn’t enough free space on my C drive.  It seems that HP aren’t at all interested in all that space on the F drive, and insisted that I cancel the installation.

    So now I decided to take my life into my hands and plug in the printer without installing the software.  Nothing bad happened – it asked me to load the CD and I managed to find an option on the install program to load the driver and a few other bits and pieces.  This time it went through the disk space check, and then (cue drum roll) it allowed me to choose which drive to use.  Brilliant.

    Just a thought, but might it not be smart for HP to allow you to choose the drive before checking for available space?   

    Idiots.

  • Cheesy

    A new cheese shop in Central.  The website is useless, but apparently they will focus on British & Irish cheeses.

  • Everything* – or nothing?

    Mannings are currently advertising "25% off everything*", but if this were true their shops would be overrun with bargain-hunters.  The reality is that this offer is so limited as to be meaningless.

    Firstly they have a long list of brands and product types that are excluded.  Then they say that it does not apply to any products that are already on offer – which means that all they have to do is reduce the price from $10.00 to $9.90 to avoid giving 25% off. 

    So far, so bad, but surely there must be some products with 25% off?   After buying about 8 items yesterday, and discovering that not even one of them qualified for this offer (no, not even the items that didn’t appear on their list of excluded categories or brands and which were sold at full price), I’m beginning to wonder.  Even their shop managers don’t seem to be able to explain why some of the items were not included in this offer. I hope it isn’t too inconvenient for them when people ask for their money back because they feel they have been tricked.

    Bunch of weasels.

  • Fact or Fiction

    Simon Patkin is at it again.  Today’s Sunday Morning Post includes a letter from him entitled “Don’t be fooled by alarmists on global warming”.  He is responding to Christine Loh’s column (Global warming won’t wait – subscription required) on Thursday which referred to the Stern Review. 

    The time she has seized on a report saying that global warming could cost 20 per cent of gross domestic product.  Note the emphasis on the word could – environmentalists use “could” to turn a claim into a certainty.

    Except that this is what she actually wrote: 

    The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a report commissioned by the British government, was published on Monday. It notes the urgent need for the world to bring down greenhouse-gas emissions, because climate change will impede growth and development.

    But it will take significant reductions to stabilise gas emissions even at 1990 levels. As the Stern Review notes, the actions of countries, cities, companies and individuals will be critical.

    Sir Nicholas Stern, the principal investigator of the review, is a noted economist. He made it clear that the emission of greenhouse gases imposes a cost on others that is not borne by the emitter. Without intervention by policy, the emitters do not consider that cost in their decision-making.

    Sir Nicholas highlights the need for a broad economic view in reducing emissions. Policymakers need to look at the economics of growth and development, industry, innovation and technological change, the international economy, public finance, the environment and so forth.

    Mr Tsang should ask the government’s chief economist to digest the Stern Review, and to give him and senior officials a briefing on how the Hong Kong administration can be at the forefront of climate issues. Assuming Mr Tsang will serve a second term as chief executive, he needs to have a clear view of how Hong Kong can adapt its policies to further reduce greenhouse emissions.

    This will require the government to develop an energy policy, something it has been reluctant to do. What Hong Kong has are a number of policy areas involving energy. But the government does not have a comprehensive energy policy that focuses on achieving efficiency, conservation, environmental protection, public health and energy security.

    Nowhere does Christine Loh repeat the figure of 20% mentioned by Simon Patkin.  Instead she is making the point that the Hong Kong government needs to to take note of climate change and to have an energy policy that takes this into account. 

    Simon then moves on from attacking Christine Loh for something she didn’t write to fiction of a different kind:

    Michael Crichton’s novel State of Play gives an excellent analysis of the environmentalists’ attempt to deceive us over global warming.  But I wonder if he will be treated by the environmentalist left the same way the religious right treated Dan Brown and his novel The Da Vinci Code

    Dan Brown?  Michael Crichton?  Get me outta here.

  • Another muddle

    In his Policy Address, the Chief Executive announced that parents of children aged 3 – 6 will be given an “education voucher” worth HK$13,000 per child to contribute to kindergarten fees.  The strange thing is that rather than using means-testing to limit the cost, they announced that some kindergartens will not be eligible – either because their fees are too high (there is a maximum of HK$24,000 a year or less for half-day classes, and HK$48,000 for whole day classes) or because they are profit-making. Also, they will only available for children with right of abode in Hong Kong (so tough luck if you pay taxes but aren’t a permanent resident).

    I don’t see why the government should be concerned about whether a kindergarten is making a profit or not – after all, many government handouts end up in the bank accounts of commercial organizations, and some government services are contracted out to profit-making companies.  The government is fully entitled to monitor the quality of kindergartens, but if they are good enough then why does it matter whether they make a profit or not?  There have been some stories in the SCMP recently suggesting that the government was reconsidering this, but today Arthur Li has denied this

    Anyway, what’s to stop the owner of a kindergarten paying himself a large salary or contracting out some of the services to a profit-making company that he controls? 

    I also don’t see why there should be a ceiling on fees. Why should parents be denied the choice to use the vouchers on the kindergarten of their choice just because it charges higher fees? 

    In addition, it creates another problem for kindergartens – whilst some will carry on regardless charging higher fees and survive because of their reputation, what about the ones at the next level down?  They will have to make a difficult decision – whether to cut fees to the government’s figure so that they can accept vouchers, or tough it out.  If they do cut fees, it seems inevitable that they will also cut salaries for teachers.  Which is probably not going to help with the government’s aim of improving the quality of nursery education – assuming that is what this is all about.

    I think to have to agree with Milton Friedman on this one:

    There is nothing wrong with having a voucher scheme but it has got to be universal and without restriction by anyone and by any kindergarten that satisfies the broad criteria, regardless of the income of the parent and the tuition fees of the kindergarten,” said Professor Friedman in an interview. 

  • Petaflops and gigawatts

    I found this article in Wired magazine fascinating. 

    For it’s here in the quaint Oregon town of The Dalles that Google has chosen to build its new 30‑acre campus, the base for a server farm of unprecedented proportion.

    Although the evergreen mazes, mountain majesties, and always-on skiing surely play a role, two amenities in particular make this the perfect site for a next-gen data center. One is a fiber-optic hub linked to Harbour Pointe, Washington, the coastal landing base of PC-1, a fiber-optic artery built to handle 640 Gbps that connects Asia to the US. A glassy extension cord snakes through all the town’s major buildings, tapping into the greater Internet though NoaNet, a node of the experimental Internet2. The other attraction is The Dalles Dam and its 1.8‑gigawatt power station. The half-mile-long dam is a crucial source of cheap electrical power – once essential to aluminum smelting, now a strategic resource in the next phase in the digital revolution. Indeed, Google and other Silicon Valley titans are looking to the Columbia River to supply ceaseless cycles of electricity at about a fifth of what they would cost in the San Francisco Bay Area. Why? To feed the ravenous appetite of a new breed of computer.

    I have to admit that I’d never given much thought to the physical location of the huge "server farms" that are needed to power search engines such as Google.

    …the total of electricity consumed by major search engines in 2006 approaches 5 gigawatts.

    That’s an impressive quantity of electricity. Five gigawatts is almost enough to power the Las Vegas metropolitan area – with all its hotels, casinos, restaurants, and convention centers – on the hottest day of the year. So the annual operation of the world’s petascale search machines constitutes a Vegas-sized power sump. In the next year or so, it could add a dog-day Atlantic City. Air-conditioning will be the prime cost and conundrum of the petascale era. As energy analysts Peter Huber and Mark Mills projected in 1999, the planetary machine is on track to be consuming half of all the world’s output of electricity by the end of this decade.

    I rather doubt that, because it must be in everyone’s interest to reduce power consumption (which is normally achieved by making the processor run cooler).

    Anyway, the article’s not just about power supply.  It also speculates on what Google will do with all this computing power.  More stuff like this, presumably.

  • IE7 – not working very well

    Internet Explorer 7 is now available, and will be automatically installed this week if you are not careful. 

    They’ve finally added tabbed browsing, but it still seems inferior to SlimBrowser (one of a number of products that use the insides of IE and then make it do useful things).  From my perspective, the tabbed browsing function in SlimBrowser works exactly how I want it to work, and I haven’t yet found a way to make IE 7 do the same.  Also, the tabs in IE are too big and it doesn’t arrange them in rows (yes, I do open a lot of tabs).  Also, they have done a rather weird re-design that has moved the ‘refresh’ button to a less obvious place and hidden away most of the menus.  I think is how Vista will look.  I don’t think I like it.

    The other good thing about SlimBrowser is that you can define groups of websites to open with a single click.  You can now do the same thing in IE 7, but in a slightly different way.  Except that there seems to be a bug, because after opening all the sites it then gives up and IE closes.  Even more annoyingly (but unsurprisingly), SlimBrowser now also has the same bug.

    So I’m using Firefox instead.

  • A bicycle with seats

    The SCMP had another go at analyzing Oasis Hong Kong Airlines on Sunday, but I think they’re still missing the point by asking “can an airline be both budget and long-haul?” 

    As I have said before Oasis really have very little in common with budget airlines such as Southwest, Easyjet and Ryanair – the world’s least favourite airline.  They haven’t taken out the toilets or reduced legroom to cram in more seats, they do have seatback TVs (even if the films are a bit old), and they do serve complimentary food.  They also offer business class (which no other budget airline offers, as far as I know).

    Also, if you were planning a budget airline, I don’t think you would start out by operating on one of the most competitive routes in the world (BA, Cathay, Virgin, Qantas & Air New Zealand curently fly direct between Hong Kong and London, with a host of other airlines offering indirect services).  Nor would you fly from a high-cost airport such as Chek Lap Kok.  That’s certainly not how Ryanair or Easyjet started out. 

    So I’m sticking with my theory that Oasis is not a budget airline, and that the description of it as the “budget airline with frills” is about as helpful as describing a car as a bicycle with four wheels and seats and a roof and an engine.

    Yet the Commercial Director of the company, Kenneth Chad, is quoted in the article as saying that Oasis are “Easyjet meets Emirates”.  This is a bit puzzling, as if someone was starting a new supermarket and said that it was “Fortnum & Mason meets Aldi”.  I’m sorry, but you really can’t have it both ways.  Mr Chad thinks that the key to this puzzle is high utilization, and that long-haul gives higher utilization.  This may be true in the sense of the number of flying hours you can get from a plane, but what really matters is how much revenue you can generate per day.  Anyway, I am sure that the same thought must have occurred to every other airline, and you have to wonder how Oasis could get significantly better utilization from their fleet than say Virgin or Cathay.  With great difficulty, I suspect.

    However, Mr Chad rightly points out that Oasis have to get established first.  He says that they can then start to worry about utilization later, but I think there is another way of looking at. 

    As things stand, Oasis are simply operating the planes they purchased from Singapore Airlines in the same configuration as when they bought them (and trying to offer competitive prices).  It suits them to be known as the “budget airline with frills”, but I think they must know that this doesn’t really make any sense and that they will have to re-think their business model before too long.   Rather than trying to offer the cheapest economy seats, perhaps they could offer a lower-priced ‘premium economy’ service. Or switch to all-business service similar to MAXjet or Eos.  Or even, who knows, become a real long-haul budget airline – but I think they’d have to be fairly desperate to try that.   

    Meanwhile, the official Russian explanation for the problems Oasis had last week (Russia delays flight of Hong Kong Boeing for security reasons) is that:

    the application for a flight over the Russian territory submitted by the airline “did not conform to the established form.” Moreover, it was submitted behind schedule, specifically less than “12 hours before the flight”.  

    However, it seems that Oasis will continue to avoid Russia for the time being.  In spite of the initial statement that this would not add anything to the flight time, they have now conceded that it will add an extra hour to the journey.

    More on Oasis:

    One day late (26/10/06)
    Weeks rather than years (24/10/06)
    What’s the story? (03/10/2006)
    Up in the Sky (07/09/06)
    Missing the point (as usual) (07/07/06)
    Cheaper flights (06/07/06)
    Even more options (05/07/06)
    In the holiday mood (13/04/06)
    I hate Heathrow (02/02/06)

  • Did he really mean that?

    This made me laugh: 

    “Knocking down somebody’s home is not a simple matter, although we use professional social workers to help.”

    – Tsang Cheung-chuen, Assistant Director of Buildings

    I wonder how they help?  Maybe they keep a large sledgehammer in the office for just such an occasion, or perhaps they are trained to use wrecking balls…