SINGAPORE: The buzzword in the news media world appears to be “integration”, which involves one newsroom providing content across different platforms.

And that’s what Media experts from all over the world including the US, Germany and Hong Kong have been discussing at a two-day conference in Singapore.

Said Dr Chitra Rajaram, director of MediaCorp NewsHub: “…In any integration I think (the challenge is) change. So change in many forms. Change is very hard for people. People have been doing the same thing for the longest time. So to come together and think differently – different workflows, different ways of writing stories, different ways of putting it out together. I think all these are change elements that we have to take into account.” (Source: Channel News Asia)

“Integration” is the new buzzword? But integrate what sort of things? If what they are planning is to integrate Twitter and blogs right into a daily news digest, it’s probably not going to work. All these blogs and Twitter, to me, are just distractions to news reporting. What’s need, however, is better article organization. News has so much more value if every name is tagged to a person, every event happening is tagged to a GPS location, every minute is properly timestamped. Blogs and Twitter are secondaries to return user opinion in a news article. Metadata such as persons involved, GPS locations and time are used to facilitate the retrieval of such mentions. Citizen opinions can be bias, news reporters ought to know better. I feel news reporting can go back to being just news reporting. News websites just have to get smarter.

And regarding newspapers? Milk the cash while it last. It’s going to evolve. Our consumption habits are changing. I see news delivered directly in the decline and news delivered through social mediums via recommendations the uprising trend. With a single recommendation, I would like to find out more and that is when I read news. I don’t poke around a news website to find news to read; I am directed via instinct and recommendations to find out more.

Just my 75 cents.

Rony Tan made the following comments:

• When we talk about religion, false religion [in context of Buddhism], we are not talking about a set of teaching, we are talking about a spiritual war, we are talking about satan and his demons.
• A demonic power has supernaturally put some ideas into her mind [refers to the interviewee]. And the same demonic power you cannot see put the same kind of thoughts into the Tibetan monk. So when they check out the facts, it dazzles us. But if you have to look behind the scene, it is a cheap David Copperfield trick. Nothing more; nothing more. So conclusion, there is no truth in reincarnation.
• [Referring to Buddhism] When you do good, then you will go higher. Then the definition of ‘higher’ is always a man; higher than a lady. Of course a lady is higher than a cow. That’s their scale of things.
• The theory of reincarnation is rubbish.
• When Buddha is dying, he says “I am still searching for the way.” But when Jesus comes, he says “I am the way.” [audience laughs]
• [In the context of reincarnation] I tell you, ladies should be very offended — they tell me, one of the Buddhist — if you want to argue and you are such an unbeliever he said, next life, next life, Pastor Rony, you will be born as a woman. Ladies are of a lower stature to God. You ladies should say a good “Amen” to the God. We are equal.
• If the men is the high of the home, it is not because of his higher status, it is because of a greater responsibility for the household.
• According to Buddhism, if you are a lady and you behave yourself, you become a man. But some of you ladies you don’t want to be man. Right? You just don’t want to be a man. I see lots of ladies shaking their heads. You don’t want to be a man. I don’t want to be a woman too.

Actually the interviewees are quite funny if you watch it with an open mind. One of the interviewees revealed that he had some bowel problems causing blood during defecation. In a moment of fear, he prayed to Jesus and was totally healed.

Pastor Rony Tan blasts Buddhism Part 1

Pastor Rony Tan blasts Buddhism Part 2

Pastor Rony Tan blasts Buddhism Part 3

Pastor Rony Tan blasts Buddhism Part 4

Here’s the news report:

Pastor apologises personally to Buddhist & Taoist federations

SINGAPORE: The pastor who was called up by the Internal Security Department (ISD) for making insensitive remarks against the Buddhist and Taoist faiths has apologised personally to the leaders of the two religions.

The leaders of the two faiths accepted Pastor Rony Tan’s apology, and wish to let the matter rest.

Pastor Tan of Lighthouse Evangelism made the comments at his church sessions. These sessions were video—recorded and made available on Lighthouse Evangelism’s website.

In response to MediaCorp’s query, the Singapore Bible College said it trains would—be pastors to be mindful of what they say, especially in a multi—religious society.

Dr Albert Ting, principal of Singapore Bible College, said: “You can talk about your uniqueness, you can talk about your values, you can talk about your doctrines, you can talk about what constitutes the basis of your faith.

“That is all within the allowable discussion. That is your faith, you can’t change it. But whenever you’re engaged with others, then you want to show your respect.”

In a statement, the National Council of Churches said an advisory was issued to Christians in 2008 “not to denounce other religions” even as they evangelise. (Source: Yahoo News)

I should point out that religion is a sensitive issue, especially in Singapore, where the risks of tensions are high. We will not want to jeopardize peace in the process. Singapore has been strict on religious harmony.

In the church I frequented, there is a strong belief that Christianity is the only true religion and all other religions are Satan attempting to bring away people from the Christian God.

Religion is a highly personal position, evangelize with care. Most of the things brought up by Rony Tan are badly delivered. Christians indeed do not believe in the concept of reincarnation. Regarding men and women having similar stature, the Christian Bible has preached otherwise. It has, however, been explained that many of these Bible teachings were applicable to the society in the past and is not meant for literal practice today. The general consensus is that man and woman are of equal level although more progress is required in reforming the church leadership selection process which has barred women from key positions.

[Disclaimer: I come from a Christian background, however, I currently show no interest in any theological positions.]

The amount of hassle involved in obtaining newspaper such is not that worth it if you think about it. How many times do you make an informed decision based on a news event? Hardly for me. I don’t mind getting my news one week late or view a consolidation of news since newspapers are a day late anyway.

My only issue with getting late news is that I end up missing out on the beginning since the news article report only the progression of the event; this makes the news article difficult to understand. I probably need something like a recap that typically isn’t available in newspaper. What I want is probably a news magazine and not a newspaper. We do not have localized news magazines like the fortnightly-published Newsweek.

Furthermore, newspaper reports can be bias; Singapore is ranked 147 out of 167 in the Annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index for 2004. In Singapore, since we only have one English non-tabloid newspaper, there is little competition on who can provide better news coverage. Also, there’s no way to see how objective a newspaper is if there is no other local newspaper to compare with.

These days, I just wait for local news to come to me.

Friendster to be sold by month’s end -source

SHANGHAI, Dec 4 (Reuters) – Friendster, one of the world’s earliest social networking sites, will be sold to an Asian buyer by the end of December for at least $100 million, a source familiar with the matter said.

Friendster, which predates Facebook and MySpace in the social networking space was founded in 2002. But it quickly lost ground to other social networking sites in the United States. Friendster is now mostly used in Asia where more than half of its registered 100 million users are from.

Friendster will be sold to an Asian listed firm for more than $100 million in a deal set to be announced by the end of the month, said a source who declined to be identified as the information was not yet public.

Headquartered in California, Friendster had turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Google Inc (GOOG.O) six years ago, according to newspaper reports.

Tencent Holdings (0700.HK), China’s largest Internet firm by market value at $35 billion, was among the short-listed bidders, while Facebook also showed interest but was turned down due to competition and intellectual property issues, the source said. (Source: Reuters)

Thanks for pioneering the idea of how social network should be but you will not be missed.

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2),
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3),
• Amazon SimpleDB,
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS),
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS),
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce,
• Amazon CloudFront.

Yes EC2 is coming to Singapore over the second half of 2010. I am considering migrating some stuff over to Amazon due to its pricing.

Amazon Web Services Announces Expansion into Asia in the First Half of 2010

Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced an expansion of its services into an Asia-Pacific region in the first half of 2010, enabling businesses to deploy compute and storage resources in close proximity to their end-users in the region. Software developers and businesses will be able to access AWS’s infrastructure services from multiple Availability Zones in Singapore in the first half of 2010, then in other Availability Zones within Asia over the second half of 2010. AWS services available at the launch of the Asia-Pacific region will include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and Amazon CloudFront. (Source: Amazon)

Amazon has yet to release the pricing for Singapore but I’m guessing it would cost about USD0.20 per hour. Hosting hasn’t been that cheap in Singapore currently. If they charge less than USD$0.14 per hour for a small Linux EC2 instance, I would start advocating people to switch. Currently in US, Amazon charges USD$0.085 per hour. VPS hosting in Singapore is still kinda expensive for whatever reasons. Running a website really shouldn’t be that costly.

SourceForge, Inc. Changes its Name to Geeknet, Inc.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, Nov. 4, 2009 – SourceForge, Inc. (NASDAQ: LNUX) today announced that it has changed its name to Geeknet, Inc. to more accurately reflect the company’s business and the growing market it serves. The name change also supports the company’s intention to expand the reach of its online advertising services into new categories.

“Renaming the company Geeknet is the latest step in our rapid transformation,” said Scott L. Kauffman, President & CEO of Geeknet. “Our new name is a more accurate articulation of our business. With Geeknet as our calling card on Madison Avenue, we are now able to clearly define the audience we serve and more effectively capture the business opportunity that we are addressing.”

The Geeknet network, which includes SourceForge, Slashdot, ThinkGeek and Ohloh, among others, serves a global community of nearly 40 million geeks each month. These tech-savvy professionals and enthusiasts are affluent, well-educated and command significant spending power. (Source: Geeknet)

SourceForge is a more widely known name as compared to Geeknet. I don’t really see how it would be better to change the company name to Geeknet.

Manuel Zelaya

Honduran Congress names provisional president

Hours after the sitting president was deposed by a military-led coup, a new president of Honduras was sworn in Sunday.

But the former president was not ready to give up his powers.

The political developments that swept Honduras over the past weeks and led up to Sunday’s coup had the makings of a crisis, but the situation in the Central American nation of 8 million people was calm.

Roberto Micheletti was sworn in as provisional president to the applause of members of Congress, who chanted, “Honduras! Honduras!” Outside the building, supporters of ousted President Jose Manuel Zelaya protested, but their numbers were limited, and the streets remained mostly peaceful. Micheletti told CNN en Español Sunday evening that he has imposed an “indefinite” curfew. (Source: CNN)

Also after reading much of the English comments here, I got a better picture and it appeared that the people are generally in favor of President Zelaya being removed.

President Jose Manuel Zelaya was arrested at his residence by the military on Sunday June 28, 2009 and flown to Costa Rica. He had promised to put a referendum on the ballot that would change Honduras’ laws, allowing him to run for another term. The Supreme Court had previously ruled that the referendum was illegal. Around 100 Zelaya supporters protested the arrest by blocking the gates to the presidential palace and throwing stones at soldiers. It is not clear who has control of the executive branch at this time, but the constitution of Honduras says the head of congress would succeed the president. (From Wiki)

CNN has more information.

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04

The growing adoption of the Linux operating system on netbook devices has compelled Linux distributors to focus on improving startup performance. Ubuntu 9.04, which was released last month, is one distribution where these improvements are particularly noticeable.

The developers behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution aim to significantly improve boot performance. Their ambitious goal for 2010 is to reduce total boot time to 10 seconds. (Source: Ars)

On a side note, I just ordered a MacBook Pro.

Unconfirmed Reports of Massive T-Mobile Breach

Early reports indicate that hackers have penetrated the T-Mobile U.S. network and stolen proprietary operating data, customer databases and financial records. According to a post on insecure.org, the hackers have claimed to be auctioning the pilfered data to the highest bidder. T-Mobile competitors, they say, turned them down.

There are no details as to how the hackers achieved the breach, but they did post code to show that they did penetrate the T-Mobile network.

T-Mobile was the target of a masssive 2005 hack, in which Nicholas Jacobsen was charged with unauthorized network access by the U.S. Secret Service. According to published reports, Jacobsen had access to all the information about T-Mobile’s 16 million U.S. subscribers.

T-Mobile subscribers are also the frequent target of e-mail and text messaging phishing scams.

UPDATE: There is no mention of a security breach or incident on T-Mobile’s Web site. We spoke with T-Mobile Saturday night, and they were unaware of the reported incident. They were looking into it, but stil have not provided a formal response.

From: http://blogs.channelinsider.com/secure_channel/content/data_security/early_reports_of_massive_t-mobile_breach.html