Ji He's Weblog

Chinese automakers racing to enter the U.S. market are being slowed by everything from financing to pollution regulations. Entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin is trying to raise $200 million -- $2 million from each dealer looking to sell vehicles from China's Chery Automotive -- but he only has 37 dealers so far. Rival automaker Geely, which hopes to offer vehicles for $10,000, just flunked U.S. emissions and side-crash tests, forcing engineers to tweak designs. Someone will bring cheap Chinese cars to the U.S., said George Peterson of consultant AutoPacific. "The question is who will be first."

USATODAY has the full story.

Posted by Ji He at 11:00 AM | Permalink

The Department of Entomology, Purdue University has a well written document on managing insects in home vegetable garden. The article is downloadable in PDF format.

Posted by Ji He at 1:25 PM | Permalink

The pitches are irresistible: Get a $100 hard drive for $30 after rebate. Score the latest $150 cell phone with digital camera for nada. Make $10 by mailing in a rebate form for virus-protection software. However, it's NOT a great buy until you’ve cashed the rebate check -- and a lot of companies are earning bad reputations for making that as difficult as possible. Nevertheless, the good thing is, with consumer complaints to the FTC and Better Business Bureau escalating, regulators are ramping up their scrutiny of rebates.

MSN Money has the full story.

Posted by Ji He at 4:43 PM | Permalink

America Online will begin charging businesses to send commercial e-mail to its users in the first wide-scale use of authenticated e-mail to reduce spam. "This is all about protecting consumers from spam, phishing, viruses and fraud," says Richard Gingras, CEO of Goodmail. Gingras compares the system to certified postal mail. Still, the revamped commercial e-mail system could have unintended consequences for some marketers and consumers. Some marketers affected by the plan, set to start in several weeks, call it e-mail taxation designed to create a new stream of revenue for AOL.

USA Today has the full story.

Posted by Ji He at 9:01 AM | Permalink

Google Inc. and eBay Inc.'s Skype are investing in FON, a Spanish startup that plans to help hotspot owners charge for Wi-Fi access, a plan that could face significant opposition from Internet service providers.

FON's idea, floated just three months ago in a Web posting by founder Martin Varsavsky, is to sign up people who have Wi-Fi hotspots, either for free or not. FON faces a hurdle in that most ISPs prohibit subscribers from sharing internet access with people outside their household. Many broadband subscribers share their access now for free, though, and it's hard for Internet service providers to stop them.

Yahoo business has the full analysis.

Posted by Ji He at 8:35 PM | Permalink

On Jan 30, 2006, Zend Technologies announced the general availability of the updated Zend Core™ for IBM®, featuring a free DB2 Express Data Server and the Cloudscape database for embedded applications. Earlier releases of Zend Core for IBM already supported Linux and AIX – this update adds support for Windows®, allowing many additional developers to rely on a certified and easily installable PHP environment. All Zend Core for IBM versions are available as a free download from Zend's web site at www.zend.com.

Posted by Ji He at 9:38 AM | Permalink

This monster is great...
My old millionaire nan came over recently to tell us that she was about to take us out of her will because we had too much money already, and as luck would have it she had to use the bathroom during that same visit. We heard this scream from the bathroom and when we broke in we found our nan dead on the floor...luckily she hadn't gone to her attorney's office to sign the new will and we got our share after all...thanks toilet monster..you were worth the $15 + $5 shipping we paid for you.

Don't use to scare people with guns...
ok so i planted one of these in the toilet for a BBQ my parents were throwing(im 13)i figured this way no one would stink up the bathroom. so my family is friends with a cop and he came right from work, thus he had his gun in his holster, so the parties going on for like 45 min. when all of a sudden we here like 9 very loud booms we all run to the bath room where they had came from and the cops there and the toilet monster (and the toilet)is filled with holes.apparently the cop went to the bathroom lifted the seat, saw the monster, and unloaded about 9 shots into it we all had a good laugh then he paid my parents for a new toilet and me for a new monster(i told him they costed $90)

NOT REAL!
I thought this would be an actual toilet monster, and was happy to see such a low price. It is, however, made out of rubber, and can not actually eat people.

Read more about Toilet Monster at Amazon.com.

Posted by Ji He at 7:29 PM | Permalink

Partition Logic is a free hard disk partitioning and data management tool. It can create, delete, format, defragment, resize, and move partitions and modify their attributes. It can copy entire hard disks from one to another.

Partition Logic is free software, based on the Visopsys operating system. It boots from a CD or floppy disk and runs as a standalone system, independent of your regular operating system. It is intended to become a free alternative to such commercial programs as Partition Magic, Drive Image, and Norton Ghost... (read more)

Posted by Ji He at 5:01 PM | Permalink