ProTibet Dot NET

New Apple’s Macbook Air

Apple has introduced the the world’s thinnest personal laptop notebook - Macbook Air. What makes the Macbook Air so thin?

MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else. But you don’t lose inches and pounds overnight. It’s the result of rethinking conventions. Of multiple wireless innovations. And of breakthrough design. With MacBook Air, mobile computing suddenly has a new standard. 

MacBook Air is nearly as thin as your index finger. Practically every detail that could be streamlined has been. Yet it still has a 13.3-inch widescreen LED display, full-size keyboard, and large multi-touch trackpad. It’s incomparably portable without the usual ultraportable screen and keyboard compromises.

So many innovations. So little space.
The incredible thinness of MacBook Air is the result of numerous size- and weight-shaving innovations. From a slimmer hard drive to strategically hidden I/O ports to a lower-profile battery, everything has been considered and reconsidered with thinness in mind.

Built for the wireless world.
MacBook Air is designed and engineered to take full advantage of the wireless world. A world in which 802.11n Wi-Fi is now so fast and so available, people are truly living untethered — buying and renting movies online, downloading software, and sharing and storing files on the web.

How is China Handling Tibet

Time Magazine recently published an article called Tackling Tibet:

Since 2002, a little-known academic ritual has taken place each year at Harvard University. Academics of every stripe, from historians to constitutional lawyers, gather to discuss Tibet’s past, present and future. Uniquely, these intellectual debates have brought together Chinese and exiled Tibetan scholars. In the real world, the simplest facts about Tibet are so divisive that dialogue is impossible. Chinese speak of the 1950 peaceful liberation of the Chinese province of Tibet, and of its subsequent modernization; Tibetans speak of the invasion of an independent nation, and the suppression of its religious and cultural traditions. The polite rules established at Harvard, however, at least allow the two sides to exchange views. In fact, a senior Chinese scholar attending the first Harvard event met with the Dalai Lama’s envoy. That secret meeting birthed the official Sino-Tibetan dialogue between the Dalai Lama’s representatives and the Chinese government, which still takes place annually in Beijing.

The most recent Harvard Tibet conference, late last year, occurred amid a hurricane of news events. The Dalai Lama met the leaders of Germany, the U.S. and Canada in quick succession. Headlines trumpeted Beijing’s angry response. In Tibet, 4,000 armed police confronted monks at Lhasa’s venerated Drepung Monastery when they tried to celebrate the Dalai Lama being awarded the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal. Then the Chinese government announced that it must certify all new reincarnations of Tibetan Buddhism’s top clerics, signaling its firm intention to select and control the next Dalai Lama when the current 14th Dalai Lama passes away. He, in turn, announced that he was considering the idea that he might select his successor before he died. At the Harvard conference, you could see these news events landing like mortars amid the polite dialogue. The scholars carried on, reflexively, trying to peel away each other’s assumptions, looking for any sliver of space where a beachhead of shared meaning might be established.

Can reconciliation ever be achieved? Beijing first needs to give Tibetans, in exile and in Tibet, at least a hint of mutuality in their relationship. China could start by listening to Tibetans like Phuntso Wangye. He founded the first Communist Party in Tibet in 1940, which he merged with the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, and then helped lead Chinese troops into Tibet in 1951. Mao Zedong trusted Wangye so implicitly that he selected him as the translator for his 1954-55 meetings with the Dalai Lama. Today, the 85-year-old Wangye lives in Beijing. He believes that those Tibetan leaders collaborating with Beijing are misleading the Chinese leadership by claiming the Dalai Lama no longer has much sway over Tibetans. Wangye has urged Beijing to invite the Dalai Lama to China. Only the Dalai Lama has the standing among Tibetans to convince them to give up their hope for independence (it’s self-deceiving to think such feelings do not exist).

The Dalai Lama has clearly indicated that he wants to negotiate meaningful autonomy, not independence, for Tibet. Yet the hawks in Beijing refuse to deal with him; they believe China can solve its Dalai Lama problem by letting the current one die in exile. However, history proves no power has ever successfully imposed a fake Dalai Lama on the Tibetan people.

Harvard’s professor emeritus Ezra F. Vogel — who has enjoyed good relations with many of China’s leaders, past and present — chaired several sessions during the Tibet conference. Beijing might want to consider Vogel’s opinion regarding the 15th Dalai Lama: “If the Dalai Lama passes away without agreement with China, then you could have someone Beijing selects, who would not be acceptable to Tibetans. Then China could be in for a long-term problem, like Russia has in Chechnya.”

Today’s sporadic Sino-Tibetan dialogue continues not because China wants to use it to reach some accommodation with the Dalai Lama, but because China does not want to be blamed for ending it. Yet Beijing needs to engage the Dalai Lama because only he has the legitimacy among Tibetans to negotiate, and sell, genuine autonomy to the Tibetans. Inviting the Dalai Lama to China would do more to burnish the country’s international image in this Olympic year than any other single step. When the Dalai Lama departs the scene, things will become harder, not easier, for China to deal with Tibet.
With reporting by Journalist Thomas Laird’s latest book is The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama

AOL Decides to Kill the NetScape

Hard to believe but Netscape Navigator has been online browsing websites for more than 13 years. Netscape was the world’s first and foremost commercial Web browser. Netscape will be pulled off life support Feb. 1 by its creator America On Line AOL.

AOL won’t be doing any further development and offering technical support to focus on growing the company as an advertising business. Netscape’s usage kept falling ever since Microsoft Corp.’s started to jump into into the browser business, and made it even worse when the popular open-source browser called Firefox popped up.

“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer,” Netscape Director Tom Drapeau wrote in a blog entry Friday.

In recent years, Netscape has been little more than a repackaged version of the more popular Firefox, which commands about 10 percent of the Web browser market, with almost all of the rest going to Internet Explorer.

People will still be able to download and use the Netscape browser indefinitely, but AOL will stop releasing security and other updates on Feb. 1. Drapeau recommended that the small pool of Netscape users download Firefox instead.

A separate Netscape Web portal, which has had several incarnations in recent years, will continue to operate.

The World Wide Web was but a few years old when in April 1993 a team at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to integrate images and sound with words. Before Mosaic, access to the Internet and the Web was largely limited to text, with any graphics displayed in separate windows.

Marc Andreessen and many of his university colleagues soon left to form a company tasked with commercializing the browser. The first version of Netscape came out in late 1994.

Netscape fed the gold-rush atmosphere with a landmark initial public offering of stock in August 1995. Netscape’s stock carried a then-steep IPO price of $28 per share, a price that doubled on opening day to give the startup a $2 billion market value even though it had only $20 million in sales.

But Netscape’s success also drew the attention of Microsoft, which quickly won market share by giving away its Internet Explorer browser for free with its flagship Windows operating system. The bundling prompted a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit and later a settlement with Microsoft.

Netscape eventually dropped fees for the software, but it was too late. Undone by IE, Netscape sold itself to AOL in a $10 billion deal completed in early 1999.

Netscape spawned an open-source project called Mozilla, in which developers from around the world freely contribute to writing and testing the software. Mozilla released its standalone browser, Firefox, and Netscape was never able to regain its former footing.