Archive for the ‘Air’ Category
The recently opened Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport was designed and completed in record time for the Summer Olympics. It can handle 50 million passengers a year. More Photos >
BEIJING — Beijing airport’s new Terminal 3 — twice the size of the Pentagon — is the largest building in the world.
Adorned with the colors of imperial China and a roof that evokes the scales of a dragon, the massive glass- and steel-sheathed structure, designed by the renowned British architect Norman Foster, cost $3.8 billion and can handle more than 50 million passengers a year. The developers call it the “most advanced airport building in the world,” and say it was completed in less than four years, a timetable some believed impossible.
It opened in late February with little fanfare, but also without the kind of glitches that plagued the new $8.7 billion terminal at Heathrow in London, a project that took six years to complete.
This is the image China would like to project as it hosts the Olympic Games this summer — a confident rising power constructing dazzling monuments exemplifying its rapid progress and its audacious ambition.
While much of the world has focused on protests trailing the Olympic torch, China’s poor human rights record, its pollution, product safety and child labor scandals, workers here have been putting the finishing touches on one of the biggest building programs the world has ever seen.
Beijing hopes to overcome these negatives, and the dark sides of its roaring economy, by emphasizing its ability to upgrade and modernize, at least when it comes to buildings and infrastructure projects. The main Olympic stadium, nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, is already widely admired for its striking appearance and its use of an unusual steel mesh exterior. The nearby National Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube, is a translucent blue bubble that glows in the dark.
And east of the main Olympic arenas, construction is winding down on the new headquarters of the country’s main state television network, China Central Television, or CCTV.
That $700 million building, designed by Rem Koolhaas, consists of two interlocking Z-shaped towers that rise 767 feet and may be the world’s largest and most expensive media headquarters.
New York has the Chrysler Building, Grand Central and the Guggenheim Museum; Paris has the Louvre and the Pompidou Center; now Beijing is determined to build its own architectural icons.
CHINA has poured cold water on opposition and Western claims that an arms shipment to Zimbabwe was to be used in a clampdown against MDC-T supporters, pointing out that Harare placed the order last year.
A spokesperson from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Jiang Yu, has stated the arms contract was signed last year contrary to claims that it was related to the current election situation in Zimbabwe.
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“This is normal trade in military products between the two countries,” Jiang told a Press briefing in Beijing.
She added that the shipment was “irrelevant” to what was taking place in Zimbabwe at the moment.
Jiang also reiterated China’s long-held foreign policy that its economic dealings with other countries, including the sale of arms, adhered to a strict policy of non-interference in their sovereign affairs — a stance that has boosted the emerging power’s ties with Africa, much to the chagrin of the West.
This is contrary to claims in some quarters that the Government intends to use the arms in a clampdown on opposition MDC-T supporters.
On Monday, Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Cde Patrick Chinamasa pointed out that Zimbabwe had a right to arm itself to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity while dismissing suggestions that the military would want to use the arms against civilians.
The European Union, the United States and their allies slapped an arms ban on Zimbabwe in 2002 and observers have said in such a situation, it was only natural that the country would increase such trade with traditional partners such as China.
Google – the genial web host?
Posted on: April 9, 2008
- In: Air | genial | Google | Google APIs | Google App Engine | Moore's Law | Silverlight | web host
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Last night Google launched a beta of what it calls the Google App Engine – a service which will host developers’ web applications.
“So what?” I hear you ask.
Well, more than 10,000 people signed up in less than 24 hours to the beta and it’s an important sign about the direction that Google is going as a company.
And my use of the word “host” is a bit misleading – sorry – the Google App Engine enables developers to run their applications on Google’s infrastructure.
Google will offer the CPU cycles, the server space and the bandwidth – the whole shooting match, in effect – to developers. They will also offer use of Google APIs for e-mail, signing in and signing out of users etc.
There’s no doubt that hosted services, from web applications to programs we associate mainly with desktop computing, are the future.
From productivity programs to gaming experiences – it’s all shifting into the cloud.
I was at an event at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year and Raph Koster shocked some fellow gaming luminaries when he pointed out that Flash would soon have the graphical flexibility and capability of games consoles from just a few years ago.
Increased bandwidth, the evolution of tools like Air and Silverlight, and broadband penetration coupled with Moore’s Law is combining to make the future of computing something we’ll experience down the pipe and not necessarily hosted on our own machines.
So Google’s plunge into this makes sense. It wants to be a part of this future.
But more interesting will be what Google says it will be able to do with the applications and resultant data that it will host on our behalf, on the behalf of developers and companies.
Google could help drive standards not just for the web as we understand it today, but for each and every device that is being connected to the net now and in the coming years – from TVs to cars, from fridges to mobile internet devices.
For companies like Amazon and Salesforce.com, it means big competition in this marketplace right now.
But longer term I hope Google’s entry into this will help turn the web into a truly open, cross platform space.
Some fears have already been expressed. Jack Schofield at the Guardian has queried if hosting your app on Google’s infrastruture might well leave you open to being bought by the firm in one simple swallow – after all, your entire application already fits inside the Google empire if it’s on their servers.
So big bad corporation tries to swallow web development and developers? Or brave new frontier for web development?
You decide.
Valleywag - valleywag.wordpress.com 
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