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1. Airport exhibition centre to get station

2. Portable data storage goes cutting edg

3. 'X' words add eXtra eXcitement to Macs

1. Airport exhibition centre to get station
Keith Wallis, The Standard 30 March 2004

The MTR Corp is to build a new station to serve the HK$4 billion international exhibition centre at Hong Kong International Airport.

An operating agreement is currently being negotiated between the railway company and AsiaWorld-Expo, the public-private partnership company set up to develop the complex.

This follows the signing about two weeks ago of a project agreement between the two sides after the MTRC proposed the project several months ago.

The Environment Transport and Works Bureau has asked the public to raise any objections by May 4.

Plans call for the construction of a new platform and concourse inside the station structure, modifications of the existing trackside area to accommodate the new station, construction of two integrated entrances to the exhibition centre and a link bridge.

Benoit de Ruffray, AsiaWorld-Expo vice-chairman and managing director of Dragages Hong Kong, confirmed the station would be built during a ground-breaking ceremony yesterday to formally mark the start of construction of the complex.

Dragages Hong Kong, an offshoot of France's biggest contractor, Bouygues, is one of the shareholders in AsiaWorld Expo, together with the government and Yu Ming Investments.

De Ruffray said work on the foundations is already one month ahead of schedule.

``We are confident that the project will be delivered on time and AsiaWorld-Expo will open in 2005,'' he said.

Phase one involves the construction of 66,000 square metres of column free exhibition space and an arena-style multi-purpose hall, together with more than 4,000 sq m of conference and meeting rooms on a second level.

There is scope to expand the complex up to a maximum 100,000 sq m as demand warrants.

The complex, which comprises 10 exhibition halls varying in size between 5,680 sq m and 10,880 sq m, has been designed by architect Ronald Lu & Partners. The structural engineering firm is Scott Wilson, while the mechanical and electrical consultant is Parsons Brinckerhoff Asia.

AsiaWorld-Expo chairman Mike Rowse, who is also InvestHK's director general, said the government has no plans to provide extra cash for the second phase.

The government has already committed HK$2 billion to the project and it would be up to the ``private sector developer to stump up the money'' for phase two, Rowse said.

Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology John Tsang said the exhibition centre ``is expected to generate economic benefits of more than HK$10 billion over a 25-year period''.

2. Portable data storage goes cutting edg
NEIL TAYLOR, SCMP 30 March 2004

Product: Swissmemory data storage goes cutting edge
Price: To be confirmed

Pros: Everybody needs a Swiss Army Knife

Cons: Lack the tool for removing nails from horses' hooves

It had to happen. Over the past year, USB drives have become as ubiquitous as toothpicks, tweezers or those spikes you use to remove a nail from a horse's hoof. So it was inevitable that prodigious penknife producer Victorinox would incorporate one into a Swiss Army Knife.

The Swissmemory USB Victorinox comes with a detachable USB 2.0 drive, to let you store and transport data on your next camping trip.

There is little you can say about the average thumbdrive.

This one comes in either 64 megabyte or 128MB capacities, includes password access and has an light-emitting diode to indicate read and write activity.

However, being a Swiss Army Knife, it also has a ballpoint pen, a laser pointer, a knife, scissors, a screwdriver and a nail file. Sadly, it lacks all the extra gizmos one expects from a top-end pocketknife. Victorinox's recent CyberTool had 34 gadgets - now that is something any geek will happily hang on his belt.

Especially for regular travellers, there is even an edition that comes minus knife, scissors, screwdriver and nail file. Though why anyone might want a knifeless penknife is beyond me. If you need your USB drive during a flight, then detach it and check in the knife.

3. 'X' words add eXtra eXcitement to Macs
DAVID WILSON, SCMP 30 March 2004

The alphabet amounts to one of the great triumphs of the human mind (second only to mobile phone shoot-'em-ups). And, of all its letters, the 24th must rank as the most exciting.

Its aggressively symmetrical form lends it a futuristic feel fostered by phenomena such as, first, the X-ray then X-Men, The X-Files and, simply, X, the millennial Manga battle orgy. Without it, the world of personal computing would be poorer (and there'd be no such thing as X-rated websites).

Think of Apple's Mac OS X (originally called Rhapsody) and its questionable yet strangely popular counterpart Windows XP (née Whistler), both of which arrived in 2001. Think how banal it would be if Apple and Microsoft had designated their products "OS 10" and "Windows 10P".

That scenario would be an inducement to slither back to the primeval screens and command prompts of that system from the swamp known as MS-Dos. Thank the stars for the X-factor.

In the case of Apple, the symbol's attraction is enhanced by its double significance. It denotes not just the tenth version in accordance with the Roman numeral but also "Unix".

Pedants may grumble that OS X's association with Unix makes no sense. For one thing, Unix does not start with "X" and so, technically, the system should be called "OS U".

For another, Unix is a devilishly complex language publicly maligned by Scott Adams in Fugitive From The Cubicle Police and other Dilbert books. So it seems a weird choice for such a purportedly user-friendly machine.

My response to the first point is, yes, now shut up. As for the criticism that Unix is a riddle wrapped in an enigma and encased in a shell - admittedly that may broadly be true but the joy of the system is that it also confers stability. As any OS X evangelist will tell you, Apple's baby hardly ever crashes and running a computer blessed with it feels like watching TV without the provocation of commercials. The same was meant to be true of XP, which was based on the Windows 2000 code but also featured a newly developed Graphical User Interface called Luna.

Although, as usual, it appeared that Mr Softy had "borrowed" in using the elegant letter, again the play on it was clever - XP stands for "experience".

But for many users, the experience is tainted by bitterness. Cynics have dreamed up a wealth of competing interpretations ranging from "eXtra Pain", "eXtra Pathetic" and "eXponential Pricing" to "eXPensive", "eXtremely unPredictable", "eXPloitation" and "eXPired".

Despite its susceptibility to parody, Microsoft's consonant cluster surely has more class than "3.1", "95" and other numerical predecessors which smack so much of pallid skin, bad haircuts and spectacles.

The question now is, after raising the bar, what name Apple and Microsoft will come up with next.

"Mac OS Y"? "Windows XQ" for "eXquisite"?

Perhaps, in the manner of the Artist Formerly Known As Prince, the rival giants will replace mere Roman letters with a made-up hieroglyph. Or perhaps not, given that saddled with an unpronounceable name, Prince's career promptly went into freefall.

Doubtless, Steve and Bill are already exploring this issue. I've so far failed to find detailed rumours of any successor to OS X. But a leaked pre-beta version of the successor to Windows XP, codenamed Longhorn, apparently can be found on the internet.

Longhorn, it seems, will be a revamped OS built on a new file system that gives users a single route to data, irrespective of how that data is created or where on a PC or network it is stored. Sounds practical but hardly eXcePtional.