from the homepage, click on "Buy Books online". Scroll down to Dynasties and Reigns. There are several books.
The first book by Ann Paludin is most suitable. Just click on it.

The new spelling for Yung Cheng is Yong Zheng.

He was the third emperor of the Qing Dynasty, and reigned from 1723 to 1735. He was the great great great great great grandfather of the "last emperor" Puyi. Check out the chronology page, and you can find the Qing (Ching) Dynasty by scrolling down to the end.

You asked why Pandas are so important and worshipped in China. In fact, I think Panda are important not just to China and they are loved all over the world. There are a few reasons why:

1. Pandas are cute. Just look at their faces and movement. They are so likeable that you just have to love them.

2. Pandas have very gentle temperment. They are not wild like other animals of their size. They don't even eat meat. They eat bamboo leaves.

3. Pandas are few. You can't find them anywhere outside China. They are considered endangered species.

You are not alone. There are many Chinese dispora living all over the world who do not know their original Chinese name or the city of their ancesters. Similarly, there are also many people in the U.S. whose fathers or grandparents from Eastern Europe with the same problem.

As a first guess your family may be either . It is possible that lau is the first name of the person who first came to your country, but the official carelessly wrote it down as part of the last name.

Try to find out the approximate date of the immigration, from what part of China (North, South, which province) would help.

Both Sun and Song are common names. So people with the same last name are not necessarily related.

On the contrary, Panda is not worshiped at all in the Chinese culture! Until the last hundred years, Panda is practically unknown to the Chinese. There was no paintings of panda, no songs, no toys, nothing.

Panda was "discovered" by the Americans. It was brought to the U.S. and became a hit. From the U.S., it went back to China and now is very popular in the Chinese Pop Culture.

Chinese love animals. There are many animals important in the Chinese culture. From cats, dogs, to birds of many kinds, they are raised as pets, written about in literatures, etc. But no panda. At least not I am aware of.

Ming

I was refering to the central cylindrical hole in Cong. I doubt if it is done by carving. It has to be drilled with a bit of some sort to achieve uniformity. But it would be very wasteful if the core is turned into just dust. So, I think they had some hollow bit drills. But for a Cong of one foot tall, it is something difficult to achieve.

Normally one does not use a large drill bit to drill a large hole. That is both slow and wasteful.

Instead, one drills a small pilot hole at the circumstance of the hole. Then use a saw to cut along the circumstance of the hole. This method is also used today in a wood workshop for instnace.

Drill is only one the many tools. Much work is done by the carver with a knife. See this bird-shaped P'ei pendant from Shang Dynasty 1766-1122 BC in the National Palace Museum collection.

The drill as Ming mentioned and I briefly touched upon was still used in 1960s in Hong Kong. The most popular application was drilling concentric circles for one set of the Majong set. I passed by a few of these shops everyday and watch them do it without any measurement( they might have premarked them) accurately. They also work on ivory balls using a similar tool. The string wraps around the central shaft with the drill bit and recoils after each downward stroke. Very rpimitive looking yet very efficient indeed. I have not seen the tool any more.

I also believe they would not waste the material within the big hole, but "core" it out for somethng else. So they would have to have a hollow drill bit too. How did they do it 2000BC? What material was their drill bit made of? It is a mystery. This tool was never found in any tombs.

I posted a photo of a jade cong from the Neolithic Liangzhu culture (c.3300-2200) on our Yahoo Club. (Back then click on Yahoo to go there)

The drill is a very efficient tool and was well developed early in China. Once you see how it works you can only marvel at its simplicity and efficiency. Believe it!

Basically a drill is a sharp bit (hard point) attached to a shaft. By rotating the shaft, the bit rotates and cut into the material to drill a hole. A lot of heat is generated if the material is very hard.

From pre-historical times, people know how to rotate the shaft by placing the shaft between the palms of two hands and rotating it back and forth. This works but is slow.

The remarkable innovation is the introduction of a bow and string. Unlike the bow of a violin, the string is not a straight string, but is wraped once around the shaft. Now if you draw the bow back and forth, the shaft rotates! Let's say the string of the bow is 15" long and the diameter of the bow is 0.5", simple math will show that one draw will rotate the drill 20 revolutions. If you "play" the bow once a second, which is not hard to do, then you are rotating the drill at a speed of 1,200 revolutions per minutes. 1,200 rpm. Now that is nearly comparable with your household electric drill powered with a 1/4 h.p motor today. So, don't say it's unbelievable.

The jade factory in China uses electric drills nowadays. I have never seen workman working on jade. But as a child growing up in China many, many years ago, I remember vividly seeing itenerary repairman going from house to house doing repairs. With a drill, he can mend broken pieces of porcelein. Drill two small holes, and attach a metal clip and the bowl is whole again. Nowadays, I suppose that people simply throw them away.

I do not know good sites on the Web with well organized teaching materials. I have for some time trying to encourage people to put up a web site for this.

However, there are hundreds of Chinese schools in the U.S. and good books and teaching materials. I would try to find if there are such school near where you live.

There is Chinese School Association in the U.S., (CSAUS) You may contact them for assistance. Their website is www.csaus.org Their website also lists a set of books written specifically for teaching children living in the U.S.

Finally, I have a collection of stories at the story page which may be of some interest to you.

When you find the suitable books, I hope you will post a note here for other parents.

Jade is a very intersting topic in Chinese culture. We had some discussion when comparing Olmec culture and Chinese culture. Cong is a special object which still has a lot of mysterious features why it was made. It is a long stick/column with s cylindrical hole through the middle longitudinally and the cross section of outside is square. Some scholars guess it is from the idea of a round heaven and square earth concept. Others think it is a symbol of male fertility or tribal authority. The outside is usually marked with fine lines evenly spaced with high accuracy. See examples There is a good collection at the Palace museum in Taiwan, but I could not find the pictures on the website. See also Chinese description here.

As you mentioned, the carving of jade is a high technology and not many ancient tribes have mastered the technique. I am actually more fascinated by the even drilling of the cylindrical hole than the outside markings. They should have a very sharp tool to accomplish this. The hole is perfectly vertical through the entire piece. Even with today's technology, it is still considered a difficult task. The drill they had is probably similar to the hand drill in Chinese carpentry. It might have started as a tool for making fire. What kind of drill bit did they have to be able to drill jade? That is still a mystery.

This is a very interesting News report. I hope there will be more details coming out.

I read the report and have a somewhat different interpretation of the discrepencies in the dates. I think the statement that the date of the discovered object with written characters being 4,800 years old is correct. This date is cited more than once.
The News article has just one sentence saying "therefore it is 2,000 years older than Oracle bone scripts." I think this is sloppy. Instead, it may be approximately 1,200-1,700 years older than oracle bone scripts.

I think that they arrived at the figure of 4,800 years old by some other methods, and not by "2000 years older than oracle bone," because there is no conceivable direct relation between the two.

Dialects are mainly variations of how a language is spoken.

At the dialect site, I find there are many German dialects. And countless English dialects. And there are many Japanese dialects!

It may be fun to talk about them, but for people who are not conversant about languages, it just adds complexity and confusion.

BTW, this site's project (Earth Language - EL) seems pretty demanding, I like it: http://www.sfo.com/~ucathinker/earth/english/ehome.htm

Alfred 而纒

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - 胶冠勃 "Tieh Meng Hen"
My Poetry

You asked if a Chinese reader is able to judge from a character text whether it is written in Mandarin or Cantonese etc. A short answer to that is "yes".

Take these two sentences as an example :

 琌 ぃ 琌    

 玒  玒    ?

The first sentence is written in Mandarin and the second one is written in Cantonese. In fact, if you buy any local Hong Kong Chinese newspapers, you will see many articles, including news, are written in Cantonese. If you buy Peopel's Daily, then it is written in Mandarin.

Yes, there are a lot of Cantonese writing in newspapers in hong Kong. Some of the novels are written that way that people from the north cannot understand at all. In addition, Hong Kong also come up with a lot of slangs every year.

Similarly, some writers have written in Beijing dialect and slangs (Lao She is a famous one). There are novels written in dialects of Shandong, Shanghai, etc. that increases the regionality of the novel or character.

I mentioned XiangXing, a dialog comedy. It is very popular to use dialects and the misunderstanding to create jokes. Unless you know the dialects, you won't get the puns.

In my Chinese softare, there is Cantonese input too. SOmetimes it is useful when I cannot pronounce the word in Mandarin, I would have to use Cantonese to input. Although this happened only once or twice. So, you can say the dialects are still very much alive in CHinese language and I hope it will continue.

> As far as I know, Lee used to be spelled Rhee by Koreans, because their influence by Japanese

that's what I also had been learning. Thanks for the examples of  厩 ("Tae-Hak"), い ("Kim Dae-Jong") and ┯边 ("Rhee Syng-Man", pinyin: Li Chengwan), just knew that 'Kim' is a very common name written with the 'gold'-character. Isn't it amazing that this Ural-altaic language also can be written with Chinese characters? I'd like the idea of Chinese character writing being a global way of writing all languages! But, alas, the adoption would be far too complicated with regard to flective languages like German. But the Japanese (and Koreans) did manage this - and although not knowing Japanese, seeing Japanese texts, I anyway am getting an idea of what's its contents.
Oh, how time has been passing: I still remember all the newspapers headlines on president Mr. Syngman Rhee.

BTW, would you please answer me a question? Is a Chinese reader able to judge from a character text whether it is written in Mandarin or e.g. in Cantonese, Hakka, Hoklo etc.? (i.e. from different use of words, idiomatic expressions). Could he say that it is a 'foreign' text, like when reading a Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese character text? (Although all German, an Austrian or Swiss text very usually is recognizable as being Austrian or Swiss.)

Alfred 而纒

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - 胶冠勃 "Tieh Meng Hen"
My Poetry

Alfred 而纒

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - 胶冠勃 "Tieh Meng Hen"
My Poetry

There are many poems of Li Bai right here at our website. Start from "Poetry" at the Home page. Both in Chinese and in English. Your friend can help you to do a bit of readings.

As SL pointed out, the value is just as impossible to estimate as to the question, "How much is my copy of Shakespeare worth?"

Perhaps you can donate it to a major university whose library has a strong collection of Chinese classics. I might be able to assist you. You may get a tax deduction of out it.

I hardly think so. In the U.S., asians as a minority group, and till recently a very tiny minority, have been discriminated against as much, if not more, than the Blanks and Hispanics. There are little reason for them to feel "superior" in the society they live in.

Just because you couldn't get them to talk to you does not mean they look down on you. Have you tried to just talk and make friends first? Asians are not as gregarious as you. Have you noticed that they don't even talk among themselves as much? Or shout and yell and jump up and down in public? They don't respond well if you stop them on the street, thrust a microphone in their face, and ask them to bare their souls.

Try approach them slowly, Michael, make friends and earn their trust first.

The poem will endure long after the politicians are forgotten by history.

Maybe Julian, Siu-Leung or Stephen will give some information on this pretty interesting topic.

Alfred 而纒

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - 胶冠勃 "Tieh Meng Hen"
My Poetry

There is some introductory material about on Zen Buddhism, or Chan Buddhism, at the webpage zen.html
From there you may wish to look at the zenfaq page.
In China, and increasingly elsewhere, Buddhism is not only practised as a religion, but also studied as a philosophy as well.

Dear Julian

I have also heard of that famous saying, "ぱ ぃ ┤   ぃ ┤  程 ┤ 約 狥  量 ﹛ 杠 ." ( translation: I fear no heaven or hell, but I fear to hear Cantonese speaking the official language ). In Guangzhou, the people are so at home with Cantonese that they do not have to speak Mandarin (Putonghua) unless they have to communicate verbally with a non-Cantonese. A story was that a Guangzhou headmaster was hectoring his students to talk Mandarin in school, until he found difficulty with one word, and had to switch over to Cantonese.

However, times have changed. The Guangdong Cantonese are taught Mandarin in school, and the level of spoken Mandarin is much better than those from HongKong. The difficulty of the Southern Coastal Chinese is their inability to roll the tongue when pronouncing "chi" and "zhi". Most will find it hard to pronounce the word "eat" . If I meet some-one who cannot pronounce this word correctly, then he is most likely from Southern China.

From my travels and my work, I have met many people who were sent to Guangdong Province from various other places in China and they have to learn Cantonese too. I find Cantonese songs very pleasing to the ears, though I do not understand the dialect well. My friends tell me that the Cantonese seven tones, as opposed to Mandarin four tones, help with more vocal variation.

Siu-Leung has pointed out before that speaking Cantonese can be a mine-field, and I have found that out to my embarrassment. Sometime ago, I was trying to tell a person that he had a kidney disease. I told him he had "Seng peng", actually meaning to say "San peng". "Seng peng" ┦痜 is venereal disease and "San peng" 登痜 is kidney disease. Imagine his eyes dropping out in disbelief, since he had been a very good husband all along.

I am surprise that Stephen Hwang has not posted any reply or message in regards to his favoutite topic, Chinese linguistics.

Tin-Kay

Dear CC Fan

As a recent student of Chinese, I think I can understand your confusion. As Prof. Ming Pei has mentioned, you have mixed up the Chinese language with the dialects.

The Chinese language is actually of two components viz. the written and the spoken. The written language, Hanzi 簙, unlike the alphabetic languages like Greek, English and Arabic, has no phonetics (sounds) and is understood by all educated Chinese irrespective of the different dialectal groups they belong too. As for spoken Chinese, there is no single spoken Chinese language, since the written Chinese characters can be pronounced differently in any dialect, such as the Beijing dialect (also called Mandarin or Putinghua), Cantonese, Hakka, Hoklo (also called Min-Nan or Southern Hokkien), Teochew, Shanghainese, etc. Hence, although the Chinese speak a myriad of different dialects in China, they are paradoxically united by a single written language of non-sounding pictograms, passed down, essentially unbroken, for about four thousand years.

I speak fluent Indonesian and Malay, which are so easy to study when compared to Chinese. Unlike the Indonesian and the Malay languages, which have many similar words and pronounciations, the Chinese dialects can differ so greatly in their pronounciations and sounds that one Chinese cannot understand another Chinese person's spoken dialect. As there is no true common dialect, the Beijing dialect was taken to be the national language, and hence called Putonghua (or Common Language). The Westerners, esp. the English, called the Beijing Language "Mandarin" because it was used by the Chinese Officials or Mandarins. Consequently, Mandarin is the national spoken language across the whole of China, where the different dialectal groups can understand each other by using Mandarin.

Prof. Pei has mentioned that a short distance may separate one dialectal group from another. Even a village on one side of a small river or a hill may differ greatly in the speech with the village on the other side, sometimes totally incomprehensible to each other.

So, to answer about "mother tongue", a Chinese will say his mother tongue is Chinese, and his dialect is Cantonese or Hakka or Shanghainese, etc. Once you have embarked on learning the written Chinese, you will find you have stepped into another world, full of fascinating and stimulating meanings and expressions.

Tin-Kay

When inputing, do not worry about the width of the frame. Just type! the text will automatically wrap to the next line.

As a rule, the discussions are posted here for all to read. It is not just for you alone. So don't ask us to email to you.

Let's add some fun to this topic that you raised.

There is a famous saying, "ぱ ぃ ┤   ぃ ┤  程 ┤ 約 狥  量 ﹛ 杠 ." ( translation: I fear no heaven or hell, but I fear to hear Cantonese speaking the official language ). Siu-leung may be the only exception : )

Your friend does not seem to know the distinction between (a) language, (b) dialect and (c) accent.
To the question, "What language do you know (speak)?" the answer is "Chinese," irespective whether you speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other.

Now, to the question, "Which dialect do you speak?", then the answer would be different, depending on whether you speak Mandarin or Cantonese or another dialect.

We share the same ancestry and the same Chinese language. Until the last 50 years or so, people could not travel very far, so the spoken words become different between one town to the next. You only have to travel 50 miles to find peolpe speaking a different dialect. In all of China, there must be thousands and thousands of different dialects. Cantonese is the dialect spoken by most people in Hongkong and Canton. But you only have to travel 50 miles to towns in China where people do not speak the Cantonese dialect. So your friend is certainly not justified to claim that all Chinese speak Cantonese!

As to the question of why Mandarin dialect is chosen as the common form of spoken Chinese, there are several reasons. The two most important ones are (a) it is spoken by the most people (more or less), and (b) it is the official dialect now and for many years past.

Now let me add one point. The spoken words changes over time as well as from location to location.

I am sorry to hear that your computer has been infected by this virus. It really makes it urgent that everyone should read my web page and erect a firewall as soon as possible.

This particular virus is fairly easy to defeat. In fact, with most viruses, defensive measures are not too hard to implement.
Most of us have just one computer, which is not connected to other computers in a "local network." We should "configure" the computer to "no network." It is stupid that we get our computer from the store "configured" to "yes on a network".

Years ago, we get virus if someone gives us a floppy disk. Nowadays, unless you erect a firewall (as explained in my webpage), the virus can come in several times a day when you log on to the Internet! You don't know about it because these viruses do not ring your door bell. They just come in.

I have been reading your contribution on surnames with great interest, especially that old European clan's names sometimes even go back to old Indian mythology/deities.
With regard to those Native American (e.g. Algonkin) clan's names, could you give examples of those names coming up from ancient times?

In Europe, our family names (surnames) often derive from personal names (Personennamen), which are pretty ancient and going back to old Germanic (or even Celtic) names: The old Indo-European way of forming (personal) names was mainly by composing two nouns, or one noun and one adjective, e.g. 'Sieg-fried', (victory+peace), 'Ger-hard' (spear+strong) or - Greek - 'Timo-theos' (praise+God).
The second part always clearly indicates the gender respective as e.g. masc. 'hart', 'brant', 'mar', 'bald', 'ger' and fem. 'hilt', 'burg', 'lind', 'trud' etc. An alliteration of the two parts (e.g. 'hadu+hart') was not allowed (but: 'Hadu+brant'). Those names often had been connected with a wish for 'hail', e.g. Rudolf (may you have *fame* like a *wolfe*), Wolfram (wolfe+raven), Ludwig (famous+fight), Dietrich (people+ruler) etc..
Those names adopted from other old languages like Greek or Hebrew are very ancient too: Peter/Petros/Petrus (rock), Andreas (the manly), Johannes/John (God is merciful) etc..

Surnames in Germany or other European countries are much younger (less than1000 years). It was the nobility to first having surnames (from their clan's names, as you mentioned already) and after their family's seat, the fiefs' names changing to family names, and later (in the mediaeval towns) the bourgeoisie and the guilds got the names according to profession etc. Much later, as the population was encreasing, it became necessary to also give 'distinguishing' surnames to the ordinary people. In Turkey this was only in 1934, in Egypt in 1955.

It's quite interesting that old Roman (Latin) names initially only had the clan's name (Gentil name) and personal names were not very common. Unlike in Chinese, the personal names were rather few so they had been abbreviated by 'C.' (=Gaius), 'T.' (Titus) etc. and (like in Chinese family hierarchy) even 'replaced' by ordinal numbers like 'Quintus', 'Sextus', 'Octavus' (the Fifth etc.) or 'Postumus' (born after his father's death).

My own surname (Tüting/Tueting) is pretty old (maybe not as a surname but as a place's name): it goes back to a former municipality in Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) with the name of 'Tütingen' (deriving from Germanic 'Tiu-tinge' with the meaning of 'judgement's place dedicated to Tiu the Nordic god'). It is still to be found on the landscape. (BTW, Mr. Kissinger's name derives from Kissingen, a town near Nuremberg/Franconia/Bavaria/Germany ;)))

Alfred 而纒

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - 胶冠勃 "Tieh Meng Hen"
My Poetry

Yes, virus is really a terrible nuisance for the internet. I just got infected with a rather new and benign one call VBscript worm, which can be easily removed. But it could drag you down on productivity ( very sluggish cursor and frozen mouse and screen). Please read up on the following and check if your computer has it:
http://pc-help.org/news/scriptworm.htm

I vote for lifetime penalty for all virus creators (i.e. lifetime deprivation of computer use, probably more painful than physical death). Alfred, any comment?

Computer virus has become an increasing serious problem for all of us. FBI (U.S.) has just posted an anouncement (April 2000) of a new virus that travels from computer to computer and secretly enters your computer if you are on the Internet. Once in your hard disk, it can dial 911 repeatedly to disrupt their operations, and then wipe out your hard disk.

I have prepared a webpage : Click here. At this page I give (a) a detailed explanation about how and why your computer is in danger when it is connected to the Internet. (b) how to run a test to find out if your computer is unguarded, and (c) where to download a free software to protect your computer.

I urge everyone to read this and at least run the free test (no download required) to see for yourself how wide open your computer is. The test takes only a few minutes.

In the past, the hackers only attack big, or important computer sites, so you are safe. Now this is no longer true. The hackers want to come into millions of ordinary computers so the hackers can launch attacks on the big sites from your computer. From your computer! So beware.

There are countless Chinese painters, just as there are countless painters in the world. Famous painters are far fewer and their paintings are expensive.

If you wish to upload graphic files, from the Home page, click on "China Room (any browser)" and then click on "Upload graphics" and follow simple instructions.

In this first place, you should learn to use the correct word.

In English, the word for Chinese words is "Chinese words," not "symbol" or "alphebet." You speak Chinese words. You write Chinses words.

Now to learn a few Chinese words - to read, write, and listen - go to the "A is for Love" page at this website. This page is written specifically for you! You can get there from the homepage.

I think that you misunderstood what Maxine Hong Kingston said in her book. What she meant, in my opinion, was that many second- and third generation Chinese-Americans do not know their family names as written in Chinese. Not that they don't know their family names. When immigrants came to this country, their names were often altered and romantized and anglocized. Not just Chinese. Polish and others as well.

Please review her book and let me know if I am wrong.

Chinese has a long tradtion, going back many thousands of years, of knowing and honoring their family names. On would never change one's family name. Unless you commit murder and bring dishonor to your family!

In contrast, according to Dr. George Redmonds, the customs of using family names did not begin until 1250-1450 in England.

In the United States, the use of family names is only a few hundred years old.

As S.L. said, the topics has been discussed often in this space.

To read a bit about my name and Chinese names in general, go to this page.

We have discussed this before in this forum. You might want to do a search. In simple terms, Chinese in the ancient time has several names. First it is the name (Ming) given by the parents. That is only used by the parents. Firends and especially younger generations are not supposed to call the person by the name his/her parent gave him in honor of the parent.

Among the same generation friends, people call each other by a different name (Zi).

For literati, they usually also make up a literary name (Hao) and use it in their poems, articles, paintings, etc.

Younger generations do not call people by names. Usually the relative pronoun is used (uncle, aunt, ...)

Emperors, contributive generals, prime ministers, also get a name after death. This is usually a clue to identify fraudulent antiques. Some articles used by the person in life time should never have this death name engraved or inscribed on them.

繟赂い地承せ㏄ My congratulations to your site's anniversary and your good work! There are now four years already that I am visiting and accompaning 'China the Beautiful' and three years that I am linked to it with my site. The years are passing away, the web world had undergone changes to much (and too much) commerce - yet your idealistic pages still are there and still going strong. So again my congratulations and best wishes to you and all our friends of CTB and the forums for all the best in the future.

Alfred 而纒

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - 胶冠勃 "Tieh Meng Hen"
My Poetry

1. Yahoo Chinese
15 Feng Hwa Yuan
28 China the Beautiful
29 Netscape Chinese
41 Excite Chinese

You can see the full list here.

It is sad that Netscape can no longer devote more effort to their Chinese-language site.

Once a while, Yahoo's computer will act up and do strange things. I think that they are simply falling behind their work load. Hopefully it will be fixed.

Rudy will keep an eye on this.

This is off the topic of our forum, but certainly I am glad you brought that up and I will chip in a bit of my thoughts. From the first time Microsoft was sued for bundling the browser with Windows, I felt this was an unfair prosecution of business operation to protect its own intellectual property and market share as well as providing customer a needed service. Obviously the lawsit did not work. This second prosecution will again meet with appeal and I still think Microsoft will avail. When Greenspan could not bring down the economy with interest rate hikes, this laughable move of the government is giving a second try.

There are plenty of competitors: Linux, McIntosh, IBMOS2... They all failed to match MS's windows usability, one way or another (Sorry, Alfred). Yet, they are the proofs that MS could not have blocked any development from success if the competitor is really good. It is ridiculous to force MS to release its codes when the whole business system is based on protection of intellectual property. This is not the last we will hear about MS yet. But I think the whole law suit is unjustified except to create jobs for these lawyers who are already well fed.

BTW, other than being a beneficiary of the software and as a shareholder (oops, wish not today), I have nothing to do with MS or any other software companies. In fact, I am invested in Sunmicro and IBM too. :)

The day I will be forced to buy a Microsoft computer, will be the day I refrain from computing and again will be writing on real paper ;)

I'll then be a victim of US brand capitalism.

Alfred 而纒

http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de
Traces of Butterflies' Dreams - 胶冠勃 "Tieh Meng Hen"
My Poetry

The latest Chinese version of Netscape browser is version 4.51

I started with Beta 0.9, and purchased version 1.0 for something like US$50. I am using v. 4.7 now. This may be my last upgrade :-(

The majority of our readers has switched to Microsoft's IE version 5 and version 4.

In view of this, I have stopped verifying the web pages against Netscape browsers. If you are using Netscape browser, and find problems in any page, please let me know. Be sure to give me the URL of the webpage and the specific errors. Your help will reduce my workload and is much appreciated.