simonb.com: blog > articles tagged with china

The Big Picture has some good pics from the effort to clean up the oil spill in Dalian.

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This is not for the squeamish. You have been warned...

The Sky Burial is the traditional funeral in Tibet. The process: the body is cut up and left to vultures. It's a circle of life thing. It is very rare to witness this. Let alone be allowed to take pictures. Nevertheless mbv travel has a photo set of the whole thing. Please don't click if your eating lunch.

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Dan Chung (The Guardian and DSLR News Shooter) has shot a video of the Zhongguancun gadget city in Beijing. He shot the video to test his new Canon 550D cameras. But it is of interest to a geek audience because it shows what China's gadget/electronic markets are like. They're huge multi-floored malls in which you can get everything you need to satisfy your inner geek.

The video is embedded below from Vimeo.

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According to the China Daily an average of 2.1 billion SMS messages are sent per day in China. Imagine the infrastructure required to support such volume. The monitoring systems must be huge! Gotta go and delete some junk Chinese SMSs from my phone...

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A new book shop sprang up on Fuxing Lu last week. This book shop is a little different, it sells by weight: RMB 11.8 per 500g. Another example of content being regarded as free in China. The other obvious example is DVDs. The costs are based on the media not the movie. That is, DVD-9 is more expensive than DVD-5.

In a country which keeps a tight control on (official) content, clearly content is regarded as having a value. The power of words and images etc. But at the same time it is considered to be of zero value -…

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Last night, at my local DVD store, I purchased a Blu-ray disc for RMB 80 (USD 12). The same disc on Amazon costs USD 17.50 (down from USD 35). It is safe to assume, just like every other title in the shop, it is a fake. When Blu-ray was introduced there was doubt as to its viability due to the rise of Internet delivery and competition from HD-DVD. But the appearance of fake discs means Blu-ray has arrived as a standard. It must be viable because there is a big enough market for pirates to be shipping discs. Therefore, I…

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CNNIC recently updated its rules about who can register a .cn domain name. Basically only registered companies in China. OK. This was on 11 December 2009. GoDaddy wait until 5 February 2010 until they send an email to registrants with details of a list of paper work that must be submitted by 12 February 2010. That is, they give us one weeks notice. Here's the thing. They don't say in the email where the paperwork is to be submitted. Or if it has to be paper. Or if scans are OK. Only it is to be submitted. Duh! So I…

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China has been in the news a lot lately. Not all of it good. But here is some good news. The New York Times is reporting on China's rise in renewable energy industries - already World leader in wind turbines and solar panels. And The Guardian is reporting that, in the wake of the US plans to scrap moon missions, China could be the only country remaining with the goal to place men on the moon. Good luck to 'em it will be a marvellous achievement.

See also: China's Scientific Rise

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For someone who spent 14 years in a corporate research lab (seven of those in China) I don't write much about research. Perhaps I should. One of the things that was obvious to me went I came East was that, given the scale of investment and the determinism and hard work going on, China would soon be catching up with the West in research. The numbers seem to be suggesting this will soon be true.

The New Scientist is reporting that by 2020 China will be the World's largest producer of scientific knowledge. Between 1995 and 2006, China's gross expenditure…

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Akamai's State of the Internet Report make an interesting read. I would never have guessed that China is number two in numbers of Internet connected devices (see above from the Q3 2009 report). The Q2 2009 report is also interesting for China Internet users because it brings news of a new regional undersea cable called the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) which should be on line in mid 2011. You can never have too much bandwidth.

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