Another Chinese Decision

China’s going to launch their own mobile TV technology in time for the Olympic games’ opening ceremony on August 8, 2008.

Mobile TV standards have been largely incompatible, with systems in the North America, South America, South Korea, Italy and Japan. Now we see yet another incompatible system to be introduced in one of the largest potential user based. Shall we keep starting these standards wars? We saw the battle of BetaMAX and VHS. We recently saw the HD disk format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

China had always wanted to come up with their own standards. They attempted to do so with WiFi, but failed drastically when the Chinese businesses complain that the China WiFi system would not be compatible with 802.11, hence forcing all Chinese businesses to equip their staff; who travels outside of China, with connected devices compatible with dual WiFi system.

Then China choose a HD TV standard that is incompatible with the rest of the world’s HD TV standard, but this time there are no Chinese businesses available to fight the decision for the consumer. So due to business survival, TV manufactures are making converter boxes that will sit between their HD TV sets and the signal coming at Chinese cities. For what have to be a patriotic decision, Hong Kong choose to go with the China standard rather than the standard that is use in majority of the countries outside of China.

Standards wars are never good for the ultimate consumers. I call for the technology decision makers and government officials, to consider the ultimate consumers in their decisions.

China’s Olympic Torch Relay 2008

This Olympic torch relay around the world has now become such a controversy that the International Olympic Asscociation is considering terminating the relay. If this decision is final, it will become the first world record obtained by China in this year’s Olympic.

The people at “Torch Relay Beijing 2008” has created an animation to show their disguss of the recent events.

Please enable Javascript in your browser if you want to see the animated image here.

So far most sites who had talked about this or mentioned Tibet has been banned from China. I suppose mentioning these facts will also cause my site to be banned from China. After over 16 years of Internet presence for my site, I have finally dragged myself into a political topic that will cause me to loose the readership of fellow Chinese in China.

Hopefully, the well informed any Internet savy readers will find the usual techniques to circumvent the Chinese government’s censorship.

Movie Review: Step Up 2 the Streets

Poster

My Rating: 1Stars

This evening I saw the movie “Step Up 2 the Streets” at UA Cinema, Time Square, Hong Kong.

I was a bit disappointed to say the least. The dance moves were not that spectacular; at least to me. May be a true dancer will find them amazing.

The soundtrack was boring, I find each track to be the same as the others. Normally sequels are not as good as the original, but I was hoping this time it would be different. I had been surprised in the past: Die Hard, Indiana Jones and Bourne Identity.

There was a cameo appearance of the character “Tyler Gage” (Channing Tatum), but that was all there was to tie this movie with the original. May be they should have done more, may be they should have done it differently. In my opinion, whatever it is they had not done it right.

I suggest the directors, producers and writers to step up their game or step aside. I do not think they will try for Step Up 3. If anyone thinking about it, I suggest you come up with a new and more original story.

Rating Legend:
5Stars Not to be missed
4Stars Wait for the DVD
3Stars Buy from iTunes Store
2Stars Rent it if you can
1Stars Waste your time elsewhere