Slashdot Mirror
Shanda Box vs. Microsoft Venus After Six Years?
Luyi Chen asks: "Shanda revealed their new PC entertainment center (aka Shanda Box) at China International Consumer Electronics Show (SinoCES) last Friday. It's strategy is to move Internet content to TV. Six years ago, Microsoft Venus was to provide a cheap operating system with basic information processing ability for the TV set-top market. While Microsoft focused on reducing the price, Shanda focuses on reducing the entry level. Both strategies are based on the fact that the number of TVs dwarfs the number of PCs in China, which won't change in six years. What is different is that we have faster hardware, more Internet content and users. Amazingly enough, Microsoft's Venus didn't make it out of the laboratory. Does Slashdot think Shanda will succeed where Microsoft thought it would fail?"
rotten resolution, if apple II didn't look good on the old Philco in the living room, why would dark-blue on blue web pages? I don't get this. sounds like somebody wrote down a dream on toilet paper when they got up, and it doesn't translate into reality.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
What is the same is that unless the Shanda folks are assuming that the number of HDTVs is going to also dwarf the number of PCs in China, it doesn't matter how fast the set-top box is: Surfing teh Intarweb, whether you do it in NTSC, PAL, or SECAM, is going to be teh suck. It's bad enough trying to read ASCII characters at resolutions comparable to 640x480 -- can you imagine trying to read Chinese characters?
Sometimes you can leapfrog technology - as China did with wireless telephones vs. land lines.
Problem is, you can only do it when it's cheaper to set up the new technology (cheap transmission towers in the middle of nowhere) than the old one (a hunk of fiber or copper, to every home, multiplied by a billion users).
Barring a miracle in materials science, we're not going to see HDTV sets eclipsing TV in China. We're therefore, I think, not going to see "Internet TV" taking off in any big way, either.
Some form of web tv will eventually catch on and bring with it new problems. There should be a betting pool on the date of the first television virus, possibly one which hijacks the display to present spam advertising.
Loose lips lose spit.
Yeah, well the problem is that we let our current account balance get way out of hand by running up enormous defense budget and tax cut debts (as well as SS and Medicare cost increases). We let credit cards rule the consumer so individuals aren't saving shit either. And it's possible that the tax code also encourages consumerism in big business. The end result is that China is buying up our debts and propping up the dollar. We can't afford to call their bluff now.
Asparagus has many and excellent powers.
I'm in agreement with the other posters in that if China wants a really cheap PC to be both the entertainment center as well as the TV center - then let them use a cheap PC with a TV video card in it. After all, you can get a PC for around $200.00 now on-line and a cheap monitor (CRT at least) on-line as well. The whole thing can sit in the entertainment center or shelves and then they'd have a decent picture as well as a way to play games if they wanted.
There are only a few problems with this though:
1. China still has a huge number of farmers who do not have electricity.
2. Most of the people living outside of the major cities have hardly any money at all and get most of their news from radios or TVs which are run by generator and are communal radios/TVs.
3. Unlike the US - the people of China do not have the "I've gotta have it!" kind of outlook. It is more like how the US used to be. The "If it won't solve my problems I don't want it." kind of outlook. And their major problems are food, clean water, medicines, and shelter. Electricity would be nice but just having enough fuel to keep the fire burning is better in some areas. (I'm not saying all of China is backwards or anything like that. Just that in some areas they live with the land and have more basic needs than some electronic gadget.)
There was a story about Africa from some years back. (I know a couple of them actually.) Anyway, people thought that it would be a great idea to send tractors over so the people of Africa could plow the fields and produce more goods. Only they forgot that there weren't any oil refineries, gas stations, and the like in place yet. So all of the equipment just sat and rusted away. This situation is similar to that problem (IMHO). There are huge numbers of people who live so far below the poverty line that we tend to just push them out of our minds. So a few million people in China may be able to buy a box to watch TV and play games with. Well, what about the other 3.5 Billion people who are just trying to make it day by day? They aren't going to buy anything.
Unless we treat them like we do some of the other countries. Where we give them our money so they can buy our products. Sounds crazy I know, but the US does that to several countries. As far as I can tell, we do that to help jumpstart those countries' economies. But that's just my opinion. What's yours?
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
For 90% of the target market, the only thing that matters is if it can display dhtml, flash , javascript, and multimedia as well as IE 6
You aim too high grasshopper, 90% of users just want pretty pictures and no pop-ups, the rest sounds too techinical for them.
[BEGIN USER MODE]
D-H-T-M-L? Sounds too complicated, I just want to see slideshows in my browser!
[END USER MODE]
Long answer: TVs are terrible output devices (low rez, interlaced), and couches are terrible ergonomic environments for keyboarding/mousing.
You'd be better off building very cheap laptops like the Indians are doing.
TRUE: You will not be able to fit that many characters in a 6x4 grid so you will need a larger grid per character.
FALSE: it seems unlikely that a useful amount of chinese text could be displayed on an ordinary TV.
Remember, in Chinese, 1 character equals ONE WORD, not 1/5th of a word.
Not only that, Chinese has simpler sentence construction and ideas can be expressed in fewer words.
Can all be expressed, basically as, "I RUN" and then if you want, you can modify it but not as a required part of sentence structure. If you want to express the past, you say something like "I RUN BEFORE." Most likely, you can express all of these sentences in two or three characters.
Okay, I'm not Chinese (Japanese actually) so my rules are off (feel free to correct). But the point is, even with less characters, you are saying more words and potentially expressing more ideas.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Laws which exist on paper but are not enforced are not laws.
All I can say is; go to China and see what any of these laws are worth to you.
China recently made some IP concessions, but I don't know how they're being enforced. It happened less than a year ago.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.