Yesterday at the Third Family Planning and Reproductive Health Technology Exhibition in Beijing's Agricultural Center, "condoms named 'Super Girls' (超级女声) and 'Female Music Troupe' (女子乐坊) aroused great interest".
According to the Beijing Times, the companies that own Super Voice Girls (the televised singing contest) and 12 Girls Group (a group of young Chinese women who play traditional instruments) "have expressed that they cannot accept such usage".
The condoms, produced by Guilin Latex Factory, are especially designed for oral sex. Factory director Tao Ran said that oral sex condoms are one of their newest products. Apparently the condoms are not yet available on the market.
Mr Tao went on to explain the reason behind the names: the images of a Super Girls contestant singing into the microphone and a female musician playing the flute are "highly reminiscent of the act that this condom is intended for."
Another new product introduced by the enthusiastic Mr Tao was a condom specially for homosexuals, named 'Comrade' (同志 — Chinese slang for gay). Other news from the Third Family Planning and Reproductive Health Technology Exhibition: sex toys are selling very well, with most purchases being made by women.
The older boy then bit the younger boy's penis so hard that blood gushed out. The language of the report is a little vague on certain details, but its seems that it was nearly bitten off completely.
Apparently, doctors managed to save the penis, but could not say whether its function would be affected in the boy's later life.
订阅的Feed越来越多,即使基于简单的配置缓存有时候也经常速度跟不上:网站经常出现只剩下右边半边的情况,就是由于缓存期间抓取远程的网页超时导致的。其实Planet和Gregarius一样,都是在用户访问的时候避免对FEED的动态更新。Planet和Gregarius都是使用后台脚本定时同步FEED,在MagpieRSS外面包了一层存储(数据库),我直接在MagpieRSS中增加了一个只读本地缓存模式。修改了一下MagpieRSS的缓存逻辑:加入一个MAGPIE_LOAD_CACHE_ONLY 模式,只从本地的缓存中取feed,避免更新期间向远程发送FEED同步请求。
然后在lilina前台这样调用即可:
// cache expire in 3 hours
define('MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE', 60 * 60 * 3);
// load cache only
define('MAGPIE_LOAD_CACHE_ONLY', true);
require_once('./lib.php');
People who want to avoid mistakes like that are advised to buy a copy of the Insider's Guide to Beijing: a comprehensive guide to living in Beijing. It's got all the phone numbers you need to avoid sounding like an ignoramus when trying to reserve events in supposedly top secret commie hide-outs.
You can buy the book online, for delivery both in and outside of China (link below).
Disclosure: your correspondent contributed to the business chapter of the book.
The pages of the business press last week were abuzz with stinging indictments of Intel and its "faked chips" - rebranded Pentium M were found in notebook computers on the mainland. Other news of the week included Microsoft outfoxing the domestic owner of the "live.cn" domain, and the Ministry of Agriculture yanking Jinyu's pharmaceutical license after it produced a fake bird flu vaccine. And a CASS report says that private companies are more competitive before they go public.
Intel's reputation was hit hard this past week when remarked Pentium M chips were found in circulation in domestic notebook computers. Remarking chips is an "open secret" within the industry, according to reports carried in the Chinese media as well as papers overseas, but what really hurt Intel wasn't the existence of the chips themselves. Intel reacted by dismissal, then denial, then grudging recognition of the possibility it may have been the source of the problem chips, a process that many in the tech media sector saw as lack of respect for Chinese consumers. This comes shortly after Intel insulted Chinese technological development by calling AMD's x86 deal with the Chinese government "ten-year-old technology."
Intel is currently preparing an official statement for release in the near future. As the media investigates further it is uncovering evidence of widespread resale of engineering samples, especially in low-low-end notebooks, so Intel may not suffer too much.
Microsoft launched its "Windows Live" service across the globe on 1 November. In China, the domains it used were "live.cn" and "live.com.cn," which had originally been owned by the Chinese company Cinet. It lost out on the chance to profit like cyber-squatters had done to Google earlier in the year since Microsoft acquired the domains through a third party, Melbourne IT. The Australian company paid five figures for the two names in a purchase that only last week was revealed to be done for MS.
Earlier this year, the Inner Mongolia BioPharmaceutical Factory manufactured fake bird flu vaccine and sold it in Liaoning Province. The Ministry of Agriculture, never one to let things slip by, reacted last week by pulling the license to manufacture drugs for livestock from IMBF's parent company, the Jinyu Group. This punishment could be serious for Jinyu, since its medical arm generates more than half of the Group's operating income. On the other hand, the suspension is only so that the Ministry of Agriculture can perform a further investigation before determining the Group's ultimate punishment, so it's hard to tell what the final effect will be.
Private companies out-compete public ones, according to a report on the competitiveness of Chinese business released by the Institute of Industrial Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. When companies operating in sectors where there are no clear economies of scale go public, their competitiveness drops. Jin Bei, vice director of the institute and editor of the weekly China Business, ascribes the gap to a view that financing received from an IPO is basically free money, tallied up under revenue, so the companies don't feel as pressed to improve their operations. The report also noted that public companies operating with clear economies of scale outcompete private ones; the top five public companies named - Sinopec, China Unicom, CIMC, Conch Cement, and Baosteel - bear this out.
These summaries were collected from the The China Perspective, which covers major business news and trends in the China marketplace.