There is an article over at The Reg about Google doing business in China and opening a business office there. Everything you can think of or want to buy is now made in China.

Tiffany Lamps? Made in China. Patio Heaters for your outdoor patio? Made in China. Fireplace Screens & Accessories? Made in China.

Used to be products coming from China were of substandard quality and terribly inferior compared to products made in America. Those days are over. If you run across poorly made products from China, the blame almost always lies on the manufacturer/importer in the U.S. You can specify whatever quality you want from the Chinese manufacturers and get it.

Remember the term “Jap Crap” from the 60’s & 70’s? You don’t hear it anymore. The Japanese manufacturers fixed their quality control problems many years ago and the world took notice. The Chinese appear to be on the same road. If they continue to improve their overall quality and communications, they will be an incredible force to be reckoned with.

Now if they could just get that dinosaur named communism off their backs they will be in great shape… but that is another rant.

Apparently G took a digger last Saturday night. Google says the outage was 15 minutes, some users say the outage was over an hour. You can read more here…

ZDNet reports

“Personal information for 600,000 current and former Time Warner employees has been lost, the company announced on Monday, potentially setting the stage for one of the largest cases yet of identity theft.” The rest of the story…

Gotta love this kind of report. Being a very large corporation interested in spin control, you have to wonder what they aren’t saying. The fact that the loss was apparently limited to backup media being moved offsite may make it a non-issue. If they are using a good backup program the chance of data being recovered from the media is almost non-existent.

Also uncovered this gem from The Reg.

There is a story in the May 2005 issue of Business 2.0 magazine about Shawn Fanning of Napster fame. This young man is on to something big here if they can effectively sell the concept of their new company, SNOCAP, to the big boys in the music industry.

It would seem they have a long road ahead of themselves if the music industry heavy weights aren’t “getting it” yet. How many other industries could effectively flip their potential customers the bird and not have them go elsewhere? Unfortunately there was nowhere else to go. I don’t condone the freebee P2P sharing networks when it comes to copyrighted material but the entrenched clueless music industry shot themselves in the foot when they killed Napster and some of the others. Did they really think the P2P’s were going to go away? Why didn’t they show a little mercy and creativity and try to monetize the Napsterite networks that were already thriving? Instead they flipped the bird to millions of customers and walked away. Clearly a stroke of genius! It’s curious to me the music industry was blaming their apparent sales slump on P2P’s like Napster but after they killed them off their sales have not improved. Here is an old Slate article that does a pretty good job of recapping the music industries woes.

It will be interesting to watch the old school music industry learn a new dance over the next few years. Of course their lack of creativity and foresight may cause them to blow their feet clean off their legs this time around. This would be fine because there will be a new generation of technologically savvy music lovers that will show them how to monetize the music industry in ways their minds will never grasp.