INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Thailand remains a wild card

Worldwide computer sales grew somewhere between 7.4 per cent to 67.3 million units, or 8.7 per cent to 65.6 million, depending on whether you grant your trust to research firm Gartner or its rival IDC; HP widened its lead over Dell as Alpha Dog salesman; Asia sales were strong, US growth was waiting for Vista and weak, while Thailand was a non-starter; "political tensions in countries like Thailand remain a wild card," explained the IDC version.

Research firm IDC said global telecommunications spending is expected to be around $7.06 billion this year, up 7.2% from last year.

Three of the four most involved foreign companies enabling Chinese human rights violations agreed to get more principled; Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Vodaphone (but not Cisco) committed to produce "a set of principles guiding company behaviour" when the Chinese use them to interfere with human rights; it's a start. China shot down an orbiting missile - one of its own - for the first time since Earth cooled; Canada, the US and Australia were ever so peeved.

More than 250 Swedes bit on an email phishing scam ("Click here and give us all your personal details"), whose authors - probably Russians - then stole $1.1 million from their accounts at Nordea bank. An email scammer claims to be a hit man who won't kill you if you send him $80,000.

Speaking of criminals, the notorious Garyl Tan Jia Luo of Singapore got off with just 18 months of probation and 80 hours of community service; the hard-core 17-year-old desperado used the wireless Internet of his neighbour. Speaking of copyright, Internet telephony firm Skype unveiled a test version of an online TV service; it's in beta testing for now. Singapore got the region's first two high-definition TV channels from Discovery.

EMI Music will stream on an advertising supported channel at Baidu.com in China. Apple Corp, aka The Beatles, may appear on Apple Inc musicholders (aka iPods) sold through Apple stores aka iTunes as early as Valentine's Day; the two Apples reportedly have decided to do business instead of continue their entertaining catfight.

India announced it will launch a capsule into space next year and bring it back to Earth; in 2010, it will send an unmanned mission to the moon - the same year China expects to do the same thing. British physicist Professor Stephen Hawking - yes, the quadriplegic genius - is planning to go into space in 2009 aboard the Virgin Galactic space tourism vehicle, presuming it flies.

Netflix started out by mailing movies for rent, and beat Blockbusters' bricks and mortar business model silly; now the California company is about to start seriously offering some movies and TV series via the Internet. The fact is, said research firm NPD Group, that people don't really want TV shows, videos and video games on their phones; it turns out they are big, expensive and slow to download; 80 per cent of Americans have mobile phones, and it now appears that the entertainment industry has spent 1.7 grajillion dollars creating something that precisely 1 per cent of them want.

Apple Computer may have become Apple Inc just a month or two too late; the company had a record quarter, but that was so last year; when investors saw the projected sales of Apple computers for this quarter - good, not great - they hammered the stock down by 5 percent in three hours.

Overkill [oh-ver-kil] - noun, 1. an excess of what is required or suitable, as because of zeal or misjudgment. 2. Apple Inc. When well-known Palm programmer "Mo" produced his little, free software called iPhony, he flew into the turbulence of Steve "President for Life" Jobs; Apple launched a propaganda attack that called Mo a hacker - and the media followed; then in a Pulo-style intimidation campaign, Mr Jobs sued Mo and his Brighthand.com blog, then he sued other blogs who posted links to Mo, then he sued bloggers who commented on Mo's program; for all that, all iPhony does is put a desktop on the Treo that looks like the vapour desktop Mr Jobs claims his alleged iPhone will have if he ever is able to bring it to market; on the Brighthand site, this notice: "Disclaimer: Due to possible legal implications the download has been removed."

Microsoft Internet Explorer Ver 7 became the second most popular browser in the United States - after Internet Explorer Ver 6; the new Microsoft offering passed Firefox.

Hewlett-Packard admitted it broke the law... well, it bragged it broke Moore's law, with an eight-fold increase in the number of transistors on a chip; that triples the "law," which states that the number of transistors will double every 18 months; the new nanotechnology technique has an added bonus: It uses less energy.

Bangkok Post
Wednesday January 31, 2007