Wirasit Kitwannakul drives a heavily modified Porsche 911. He has been the fastest driver in Thailand for many years, and this year he is officially the fastest in Asia and can usually lap a good racing driver over just five laps, being 30 to 40 seconds a lap faster than many other pros. The only thing is, he has never even sat in a real Porsche 911 and does this in the PC game Need for Speed.
TOKYO : This month Canon introduced a broad range of printers and scanners for home and small office users offering enhanced features that include wireless connectivity with improved security, "photo lab quality" output, a grey ink cartridge for better black and white photographs, plus improved performance and ease of use.
Over 70 years ago, Canon introduced one of Japan's first quality 35mm cameras - the Hansa Canon, a copy of a Leica - and followed this with many innovations around imaging.
BUSINESS PROCESSES
IT departments are increasingly looking towards adopting "Six Sigma," a business management concept with roots dating back to the 1920s, but formalised by Motorola in the 1980s. The three basic elements of Six Sigma are process improvement, continuous process design and redesign, and process management.
MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS
CHIANG MAI : HTC opened its first "concept" shop in Chiang Mai to serve users in the province. The shop, a co-venture by HTC, Zoom Technology and SIS Distribution, is exclusively for HTC products and service.
MOBILE COMPUTING
Kohjinsha, based in Japan and a newcomer to Thailand, recently announced its entry into the Thai ultra mobile PC market (UMPC) by appointing Synnex (Thailand) as distributor for the Kohjinsha UMPC.
FROM DATA CENTRE TO THE WAN
Brocade has taken a bold step into the networking industry with the agreed $3 billion acquisition of Foundry, giving it a footprint beyond the data centre, into the LAN, WAN and layer 3 to layer 7 spaces, as well as in network security.
EXTENSIONS
I am working through the System Preferences in OS X, and am now at the letter S, which means Security, Sharing, Software Update, Sound, Speech, Spotlight and Startup Disk. For now, I will skip Q (for Quick Time).
MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS
UK-based Celltick is trying to grab a larger share of the mobile advertising market in Asia through what it claims is a unique combination of SIM-based application distribution and cell-broadcast information, that together allow a much wider reach to virtually every mobile phone.
Technology is helping to reduce power costs and meet the hype of green IT, but many CIOs and business managers are still more focused on business and agility than power consumption. The good news though is that IT companies have delivered huge increases in power efficiency as well as tools and methodologies to meet this "Green Bet".
OPEN THOUGHT
According to IDC, Web 2.0-style collaboration is the No. 2 concern of CIOs today, second only to data centre reorganisation, and ahead of other hot items such as green IT, compliance or security.
COMPUTING ON THE GO
The Aspire One marks Acer's entry into the fast-growing netbook market, an era begun by the Asus Eee 701. Like other 8.9in. netbooks, the unit is compact and light, with a footprint about 68 per cent of an A4 page and weighing less than 1kg (with an 8GB SSD and three-cell battery). It comes in five colours; brown, black, white, pink and blue, all with their associated feng shui explanations on Acer's web site.
COMPUTING OUT OF THE BOX
I recently went on a business trip to South Africa. After spending a week visiting customers, I decided to spend the final day in South Africa going to the apartheid museum. My taxi driver introduced himself as Tony. I noticed that Tony was speaking the local language with ease and I asked him about this. Tony told me that his mother was Zulu and his father was Indian. This surprised me. To me, Tony looked completely Indian. Tony then explained to me that under the apartheid system, people were classified in very strange ways.
COMPUTER CURRENTS
I updated my PC to XP SP3 today and it took quite a while to complete. The restart was also a little slow but then I guess it was updating a bunch of settings on the restart. A little DOS window popped up and displayed a number of "parameter in error lines" which was a little disconcerting, but everything seems to be working okay so far.
EVENTS : Barcamp Bangkok 2 , a gathering of geeks talking about anything and everything regarding web applications, open source, open data formats and social protocols, at the faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University on August 30 and 31.
HOME BUILDER
Do you know COBOL? Newer programmers will know Visual Basic, C#, C++ and perhaps Pascal, but Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL) has been around for a long time and still makes up some very large systems.
SLOAN RANGER
FTP is so old. (How old is it?) (Over 30 years old - Ed.) It's so old it doesn't have a spiffy new-age name such as Fred's Transport Place.
DIGITIZING MANAGEMENT
Way back in October of 2001, I wrote an article on the danger of the impact of computer games on young children. That article, however, focused mainly on how a hyper-realistic gaming experience can influence childrens' social lives.
HELP DESK
I like your description "blasted machines." I sometimes want to use stronger language with my Personal Contraption.
APP SHOT
A simple and potentially useful program landed on my desk recently. MP3 Clipper and Joiner describes the software well enough, but left a couple of people in the exotically brilliant yet unfailingly calming Database suites a little puzzled about why they would want it.
WORLD REVIEW
The cloud parted, and when it did Apple's MobileMe service crashed yet again for several hours (no explanation provided; they are Apple), Gmail crashed ("temporary outage in our contacts system"; Google CEO Eric "I know Jack" Schmidt: "That was a screw up. We fixed that. We're not perfect."); DVD renters Netflix shipped almost no movies to Internet customers for three days ("shipping system problem"), and the Linkup backup/storage centre, aka MediaMax, lost so much customer data they simply folded up the business entirely.
HOME REVIEW
As of last Saturday, every business of any size that hasn't kept Internet records for 90 days is a law-breaker; "No exceptions," vowed Pol Col Yannapol Youngyuen, commander of the Bureau of Technology and Cyber Crime at the Department of Special Investigation; he wants to go through everyone's records to see if he can find out who has been putting pr0n pix on the forums; if you don't have your records ready, you'll be coughing up 500,000 baht - banks, hotels, charities and schools included.
Microsoft has introduced a free beta version of Photosynth, a tool that will create a three-dimensional navigable image from a collection of photographs. The technology, from Microsoft Live Labs, can be explored at photosynth.net, where you need to first download a browser add-on that works with IE7 and Firefox (thank you Microsoft for being cross-platform with this tool).
