WORLD REVIEW
The ladies and (especially) gentlemen of Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google trooped into the US Congress to inform US politicians about how good and how bad and how anti-competitive the Yahoo!-Google advert deal is; Yahoo! got things off with a joke by their lawyer Michael Callahan that was pretty funny but disrespectful: ''With all due respect to Google, we have every expectation of fighting them and winning;'' Brad Smith, Microsoft solicitor, explained to the congresspeople that if search is the key to the Internet, as ''many'' believe, then ''this deal will put Google in a position to own that gateway and the information that flows through it''; so it's probably fair to say that when Microsoft takes over Yahoo!, this deal will follow the dodo and other extinct species. Internet researchers HitWise said that the Google share of US searches in June climbed to 69.17 per cent; No. 2 Yahoo! dropped to 19.62 per cent of the market and Microsoft huddled in its ever-shrinking ball, which risibly reached of 5.46 per cent.
Google and US mobile phone company Viacom agreed that Google can make the viewer data on YouTube anonymous so that Viacom employees will not learn about your obsession over the laughing baby video; the judge ordered Google to turn over all records of every video ever watch on YouTube including who watched it _ records that take up 12TB of hard drive space, and showing just how stupid and dangerous such record-retention truly is _ no matter what country is involved. Watchdogs of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that most laser printers sold today leave microscopic dots on every page they print that identify the printer's serial number and, of course, its owner.
Dude, where's my economic downturn? Intel beat all second-quarter estimates with a 25 per cent profit leap.
There was a lot of noise coming from the opening of E3, the annual music and entertainment show in San Francisco. Nintendo said its next act will be the Wii MotionPlus, no more words needed. No. 3 on the market but still as snooty as a Petchaburi Road Volvo salesman, Sony called the Nintendo Wii a cute little fad, nothing to worry about. Microsoft cut Xbox prices, and announced a new one coming that will had a lot more games, and download movies by film-renter NetFlix _ US only, you are too foreign. Game-making giant EA announced Sims 3, a ''seamless world'' where everything that happens impacts on every other character; and fans have created more than two million creatures in a few weeks with the Spore software.
Microsoft released Version 11 of DirectX, the free API required for the latest, spiffiest computer games; there are no games using this API of course, but there will be, and here's the catch: DirectX 11 will only work on Windows Vista and Windows 7, which might be released next year; in other words, gamers will lose Windows XP or, well, they won't be gamers.
The Indian state of Tripura, next to Bangladesh, banned base towers for mobile phones because of all the radiation illness they cause; Tripura ''Science and Technology Minister'' Joy Gobinda Debroy said she has demanded that the central government immediately step in and deal with radioactivity from the towers, which ''have a dreadful effect on living organisms,'' and there will be no relay towers without government permission _ and none at all, ever, forever, in schools, hospitals and densely populated areas.
Apple sold one million new iPhones in three days, not counting the glamorous black market it runs in Thailand and elsewhere; that is about 10 per cent of all phones sold in an average three-day period. iPhone fanboys were a little taken aback that they couldn't activate them without Microsoft, whose Windows CE runs the Symbol devices, the only ones robust enough to input the barcoded information needed to turn on phones worldwide.
A mere three years after the Los Angeles Times announced it would merge its online and offline newsrooms 10 years too late, the newspaper announced it intends to merge its Web and print operations 15 years too late. Still chasing the elusive one per cent, the worldwide use of Linux on the desktop hit eight-tenths of one per cent in June, up from a lowly 0.44 per cent in a mere two years. German marketers Fittkau and Maass reported that their worldwide survey shows 75.8 per cent of German-speakers on the Internet use Windows XP, with another 13 per cent using Vista; Mac OS is favoured by 3.8 per cent _ while German-speaking, Internet-cruising Linux geeks finally cracked the elite one per cent circle.
The world's oldest blogger died; Australian Olive Riley was 108, and made her last blog entry two weeks before her death; the blog now leads with a tribute, and you can read it at worldsoldestblogger.blogspot.com.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said the Internet as we know it will end in 2011, because there aren't enough numbers for domain addresses; the OECD said there are only four billion possible IP addresses, and your phone and your computer are using two of them; do the maths, and you'll believe Malthus was also correct about the Internet.
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