World stocks mostly lower on dour economic outlook

World stock markets were mostly lower Monday as a U.S. pledge to rescue its troubled carmakers failed to ease deep concerns that the global slump was hurting company profits.

The plan announced Friday to extend General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC $17.4 billion in loans brought a measure of relief to some investors, staving off bankruptcies that would have surely deepened the recession in the world's largest economy.

But early gains in Asia soon faded amid trenchant worries about the U.S. and global outlook, as well as shrinking demand for Asian-made products like cars and electronics that keep the region's economies growing, analysts said. In Japan, new figures showed a record 26.7 percent plunge in exports last month compared to a year ago.

With demand drying up, Toyota Motor Corp. slashed its profit forecast Monday for the fiscal year to the barely break-even point. Meanwhile, tech companies saw heavy selling after Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., world's largest contract electronics maker, announced plans to cut jobs and its chairman suggested the worst of the downturn was yet to come.

"The big question about what's going to happen with the big U.S. automakers has been settled for now," said D. Gorton, research analyst at Louis Capital Markets in Hong Kong. "But investors are still wondering what's going to happen with the U.S. and ... when the U.S. economy is going to recover."

Trading was light and investors pocketed some profits ahead of the year-end holidays.

In Europe, key stock measures in Britain, Germany and France fell more than 1.5 percent in early trade.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index dropped 3.3 percent to 14,874.61. Taiwan's key stock index sank 3.4 percent, dragged lower by a 6.6 percent decline in Hon Hai shares.

In South Korea, the Kospi dipped 0.1 percent after opening higher. Singapore, Australia and mainland China benchmarks were each down over 1. 5 percent.

Tokyo bucked the downward trend, with its Nikkei 225 stock average rising 135.26 points, or 1.6 percent, to 8,723.78 despite the latest bad news about the country's exports.

Japanese investors seemed focused instead on the U.S. auto industry bailout, helping buoy Honda 5.4 percent and Nissan 2.7 percent, and the country's recent efforts - including an interest rate cut Friday - to counter the recession.

Deutsche Securities banking analyst Shin Tamura said the central bank's recent moves, while unlikely to have a major direct impact on earnings or financial markets, might help improve sentiment.

"That the government and the Bank of Japan continue to take steps to stabilize the markets and economy is likely to allay market concerns somewhat," Tamura said in a report.

In Hong Kong, heavyweight HSBC lost 2.5 percent, pressuring the broader market, after the bank's credit outlook was revised to negative by ratings agency Standard & Poor's on Friday. China Mobile, meanwhile, tumbled over 5 percent on concerns about growth in subscribers.

Last week in New York, Wall Street finished a choppy session mixed. The Dow fell 25.88, or 0.30 percent, to 8,579.11 while the Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 2.60, or 0.29 percent, to 887.88.

U.S. futures were down, suggesting Wall Street would open lower. S&P futures were down 1.7 points, or 0.2 percent, to 879.60.

Oil prices were flat. The January contract dipped 7 cents to $42.29 in Asian trade on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

In currencies, the dollar strengthened to 89.67 yen, up from 89.24 yen, and the euro rose to $1.4075 from $1.3913 late Friday.

source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/12/22/world-stocks-mostly-lower-dour-economic-outlook.html

HDX, a notebook computer or a portable TV?

Back in the mid 1980s, IBM, Toshiba, NEC and a few other makers of IBM-compatible PCs began selling portable computers with a hinged display that people could carry with them from place to place in their bags.

That was when we became familiar with the term “laptop”.

A laptop computer was much larger than an A4-size writing pad. It was quite heavy, too.

The term notebook was coined later around the time a U.S. brand called Zeos started being advertised in computer magazines. Notebooks were supposed to be portable computers that had been reduced in size to fit into a briefcase.

At that time, despite their large size, laptops had quite teeny-weeny screens. In addition, they were all monochrome LCDs. (Remember that those were the days when the user interface was text-based).

We were all quite happy we could use a laptop as a glorified typewriter replacement — all that was required was MS or PC DOS and WordPerfect and a box of 5.25-inch or 3.5-inch floppy diskettes.

In those days, few could envision watching live TV for many hours at a stretch on one of those laptop computers. But, today, it is no longer a dream; you can watch TV broadcasts the whole day in your office cubicle as if you were relaxing in your own living room.

Courtesy of Hewlett-Packard (HP) Indonesia, I had three weeks to enjoy a brand new HP HDX16, a premium notebook that could keep you captivated for months.

I reported in this column a couple of weeks ago that HP now pays really serious attention to the style element of its notebooks in an effort to make them stand out in the crowd. The HDX16 is as impressive in the list of its technical specs as in its beauty. It has many of the upper-caste components, making its US$2,199 price tag fairly reasonable.

Here is a list of the critical components: Intel Centrino 2 platform with a Core 2 Duo T9400 processor running at 2.53 GHz; 4 GB of DDR2 memory; 320 GHz hard disk spinning at 5400 revolutions per minute (RPM); a 16-inch BrightView Infinity widescreen LCD; a Blu-Ray ROM; Wi-Fi a/g/n and Bluetooth; lots of lighted touch buttons; and a pair of Altec Lansing speakers with HP Triple Bass subwoofer.

The processor has 6 MB of L2 cache memory. Of course, to match the hardware, HP, not surprisingly, has chosen Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium.

With such top-notch components under the hood, it is not surprising that this notebook performs with flying colors. Although, given its focus on digital entertainment, it may not be the best machine for games or heavy-duty movie editing, but it is certainly close enough.

The specs on the box also list that the notebook has an integrated DVB-T/analog TV tuner. I could not test the DVB-T, but the analog tuner using the included antenna produced reasonable display quality.

There is a cable connector for TV cable reception, too, which raises display sharpness and color quality significantly. HP also throws in two remote controls — one for the notebook and the other for the Media control.

The keyboard is extremely close to my ideal: Each of the caps is covered with a chrome-like layer. HP has chosen the right material to ice the keycaps so that they do not get smudged as quickly as the “piano-like” keycaps. The separate numeric keypad on the right has keys that are narrower than the main keyboard, but they are still as usable.

Of course there is an integrated Webcam, too.

HP uses NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT with a 512 MB dedicated memory for the graphics subsystem. By default, the characters on the screen are comfortably large (even for me).
If HP had wanted to equip it with the latest technologies, it would have to include a 7200 RPM hard disk and DDR3 memory instead of the 5400 RPM and DDR2. However, as it is now, this notebook is already among the top-end units.

HP has also added a very thoughtful feature to the standard touchpad: Right above the panel there is a button to deactivate the pointing device. You must know how frustrating it is to have the pointer jumping all over the place as you inadvertently touch the pad. I think this toggle button should be made standard on every touchpad.

Strangely, despite its size and long list of features, the HDX16 is not as heavy as you might have guessed. HP managed to pack everything in a notebook weighing only 3.2 kilograms.
The HDX16 has a bigger sibling, the HDX18, which has an 18-inch display, and a whopping $2,999 price tag. Unfortunately, I did not have the detailed specs, and I do not know whether it will be available here, either.

A rather serious complaint that I have is that the chromed touchpad panel itself is not slippery enough to let the fingertips glide smoothly over it.

A glossy finish is very smudge-friendly, as you already know. The good thing is that the graphic artwork printed on the notebook’s body and cover, as well as its gray color, tones down the marks left by oily hands.

It’s too bad though that HP put the audio port on the front side; an area where the plugs are vulnerable to accidental elbow action.

Still, this is one of the notebooks that managed to make me feel sad as I said goodbye to it and put it back in its box for the courier to pick up.

source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/12/01/hdx-a-notebook-computer-or-a-portable-tv.html

Dream Recorder

Dream is a flower bed "and said people usually get up after, sometimes we forget what we have dreamed before.

But perhaps momentarily, we can play back what we have dreamed because of a previous research company in Japan, ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories has successfully developed a technology that can record all the dreams that experienced human and converted to a form / digital images.

By recording the dream, later we can see what is / happening in our dreams. :-)

Technology itself is actually a development of the technology they have developed where previously they have successfully created a computer through a rule based on the mind.

Examples of success are with them do a test where a researcher showed a word "neurons" to the computers of visitors and successfully translate the mind / word to the computer screen without the researchers pressing any button on the computer.