Earthquake disrupts Internet access in Asia ... PS3, Wii have banner sales week

HIGHLIGHTS
News: Earthquake disrupts Internet access in Asia
News: PS3, Wii have best week of sales since launch in Japan
News: Samsung develops 1G chip for handheld devices
News: Wikipedia-like search engine in development
Opinion: Remote monitoring
ITwhirled: Terrible iPod-related gift ideas


NEWS UPDATES

Earthquake disrupts Internet access in Asia
A pair of powerful earthquakes off the coast of Taiwan damaged undersea cables and disrupted telephone and Internet access in Asia on Wednesday.

PS3, Wii have best week of sales since launch in Japan
Sales of both the PlayStation 3 and Wii consoles jumped in Japan during the second week of December thanks to greater supplies of the consoles from their respective manufacturers.

Samsung develops 1G chip for handheld devices
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has developed a thin, low-power 1G-byte chip for portable devices such as cameras, media players and game consoles.

Wikipedia-like search engine in development
The founder of Wikipedia, the user-edited online encyclopedia, is developing a wiki-based search engine to compete with established commercial search engines from Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.


OPINION

Remote monitoring
By James Gaskin

Do you know what's going on at all your remote offices? When someone
calls and reports the network is "acting funny" do you have a way to
look at their network, or are you doing that painful "tell me what
lights are on" dance with the remote site secretary who started work
yesterday?


ITWHIRLED

Terrible iPod-related gift ideas
Were you the lucky recipient of one of these iPod-themed gifts? If so, you may be questioning the gift giver's sanity. Who knew so many undergarments could uselessly be redesigned to accommodate iPods?