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World Business Quick Take

■ Economics
Fewer rules the better
Fewer business rules lead to more efficient economies, the Wall Street Journal said, citing a World Bank study on the costs of business development in 130 coun-tries. The Doing Business report studies the costs of registering a company, get-ting credit, hiring and firing workers, enforcing con-tracts and working through bankruptcy courts, the paper said. The most effi-cient economies and least regulated countries include the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore, it said. Too much regulation in much of Africa, Latin America and the former Soviet Union stifled production, the paper said. Govern-ments in those countries need to focus on protecting property rights, the Journal said. Legal systems that enable com-panies to collect debts are the biggest factor in attract-ing business to a country, the paper said, citing the co-author of the report. Countries with slow debt-collecting systems include Brazil, Guatemala and Burundi, the Journal said.

■ Semiconductors
Intel cuts chip prices
Intel Corp slashed prices by as much as 34 percent for processors that enable laptop computers to make wireless connections to the Internet. The 1.7-Ghz Mobile Intel Pentium M chip was cut to US$423 each from US$637 in batches of 1,000, the company said on its Web site. The price of Intel's Centrino chips fell as much as 30 percent to US$497 apiece from US$713 per 1,000. Laptops using Cen-trino are designed to con-sume less power and auto-matically connect to the Internet through wireless networks. Intel regularly cuts prices to boost demand for older chips as it devel-ops less costly manufac-turing methods and intro-duces higher-performing products.

■ Internet
Microsoft adjusts programs
Microsoft Corp said it will make ``modest'' changes to its Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser because of a patent violation. The move is a response to an August verdict that Micro-soft violated a patent held by Eolas Technologies Inc, the company said in a state-ment. Microsoft intends to appeal the ruling once it's been made final, spokesman Mark Murray said. Taking steps to remove the dis-puted technology from its software may limit the additional royalties Micro-soft might have to pay, should the judge agree to Eolas's request to extend the royalties to include sales beyond September 2001. The jury awarded Eolas US$521 million, or US$1.47 for each of copy of Internet Explorer sold between Nov-ember 1998 and September 2001.

■ Computers
IBM adds laptop sensor
International Business Machines Corp added an air bag-like motion-detection system to some new laptops to help protect information on disk drives if the machines are dropped. The ThinkPad models, which went on sale yesterday, have a chip that senses motion acceleration. The chip sends a command to the disk drive, which secures the write-record head and prevents it from crashing into the disks that hold information, IBM said. IBM is the first to use this type of motion-detection in com-puters, analysts said. Disk-drive heads fly about a millionth of an inch above the surface of the disks, which spin as much as 7,200 revolutions per minute as they hold data, making the devices especially sensitive to shocks.

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