■ Electronics
Media Center on the way
Philips intends to bring a so-called Media Center into stores by the end of the year. The firm revealed the plans prior to a recent international electronics fair in Berlin. The device resembles a DVD recorder, but in fact is a combination of entertainment electronics and a computer. The Showline Media Center MCP9350i can store videos, photos and music in its 250 gigabytes of storage space. These can then be sent on to other audio or video devices for playback, using either a cable or wirelessly. The Media Center also offers two TV tuners to allow one program to be watched while another is being recorded. It also has a built-in DVD and CD recorder and insertion slots on the front for various storage media types. The Media Center is due in December with a Pentium 4 chip, USB 2.0 and Firewire. Philips declined to name a price.
■ Electronics
Mitsubishi pulls PC's LCDs
Mitsubishi Electric Corp will stop production of liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) for personal computers as early as 2008 and focus on smaller panels for cellphones, the Nihon Keizai newspaper reported, without citing sources for the information. Mitsubishi Electric expects personal-computer panels will make up 10 percent of its total LCD sales in six months through to this month, down from 15 percent at the end of March as it seeks to counter price competition by rivals in South Korea and Taiwan, the newspaper said. Hitachi Displays Ltd, a unit of Hitachi Ltd, will raise production of cellphone panels, the newspaper said. The company's LCDs larger than 10 inches will be mainly for television sets, the newspaper said. Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Co, an affiliate of Toshiba Corp, will reduce its LCD panels for personal computers to 15 percent of total sales, down from 30 percent, the newspaper said.
■ Aviation
Fuel monopoly attacked
China Eastern Airlines (東方航空), one of China's top three carriers, has called for an end to the monopoly of fuel supply in the domestic market, which has sent its profits diving, state media said yesterday. "The fuel monopoly system must be broken to let airlines have the freedom to choose where to buy," said Li Fenghua (李豐華), president of China Eastern Airlines Group Co, in a report on the China Daily Web site. China Aviation Oil Holding Co holds a near-monopoly on China's jet-fuel market, limiting the choice for airlines such as China Eastern, which purchases 70 percent of its fuel from the domestic market. "The fuel market, which is monopolized by one company, has put Chinese airlines in an unfavorable position to compete with their overseas counterparts," Li said.
■ Mobile phones
Spice Nepal sets up shop
A privately owned cellular phone company yesterday said it had started services in Nepal, breaking the monopoly held by a state-owned telecommunications company. Spice Nepal Private Ltd said in a statement that it began signing up subscribers over the weekend in Kathmandu, and would spread its service to other cities in Nepal. Spice Nepal's entry into the cellphone market comes after the government opened the telecommunications industry to private businesses in 2000. Until Spice Nepal's entry, only government-owned Nepal Telecom provided cellphone services. It has about 300,000 subscribers.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
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