Globe Happenings

Microsoft Launches 'Service Pack 1' for Vista.

or most average consumers, it will likely be a nonevent, and for others it will be disappointing. Many of its benefits are aimed at corporations and power users, or are under-the-hood fixes that are hard to discern. For mainstream users, it adds no significant, visible features to Vista, and changes little or nothing about the way the operating system looks and works.

Pluses: better file transfer time, better time for resume from standby/hibernation.

Minuses: 65MB download, slows down start/shutdown times.

Japan's Economy Grows at Surprising Pace

Japan's economy grew at an unexpectedly robust pace during the final quarter of 2007, as strong capital spending by companies and demand for Japanese goods from Asian consumers more than offset the impact of a slowdown in the U.S.

The government said Thursday that real gross domestic product, the widest measure of the nation's economic activity, expanded 0.9% in the October-December period from the previous quarter, or an annualized rate of 3.7%. This represents sharp acceleration from the 1.3% annualized growth in the July-September quarter, and it marks the fastest pace of growth since the first quarter of 2007 when the economy expanded by an annualized 3.9%.