Big Blue leaving PC scene; MSN bleeps the obscene

Working on my list for Santa this week, but so far Ive only come up with two items: A glow-in-the-dark thong (I’ve seen some great pix on the Web) and someone to model it. In the meantime, I’ve got some hot tips to keep me warm.

Cultural evolution: It seems after 23 years, IBM has decided this whole PC thing is just a fad. Big Blue is selling its $11 billion  PC division (which includes its popular ThinkPad laptop line) to Lenovo Group, a PC maker based in China. I guess we’ll have to start calling it Little Red. Meanwhile, Gartner predicts that three of the 10 biggest PC vendors will be history by 2007. Pop quiz: Can you name the top 10 PC vendors? I thought so.

A clean, well-censored space? Last week, Redmond Van Winkle awoke from a 20-year nap and discovered the blogosphere. But Microsoft’s newly minted blogging service, MSN Spaces, ran into problems almost immediately. As the blog Boing Boing reports, Spaces is trying to stay family-friendly by banning profanity in blog titles, but its censorbot apparently lacks a thesaurus. So “whore” is a no-no, but prostitute, hooker, and call girl are A-OK. Also verboten: the seven words banned by the FCC, the title of a certain Nabokov novel, and a few choice anatomical terms. They’re probably just trying to keep the site safe from all those potty-mouthed Microsoft programmers I wrote about back in March.

Outlook questionable: Several Cringesters say that, contrary to last week’s item, they’re able to access Hotmail from inside Microsoft’s e-mail clients just fine, thanks. The explanation? Microsoft is still slowly cutting off access for existing accounts. By next April, everyone must pay for the (dubious) privilege of accessing Hotmail from Outlook or Outlook Express.

That slang thang: Submissions of Brit slang continue to pour in (and no, I can’t share the naughty ones -- sorry). Column regular Nicole C. reports hearing that in the United Kingdom, “on the job” refers to an act of intimacy not much seen around Chez Cringe of late. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “on-the-job training.”

What’s the dumbest thing to happen in IT this year? Send your candidates to cringe@infoworld.com and you may snag a bag.