Hitachi is closing its hard drive plant in Mexico. Those Malaysian DVD sniffing dogs now have a bounty on its heads. IBM is all happy about its new cooling technique.

As we reported last year, Big Blue boffins at the company's Zurich Research Lab discovered that if the upper surface of a chip's ceramic casing is etched with a network of channels, the thermal paste applied to conductively connect the chip to its cooling mechanism - heatsink, fan, whatever - spreads in a more efficient manner. Or, as we say in the trade, it gets thinner.