According to PCWorld, “

[t]he charitable Give One, Get One XO laptop program [has come] under fire by participants who say they’ve suffered chronic delivery snafus and delays.”  One example is David Ruggiero.  “When [the] Seattle, Washington, resident […] heard about an opportunity to get his hands on the innovative XO laptop made by the One Laptop Per Child charitable organization, he hopped on it. Within two hours after the promotion began on Nov. 12 he snapped one up.  ‘It was for a good cause and also I really wanted a cool geeky toy for myself,’ Ruggiero says. Two and half months after placing his order, Ruggiero still has no XO, and he–and many others who took advantage of OLPC’s Give One, Get One program–are furious about having to deal with a litany of problems associated with the purchase.  […]  ‘I’m a big supporter of the OLPC and think it’s a fantastic mission, but there comes a point where you’ve got to say enough is enough,’ Ruggiero says.”

Reuters reports that “[m]arket researcher IDC expects growth in the global market for mobile phones to slow to single digits from this year onwards after unit sales rose 11.6 percent last quarter, it said in a statement on Friday.  Despite slowing growth, more than 300 million handsets were sold in the fourth quarter — which includes the Christmas holiday season, when sales are traditionally strong — a record for any single three-month period, IDC said.  ‘Over the last three years, growth in the industry during the holiday quarter has fluctuated from 18.0 percent to 30.0 percent, and this past quarter we saw it drop to 11.6 percent,’ IDS senior analyst Ryan Reith said in the statement.  ‘The expectation that the market would maintain the level of growth it saw over the last three years was unrealistic. We expect growth to be in the single digits throughout 2008, and most likely for years to follow.’”

The Register writes that “[c]ybercrooks are looking beyond PCs running Microsoft as targets for attack, with Macs increasingly in the firing line of hacker activity.  That’s according to the latest edition of the SophosSecurity Threat Report, which predicts that – based on early flaws with the inbuilt Safari browser – Apple’s iPhone devices might also become targets in future.  […]  [T]he back end of 2007 witnessed financially-motivated hackers turning towards Macs for the first time. For example, many versions of the malicious OSX/RSPlug Trojan horse, first seen in November 2007, were planted on websites designed to infect surfing Apple Mac computers for the purposes of phishing and identity theft.  Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said the creation of Mac-specific malware by the gang responsible for the Zlob worm marked a ‘turning point’ in the creation of Mac-specific malware.”

The International Herald Tribune has an interesting article on a Harvard Business School study which finds that private equity is not a “big job killer.”

ZDNet.com asks if “Sun Microsystems can grow.”