Malaysian household monthly income distribution

The pie chart below indicates the Malaysian household monthly income distribution. The information is sourced from MP Amirsham’s reply to Dr Michael J Devaraj's question during a parliament assembly in July 2008 recently.



The root source and period of the statistics is not provided, and the number of households surveyed is also not available. It is believed that this information should be not before 2004 and not later than 2007.

Which group do you stand in the pie?

If the same piece of information is represented by bars, it will now look like this:




And according to another survey done by the Statistic Department for the Economic Planning Unit recently, the Malaysian average monthly household income is RM3686, which falls in the RM3-4k group.

57.8% of the families are below this group, and 29.3% are above it. This shows that the families fall on the average is actually have a higher position than the median in the distribution, as the median falls in the RM2-3k group.

This mean majority of the households are at the poorer side of the income group, forming a triangular distribution graph (if you break up the RM5-10k bar into intervals of RM1k as in other bars, you should see the triangle clearly), but the income of the richer side is so much that it is still able to pull up the average income figure.

Now, can you sense the "M"?

EIU published IT competitiveness benchmarking report 2008

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU, a leading research and advisory firm under The Economist Group that publishes various famous business publications such as The Economist, CFO, etc.) has just published a white paper namely "How technology sectors grow: Benchmarking IT industrycompetitiveness 2008" sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

To produce the report, they have performed in-depth studies and ranked 66 countries based on the following 6 categories with a number of indicators in each of them:

1. Business environment for the IT industry
2. IT infrastructure
3. Human capital
4. Legal environment
5. R&D environment
6. Government support for IT industry development

Compared with the same studies done last year, here are some of their findings:

• Taiwan has risen from 6th to 2nd in the overall index based primarily on its strong performance in the R&D environment category, and particularly in patents.


• Japan has suffered the steepest dropamong the index countries—from 2nd to12th—also largely due to changes in its R&Dand patents scores.


• South Korea also fell from 3rd to 8th affected by patents scores.


• Canada has risen from 9th to 6th placethanks mainly to improved performance inthe area of human capital development.


• Israel has advanced from 20th to 16ththis year thanks to stronger scores in IT infrastructure and in the area of governmentsupport for the IT industry.


• Germany has fallen from 16th to 19th place due primarily to the change in measuring patents, as well as toslower growth of R&D funding.

Three Asian economies have made it to the Top 10. They are Taiwan (no. 2, just trailing the champion US), South Korea (no. 8) and Singapore (no. 9). Malaysia ranked no. 36 overall (same position as in 2007), and ranked no.8 among the 17 economies in the Asia-Pacific region.


(Click image to enlarge...)

Click here to read the full report of "How technology sectors grow: Benchmarking IT industrycompetitiveness 2008".

Intel launched 6-core Dunnington processors

Intel has just launched their 6-core Dunnington a.k.a. Xeon 7400 processor, which is designed to dramatically improve the performance of virtualization applications, and comes with Flex Migration and VTD technology.

This new processor is Intel's first to use a dedicated level-3 cache, and able to boost performance by 50 percent compared to the 4-core Tigerton a.k.a. Xeon 7300 processor. All its 6 processing cores are placed on the same piece of silicon, which is different from the older 4-core Xeon processors that were created by tying two 2-core silicon packages together.

The Dunnington is socket-compatible with the Tigerton, and both of them are designed to be used in machines with four or more processor sockets. In fact, you can plug the new Dunningtons into the same sockets for Tigerton, and use a BIOS patch to upgrade the system to support the new processors. There are also optionally scaled down 4-core version of Dunnington processor with a cheaper price tag.

If you are dealing with virtualization and high performance computing, this will be a very good news for you.