After photos of Barack Obama in a turban are circulated in the US – part of a smear campaign against him by the Clinton camp, the senator claims – the Guardian had the idea of digging out other photos of politicians following the when-in-Rome dress code. There are particularly fetching snaps of Dubya and Putin wearing Vietnamese ao dai silk tunics, and of Bill Clinton looking fluthered in a Gujarati turban.
Thanks to Pete for spotting it.
Larry’s thinking about running for Congress.
Om Malik is not impressed by the way the Yahoo Board has dealt so far with the Microsoft bid.
What has taken them so long? Nearly a week has passed since Yahoo received an unsolicited offer of $44.5 billion from Microsoft.
Since then everyone — including Google — has had his or her say on the deal. The only group that has been silent on the topic – Yahoo’s board of directors -– is the one that really matters. Reuters is running a long piece on Yahoo’s board and its role in this merger. It is a bit of PR puffery; it tries to position the board as key players in the deal, and notes how they need to deliberate everything in order to get it right.
Malik believes that the Microsoft offer is a great deal (in financial terms) and I agree with that. Nobody in their right mind wold pay a premium for Yahoo in its present state. So he thinks the Board should just bite the bullet and take the cash.
While it is easy to blame the management, Yahoo’s board of directors can’t duck the blame. It was on their watch that a culture of mediocrity enveloped this once-iconic company. The board, instead of being proactive, sat idly by as the company lost its direction, focus and eventually, its market leadership.
If Wall Street and the media were aware of Terry Semel’s rumored lack of interest in the job, why wasn’t the board aware of it? Instead they decided to reward him with $71 million, much to the chagrin of the investors, before showing him the door. As one talented executive (and engineer) after another left the company, looking to go chase opportunities at either Google or with other Silicon Valley startups, what, exactly, was Yahoo’s board doing?
Where was the board when the company was making one strategic blunder after another -– losing its technology focus and instead chasing the ephemeral opportunities in la-la land? Where were they when politics and bureaucracy started to eat at Yahoo’s insides?
Whatever spin you might read in the news media about Yahoo’s board, simply put, they have failed in their duties.
Good stuff. I see an intriguing parallel between what happened to Yahoo and what happened to Apple after Steve Jobs was fired. Terry Semel plays the role of John Sculley in that analogy. The problem is that there was no Steve Jobs to return to turn Yahoo away from its corporate torpor. And, in any event, there’s less of a possibility of a charismatic individual being able to do that in a non-hardware company anyway.
“Dr Rowan Williams’ interview with the BBC’s World at One, in which he called for greater public recognition of some aspects of sharia law, is entirely characteristic. It is the product of deep thought; reasonable, thought-provoking, and in parts quite astonishingly silly.”
Andrew Brown, commenting on the Archbishop of Canterbury (or, as John Lennon styled him, the Archprick of Canterbubble).
See also Steve Bell
Well, now you know the writers’ strike is really serious. The NYT reports that the Big Event is off.
Imagine a wedding reception without food, music or Champagne, and you get an inkling of how a lot of Hollywood would view the Oscars without the Vanity Fair party. But Hollywood will no longer have to imagine it — the party is off.
In sympathy with striking writers, Vanity Fair on Tuesday canceled its annual multimillion-dollar must-attend party. There are other parties, but this is the one Oscar-related trapping that has come to rival the main event for a cast of above-the-title stars, assorted billionaires and several hundred of their closest friends.
The editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, said on Tuesday that canceling was the right thing to do, whether or not there was a breakthrough in talks between the Writers Guild of America and production companies before the Oscar ceremony on Feb. 24.
“A magazine like Vanity Fair is a group of writers and artists, and we are in solidarity with the writers and artists out there,” Mr. Carter said. “Whether the strike is over or not, there are a lot of bruised feelings. I don’t think it’s appropriate for a big magazine from the East to come in and pretend nothing happened.”
He added, “There will be something sort of liberating about ordering Chinese food and watching the Oscars in bed.”
Actually, there’s something weird about watching the Oscars ceremony in or out of bed.
Photo courtesy of iFixIt.com, an invaluable source of DIY guides for owners of Apple gear.
Why not open it up and poke about? Lots of helpful tips here. Alas, I suspect you may be voiding the warranty.
A writer friend asked me if I could recommend an alternative to Microsoft Word. He’s a Mac user, so I asked him if he’d considered TextEdit, the free word-processing application that comes with the Mac. He hadn’t, so we looked at it. “Has it got word-count?” he asked. We checked, and it doesn’t.
But a few seconds Googling found a neat — and free — little app which watches the current TextEdit window and displays an updated word count as you type. You can download it from here.
Register report:
About 27 per cent of the iPhones sold in 2007 are being operated on unauthorized wireless networks, according to research released today. That works out at about one million handsets.
The unlocked phones are used largely in regions where the must-have device isn’t officially sold, according to a report issued by Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi. He says the appetite for the modified phones has given way to a cottage industry that sells hacks or phones that come out of the box unlocked. Most phones originated in the US where, thanks to current currency exchange rates, prices are comparatively low…
Unlocked phones dramatically reduce the profitability of iPhones for Apple becaue the company gets $300 to $400 from its network ‘partners’ for each iPhone sold. So the missing phones generate 50 per cent less revenue and up to 75 per cent less profit than normal. A million missing phones therefore means $400m in lost revenue. Ouch!
Putting [Lotus] Notes on iPhone is like getting out a piece of exquisite Wedgwood china and using it to serve a steaming pile of dog shit. Have you ever seen Notes? It’s not software, it’s a form of punishment. Companies that use Notes have to staff not only a help desk but also a suicide prevention center — it’s that bad. Even the poor bastards at IBM, who are forced to use it, do nothing but complain…
From the The Fake Steve Jobs diary.
It’s that time of year again — the world’s bosses have gathered in Davos to do some schmoozing and pretend they have social consciences. Bill Gates delivered his plea for a kinder, gentler capitalism*, for example, which is bit like hoping that wild boars will learn to respect suburban flower-beds.
Needless to say, the Google boys are there — and there’s a substantial YouTube presence as a result. See, for example, the Davos question where the fat cats post their answers to the question “What one thing do you think that countries, companies and individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”.
*Footnote: latest kinder, gentler capitalist results. Microsoft sales up 30%, profits up 79%.