… is a genius. First he has the idea for Mosaic, the first real graphical browser and the main reason the Web reached a tipping point in 1993 — and co-authors the code with Eric Bina. Then in 1994 he co-founds Netscape with Jim Clark, and sparks off the first Internet boom when they took the company public in August 1995. He then founded Loudcloud and morphed it eventually into Opsware, an outfit with 550 employees and $100m in annual revenues. Now, he’s sold Opsware to HP for more than $1.6 billion in cash.

Today we have announced that Opsware is being acquired by Hewlett-Packard for more than $1.6 billion in cash, or $14.25 per share.

For Opsware, this means that our vision will now get delivered at much higher scale — being part of HP’s software business will ensure that our software will be used by a much larger number of organizations and have an even more dramatic impact on the industry than we would possibly have been able to reach by ourselves over the next several years.

And he maintains a terrific, witty, thoughtful, civilised blog. Oh — and he founded Ning, the DIY social networking service.

Pure genius.

A few years ago, marooned in the departure lounge of a big international airport, I fell to perusing the books in the (huge) ‘business and management’ section of the airport bookshop and wondered whether it would be possible to mimic an MBA ‘education’ from a combination of booklists and air-miles. It turns out that Josh Kaufman had a similar idea, but has done something useful and interesting with it — the Personal MBA Manifesto.

Business schools don’t have a monopoly on worldly wisdom. If you’re serious about learning advanced business principles, the Personal MBA can help. The Personal MBA recommended reading list is the tangible result of hundreds of hours of reading and research, and features only the very best books the business press has to offer. So skip the fancy diploma and $150,000 loan – you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.

I’ve scanned the complete list of the 69-volume ‘canon’ he proposes and am ashamed to say that I’ve only read two and hadn’t heard of most. He’s done an interesting deal with Amazon.com who will sell you the ‘PMBA Motherlode’ for $1267 — or “about 1.26% of the cost of a $100,000 business school education”. Neat, eh?

BusinessWeek ran a feature on the PMBA a while back.

Later: The basic flaw in this approach is in its implicit assumption that ‘content is king’. Just reading the same stuff as students at HBS or the Wharton School or the Judge Business School doesn’t provide the same educational experience as being at these institutions. Why? Because it’s always been the case that students learn at least as much from one another as they do from their professors.

Hmmm… Slightly uncomfortable reading.

I’ve just come across a lovely New Yorker cartoon by Alex Gregory.

One dog is saying to another: “I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking”.

Good to see that the crisis in Pakistan is occupying candidates for the Republican nomination for President. Mike Huckabee, for example, sees Pakistan as a reason for a border fence.

DES MOINES — Mike Huckabee used the volatile situation in Pakistan Friday to make an argument for building a fence on the American border with Mexico and found himself trying to explain a series of remarks about Pakistanis and their nation.

On Thursday night he told reporters in Orlando, Fla.: “We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there’s any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country.”

On Friday, in Pella, Iowa, he expanded on those remarks.

“When I say single them out I am making the observation that we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities except those immediately south of the border,” he told reporters in Pella. “And in light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.”

Fact: according to the Department of Homeland Security, far more illegal immigrants come from the Philippines, Korea, China and Vietnam.

Huckabee’s first response to the assassination, btw, was to express “our sincere concern and apologies for what has happened in Pakistan.”

Sombre New York Times assessment of the implications of Benazir Bhutto’s murder.

The assassination highlighted, in spectacular fashion, the failure of two of President Bush’s main objectives in the region: his quest to bring democracy to the Muslim world, and his drive to force out the Islamist militants who have hung on tenaciously in Pakistan, the nuclear-armed state considered ground zero in President Bush’s fight against terrorism, despite the administration’s long-running effort to root out Al Qaeda from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

The assassination has brutally highlighted the inability of the United States, despite its wealth and power, to manipulate the internal political affairs of a small but complex society.

“We are a player in the Pakistani political system,” said Wendy Chamberlin, a former United States ambassador to Pakistan, adding that as such, the United States was partly to blame for Mr. Musharraf’s dip in popularity. But, she added: “This is Pakistan. And Pakistan is a very dangerous and violent place.”

There’s a lovely quote later in the piece, referring to the US policy of trying to force an alliance between Musharraf and Bhutto as a way of pushing the former onto a ‘democratic’ path. Trying to get them to work together was, one Bush official acknowledged, “like putting two pythons in the same cage”.

So, now we’re one python down, and one to go. I can’t see Musharraf containing the crisis. Which means another military coup. What’s astonishing about the Bush administration is that it never seems to have a Plan B.

Stuart Jeffries has a nice piece about the public spat between Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn.

The feud is escalating into philosophy’s equivalent of a prize fight between two former colleagues who are both among the showiest brawlers in the philosophy dojo. In one corner is McGinn, 57, West Hartlepool-born professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, and the self-styled hard man of philosophy book reviewing. In the other corner is Honderich, 74, Ontario-born Grote Professor Emeritus of the philosophy of mind and logic at University College London, and a man once described by fellow philosopher Roger Scruton as the “thinking man’s unthinking man”. They are using all the modern weapons at their disposal – blogs, emails, demands for compensation from the academic journal that published the original review, an online counter-review, and an online counter-counter-review…

Walking down Magdalene Street this evening I was depressed to find that one of my favourite establishments — a lovely secondhand bookshop — had gone. I guess its lease was up and the landlord (Magdalene College in all probability) proposed a whopping increase. This is why Cambridge is increasingly being denuded of ‘real’ shops and is now crammed with the kind of ludicrous boutiques which are the only enterprises that can pay the exorbitant rents demanded by the colleges.