Category Archives: Asides

The Digger scoops up the Journal

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Well according to this report he has, anyway.

Rupert Murdoch has succeeded with his $5bn (£2.5bn) bid for Dow Jones, owners of the Wall Street Journal, according to a report in The Business.

Negotiations are finished and the board is confident the terms of the deal will be accepted by the Bancroft family, which controls a majority of voting shares in Dow Jones, the Business reported, citing people close to the Dow Jones board.

A formal announcement of the deal is expected next week, The Business reported.

Murdoch’s News Corporation will take over America’s most prestigious financial publisher at the price he originally offered on April 17, when he proposed $60 a share, the magazine said.

He has, apparently, given guarantees of ‘editorial independence’. Ho, ho!

Make your own iPhone — right now!

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Impress your friends! Confuse your enemies! Make geeks envious! No electronics knowledge needed. Just cut out and stick it together.

Thanks to Gerard for the image.

For those with stronger stomachs, iFixit.com has taken an iPhone apart, like this:

Why, you ask, would anyone want to do this with a perfectly gooe new iPhone. Well, here’s one reason why:

The dismantled — and in some cases, permanently busted — iPhones revealed one of Apple Inc.’s closely guarded secrets: The names of the companies that supplied the chips and other electronic components for the highly anticipated device.

The findings sent all but a few of the component makers’ stocks higher Monday, the first day of trading since the iPhone — a combination cell phone, music player and wireless Web browsing device — went on sale in the U.S. Friday evening for as much as $600 a pop.

The parts makers stand to profit handsomely if the iPhone proves popular over time. Apple itself has set a target of selling 10 million units worldwide by 2008, gaining roughly a 1 percent share of the cell phone market.

The Six Stages of E-Mail

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I love Nora Ephron. Well, to be precise, I love her writing. Someone kindly sent me a link to this from the New York Times. It opens thus:

I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me! Who said letter writing was dead? Were they ever wrong! I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to the computer to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community. Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!

You can guess how it goes on. (Hint: it corroborates my view that email has become dysfunctional — at least in large organisations.)

Celebrity culture

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Engagingly hysterical scenes outside the Cambridge Corn Exchange tonight as revellers arrived for my daughter’s Leavers’ Ball. It was interesting to see how many of the girls had managed to transform themselves into replicas of the kind of people normally seen only in Hello! magazine.