Steve Jobs’s bedside email to Apple corps

“Team,

I have some personal news that I need to share with you, and I wanted you to hear it directly from me.

This weekend I underwent a successful surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from my pancreas. I had a very rare form of pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which represents about 1 percent of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year, and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was). I will not require any chemotherapy or radiation treatments.

The far more common form of pancreatic cancer is called adenocarcinoma, which is currently not curable and usually carries a life expectancy of around one year after diagnosis. I mention this because when one hears “pancreatic cancer” (or Googles it), one immediately encounters this far more common and deadly form, which, thank god, is not what I had.

I will be recuperating during the month of August, and expect to return to work in September. While I’m out, I’ve asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, so we shouldn’t miss a beat. I’m sure I’ll be calling some of you way too much in August, and I look forward to seeing you in September.

Steve

PS: I’m sending this from my hospital bed using my 17-inch PowerBook and an Airport Express.”

What a man! Even plugs his product in hospital!

IBM open sources millions of lines of its code

IBM has decided to contributute more than half a million lines of its software code, valued at $85 million, to the Apache Foundation. The move, according to the NYT, “is one of the largest transfers ever of proprietary code to free software, and I.B.M. is making the code contribution to try to help make it easier and more appealing for software developers to write applications in the Java programming language”.

The code is for the Cloudscape Java database, an integral part of IBM’s WebSphere (which competes head-on with Microsoft’s dot-Net). From now on, Apache will hold the licensing and intellectual property rights to the Cloudscape code.

Hmmm… interesting.

Code Orange. Or is it pale grey?

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, as a rule; in my experience, the cock-up theory of history usually provides the best explanations. But ever since it became clear from the Democratic Convention that John Kerry could conceivably win the election in November, I’ve been wondering what the Bush crowd would do to top it. Now we know — the Code Orange alert, with all the accompanying solemn warnings, armed cops everywhere, etc. It’s a reflection of how comprehensive Osama bin Laden’s victory has been that one’s first thought is not about the gravity of the alleged threat, but about whether this is just a losing Administration playing on the public’s fear much as a musician might play an organ. The journalistic coverage doesn’t help one decide: all I see are hacks solemnly intoning unsourced allegations. And the fact that the alleged ‘breakthrough’ came via Pakistani ‘Intelligence’ doesn’t exactly inspire confidence either.

And now there’s this from today’s NYT:

“Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.”

The only consolation is that the Administration’s power to ramp up the threat level to meet political needs might be a declining asset. After all, if things are this bad, the Prez can’t be doing as well as he claims in the ‘war’ against terror. Maybe a new guy would do better?