A colleague of mine is in Australia at the moment. This morning he emailed me with a technical query. The message came through to my BlackBerry, so I replied straight away. Back came this message:
Gosh. Allowing for the time difference, your reply came nine hours before I sent the question!
Well, you know what they say. “The impossible we do today. Miracles take a little longer.”
Hilarious report on BBC Online. Interesting (and significant) sting in the tail:
Prime Minister Phan Van Khai and President Tran Duc Luong had earlier taken time away from the ruling Communist Party National Congress, the most important event on the political calendar, to meet Mr Gates.
Under an agreement signed Saturday, Vietnam’s Finance Ministry became the country’s first government office to use completely licensed Microsoft software.
A statement said the agreement “reaffirms the government’s commitment in copyright protection as the country integrates into the international community”, Reuters reports.
This is significant because it shows that Microsoft is making headway in stopping people pirating its software in the Far East. So the moment when that part of the world begins to realise the true costs of running proprietary software comes nearer. And I think that is good news for those of us who are working to provide a cheaper, more affordable and sustainable alternative.
From my fellow Observer columnist, Armando Ianucci this morning…
I have an office at the BBC and so have access to lots of stuff the Beeb would be embarrassed to have leaked (for example, Nicholas Witchell has webbed feet). But, now the BBC mole is out the bag, I can’t resist letting you in on an email I saw recently. It was a round robin saying that there were only a couple of places left on an internal assertiveness training course and if any member of staff was still interested, they ought to put their name forward pretty quickly. Someone replied, not realising the email would go to everyone’s desktop. His reply, I kid you not, was: ‘I would like to put my name forward for a place on the assertiveness training course, but I need to ask my deputy manager first.’…
This morning’s Observer column…
When President Hu Jintao of China arrived in the US last Wednesday, his first appointment was dinner with Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, at Gates’s mansion (aka San Simeon North) on the shores of Lake Washington. They dined on smoked guinea fowl, which had been shot at by the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney. (He missed, and hit one of his friends instead; the guinea fowl was later killed by humane means.) The pair were joined by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, the Chinese ambassador to the US, a number of the President’s aides and the deputy assistant head of protocol at the White House. Owing to an unpatched security hole in Gates’s Windows-powered home-monitoring system, the meeting of the two Great Leaders was bugged and a transcript of their conversation has been obtained by The Observer …
Gates: You Hu?
Hu: I am the President of China.
Gates: Cool. I’m the Chairman of Microsoft. (Hu bows.)
Hu: Because you, Mr Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I am a friend of Microsoft.
Gates: Wow! That’s really cool. We’re very interested in China, you know. Big market. Smart people.
Hu: We are pleased that many great US companies are coming to China – for example Google.
Ballmer: (Heatedly) Those sons of bitches. They stole one of our top Chinese execs …
Gates: Cool it, Steve. Hu doesn’t know about that.
Hu: We also have Yahoo in China. They are very co-operative in rooting out undesirable elements.
Ballmer: (Mutters.) Maybe they could help root out Google …