Five years ago today the NASDAQ peaked. Nice piece in Guardian Online looking back at the bubble.
Quote of the day
Guardian Unlimited | IRA threats continue say McCartneys
“At the meeting Bridgeen [Hagans, Mr McCartney’s partner] asked the IRA representatives a question that has been haunting her and the family for five weeks: why did they kill Robert? They responded openly and directly that there was no reason.”
Intel: abusive monopolists — us?
From Good Morning, SiliconValley
It’s been almost a year since Japan’s Fair Trade Commission raided Intel’s offices in Tokyo looking for evidence that the company illegally pressured computer-makers to use its microchips. Now, it seems the katana has finally fallen. Over the weekend, the commission, which enforces the country’s Anti-Monopoly Law, ruled that Intel’s Japanese subsidiary stifled competition by offering rebates and discounts to five Japanese PC makers on condition that they agreed either not to buy or to limit their purchases of chips made by rivals AMD and Transmeta. “In this case, a company with a dominant market position squeezed out rivals by doing business with the five major PC makers on condition of not using competitors’ chips,” a JFTC official told reporters. Intel, for its part, says it did nothing of the sort, although that is difficult to believe when the combined Japan market share of AMD and Transmeta dropped from 24 percent to 11 percent during the period in question, while Intel’s rose from 76 percent to 89 percent. In any event, the company has 10 days to decide whether to appeal the order, and if it does, the case would go through the commission’s judicial review process.
Quote of the day
“The IRA stopped short of declaring whether its offer to shoot those involved in the murder [of Robert McCartney] meant they were to be killed, or punished with a kneecapping or ‘six pack’ where victims are shot in the ankles, knees and elbows.”
The Guardian, March 9, 2005.
What’s in Dave Barry’s bag?
Gizmodo asked Dave Barry what he carries in his bag. Here’s part of his reply:
The main thing I carry in my gadget bag is about 28 different power converters. I don’t know what they’re all for: Some of them date back to the early 1990s. But if I ever need to recharge a notebook computer that I no longer own, I am READY.
[…]
My phone is a Treo 600. It’s a bit too big, but I like that it syncs easily with my computers, and it has everything in it — contacts, calendars, email, and a really, really bad camera, which I call “The CrapCam.” I take pictures on it and post them to my blog, mainly because the quality of the photos enrages the blog readers and causes them to rant in an entertaining manner. I’m thinking of getting the Treo 650, which apparently has a better screen. But it also has a better camera, and I don’t know that I’m prepared to get rid of the CrapCam.
In accordance with federal law, I also have an iPod. It has 15G of memory, which is at least 14G more than I actually need, since I realize in my old age that I really only like something like nine songs. I have Bose noise-canceling headphones, which are wonderful on planes. The plane could make an emergency landing in the ocean, and those of us with Bose noise-canceling headphones wouldn’t notice until squid swam past our seats.
Quote of the day
“You can only offer democracy to people. You can’t force it down their throats”.
Former US Secretary of State Madaleine Albright, speaking on BBC radio 4 this morning.
The virgin podcaster
Virgin Radio has become the first old-style broadcaster to produce Podcasts.
The Wikipedians
Nice piece in Wired News about the most active Wikipedia editors.
Justice, IRA-style
According to this BBC Report, the IRA has told the family of the Belfast murder victim Robert McCartney that it was prepared to shoot the men directly involved in his death.
So who really wrote MS-DOS?
A new twist on an old story. The pivot is that Microsoft’s fortunes were originally founded on MS-DOS, the operating system the company produced for the IBM PC and its clones in 1981. The irony is that when IBM came calling to buy an operating system, Microsoft didn’t have one, but Bill Gates went round the corner to Seattle Computer Products, which had written a DOS for the Intel 8086 chip that was to power the new PC, and bought it outright for a piffling sum (I think it was $50k). It was called Seattle Computing Products DOS. One of the great stories in the industry is that the IBM guys had called first at Digital research, Gary Kildall’s company in California, which had produced the first real microcomputer operating system (CP/M) to see if he was interested in developing a 16-bit version for the PC. But when the suits called, Kildall was out flying his plane and his wife (who answered the door) refused to sign the Non Disclosure Agreement that the IBM guys insisted on before they would open the conversation.
So we have two ironies: 1. How Kildall missed the chance to hit the big time; and 2. How the brass-necked Gates, who didn’t have an operating system, acquired one double-quick and sold it to IBM while retaining the right to sell it to other computer manfacturers.
But there is a third strand, which is the question of how Seattle Computer Products DOS came to be written. In his book, They made America, Harry Evans told the story about Kildall and Gates and the Seattle DOS which he described as a “slapdash clone” and “rip-off” of Kildall’s CP/M operating system. Now Tim Paterson, the software’s main author, has sued Evans and his publisher (Random House) for defamation. Evans says he will vigorously contest the case. Stand by for the public laundering of some very interesting dirty linen.