Waugh scooped

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If, like me, you love Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, then you’ll love Bill Deedes’s account of what it was actually like in Abyssinia during the Italian invasion and afterwards. Deedes was supposed to be the model for William Boot, Scoop‘s hapless hero, but it’s clear that the only aspect of the young Deedes that really corresponds with Boot was his luggage. When Deedes was setting out for the war-zone, few people in London really had a clue about the Abyssinian climate, so he was — perhaps understandably — equipped for every eventuality.

Here’s Waugh, describing Boot’s sartorial and other preparations:

The Foreign Contacts Adviser of The Beast telephoned the emporium where William was to get his kit and warned them of his arrival; accordingly it was General Cruttwell, F.R.G.S., himself who was waiting at the top of the lift shaft. An imposing man: Cruttwell Glacier in Spitsbergen, Cruttwell falls in Venezuela, Mount Cruttwell in the Pamirs, Cruttwell’s Leap in Cumberland marked his travels; Cruttwell’s Folly, a waterless and indefensible camp near Salonika, was notorious to all who had served with him in the war. The shop paid him six hundred a year and commission, out of which, by contract, he had to find his annual subscription to the R.G.S. and the electric treatment which maintained the leathery tan of his complexion.

Before either had spoken, the General sized William up; in any other department, he would have been recognised as a sucker; here, among the trappings of high adventure, he was, more gallantly, a greenhorn.

‘Your first visit to Ishmaelia, eh? Then perhaps I can be of some help to you. As no doubt you know, I was there in ’97 with poor “Sprat” Larkin…’.

‘I want some cleft sticks, please’, said William firmly.

The General’s manner changed abruptly. His leg had been pulled before, often. Only last week there had been an idiotic young fellow dressed up as a missionary…

‘What the devil for?’ he asked tartly.

‘Oh, just for my dispatches, you know.’

It was with exactly such an expression of simplicity that the joker had asked for a tiffin gun, a set of chota pegs and a chota mallet. ‘Miss Barton will see to you,’ he said, and turning on his heel began to inspect a newly-arrived consignment of rhinocerous hide whips in a menacing way.

Miss Barton was easier to deal with. ‘We can have some cloven for you,’ she said brightly. ‘If you will make your selection I will send them down to our cleaver.’

William, hesitating between polo sticks and hockey sticks, chose six of each. Then Miss Barton led him through the departments of the enormous store. By the time she had finished with him, William had acquired a well-, perhaps over-furnished tent, three months’ rations, a collapsible canoe, a jointed flagstaff and Union Jack, a hand-pump and sterilizing plant, an astrolabe, six suits of tropical linen and a sou’wester, a camp operating table and set of surgical instruments, a portable humidor, guaranteed to preserve cigars in condition in the Red Sea, and a Christmas hamper complete with Santa Claus costume and a tripod mistletoe stand, and a cane for whacking snakes. Only anxiety about the time brought an end to his marketing. At the last moment he added a coil of rope and a sheet of tin; then he left under the baleful glare of General Cruttwell.

And here’s Deedes, describing his:

“At Austin Reed in Regent Street, where Ellis [Mervyn Ellis, the Morning Post’s news editor] and I made most of our purchases, the notion of preparing me for an extended siege was greeted with enthusiasm. We were persuaded to buy, among other things: three tropical suits, riding breeches for winter and summer, bush shirts, a sola topi, a double-brimmed sun hat, a camp bed and sleeping bag, and long boots to deter mosquitoes at sundown. To contain some of these purchases we bought two large metal uniform cases and a heavy trunk made of cedar wood and lined with zinc to keep ants at bay…

At the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria Street, we found a department that specialized in kitting out those bound for the tropics. They knew where Abyssinia was and could suggest the right medicines for the region. These included bottles of quinine pills which were then reckoned to be the best protection against malaria. The Army and Navy also produced slabs of highly nutritious black chocolate — an iron ration for emergencies to go inside the zinc-lined trunk. Our purchases in all weighed just under 600 pounds — a quarter of a ton.”

I prefer Waugh’s version. You can tell that this all took place before the invention of RyanAir — who now impose a strict 10kg limit on cabin baggage and 15kg on anything that’s going in the hold.

On the slide

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Microsoft has announced that it’s cutting the retail price of some versions of Vista. Here’s Nick Carr’s take on it:

The real threat to Microsoft has always been that the battle would shift away from its turf, that its traditional hegemony over the PC would begin to matter less. The threat, in other words, wasn’t so much that Microsoft would lose its control over the operating system and the personal productivity application, control reflected in market share numbers, but that its control would simply fade in importance. And that phenomenon – the loss of importance – would be revealed through a loss of pricing power, not a loss of share.

That’s what we’re beginning to see today. At the edges of its vast and incredibly lucrative market, Microsoft is losing pricing power. As the center of personal computing moves from the PC hard drive to the web, people’s reliance on Windows and Office begins, slowly, to fade, and as a result their motivation to buy or upgrade the programs weakens. To maintain its market share, Microsoft has no alternative but to cut prices…

Google goes after Sharepoint

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According to the New York Times Blog, Google is about to launch

a rival to Microsoft’s SharePoint, a program used for collaboration among teams of workers. Google’s program, called Google Sites, will become part of the company’s applications suite, which includes e-mail, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. Like other elements of Google Apps, it will be free and require no installation, maintenance or upgrades.

With Google Sites, the company is taking on what Christopher Liddell, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, said has become a $1 billion a year product. That’s a relatively small, but far from insignificant, portion of Microsoft’s business division whose mainstay Office suite is the No. 1 target of Google Apps. Microsoft’s business division brought in $4.8 billion in the most recent quarter.

Google Sites was built on top of technology created by JotSpot, a startup co-founded by Joe Kraus, who also co-founded Excite, the now defunct Internet 1.0 portal. Google acquired JotSpot, which had developed a set of “wiki,” or collaboration, tools in October of 2006.

Encyclopedia of life launches, then crashes

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

If your new site crashes under heavy traffic at launch, even when you’ve prepared for a surge, that’s a sign that you may be on to something. And by that standard, the Encyclopedia of Life got off to a healthy start Tuesday. The encyclopedia has set itself a modest goal — it simply wants to be a single, comprehensive collection of everything we know about every species on Earth. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s 1.8 million known species and an estimated 10 times that many yet to be cataloged. To fill the pages, the encyclopedia is using customized software to extract information from all manner of scholarly sources and display it in a standardized format. The data is then vetted by experts. The site hopes to have entries for all the known species within a decade, but for its public debut, it offered starter pages for 30,000 species, mostly plants, amphibians and fish. Still, that was enough to draw a crowd that exceeded the organizers’ optimistic estimates, bringing the site to its knees for a while. To give folks an idea of what a more fleshed out version of the site will look like, some demonstration pages were created, and of these, the one most viewed so far is about the death-cap mushroom, which founding chairman Jesse Ausubel whimsically attributes to society’s deep underlying homicidal tendencies.

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When in Rome…

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After photos of Barack Obama in a turban are circulated in the US – part of a smear campaign against him by the Clinton camp, the senator claims – the Guardian had the idea of digging out other photos of politicians following the when-in-Rome dress code. There are particularly fetching snaps of Dubya and Putin wearing Vietnamese ao dai silk tunics, and of Bill Clinton looking fluthered in a Gujarati turban.

Thanks to Pete for spotting it.

The mainframe lives!

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The concern with energy costs and environmental impacts of cloud computing is increasing. Here’s Technology Review an IBM’s new mainframe.

IBM Corp. rolls out a new mainframe computer Tuesday boasting a 50 percent performance boost and dramatically lower energy costs than its predecessor.

The new System z10, with a starting price at about $1 million, comes as IBM focuses on lowering the price tag for running its storied line of data-crunching workhorses.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based company said it designed the new machine to help companies and government agencies that rely on mainframes — usually for critical data processing such as bank transactions or census statistics crunching — save money on energy bills and better handle a flood of Internet information.

IBM says that the new machine was designed to appeal to cost-conscious companies looking to consolidate the number of servers in their data centers.

The z10’s capacity is equivalent to 1,500 servers based on the popular x86 design, IBM says, though it has 85 percent lower energy costs and takes up 85 percent less space than the batch of x86 servers.

EU fines Microsoft £680m

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Small change, really. This from guardian.co.uk…

The EU today imposed a record €899m (£680m) fine on Microsoft for charging “unreasonable” prices to rivals for access to its dominant software.

The fine, the largest imposed on a single company, brings the total levied on the world’s leading software group close to €1.7bn in the past four years.

Neelie Kroes, EU competition commissioner, who said she had no pleasure in imposing the fine, told journalists she could have charged Microsoft €1.5bn in the latest penalty.

The fine, representing 60% of the maximum, reflects the 488 days – until October 22 2007 – in which Microsoft refused to comply with the commission’s March 2004 anti-trust ruling.

Denying vindictiveness, she insisted the new penalty was “reasonable and proportionate” and should be “a clear signal to the outside world and especially Microsoft that they should stick to the rules”.

“Microsoft is the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an anti-trust decision,” she said. “I hope that today’s decision closes a dark chapter in Microsoft’s record of non-compliance.”