Hmmm… Gordon Brown has a web site. But it’s called GordonBrownForBritain.com. GordonBrown.com is a Blogger-hosted blog run by someone who doesn’t seem particularly enamoured of the Chancellor. Someone on Brown’s team missed a trick there, methinks. The domains GordonBrown.net, .org and .info are taken, but GordonBrown.us and GordonBrown.biz are still available.
From today’s New York Times…
Speaking at the annual shareholder meeting on Thursday, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive, said Google’s long array of initiatives was organized around three ideas.
“Our next strategy evolution is to really think about three components,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Search, ads and apps,” he said, using a common shorthand for applications, or software programs.
The move is less a strategy shift than a new message — a way for Google to talk about its disparate initiatives in a way shareholders and the public can readily understand.
“It is worth saying that our underlying mission has not changed,” Mr. Schmidt noted.
The first two — search and ads — are well known to shareholders, and they account for virtually all of the company’s success. The third — apps — puts under one umbrella Google’s growing business of offering an eclectic mix of software.
Mr. Schmidt said the unifying theme behind the seemingly disparate programs was that they resided on the Web, rather than on users’ PCs, and were available wherever there is an Internet connection.
The programs include photo storage, social networking, online calendars, e-mail, instant messaging, word processing and spreadsheets. Most are free, and many compete with paid offerings from Microsoft. But Google has started charging businesses for some of them. “That is a business that looks like it is going to grow very nicely for us,” Mr. Schmidt said.
But a shareholder proposal to force Google to resist censorship in countries with authoritarian regimes like China was defeated “by an undisclosed tally”.
Surprise, surprise. Corporations don’t do ethics, any more than my cats respect fledglings’ rights.
Hmmm… I like the sound of this. But I’m afraid it will be like one of those diet books which show how you can eat all the steak frites you want and still fit into size 10 jeans.
Bet Prez Sarkozy takes a dim view of this kind of thing. After all, he disapproves of the 35-hour working week.
Thanks to Michael for spotting it! Great Q&A session, btw.
If you want more, why not try the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address?
Sometimes, satire is the only way to deal with oppression. Ed Felten’s been working overtime after the AACS claimed that it ‘owned’ a decryption key.
Remember last week’s kerfuffle over whether the movie industry could own random 128-bit numbers?
Now, thanks to our newly developed VirtualLandGrab technology, you can own a 128-bit integer of your very own.
Here’s how we do it. First, we generate a fresh pseudorandom integer, just for you. Then we use your integer to encrypt a copyrighted haiku, thereby transforming your integer into a circumvention device capable of decrypting the haiku without your permission. We then give you all of our rights to decrypt the haiku using your integer. The DMCA does the rest.
Here’s mine:
5A 3F 7B A3 1C 75 88 F6 18 53 C6 09 75 83 CC 71
I will be Very Cross if you use it!
Thanks to Bill Thompson for the hint.
(Bill’s number is 7E 3D 4C 5A 75 37 5D 28 82 1B 95 D5 D3 AF CB 3B and he’s equally possessive of it btw.)
Meebo (a web-based IM service) provides an interesting (and regularly refreshed) map of IM activity across the world as seen by Meebo servers. Here’s a snapshot around midday today.
Very instructive, this. A video shot inside a US Army Humvee driving through suburban Baghdad. The kind of thing you never see on mainstream TV news.
[Source]
A new kind of user-generated content — video from a US Humvee on patrol on a dirt road in Iraq. Contains strong language and is best avoided by readers with sensitive dispositions. But it provides a vivid illustration of why US military power is so impotent in Iraq. This is what Donald Rumsfeld & Co never reckoned with.
[Source]
If you like Heath-Robinson, you’ll love this.
This is wonderful — an account of what it was like to work at Microsoft in the early days.
So you’re in there presenting your product plan to billg [Gates], steveb [Ballmer], and mikemap [Mike Maples]. Billg typically has his eyes closed and he’s rocking back and forth. He could be asleep; he could be thinking about something else; he could be listening intently to everything you’re saying. The trouble is all are possible and you don’t know which. Obviously, you have to present as if he were listening intently even though you know he isn’t looking at the PowerPoint slides you spent so much time on.
At some point in your presentation billg will say “that’s the dumbest fucking idea I’ve heard since I’ve been at Microsoft.” He looks like he means it. However, since you knew he was going to say this, you can’t really let it faze you. Moreover, you can’t afford to look fazed; remember: he’s a bully…
Worth reading in full. Thanks to Billt for the link.