Now, where’s that bee?
‘$100 laptop’ now costs $175 & will run Windows
Hmmm… GMSV report…
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The founder of the ambitious “$100 laptop” project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.
Apparently, Microsoft is planning to dump XP on the world’s poor for $3 a copy. And the OLPC folks are in discussion with Redmond.
Windows XP eh? Haven’t the poor kids at which the laptop is aimed suffered enough? Or, as GMSV puts it, “that’s $176 for the laptop, $3 for Windows and $500 for the remote tech support”. And who’s going to pay for the anti-virus subscription?
Quote of the day
If your business has any kind of online service, you should prepare your Google contingency plan, and pray that you never have to use it!
Quoted on Good Morning Silicon Valley
In the round
Downing College, Cambridge, April 26, 2000.
Worse by design
This is the power supply that came with my Apple MacBook Pro. It’s got the fancy magnetic connector at the other end, but the transformer unit itself is surprisingly large. In fact, it’s very carefully designed to make it impossible to plug it into any mains socket in any British institutional building, where the sockets are invariably in the wainscoting — as, for example, here (Downing College, Cambridge):
It fell to James Cridland to suggest the obvious workaround — to remove the three-pin plug and use a standard mains lead (the kind one uses to charge the batteries of many digital devices).
Obvious when you think about it — or rather when he suggested it. But it means lugging around another piece of wire. Sigh.
Empirical research using chain letters
The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles
They’re here — on Tom Loosemore’s Blog. Like all great ideas, they’re pretty obvious — once someone else has thought of them.
Thanks to James Cridland for the link.
US media: smug, pompous — and misleading
I’m not a great admirer of the British press, but I have more time for it than for its American counterpart, which seems to me to have failed its public and no longer warrants its elevated status as the Fourth Estate. Bill Moyers recently produced a searing expose of his peers. The response of most of them has been to express incredulity. “Who — us?” is the general tenor of the reaction.
Glen Greenwald has written a nice piece about this in Salon. Excerpt:
[Moyers’s] documentary is — in one sense — a very valuable historical account of the corrupt behavior by our dominant political and media institutions which deceived the country into the invasion of Iraq. But on another, more significant level, it illustrates the corruption that continues to propel our political and media culture.
One of the most important points came at the end. The institutional decay which Moyers chronicles is not merely a matter of historical interest. Instead, it continues to shape our mainstream political dialogue every bit as much as it did back in 2002 and 2003. The people who committed the journalistic crimes Moyers so potently documents do not think they are guilty of anything — ask them and they will tell you — and as a result, they have not changed their behavior in the slightest.
Just consider that, as Moyers notes, there has been no examination by any television news network of the role played by the American media in enabling the Bush administration and its warmonger propagandists to disseminate pure falsehoods to the American public. People like Eric Boehlert have written books about it, and Moyers has now produced a comprehensive PBS program documenting it. But the national media outlets themselves have virtually ignored this entire story — arguably the most significant political story of the last decade — because they do not think there is any story here at all.
The fraud that was manufactured by our government officials and endorsed by our media establishment is one of the great political crimes of the last many decades. Yet those who are responsible for it have not been held accountable in the slightest. Quite the contrary, their media prominence — as Moyers demonstrates — has only increased, as culpable propagandists and warmongers such as Charles Krauthammer (now of Time and The Washington Post), Bill Kristol (now of Time), Jonah Goldberg (now of The Los Angeles Times, Peter Beinert (now of Time and The Washington Post), and Tom Friedman (revered by media stars everywhere) have all seen their profiles enhanced greatly in our national media.
Part of the problem with the US media is that their privileged status as one of the ‘estates’ of the realm has, somehow, rendered them impotent. Three examples:
How could responsible, intelligent media allow such a preposterous fiction to go unchallenged?
The consultancy racket
I’ve always been suspicious of the big consultancy firms. When I worked on a project in Whitehall some years ago, I watched a team from one of the major outfits at work. An ultra-cautious, ass-covering junior minister was required to make a decision about a project. Rather than ask hard questions himself, he ordered an investigation by a Big Consultancy Firm. The firm sent in a squad of sharp-suited kids who went around asking silly questions for a week and then produced a stupefyingly obvious PowerPoint presentation which told the minister what he wanted to hear. The bill for this hogwash came to £70k. The minister thought it was good value because (a) it wasn’t his money, and (b) it provided him with a document he could wave at the Public Accounts Office if any questions were subsequently raised about the decision. The whole thing was astonishingly cynical, unprofessional and shoddy.
Now comes an interesting report from Information Week about allegations contained in lawsuits filed last week in an Arkansas federal court by the US Department of Justice. The complaints claimed the defendants — companies like Sun, HP and Accenture — paid or received kickbacks from dozens of companies in violation of federal law, while denying that they had such arrangements.
Accenture figures prominently in the government’s complaints.
While Sun and HP allegedly paid millions of dollars each year in kickbacks, Accenture allegedly accepted them in the form of “system integrator compensation,” rebates, and marketing assistance fees. The company earned all three from Sun and HP, according to the complaint.
As a consultant for the government, Accenture was hired as an objective adviser in choosing vendors and purchasing IT equipment, software, and services. The government, however, says Accenture and its purchasing subsidiary, Proquire, were less concerned with their client, and more interested in profits and revenue from partners. “As a result, millions of dollars of kickbacks were sought, received, offered, and paid between and among the defendants with the alliances in violation of the False Claims Act and other federal statutes and regulations,” the complaint said.
Between 1998 and 2006, Accenture earned more than $4 million in cash from system integrator compensation, the complaint said. Between 2001 and 2006, Accenture received such fees from EMC, HP, IBM, Informatica, Mercury Interactive, NCR, PeopleSoft, and Sun. With the exception of Sun and HP, none of the other companies are accused of any wrongdoing.
Accenture also received rebates and marketing assistance fees that were based on a percentage of the revenue in reselling partners’ hardware, software, and services. Under government regulations, such rebates or fees should be pass on to the government.
Accenture, for example, earned more than $32,000 in rebates from HP in July 2002, and more than $2 million in marketing assistance fees between 2003 and 2005 from Sun, according to the complaint.
Without telling the government, Accenture also negotiated steep discounts on hardware, software, and services, and then sold them to the government at higher prices. “Accenture personnel were instructed to constantly look for ways to structure government contract transactions so as to provide for greater opportunities to maximize resale revenue often at the direct expense of its government clients,” the complaint said.
Thanks to Nick Carr and Bill Thompson for alerting me to this particular example of ingenious consultancy ‘services’.