The Vista trauma

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This morning’s Observer column…

Well, the long wait is nearly over. Microsoft’s elephantine parturition has produced an heir. Last week the company distributed ‘Release Candidate 1’ (RC1) of Vista, the new incarnation of Windows, to about 5 million favoured customers. Think of it as the final beta of the software. Microsoft says it is still on course to deliver a version to corporate customers in November, followed by a consumer release to high-street dealers in January.

Microsoft also released details of US pricing for the new operating system. The ‘Home Basic’ version will cost $199. ‘Home Premium’ comes at $239. ‘Vista Business’ is priced at $299. And ‘Vista Ultimate’ weighs in at a whopping $399. Security vulnerabilities come free with all versions. There is also to be a ‘Vista Starter’ edition which will be marketed to people in poor countries in a futile attempt to stop them pirating Vista Ultimate and selling it on the streets of Shanghai, Bangkok and Singapore for a dollar a pop…

No talent needed

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A house in our Provencal village, photoshopped in a painterly way. Such a cheap trick, really, but — as Oscar Wilde said — one can resist anything except temptation. Were it not for the car and the satellite dishes on the roof, it might have been almost convincing!

Me no Leica*

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A new (tacky) tack in Leica’s attempts to counteract the threat of digital photography. Seen in the Financial Times‘s absurd How to Spent It supplement. That whirring sound you hear is made by Oskar Barnack whirring in his grave.

*And yes I do know that this was the headline on Dorothy Parker’s famous review of Christopher Isherwood’s I am a Camera.

The HP bugging saga: contd.

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From today’s New York Times…

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 7 — The California attorney general’s investigation into the purloining of private phone records by agents of Hewlett-Packard has revealed that the monitoring effort began earlier than previously indicated and included journalists as targets.

The targets included nine journalists who have covered Hewlett-Packard, including one from The New York Times [John Markoff — JN], the company said. The company said this week that its board had hired private investigators to identify directors leaking information to the press and that those investigators had posed as board members — a technique known as pretexting — to gain access to their personal phone records.

In acknowledging Thursday that journalists’ records had also been obtained, the company said it was apologizing to each one. “H.P. is dismayed that the phone records of journalists were accessed without their knowledge,” a company spokesman, Michael Moeller, said.

Hang on, let’s deconstruct that last sentence. “H.P. is dismayed”: legally, “H.P” is the Board of the company. But the company said earlier that that same Board “had hired private investigators to identify directors leaking information to the press”. So the Board is “dismayed” by what the Board did? And that same Board has done nothing yet about sacking its CEO.

Goor Morning Silicon Valley reports…

“Colossally stupid.” That’s how California Attorney General Bill Lockyer described Hewlett-Packard’s ill-conceived investigation of boardroom leaks to the press …. On Wednesday afternoon Lockyer’s office subpoenaed some of HP’s officials after the company, in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (PDF), acknowledged that a controversial data-gathering technique known as “pretexting” had been used in the investigation. “I have no settled view as to whether or not the chairwoman’s acts were illegal, but I do think they were colossally stupid,” Lockyer told the Mercury News. “We’ll have to wait until the investigation concludes to determine whether they were felony stupid or not.”

Dubya the hedgehog

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Interesting Whiskey Bar meditation on George Bush (aka Shrub in this context)…

When [Isaiah] Berlin divided writers and thinkers (which leaves Shrub out) and human beings in general (I suppose we have to include him) into two categories — the hedgehogs and the foxes — he didn’t mean for either label to be taken pejoratively. After all, his list of hedgehogs included Dante, Plato, Dostoevsky and Proust, while Shakespeare, Aristotle and Erasmus were among his foxes.

What Berlin meant, I think, is that hedgehogs try to integrate all of their experiences and thoughts into a single, overarching concept of life and their place in it, while foxes, as he put it, have ideas about the world “without . . . seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”

At this point, I would say Shrub is acting like a hedgehog on hallucinogens. His one big integrative idea — exporting American-style “democracy” to Iraq at the point of a gun — has proven fatally, disasterously wrong, but he can’t let go of it, because it’s the only idea he’s got. He’s fully vested in it, like a ’90s e-trader who decided to throw caution to the wind, empty his retirement account and bet it all on pets.com.

I think if Shrub were ever forced to let go of his vision, his one big idea, it would not only crush his fragile ego, it would leave him completely incapable of making any sense at all out of his presidency, out of America’s role in the Middle East, out of the universe.

So now he’s imitating the hedgehog as literally as any human being can — he’s rolled himself up into a defensive ball, spines out. He has nothing useful to say and absolutely no strategy beyond hunkering down and passively defying reality. Which leaves the generals and the troops no choice but to hunker down with him.

The next two and a half years are going to be very long ones…