WORLD REVIEW
When the Microsoft surrender ultimatum expired, Yahoo! simply went quiet - too quiet for a town clearly too small for both of them; for a week of eerie silence and rumours, affable, unflappable Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wavered between launching a hostile assault and simply walking away to let Yahoo! stockholders stew in their own juices; then, Microsoft made a timid offer to raise the share price; when Yahoo! board members failed to respond within 12 hours, Mr Ballmer withdrew the offer and walked away.
Dell of America and Lenovo of China began offering a Windows Vista Downgrade option with new laptops already outfitted with Vista Business or Ultimate operating systems; the downgrade is to Windows XP, which Microsoft thought it would be getting rid of next month; the two Vista versions specifically allow such a downgrade, legally, so long as users attest they need XP to run their software; the Dell offer is currently open-ended, and Lenovo guaranteed the offer would run until at least the end of the year.
Database gurus formed a group to protect the 25-year-old standard relational database against newcomer sexy-database platforms such as SimpleDB by Amazon and Google's App Engine Datastore; this story was not particularly important, but we include it because we love to see "sexy" and "Database" in the same sentence.
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| Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Microsoft has walked away from its Yahoo! bid. |
The World-Wide Web celebrated its 15th birthday, marked from the day that CERN donated all the source code to the public domain, i.e. agreed never to enforce its copyright; the main inventor of the Internet, Al Go... er, Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC it's only just begun; and while it has been a wild and wacky ride so far, it's only prologue to the world-wide effect; in fact, it's like any 15-year-old - rude, arrogant and, as Sir Tim said, "still in its infancy." Spam celebrated its 30th birthday, but only briefly, because it's hard work helping you to put on centimetres where it matters and ensure your blue pill supply.
The Indian Space Research Organisation fired a rocket from the PSLV-C9 and launched 10 satellites into space at one blow, a world record; only two were Indian, including the Cartosat-2A for remote sensing, and the other eight were so-called nano-research satellites from various countries including Germany and Canada; the previous record of eight satellites on one launch was by the Russians in April of last year.
The benevolent Communist Party of Cuba allowed citizens to line up outside shops and look at computers through the windows; the PCs were actually on sale for the first time in history, but 49 years of glorious rule has ensured that few Cubans have the money required, and computers are definitely not issued to Cubans according to their needs.
Because it worked so well in movies and was such a huge hit on the Internet, the Japanese yuppiephone operator NTT DoCoMo finally managed to get fragrance on a chip so you can send someone a smell over the phone, isn't that great? The Reuters news agency found that Japanese old people have figured out this computer stuff and actually go online to find dates, marriage and, unbelievably, sex. The Japanese National Police Agency "requested" that every Internet provider in the country search its web sites and take down any that give hints on how to commit suicide by extracting hydrogen sulphide; authorities said "dozens" of Japanese had killed themselves on purpose by this method, and of course the actual culprit is the Internet.
Forbes magazine figured that the highest paid executive in the world is Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle; last year, his pay cheques totalled $192.9 million; those who made more should write to Database so we can properly place them above Mr Ellison at the top. A whingeing article on the MSN Money Central web site on Why Generation Y is broke snivelled: "No one had ever taught me to make a budget or balance a chequebook;" in fact, even The Sims taught that.
After five boring, profitable quarters, Sun Microsystems veered into the ditch again; with analysts predicting another (yawn!) healthy profit, Sun posted a $34 million loss, a $101 million change year-on-year; the company plans to give between 1,500 and 2,500 employees full freedom to do whatever they want, and not ever have to come to work again.
The UK consumer organisation Which struggled mightily and finally produced a fact-filled report that concluded yet again that your keyboard is so filthy and has so much bacteria that you should stop licking it or you might get sick; the well-paid researchers and editors responsible for the report proved conclusively that you are in the wrong line of work.
Google spotted IBM in the cloud ... er, crowd, and started talking about a plan to dominate distributed (aka cloud) computing; CEOs Sam Palmisano of IBM and Eric "I Know Jack" Schmidt of Google figured they could easily make an Axis of Don't Be Evil; the cloud is likely to look like an approaching thunderstorm to Microsoft, because it will run on Linux not Windows, and use open source software, not proprietary - at the exact time Microsoft is still struggling to devise a cloud-computing strategy.
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