Technology came of age; the US government turned down an application by United Airlines for a loan to get out of bankruptcy; hours later, the House of Representatives passed a sweet tax bill custom written for the technology industry, right down to reduced foreign revenue taxes, tax credits for research and development, protection for stock offers to employees, and support for outsourcing to foreign companies.
That grumbling you heard late each night last weekend was the sound of yuppiephone fans as they were told to check their phones at the gate or go home from the US Open golf tournament, which banned them totally, no exceptions.
Apple Computer generously allowed British, French and German people to use its iTunes online music store but our kind of Asian person remains barred from the service.
Independent artists and labels got together to accuse Apple Computer, iTunes and Steve "President for Life" Jobs of trying to extort them into horrible contracts; Apple promised less money than artists from major labels in return for a three-year exclusive contract and implied, "Nice little band you've got here, be a shame if something happened to it."
Munich, Germany, declared after a one-year trial that Linux works; it began a 14,000-computer migration to open source from Windows; the Oktoberfesters will use OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office and the Mozilla browser instead of anything else.
The Boston Consulting Group was struck off the cocktail party invitations and New Year's card lists of US companies after it said: "Go East, young companies"; BCG says outsourcing is not the bane of US workers but the hope of the US economy, and the first companies who outsource will be in at the beginning of the next mini-trend of globalisation. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics said maybe 2.5% of lost US jobs went overseas _ 4,000 jobs maximum.
If you are getting a lot of spam these days and need a 100MB email box to store it, Yahoo will give it to you for free; for 400 baht a year (down from 600 baht) Yahoo will give you two gigabytes for your spam plus all virus attachments plus legitimate email _ and a POP3 link to boot; this is only because Yahoo loves you and has nothing to do with Google's Gmail, which will give you one gig of spam storage for free as soon as Google clears the vapour from its offer.
"This was our D-day," bragged an organiser; guns drawn, hundreds of German police fanned out across the country, kicked down doors in coordinated 5am raids and arrested 12 of the country's most dangerous criminals _ film pirates.
Spam is all right if your politics demand it; the leftish anti-Bush Moveon.org spammed 2.2 million innocent people to demand they see the anti-Bush movie Fahrenheit 9/11; this information is just in case you wondered why governments won't ban spam.
Microsoft released yet another test version of its Service Pack 2 security upgrade and bug fix for Windows XP; the company won't even answer questions about whether the update will be ready for the latest final, unshakeable deadline of next month.
Now that it has solved the spam problem and has a search engine on the way, Microsoft will offer an anti-virus program; actually, Microsoft had an anti-virus program a decade ago but it was atrocious. The scare-monger Eric Drexler admitted that he was totally wrong with his 1986 forecast that nanotechnology's self-replicating machines would turn the world into a grey goo; men can't even make such machines.
Northwest Airlines turned over all data on all passengers to the US government because of all that terrorism that is going on; passengers sued the airline for breach of its stated privacy policy; US District Court Judge Paul Magnuson explained the company did not have to follow its privacy policy because there was no proof customers actually read it; in other words, privacy policies are just big business laughing at you, and totally unenforceable.
The US Federal Trade Commission said a "do-not-spam list" would merely give spammers another list of good email addresses to spam, so they won't have one.
Dave "Mr Blog" Winer abruptly turned off 3,000 web logs he was supporting for free, saying he simply could not afford the bandwidth; the sudden move brought mixed reactions, including praise for everything Mr Winer did to promote RSS blogging, to criticism of turning off so many people without notice.
No comments:
Post a Comment