Almost five decades of experience… and I write THIS?
Do you remember that old saying - why should I tell him he’s an ass when he does such a good job of proving it all by himself?
Well, I did write something about Max Mosley and F1 here. It was just written a little while ago, but still seems to be quite popular.
Enjoy the Max and Burnie show…
BMW are the surprise of the year so far. Yes, everyone thought they would do well, and certainly be in the top three teams (ie 5th and 6th places) but they are instead nearly leading the Formula One World Championship. OK, that’s a bit like being “nearly pregnant” but it is a Boolean variable. Off and on.
And that’s exactly what Kubica has been. Off and On. In Melbourne he was on when he qualified second on the grid, but fell off in the race. In Sepang in Malaysia he actually finished second showing that his team-mate’s second place last week was no fluke. It is also a warning that Kubica is the main danger in the BMW camp, not Heidfeld (although Nick is no slouch).
Heidfeld has been out-qualified by Kubica at every race this season, much like last season. If Kubica had finished in second place last week, not Heidfeld, he would now be the one leading the Formula One World Championship, not his age-sibling Hamilton. They are both just twenty three years old.
Robert Kubica could be the 2008 World Champion if McLaren and Ferrari keep on screwing things up like they have so far shown themselves to be most adept at doing.
But how the heck do you pronounce Robert Kubica’s name? I cannot rely on the people commentating at ITV as anything remotely Continental to them seems to be unpronounceable. I guess James Allen would even have a problem pronouncing Cafe. Oh dear, I’m being naughty again. Well, some people are easy targets. But that’s no excuse. It isn’t his fault. I shall try harder next time.
As for pronouncing Robert Kubica, my best guesses are:
I am assuming the “Ku” bit is pronounced like “Coo” as in a dove’s cooing, but I guess it could also be pronounced like “Queue”. Let’s face it, Poland uses a strange spelling system: you only have to see the TV ads for Lodz to understand that (it’s pronounced “Wudge” or something similar). Yes, I know, it’s very weird - but they are lovely friendly people, really. I like them.
Anyone got any ideas? Are there any Poles out there who can tell us, please?
Dobri wieczur…
Seems to me we’ve heard all this before, and we’re going to hear it all again. Big men in big powerful positions who just can’t resist the temptation of a bit of sex on the side. Why do they do it? Why do they put the success of their whole careers, lives, and families at such risk? Why is it always men who make politics so sleazy? The latest rumpus involving Elliot Spitzer is a typical example.
In Japan, the girl would have been called a Geisha, and it would have been completely OK - apparently, even some wives pay for their husbands to visit a Geisha house as a special birthday present. But in Japan, it’s done with a little more decorum, baths, massages, tea ceremonies and other civilising influences that take place over sometimes a 24 hour period or even a whole weekend, perhaps with very little actual sex involved.
It seems in the US where some powerful people have little patience for such civility, Mr Spitzer is reported to have paid $4,000 for sex with a pretty, petite brunette, part of an “Escort Agency” involved in Prostitution. In Japan, the idea is apparently for the man to feel like a King; in the US model, perhaps as British heart throb Hugh Grant liked to find out, things can get pretty dirty.
If you look at the recent record, we’ve had successive Republican politicians involved in scandals involving gay sex, extra-marital sex, and now a Democrat dragged down as well.
If people want clean politics, why don’t people elect a female President? I can’t see a woman straying from the straight and narrow as much as a man. We men are too easily tempted. And men at the top of the ladder of power only get there because they’ve got big Cajones.
Perhaps it’s hardly surprising that having big Cajones brings a few other effects, too…
To paraphrase Frankie Goes to Hollywood:
Cajones!
What are they good for?
Absolutely nothing
Politics,
Having sex,
Everything that you can get,
Cajones!
Sometimes you can see leadership written all through some people. It colours all of their actions, their interactions, and their fundamental reactions. Leadership is something you either have, or you don’t. It isn’t about what you know, it’s about who you are. It isn’t how you do things, it’s about how others react to those things. True leadership is like the Midas touch.
And Nick Clegg doesn’t have it.
In Parliament today he managed to split his party on one of the main issues where previously there had been agreement. He managed to sow discord where previously there had been harmony. And why? Not because he wanted them to vote against their principles, not because he wanted them to vote this way or that way, but because he actually told them not to vote at all! Not content with playing the wimp hand, he then proceeded to try to force them to his will using a three line whip.
Not surprisingly, 3 Front Bench spokesmen resigned and 15 of “his” MPs ignored his commands as the tide ignored Canute all those years ago. Oh dear, I thought, the Lib Dems have a right one here. But then I thought that over the LibDem leadership election, too: neither candidate had as much charisma as a dead slug, so it was inevitable that something like this would happen someday.
What is it with British politics these days? Don’t politicians like strong leaders anymore? The Conservatives have overlooked Ken Clarke again and again when he is one of the few men who could have gotten them elected by now, and the LibDems have passed up on an excellent leader in the form of Vince Cable, a true performer. Vince Cable is so good that he overshadowed both Cameron and Brown, and I think they were both a little scared of him.
But who’s going to be scared by Nick Clegg? Well, based on the fact that almost a quarter of his party MPs don’t even do what he tells them anymore, I would say nobody. I mean, he’s just so Last of the Summer Whiney isn’t he?
US Elections
Senator Barack Obama: Aimed as much at Hillary Clinton as it is against George W Bush, Obama keeps on calling for a change in Washington. He wants to get rid of the people who are already there and bring in new blood to replace them. Err, Senator Obama, that big round Senatey thing you go to work in every day, isn’t that in Washington? So doesn’t that mean you? And by the way, how about a different speech now and then - I keep on hearing you say the same things over and over again…
Senator Hillary Clinton: All the world knows you stuck by your husband Hillary, and that’s laudable, but did you have to cold shoulder him quite so publicly when he was trying to congratulate you after your speech on Super Tuesday? He tried so very hard too… Go on, give him a hug!
IT
Bill Gates: Speaking as the owner of a company that dominates the world in many areas, not least of which being the 90% of office productivity software, 85% of Operating Systems, “The world needs an alternative to Google.” Google’s corporate motto is “Do no evil”. What does that say about Microsoft?
Tom Robertson (Microsoft’s general manager for corporate standards) talking about supporters of the Open Source ISO standard ODF file format: “Frankly some of the opposition is very commercially based”. Really? And Microsoft’s pushing of its own, non Open Source, proprietary OOXML format owned by a single monopolistic corporation isn’t commercial, then? Ahhh, Diddums…. is da likkle baby crying den?
There seems to be a complete glut of disasters happening in the Government right now, the latest of which being the two missing CDs containing 25 million records of 7.2 million families and their Child Benefit claims. That came after the row over detention without charge nonsense which nobody other than the government supports.
Before that there was the Northern Rock disaster, in which the government bailed out the ex-Building Society turned “Mortgage Bank” with an open cost of some £30 billion potentially over the long term.
There are loads more too. To be honest, the Northern Rock fiasco was caused by slack policy in the USwhich created the sub-Prime scandal, and nothing to do with Gordon at all. Having said that, he did have the choice of letting the Northern Rock go bankrupt, and he decided he wouldn’t. Bet the fat cat boss of Northern Rock who made himself a millionaire from windfall profits when the carpet baggers sold off the family silver didn’t mind being rescued like that.
Funny thing though, Fat Cat bosses of privatised and semi-publicly owned businesses such as the Northern Rock always clai they need to earn such high salaries “because of world competition for top executives which means we have to pay them the market rate”.
Like hell you do. They aren’t the same at all. They get bailed out when they create a monumental cock up. Private bosses get sacked.
Of course, neither situation is a disaster for the boss that caused the problem through his daft decisions in the first place - oh no, whether private through and through or public servant to private philanderer, they always seem to end up with contracts that guarantee them five year’s worth of salary as a Golden Handshake or £10 million, whichever is the larger.
But I digress. This is supposed to be all about Gordon, remember? Well, there’s a very good reason, I believe, why Gordon’s on the rack right now.
It’s called Revenge. Revenge of the Sir Humphreys.
Gordon Brown was probably Britain’s most successful (and longest serving) Chancellor ever - certainly in living memory. He did a great job, and by having had a deal with Tony to not be moved out of his job in any reshuffle, he actually learned his way around the civil service pretty well, learned all their tricks, cons and subterfuges, and learned how to counter them all.
Not only that, but unforgivably, he stopped them spending money! Their own money (in their eyes), which they were entitled to spend how they wished through dint of being a civil servant charged with spending the money of the taxpayers.
Imagine all the times Gordon trod on people’s toes, slowed down their plans, and even interfered in internal matters! Remember that big spat Gordon had with the Civil Service over pensions a year or two before he took over from Tony?
Well, now the chickens have come home to roost. Gordon’s out of No. 11 and into No. 10. Well, his office has changed, if not his living quarters. Apparently the flat at No 11 that is for the Chancellor is bigger than the one that goes with being Prime Minister at No. 10, Downing Street. Since Tony had a bigger family than Gordon, he bagged the bigger flat at No. 11 which meant Gordie moved into No. 10 to live in some years ago - and now he’s working from home again.
Only problem is, he cannot control the Civil Servants any more, and every chance they get they’re letting one loose. They’re revelling in his discomfort and pain.
I just wonder how long it’ll last though. At some point all the accumulated bad things they stored away for years will run out, and Gordon will suddenly start to look all competent and in charge again, just in time for the next election campaign.
From Gordon’s point of view it must be a bit like a trip to the dentist. Murder having the tooth out, and painful for a short while, but my goodness is it better in the long run when the toothache goes away!
Sir Humphrey may live to regret the way things are going…
After at least six months of “my computer doesn’t work properly” I bought my other half a new MacBook. I admit I’ve been pushing for Macs in the office for 2 years - since I found out how good my Mac mini was. But it wasn’t as if she’d never seen the MacBook, she’d even said she liked it. Especially since it could run Windows.
She’d seen it in the shop and said it looked a lot nicer than the others (PCs) and if she had the money she’d buy one, even if it was a Mac which she “doesn’t understand”.
Then her keyboard broke. She sent me an email with all the words on a line of their own, with many letters missing to prove it.
So, mug that I am I went and bought a MacBook - the very same one she said she really liked. The Black One, 2.16 GHz etc.
When I brought it home as a surprise I got a black look, and a deadly silence. “I feel like you’ve hit me over the head!” she said. Huh? How’d that happen? Big discussion followed. I said I’d take it back. That was yesterday.
Today, she said she liked it. She’d have it. I felt good for a moment. Then she didn’t want it. I said I’d take it back.
I biked in to work today so left the computer at home until I took the car. I saw her in the afternoon “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time last night, I do want it, thank you.”
That was a sudden change, but nonetheless welcome.
When I got home this evening, I was expecting her to at least open the box, plug it into her iMac, and do a data transfer using Migration Assistant. She could have the computer to use in the office tomorrow to replace her buggered keyboard. And knackered computer.
No. She doesn’t want it any more. “All that money! Take it back!” Yet another discussion. I said I’d take it back.
Her computer is a 4 year old Maxdata Pentium M Centrino 1.5 or something like that. The keyboard has no visible lettering anymore. Half the keys don’t work. It can’t connect to our wireless Network at home, and if you change the Windows 98 Network settings so it can connect up to the internet at home they all have to be redone manually to connect to the office network. And redone again on returning from work. There’s no automated script. The battery doesn’t work anymore. It crashes three to four times per day. It’s been infected by viruses at least twice.
She’s a lawyer. Would you believe it? She’s one of the principal earners in the office, if not the largest, and she depends on her computer for doing it.
Would I buy a computer for a woman again? Why bother? At least with flowers the same bad feeling only costs me a fiver!
What did I do wrong? 
I’m getting a picture of Laura Metz, the head of desktops at Apple. It’s coming through the ether to me - big power shoulder pads, possibly in purple; lots of chunky costume jewellery, designer dresses, shiny patent leather shoes but not quite matching accessories. Oh yes, and “thin” is important to her.
Where am I getting this from? Well, the new Apple iMac of course. It’s big, shiny, glossy, overly decorated, designer label - and it’s accessories don’t quite match… Who decided a black, aluminium and glossy glass computer would match a white plastic mouse and a white and aluminium keyboard? Oh, yes, most important, don’t forget - it’s very thin! The keyboard is thin, the computer is thin. It’s a thin client computer.
Who cares if the computer is thin? I look at mine front on, it’s then just a 2 dimensional thing in front of me. Like a mirror. Actually, exactly like a mirror. No, it is a mirror! So much so that the only way to view the machine without seeing everything behind you and hardly anything in front of you (ie what’s on the screen) is to point the screen away from you like in this picture by Doug Rosa.
Suddenly it’s all become clear! Of course, its thin - it has to be! Yet another Apple Innovation - the world’s first only-viewable-from-the-side computer. Glossy? It has no option. Glossy glass for a lossy lass. Poor old Laura. Looks like she Metz her match with that one…
Shame really, I was going to buy one - but not with a glossy screen. No matte screen, no deal.
And Steve, I don’t care how bloody thin it is! I just want to be able to read my text…
I’ll be honest, most of what Microsoft does I don’t like. But somewhere deep in the bowels of the giant monopoly abuser are some good people doing some good coding and producing some interesting and profitable programs despite the efforts of the upper echelons to cripple good ideas.
First of all, forget the top two. They’re both there because Bill G’s mother sat on the board of IBM at the time IBM chose Microsoft to supply the Operating System for the new IBM PC. And don’t forget - they didn’t write that themselves, they hacked someone else’s code paying the inventor of CP/M $50,000 in the process. Since then they have hardly shown themselves to be especially talented, unlike many of the people who work for them.
Forget too the business ethics department at MS, because they palpably don’t have one. If they do, it doesn’t work the way you and I understand ethics. For one, they really seem to believe they are above the law. Even where they have been found guilty of abusing their monopoly - in the US and in Europe - they have tried wriggling out of things, or dragging legal cases on so long they evaporate competition while the courts deliberate. After being found guilty of monopoly abuse in the US they applied political and financial pressure to have the judge who found them guilty removed from the case that would identify the appropriate punishment in the US; the replacement left the company intact, a big mistake in my opinion for both the coders at Microsoft and their customers. In Europe they applied similar political pressure to politicians in an attempt to wriggle out of paying that fine - which they still haven’t paid 5 years after they lost the case.
Forget how they treat competitors. The Microsoft way to dominance is to bully the opposition either by forced or coerced buyout, by sabotaging other competitors’ markets by undercutting them with loss making cheaper or even free products (eg the neutering of Netscape), or by writing the code of Windows so that it favours their own Office product (eg the removal of Word Perfect from the No 1 Word Processor slot). I’m sure you can think of other occasions.
Forget anything to do with making customers want to do business with them, the Microsoft way is to force customers to do business with them. This is in sharp contrast to companies like Apple whose customers are wooed by the company with great systems, amazing designs, and an “I want one!” culture so powerful that the shares of other companies can plummet just on the rumour that Apple the innovator might enter their market (eg mobile phone maker shares on the announcement of the soon to be here Apple iPhone).
Forget innovation too. Microsoft haven’t made anything truly innovative since the, err, erm…. actually, what innovation have they brought to the table? Ah yes, the legal argument that if the company was split up it wouldn’t be able to innovate. Er, hello? Innovation is something other companies do Microsoft. You just copy and that isn’t the same. MS is a bit like Bizarro from the DC comics Superman stories, if you remember that far back.
But Microsoft really does have a diamond in its cupboard, and that diamond is Microsoft Office. OK, it has a load of crap stuck in there too, and some of it (such as Access) has been artificially restricted to force users (there they go again, forcing) to buy the more expensive SQL server.
Perhaps Word is rather too difficult to navigate, and sometimes you need to alter three seperate settings held on lower sub-levels of more than one menu selection just to change what something looks like on a page. Word also makes you change each formatting setting one at a time, whereas programs such as IBM’’s Lotus Smartsuite have a pop up menu with all the options available in one place with one click alterations possible. Word files (.doc) take up a lot more space for storage than the equivalent from OpenOffice (.odt files) too.
PowerPoint and Publisher are pretty awful really when you look at other alternatives out there. FrontPage is tragic - have you ever seen the amount of sewage-code this generates for a simple text only web-page? It’s mind-boggling. As for Outlook, it’s really not very powerful and has loads of holes.
The brightest bit of the diamond is though, without a doubt, Microsoft Excel - particularly it’s graphing capabilities. This program is amazing, and when compared to the main opposition at the moment, OpenOffice, it’s like comparing a seedling with a California Redwood. Except that Apple comes from California of course, not Microsoft.
OK, the standard colours of the charts Excel produces are pretty uninspiring, but it’s amazing how few people change them. You can see them dotted around, here and there, in coprorate brochures, annual reports and other literature. But to give them their due, Excel I believe is a wholly grown internal project, not bought in, not pirated, not copied. When it was launched it really did mess up the sales of the then leader for spreadsheets, Lotus Corp’s Lotus 123.
If it wasn’t for Excel, I wouldn’t have bought Microsoft Office. I did buy it to run on a Mac though - I still don’t have MS Office on my PC. Actually, MS Excel appeared on Macs before it appeared on Windows, if you are to believe the stories. One other program Microsoft makes that is pretty good is Visio, but it doesn’t come with MS Office.
But don’t you think it is ironic that MS, who regularly spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about other platforms such as Linux and Apple - and who try to put Apple off people’s shopping lists by dismissively saying “Macs are only good for graphics” actually have as their “best” products two, err, graphics related programs?
The best thing that could happen for Microsoft would be a breakup, as the one that broke up Standard Oil in the 1920s. When that oil monopoly was broken up into 34 daughter companies including Exxon, Amoco, Conoco etc the sum market capitalisation of all the post-breakup component companies almost doubled overnight - a capital movement the like of like which Microsoft hasn’t seen for many years, unlike the much smaller Apple Inc whose shares have more than doubled in the last year alone. But making more money probably isn’t important as keeping control of as much as possible when you reach top executive level at MS. If I were a shareholder in the company, that would worry me.
Only after a breakup will the bright young minds that are hidden away, deep inside Microsoft have the freedom and lack of top-down management to become truly innovative and bring the world ideas to stimulate our minds and make us finally want to buy MS stuff. Maybe the hard light of day shining into the recesses of the machine would purify and illuminate smaller, post-breakup companies. I fear it’ll be just more of the same though.
What a lost opportunity.
Rumours are going around that with the recent USD 6 billion purchase by Microsoft of digital marketing firm Aquantive the software giant is planning to incorporate advertising into its Windows OS.
The BSOD could be sponsored by an insurance or car breakdown company - or even a car manufacturer with the line “Aren’t you glad our cars don’t break down as often as your computer?”
Windows Explorer could advertise the cult TV show Lost, McDonalds could advertise on the Start menu since their food always has loads of extras you don’t really need to start the day, while lastminute.com could sponsor the MS Office menu bar with the message “The total time you’ve wasted so far this year looking for the correct control in this program is enough to have spent two weeks in the Caribbean at this hotel. Book now!”
