Stories

Google to Wall St: our CFO couldn’t make it. So meet the Chef

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The next time Google invites Wall Street analysts to a six hour financial presentation, it may as well direct them to a point in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. Microsoft already has a wonderful MapPoint “drowning service” that will show them precisely how to get there.

That surely was the unspoken sentiment behind Google’s first ever analyst meeting in Mountain View this week, which left Wall Street’s finest perplexed. CFO George Reyes gave a brief introduction, took a couple of questions, but didn’t give a presentation, as is the norm.

Instead Charlie Ayers, former Grateful Dead chef, described how he’d prepare a delicious lunch of grilled pork tenderloin.

Executives gave nothing away.

The slideshow can be found here, although we’ve distilled some of the essential banality of the day by capturing some screenshots, such as this one:

Google financial analyst day - Slide 1

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Key Windows man leaves Redmond

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One of the most important figures in Microsoft’s history, David Weise, is to leave Redmond after an illustrious career with the software giant. Weise was one of the developers responsible for a technical breakthrough upon which much of Microsoft’s success today is founded.

In 1987 IBM and Microsoft were pouring vast resources into OS/2, the successor to MS-DOS. Back then, Microsoft’s Windows was a functionally-crippled GUI running on top of an operating system that offered no pre-emptive multi-tasking or long file names and that was limited by DOS’s 640kb memory limit.

After Weise’s breakthrough, Windows was still a functionally-crippled GUI running on top of an operating system that offered no pre-emptive multi-tasking or long file names, but it was no longer limited by DOS’s 640kb memory limit. Windows could take advantage of the 80286 Protected Mode.

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Verity Stob – programming’s funniest memoir

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As anyone who’s ever done it professionally knows, programming computers isn’t as glamorous as they make out in the movies. Take for example, Independence Day, where the hero lashes together a program in 30 minutes and conjures up a piece of code that saves the world. Have you ever seen anyone do in that real life? And did you bill them for the full hour?

Or take another glamorous example of the mercurial codesmith-as-shamen. In Po Bronson’s Nudist On The Late Shift – one of many books of the dot.com era that tried to persuade us work was simply another form of leisure, the eponymous hero is a programmer so dedicated to his task that he forgets to put his clothes on. And he’s so vital to the organization, no one minds.

But if this was really happening – what would you think? You’d ask yourself, what would drive a man to toil over a computer, in a deserted building, stark naked? Just what would possess a man to lose his dignity like that? The lonely soul must have been tearing his heart out. About, what exactly?

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The Cell chip – what it is, and why you should care

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Part 1: A look at how it works

No chip in years has caused as much excitement as the Cell processor developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. It promises to be the most important microprocessor of the decade, with potentially enormous repercussions for how the industry computes, and how the rest of us use digital media. It will power the PlayStation 3 and technical and commercial computing.

Technical details of Cell will be disclosed at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco next week, and in anticipation we’ll look first at how the Cell works and then tomorrow at what it means to the industry and consumers.

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Tablet PC bug ‘fills computer with ink’

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A major bug in the Tablet PC version of Windows eats up all the memory in your computer until it crashes. Redmond has yet to acknowledge the problem with a public disclosure about the issue – or even offer a feeble blogshrug [*].

The culprit is the application Tabtip.exe, the site Tablet PC Talk confirms –

“The program Tabtip.exe increases in size due to a memory leak. It starts out at approximately 10MB. I have seen it zoom up to over 150MB after a couple of weeks of suspend/resume.”

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All at sea, Microsoft axes flying car project

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It’s official: Microsoft’s flying car project is in peril, the company’s US PR agency Waggener Edstrom told us today. The mysterious vehicle that’s thrilled so many readers this week now faces the axe.

The good news is that we finally have official confirmation of these strange sightings of amphibious craft making sometimes very slow, and sometimes incredibly quick, but always unplanned detours across Europe, thanks to MapPoint or Autoroute.

But the bad news is that the fun might end soon. No longer will Norwegians, Latvians and Estonians be able to press the web equivalent of Asteroids’ “hyperspace” button and find themselves in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. There are no surface-effect vehicles, modeled after Alexeev’s Caspian Sea Ekranoplan, being tested in the Baltic.

Or at least, not by Microsoft. This is what we were told.

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Google’s No-Google tag blesses the Balkanized web

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Karl Auerbach’s prediction that the internet is balkanizing into groups of people who only accept traffic from each other took another step closer to reality today. The veteran TCP/IP engineer and ICANN board member has warned of the effect for years.

“The ‘Net is balkanizing. There are communities of trust forming in which traffic is accepted only from known friends,” Auerbach told Wired last year.

The trend can be seen at various levels. At the user level, where we see bloggers repeating each other in an echo chamber and reinforcing their views; in the middle of the network, where Verizon recently blocking off inbound email from Europe, and it’s happening deep down at the packet level too, as a result of the net’s background radiation.

But all these may look like an innocent prelude. Google said today that its search engine will respect a new link attribute, “rel=nofollow”, which will means its algorithms will not give weighting to the target URL. MSN, Yahoo! and blog vendors said they’ll follow suit. It’s effectively declaring PageRank™ dead for weblogs, in an attempt to stem the problem.

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Harvard Man in lesbian mix-up wants satire clearly labeled

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Draq queen causes Podcast confusion

The two fathers of ‘podcasting’ have called for jokes and satirical broadcasts to be clearly labelled as such, after they were bamboozled by a comic female impersonator.

Two “bloggers” – former MTV video jockey Adam Curry and former software developer Dave Winer cooked up the idea of enclosing audio files in some XML code so they could be pulled off the web onto a portable device – a nifty, if not terrible original idea. With real,grassroots webcasting itself in mortal danger, its seems an odd distraction. The Webcaster Alliance is locked in epic battle with the RIAA over the right to distribute art, but instead of supporting them, these bloggers have other priorities, and top of the list is the right to be able to burp at home, and then broadcast it over the fabled Interweb. Unscripted burps are particularly welcome.

And so not surpringly, people have taken the idea and run with it, making their own burpy broadcasts in their kitchens, and shoving them up on the web. For a week on their own burpy ‘show’, Curry and Winer rebroadcast the adventures of a podcaster they admired, one Yeast Radio’s Madge Weinstein.

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Nokia cuts hit smart phone, multimedia R&D

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Nokia is reining in R&D, with the axe falling hardest on its 3,000-strong multimedia division founded a year ago. The exact number of staff affected isn’t known, but a press release issued on Tuesday from Nokia Multimedia says the cuts are intended to reduce R&D expenditure to 9 to 10 per cent of net sales by the end of next year. That’s roughly the level it was in 2001. According to Nokia’s most recent annual report, consolidated R&D rose from 9.6 per cent of net sales in 2001 to 12.8 per cent in 2003.

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62pc of netizens unaware of Pajamahadeen militants

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New research suggests that the internet’s echo chamber has much thicker walls than scientists previously thought. So thick, it seems, that an explosion the size of the Blogosphere can barely be detected in the real world. At best, only some faint, metallic clanging sounds can be heard outside – the eerie sound of the Pajamahadeen [UK English: Pyjamahadeen] inside the chamber, hammering away at their computer keyboards.

The research was conducted by good-news foundation the Pew Trust in the United States, and it contains some warming statistics for weblog militants.

More than a quarter of US internet users (27 per cent) had read a weblog at one time or another; 12 per cent had at least once posted a comment on a weblog. But almost two thirds (62 per cent) of net users didn’t know what a weblog is – let alone how one can be safely disarmed.

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