Sneak is of course transfixed by the latest BBC TV reality show, The Apprentice, in which a variety of MBA-brained bozos drink champagne, struggle to come up with a business proposition worthy of an amoeba, fail to make any headway, and then stab each other in the back in their efforts to avoid being booted out. The most recent episode gave viewers an unwelcome insight into the mind of the average contestant, as one dim-bulb ideas man - possibly Paul although they all look the same to Sneak - confessed that it was just as well his lady friend was attractive without make-up or she'd have missed her chance. Sneak can only assume she has since taken to hitting herself in the face with a steak tenderiser. But of course Sneak has to admire tech entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar, of Amstrad fame, who acts as judge, jury and booter-outer. Not only does he permanently exhibit a scowl of laser-beam intensity, but he is also capable of stating the bleeding obvious ("It's boring", of a proposed children's toy consisting of a pack of blank cards) in an exceedingly forthright manner. Plus, he has clearly insisted that one of his firm's bizarre Amstrad Em@iler things features in every possible shot where a conventional phone would normally appear. One has to feel sorry for Sugar's secretary, for example. It's probably difficult enough dealing with a boss who barks like a dog with an impacted colon, but to have to field his calls on an Em@iler must surely be grounds for constructive dismissal.

February 24, 2005 Television | Permalink | Comments (1)

Failing to live up to the job can carry a heavy price in any profession - except that of IT industry chief executive, it seems. And while Carleton S Fiorina is no doubt very unhappy to have been jettisoned by the HP board last week, the terms of her severance package will no doubt cheer her up a bit. The golden handshake/bullion-backstabbing handed out in Fiorina’s case amounts to $14m, plus another few million accounted for by things like, say, untaken leave. And, as the official SEC filing from HP goes on to detail, on top of this plentiful bounty Fiorina will enjoy one other lucrative fringe benefit. She can keep her laptop, and enjoy three months tech support. So that's one dude who won't need a Dell for a while yet...

February 14, 2005 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

It might appear that with the exit of high-profile chief executive Carly Fiorina, HP will now have to struggle on without a strong woman at the helm. Or not. Clearly new non-exec chairman Patricia Dunn is the equal of Fiorina when it comes to not being a shrinking violet, as today’s FT reports. "In 2000, [Dunn] gave a speech that stunned a mutual fund conference. Of the industry's high fees, she said investment managers sell 'for the price of a Picasso [what] routinely turns out to be paint-by numbers'." That's a handy metaphor - one that Dunn must have come up with after pondering the price of HP colour printer cartridges, Sneak assumes.

February 11, 2005 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reader Ben Mottram contacted Sneak following the recent item on the correct spelling of the term "email", which was spurred by online pollster SamPoll.com asking the web at large to vote for "e-mail" or "email".
Mottram points to the handy Googlefight service, which employs Google results to settle such disputes without all the tedious hanging around involved in SamPoll's approach - which still hasn't delivered a verdict. And aside from proving that Sneak's own choice of spelling wins the popular vote, Googlefight also shows that amongst the profoundly word-blind, "e-mial" is a more popular misspelling that "emial", proving that the hyphen is doubly cursed.
Meanwhile another reader, William Sandison, suggests that since email is actually short for electronic mail, it really ought to have an apostrophe, not an ugly dash, to denote all those skipped letters. Somehow, Sneak doubts that e'mail is likely to catch on even among those pedantic punctuators who cuddle a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves come bedtime.

February 7, 2005 Books | Permalink | Comments (4)

Sneak was not surprised to read that an experimental computer model of the London Stock Market, in which highly-paid market traders were represented by brainless, randomly-acting zombies of zero intelligence, succeeded in creating a simulation of strikingly high fidelity when compared to the real thing. Sneak would like to suggest that the boffins involved - chaos theory pioneer J Doyne Farmer and colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico – now turn their attention to proving that the actions of other top earners are also indistinguishable from the random ravings of rabid baboons. They could start with, say, the chief executives of large IT vendors, their top marketing and PR bods and of course their tech support chiefs. Just steer clear of simulating underpaid IT columnists, is all Sneak asks.

February 2, 2005 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft chief cheerleader Bill Gates is visiting EU top brass in Belgium today, alas amid security tight enough to prevent a repeat of the flan-flinging attack that put egg-custard all over the world's richest face in February 1998, on Gates's last visit to Brussels.
This time Gates is there to talk turkey about EU antitrust sanctions against Microsoft, in particular the orders that it must open up its code to rivals and must also provide a version of Windows XP that has been stripped of its Media Player accoutrements. Apparently Microsoft's planned name for this product - Windows XP Reduced Media Edition - has gone down about as well in Euroland as a Glaswegian interpreter. Sneak presumes that Gates will have some helpful alternative names to suggest, along the lines of Windows XP Crippled Edition, Windows XP Silent Edition, or perhaps Windows XP Minus. Sneak, however, has a suggestion, bearing in mind the number of firms that would like to stop staff turning desktops into worm-prone, file-swapping, jukebox video machines. Given that the amended version will close off one significant avenue of attack, how about Windows XP Reduced Danger Edition?

February 1, 2005 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)