Just don’t call yourself a journalist

Gawker today (March 19 Mon) has a mea culpa after last week’s revelations that the theatrical performance of Mike Daisey, who has turned a theatrical rant against Apple suppliers and their oppression of workers into a global cause, was more than a little exaggerated for effect.

All Daisey’s specific stories about finding workers poisoned or with crippled hands are untrue, as confirmed by the Gawker reporter’s double checking- including the striking one where the man with the mangled had was shown an iPod and caressed it as “magic”.

Seems that Gawker’s Adrien Chen is a decent guy who did challenge Daisey in a one on one interview and was snowed by his bluster and theatrics into thinking he was reliable. Also snowed was This American Life – (see An acclaimed Apple critic made up the details), the NPR program which is probably even nicer and more gullible if the cause is right.

Bill Maher was also pleased to have Daisey on, too.

One excusing point American Life made was that Daisey’s fictional examples are all known to have existed in reality:

What makes this a little complicated is that the things Daisey lied about seeing are things that have actually happened in China: Workers making Apple products have been poisoned by Hexane. Apple’s own audits show (PDF) the company has caught underage workers at a handful of its suppliers. These things are rare, but together, they form an easy-to-understand narrative about Apple.

Meanwhile journalists are rushing to blame Daisey for being a bad journalist when it seems clear he is really a theatrical story teller caught in that role in interviews, and unwilling to interrupt.

Adam Martin at Atlantic rushes to condemn him for that without seeming to realize that Daisey’s complaint that interviews have their own momentum is valid, and objecting to the role bestowed upon you by some host who has been poorly briefed is not easy when it involves the other guy losing face. Besides isn’t every journalist trying to adopt the tricks of theater these days, to keep up on the Web?

The real revelation

Given that the case of Greg Mortenson the author of Three Cups of Tea was outed as a bit of a liberal when it came to doing his accounting, both financially and in the number of schools he had actually benefited in Afghanistan, is still simmering in the not so distant past, one principle seems clear.

You can go a long way if you plug into decent people’s liking for people who stand up for the poor and weak.

Just don’t abuse the privilege.

Here’s Evan Osnos of the New Yorker lsiting the fibs he thought sounded off:

Several places in the narrative sounded fishy to anyone who has spent much time here: 1) the gun-toting guards (maybe, but not at the factories I’ve seen; in China, guns usually belong to soldiers or armored-car drivers); 2) driving down a highway exit that ended with rebar jutting out into thin air (local taxi drivers usually know which exits aren’t finished); 3) meeting workers who said they were twelve and thirteen years old (even if they were underage, they were probably too smart to blab about it in front of the gun-toting guards); 4) workers who were such innocents that they’d never considered what they would change about the factories until Daisey asked them (where do I start?); and, perhaps most of all, 5) his description of going to the factory gates and talking to workers as a radical innovation in journalism. When he told journalists in Hong Kong about his plan, he said in his piece, they replied: “That’s not really how we usually do things in China.”
That was a howler. Going to the factory gates is exactly what reporters do in China.

Read more Mike Daisey’s Mistakes In China

Experts make Way for The Crowd, But Live On on DVD

The paper Encyclopedia Britannica is gone, sad to say (though the DVD edition lives on at $30 for 92,000 articles, as well as multimedia, atlas, dictionaries).

A front page item today (Wed Mar 15) tells all. Wiki and the Web defeated it with the latest and the longest on every topic under the sun, far more than the Britannica could keep up with. Crowd sourcing replaces the experts, at last.

But what is lost? Perhaps the biggest problem with the Wiki is that it settles on whatever beliefs and theories are most established, right or wrong.

The prevailing view will resist correction by better read readers and editors who know that it is out of date, according to the best scholars and critics, who may not be the ones who rule the public and media parts of the universe of knowledge. Any correction which is too heretical relative to the conventional wisdom will be edited out.

This process is clearly visible in the tortured area of HIV/AIDS, where critics both at the top of the field and from outside have long contested the prevailing paradigm. If they make any correction to Wiki entries on their topic it will disappear quickly, and the old misinformation reasserted.

What other things will we lose as paper information and news goes out of style and use? Newspapers are vanishing, America’s fastest shrinking industry, their revenue total at $34 billion last year, outdistanced by Google at $37.9 billion, partly from its predatory use of the news collected by newspapers, at Google News.

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses
By JULIE BOSMAN

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.

“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”

In the 1950s, having the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelf was akin to a station wagon in the garage or a black-and-white Zenith in the den, a possession coveted for its usefulness and as a goalpost for an aspirational middle class. Buying a set was often a financial stretch, and many families had to pay for it in monthly installments.

But in recent years, print reference books have been almost completely overtaken by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, including specialized Web sites and the hugely popular — and free — online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Since it was started 11 years ago, Wikipedia has moved a long way toward replacing the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds. The site is now written and edited by tens of thousands of contributors around the world, and it has been gradually accepted as a largely accurate and comprehensive source, even by many scholars and academics.

Wikipedia also regularly meets the 21st-century mandate of providing instantly updated material. And it has nearly four million articles in English, including some on pop culture topics that would not be considered worthy of a mention in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Mr. Cauz said that he believed Britannica’s competitive advantage with Wikipedia came from its prestigious sources, its carefully edited entries and the trust that was tied to the brand.

“We have very different value propositions,” Mr. Cauz said. “Britannica is going to be smaller. We cannot deal with every single cartoon character, we cannot deal with every love life of every celebrity. But we need to have an alternative where facts really matter. Britannica won’t be able to be as large, but it will always be factually correct.”

But one widely publicized study, published in 2005 by Nature, called into question Britannica’s presumed accuracy advantage over Wikipedia. The study said that out of 42 competing entries, Wikipedia made an average of four errors in each article, and Britannica three. Britannica responded with a lengthy rebuttal saying the study was error-laden and “completely without merit.”

The Britannica, the oldest continuously published encyclopedia in the English language, has become a luxury item with a $1,395 price tag. It is frequently bought by embassies, libraries and research institutions, and by well-educated, upscale consumers who felt an attachment to the set of bound volumes. Only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold, and the remaining 4,000 have been stored in a warehouse until they are bought.

The 2010 edition had more than 4,000 contributors, including Arnold Palmer (who wrote the entry on the Masters tournament) and Panthea Reid, professor emeritus at Louisiana State University and author of the biography “Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf” (who wrote about Virginia Woolf).

Sales of the Britannica peaked in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold in the United States. But now print encyclopedias account for less than 1 percent of the Britannica’s revenue. About 85 percent of revenue comes from selling curriculum products in subjects like math, science and the English language; 15 percent comes from subscriptions to the Web site, the company said.

About half a million households pay a $70 annual fee for the online subscription, which includes access to the full database of articles, videos, original documents and to the company’s mobile applications. At least one other general-interest encyclopedia in the United States, the World Book, is still printing a 22-volume yearly edition, said Jennifer Parello, a spokeswoman for World Book Inc. She declined to provide sales figures but said the encyclopedia was bought primarily by schools and libraries.

Gary Marchionini, the dean of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the fading of print encyclopedias was “an inexorable trend that will continue.”

“There’s more comprehensive material available on the Web,” Mr. Marchionini said. “The thing that you get from an encyclopedia is one of the best scholars in the world writing a description of that phenomenon or that object, but you’re still getting just one point of view. Anything worth discussing in life is worth getting more than one point of view.”

Many librarians say that while they have rapidly shifted money and resources to digital materials, print still has a place. Academic libraries tend to keep many sets of specialized encyclopedias on their shelves, like volumes on Judaica, folklore, music or philosophy, or encyclopedias that are written in foreign languages and unavailable online.

At the Portland Public Library in Maine, there are still many encyclopedias that the library orders on a regular basis, sometimes every year, said Sonya Durney, a reference librarian. General-interest encyclopedias are often used by students whose teachers require them to occasionally cite print sources, just to practice using print.

“They’re used by anyone who’s learning, anyone who’s new to the country, older patrons, people who aren’t comfortable online,” Ms. Durney said. “There’s a whole demographic of people who are more comfortable with print.”

But many people are discovering that the books have outlived their usefulness. Used editions of encyclopedias are widely available on Craigslist and eBay: more than 1,400 listings for Britannica products were posted on eBay this week.

Charles Fuller, a geography professor who lives in the Chicago suburbs, put his 1992 edition on sale on Craigslist last Sunday. For years, he has neglected the print encyclopedias, he said in an interview, and now prefers to use his iPhone to look up facts quickly. He and his wife are downsizing and relocating to California, he said, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica will not be coming with them, a loss he acknowledges with a hint of wistfulness.

“They’re not obsolete,” Mr. Fuller said. “When I’m doing serious research, I still use the print books. And they look really beautiful on the bookshelves.”

Actually prices are holding very well on E Bay. A 1970 edition has 24 bids up to $643.99 at this moment of writing. A 1965 set has 2 bids to $50 now. A 1990 set is $249 but no bids; that is the Buy It Now offer. A 2007 set is offered at $749. The classic 1910 edition can be had for $150.00

Here is Philip Bump’s entry at Daily Download discussing the change. How Will We Feel When the Newspapers Stop Printing?

As one who owns three editions of Britannica, and one of Great Books, I have to admit that one goes to the Internet and Wiki for a quick fix on almost any topic, and the entries are always up to date. The great unanswered question we need to answer is who will pay for the news in the future? I think it will all be Wikinews gathered by amateurs except for the one or two remaining newspapers, possibly the Times.

Presumably the Times will survive, but only on the Internet, if the readers all become as sharp as the latest iPad, and Google News will have to give up plundering its daily news, unless it merges with the Times.

The Times is already too big to buy on paper except as a luxury for its ease of reading and its serendipity, and the Web has its own great serendipity.

But magazines and books will thrive still on paper, lets hope, since their content lasts longer and is worth keeping around.

Books are still the best comprehensive and reliable source of knowledge and surely most educated people will prefer to have those kinds of books around to furnish their homes and provide access as instant as the Web.

Here are the thoughts of one who should be able to tell us what we will miss:

I’ll Miss the Miscellany

A.J. Jacobs, an editor at large at Esquire, read the Encyclopaedia Britannica for his memoir “The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.” He is the author of the forthcoming “Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection.”

UPDATED MARCH 14, 2012, 6:48 PM

Poor Zywiec. For years, this Polish city (population 32,000) has had the distinction of being the final entry in the print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the last word in the 44-million-word opus.

Now, in this post-print, post-alphabetical world, Zywiec will be just another Central European town with a nice castle. Well, at least Zywiec citizens can console themselves with beer, which the Britannica says they are adept at brewing.

Dan Neville/The New York Times
I too am heartbroken. I spent many hundreds of hours with those gold-embossed Britannica volumes on my lap, flipping through the tissue-thin pages and squinting at the 9-point font. About 10 years ago, worried that my brain was turning to tapioca, I decided to smarten up by reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica – all 32 leather-bound volumes. It was a stunt, yes. But as I learned from the Britannica, stunts can have their own absurd nobility, whether it was Tenzing Norgay summiting Everest or the 19th century French acrobat Charles Blondin strolling across the Niagara Falls on a tightrope, stopping midway to make and eat an omelet.

Long before me, encyclopedia reading had an esteemed history. George Bernard Shaw and the heart surgeon Michael DeBakey are members of the start-to-finish club. C.S. Forester, the author of “Horatio Hornblower,” found it so riveting that he read the whole thing twice.

I know I sound like a crotchety old grandfather on the porch reminiscing about the good old days of rumble seats, but I loved having pages you could actually turn, not click or swipe. I adored the literal weight of each volume (4 pounds), which somehow lent it metaphorical gravitas as well. I fell hard for the familiar smell of leatherette covers and the crinkling of the pages. I marveled at the odd collision of words on the bindings (one volume runs from “Excretion” to “Geometry”).

The books gave comfort. A set of Britannicas sent the message that all the world’s information could fit on one shelf.
Such juxtapositions were key to its charm. The Britannica encouraged serendipitous discoveries. Look up Abbott and Costello, and you might be lured in by abalones or Absalom, who died after his luxurious hair got caught in a tree.

But you can’t reverse the arrow of time, to borrow a phrase from the astronomer Arthur Eddington (thanks, Britannica). I’m aware that digital has tons of advantages — speed, size and searchability among them. It’s also harder to censor. Back in 1751, the Britannica’s predecessor — Diderot’s Encyclopedie — was deemed so dangerous by King Louis XV that he had the volumes locked up in the Bastille alongside murderers and madmen. It’s much harder to lock up a Web site.

But physicality has its rewards as well. For decades, the Britannica served a symbolic purpose. Fill your living room shelf with encyclopedias, and you were announcing, “Yes, we are an intellectually curious family.” A mounted moose head, but for the brainy.

It was practical, too. On his trip to Antarctica, the explorer Ernest Shackleton lugged the entire ninth edition with him in the boat. Legend has it he ended up burning the volumes for kindling. Try doing that with Google.

The books gave comfort. A set of Britannicas sent the message that all the world’s information could fit on one shelf. Hans Koning, the New Yorker writer, once called the Britannica the culmination of the Enlightenment, the naïve belief that all human knowledge could be presented with a single point of view. The Britannica marched along, neatly and orderly, from A to Z. It was containable, unlike the sprawling chaos of Wikipedia.

I need to cheer up. Maybe I’ll listen to a jaunty a-ak tune. (A-ak: ancient Korean music and the first word in my Britannica set.)

Few of the rest of us have the time or the time left to go through one edition of the Britannica, except for favorite entries.

But educated people will cherish them for the rest of their lives, I believe.

67 Interesting Comments follow the above Times piece, starting with Geep from Norway who writes:

For looking up one specific thing, Wikipedia is great. For browsing a treasurehouse of knowledge and pleasure, nothing will ever beat the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Touche!

His video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp5gX304i4U

Power cut, entire country closed down

Sixty Minutes today (Sun March 4) in a breathtakingly irresponsible act of journalism informed the world that the best way to demolish the US economy and society might cost as little as $2 million.

Moreover, the country is wide open to the weapon of choice, since it has apparently taken no effective action to defend itself against another Stuxnet.

As utilities all over upgrade to smart meters, which have already proved to be easy to hack into, the power grid is vulnerable to another version of Stuxnet, the sophisticated program with 10,000 lines of crack code which rode USB laptop flashdrives into the heart of the Iranian nuclear project and spun its centrifuges off their bearings.

According to Sixty Minutes it is hard to think of an area in America where the threat is greater and we’ve done less to guard against it. Certainly by the end of the segment one could imagine that sooner or later the entire country is going to black out, now that Stuxnet is out in the world for all to copy.

It is becoming increasingly clear that those who came to the delights of early adulthood in the 1960s made the best choice of which era in which to live!

It is not as if hackers worldwide are not busy developing Stuxnet.

While this may just be a discussion and not a release, it is interesting to note that the speaker Nima Bagheri presenting the paper is from IRAN.

For refreshing your memory, Stuxnet is a computer worm discovered in June 2010. It targets Siemens industrial software and equipment running Microsoft Windows.While it is not the first time that hackers have targeted industrial systems,it is the first discovered malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems, and the first to include a programmable logic controller (PLC) rootkit.

What is alarming is the recent discovery (On 1 September 2011) of a new worm – thought to be related to Stuxnet. The Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS) of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics analyzed the malware, naming the threat Duqu. Symantec, based on this report, continued the analysis of the threat, calling it “nearly identical to Stuxnet, but with a completely different purpose”, and published a detailed technical paper.The main component used in Duqu is designed to capture information such as keystrokes and system information. The exfiltrated data may be used to enable a future Stuxnet-like attack.

The research paper abstract discusses rootkit features and the malware authors may likely show demonstration at MalCon with new research releated to hiding rootkits and advanced stuxnet like malwares.

Released or not, MalCon certainly leaves plently of room for imagination of the future with computing – and hope we don’t get to live the Die Hard 4.0 someday.

Result: $100 billion and growing

Terrific piece by Somini Sengupta today in the Times (Business Day Front Page), Controlling His Network: Mark Zuckerberg Remains The Undisputed Boss at Facebook) telling how Mark Z resisted the interfering predations of his funders by making sure he retained total control of Facebook as he grew it to gigantic proportions.

A nice lesson in the Jobs tradition of the power and quality of one individual’s vision when protected from the compromises and limitations of groupthink, and from people who do not have the time to compete with the thoughtfulness of the founder and initiator of change in his obsession.

Obviously the individual concerned must be smart, of course. Really smart. And ruthless too, like Jobs. The key thing is, surely, the singleminded attention of the obsessive. Of course, that alone does not separate the sheep from the goats, the fools from the geniuses. The combination needed is, quite simply, focus plus intelligence. Fools can be just as obsessive as the geniuses, as we have learned from television series in the last few years, such as America Inventor, Shark Tank etc

Perhaps one should add ruthlessness too, a la Jobs. Evidently, Zuckerberg rules by edict. He rejected a calendar for Facebook which his staff had been working on for some time. Just cut it off. One wonders why – perhaps it couldn’t be loaded with ads in the way he so determinedly intends.

Anyhow the value of Facebook vindicates him and proves the point. Leave the founder in place. Let the less obsessed and the less smart go and play elsewhere. Twitter should have learned that. Instead it is still stuck with stupidity after stupidity, apparent as soon as you use it. The layout is execrable, hiding the subscribers image, the search obscure and undefined, the history invisible without massive clicking.

And this is one of the most valuable properties on the Net.

February 2, 2012
Zuckerberg Remains the Undisputed Boss at Facebook
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Since the moment he dropped out of Harvard University, Mark Zuckerberg has stayed remarkably focused on two things: Facebook, and being the boss of Facebook.

Early on he was persuaded of the vast potential of the social network he built in his dorm room, say friends, investors and detractors. He pushed his team to be fast and take risks. He resisted efforts to change the way Facebook looked and worked, even if, in the beginning, it meant giving up revenue.

Most important, he arranged the ownership of Facebook so as to give himself extraordinary power to steer the company. By the time Facebook filed for a $5 billion public offering on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg had managed to hold on to more than one-fourth of the shares in the company, and his agreements with other investors enhanced his voting power to almost 60 percent of total shares.

That’s a greater measure of control than Bill Gates had at Microsoft when it went public in 1986 (49 percent), and far greater than what the co-founders of Google had in 2004 (16 percent each). Typically, say Silicon Valley veterans, a first-time entrepreneur gets to the public market with a far smaller stake in his or her creation. Mr. Zuckerberg’s arrangement leaves little room for investors to have much input on the company’s direction.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s success is an object lesson in what works in crowded, competitive Silicon Valley: Remain in charge, stave off potential predators and expand the company so quickly that no one can challenge the boss.

“He always knew before the rest of us what Facebook could be,” said Paul Madera, managing director at Meritech Capital Partners, who invested in the company in 2005. “Mark’s vision on the purity of the product really did benefit from his control and ownership. It wasn’t subject to committee decisions. It was all Mark.”

The power that Mr. Zuckerberg wields over the company has already drawn scrutiny. “You’re willing to take someone’s money but not willing to invite their participation,” said Charles M. Elson, a professor of corporate governance at the University of Delaware. “It makes meaningless the notion of investor democracy.”

Professor Elsen added that Mr. Zuckerberg’s arrangement is similar to moves by founders of other technology companies, including Google, to create special classes of stock that grant them extra voting power. (The New York Times Company and other media companies have similar structures.)

Facebook declined to make executives available for interviews ahead of the offering.

The focus on staying in charge began early. Sean Parker, one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s first and most important advisers, helped him with that. Mr. Parker had learned a hard lesson himself about losing control: He was ousted by the backers of a company he founded, an online address book called Plaxo. Mr. Parker helped ensure that would never happen to Mr. Zuckerberg.

In 2005, when Facebook got an early injection of capital from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Mr. Parker insisted that he control one board seat and Mr. Zuckerberg control two, Mr. Parker said in an interview last year. When he left the company not long after, Mr. Parker insisted that Mr. Zuckerberg inherit his board seat, giving him three out of five seats.

“The only way I will resign,” Mr. Parker recalled telling the rest of the board, “is if Zuck receives control of the board seat, because he’s the only one I trust to steer the company.”

Before Facebook came about, sites like Friendster and MySpace had already defined social networks. But Mr. Zuckerberg was convinced early on that Facebook could be something greater, and his convictions impressed both peers and elders.

Mr. Madera, the venture capitalist, met him in 2005. At the time Facebook was open only to college students, and the only advertising it took in was from things like students selling bikes at the end of the semester. But Mr. Zuckerberg described what he thought it would become. “It was going to be the first place people went to when they got up in the morning and the last thing they went to before they went to bed,” Mr. Madera recalled him saying. “I thought he was unrealistic. If I’ve learned one thing in the investing business, it’s that when people talk about unrealistic things, you don’t tell them they’re crazy.” Mr. Madera invested anyway, putting in a total of $25 million.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s early backers included many technically skilled company founders, including Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal; Reid Hoffman, who helped build PayPal and founded LinkedIn; and Marc Andreessen, who founded Netscape. Through them and others, Mr. Zuckerberg sought out the most successful technology bosses: Mr. Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google.

“There is no problem he doesn’t think he can solve, but he constantly tries to find the smartest people he can to give him advice,” said one of his early advisers and a Facebook investor, who asked not to be identified in the run-up to the offering. “Nearly universally, he asks them, ‘Who are the smartest people for me to talk to about this?’ ”

In 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg brought in Sheryl Sandberg, a veteran executive from Google with expertise in online advertising, to be chief operating officer. She has become a prominent public face for Facebook, but it is always clear who is in charge.

Mr. Zuckerberg has always kept a direct hand in controlling the way the Facebook site works, his associates and advisers say, refusing early on to clutter the news feed with advertising. He tweaked the site constantly, sometimes even earning the ire of users, as when it suddenly made some information that people had made visible only to friends available for all to see. That misstep ultimately prompted the Federal Trade Commission to cite Facebook for engaging in deceptive business practices. Mr. Zuckerberg issued a personal apology, admitting to mistakes.

“Better done than perfect” was how Mr. Zuckerberg described his philosophy on products in Facebook’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

One former Facebook engineer described Mr. Zuckerberg as having taken on a role similar to the one Mr. Jobs held at Apple. Everyone understood that Facebook was his creation, and that he would have the final say over what it would become.

A few years ago, for example, a small team at the company worked long and hard on building a social calendar feature, the engineer recalled. They talked about it for weeks, until the day when they suddenly stopped. The engineer asked what had happened to the project. “Zuck said no,” they told him. “Killed it. Not modified it. Killed it.”

Just as remarkable, he recalled, no one seemed especially upset. “We all sort of viewed Facebook as a manifestation of Zuck’s taste, his idea, his vision,” the engineer said. “When he made a decision, that was the decision.” The engineer did not want to be identified ahead of the public offering.

To Mr. Zuckerberg’s advantage, Facebook grew fast and became so valuable that its chief executive’s influence could not be challenged.

“Mark has retained nearly absolute control over his board of directors,” said Joe Green, a former roommate at Harvard who now runs Causes, which has a popular Facebook application. “Facebook would have been sold a zillion times over if not for Mark. Especially as you hire older people with direct financial needs, you get a lot of pressure to get liquidity. But you need Zen-like self-confidence to turn down a billion-dollar acquisition offer.”

By all accounts, one of the most critical decisions Mr. Zuckerberg made was to defer a public offering for as long as possible. He did not want to get bogged down with regulatory requirements and, improbably enough given his site’s bread and butter, sharing the details of his company’s workings.

David Sacks, who was at PayPal when it went public, remembers what happened there: employees obsessed over the value of their stock and executives worried about making quarterly earnings targets. “You would rather be a pre-I.P.O. company than post-I.P.O.,” Mr. Sacks said.

After Mr. Zuckerberg’s I.P.O., it seems highly unlikely that he will take his billions and leave Facebook. The company’s filing gives Mr. Zuckerberg the authority to designate his successor “in the event that Mr. Zuckerberg controls our company at the time of his death.”

On Wednesday night, hours after the filing, a photo was posted on his Facebook page. It showed his desk, with an open Mac laptop, a yellow Gatorade bottle and a sign that read: “Stay focused and keep shipping.”

Reporting was contributed by Evelyn M. Rusli, Quentin Hardy, Nicole Perlroth and Nick Wingfield.

Mark Zuckerberg seems on the face of it as annoying as his character in Social Network, just as rude and devious and adolescent. But he has done it all himself, it seems, determinedly steering clear of an IPO which might tie his hands until now.

Let’s hope he does not regret it.

But lies stay on Web, ruining reputation

David Carr, ex-drug addict (Night of the Gun, Simon and SChuster, 2008) and one of the few genuinely unique characters on the Times, tells the story today of a female blogger out of control who published outrageous libel and slander on the Web about someone she had never met, yet even though she has now lost a civil case and damages of millions have been awarded, the huge pile of false statements she engineered on the Web with multiple URLs now fills google and there appears to be little the victim can do about it.

THE MEDIA EQUATION: When Truth Survives Free Speech By DAVID CARR Published: December 11, 2011

When Truth Survives Free Speech
By DAVID CARR
Last week, a story came across my desk that seemed to suggest that a blogger had been unfairly nailed with a $2.5 million defamation award after a judge refused to give her standing as a journalist. A businessman who was the target of the blogger’s inquiries brought the suit.

I went to work on a blog post, filled with filial umbrage, saddened that the Man once again had used a boot heel to crush truth and free speech. But after doing a little reporting, I began to think that what scanned as an example of a rich businessman using the power of the courts to silence his critic was actually something else: a case of a blogger using the Web in unaccountable ways to decimate the reputation of someone who didn’t seem to have it coming.

The ruling on whether she was a journalist in the eyes of the law turned out to be a MacGuffin, a detail that was very much beside the point. She didn’t so much report stories as use blogging, invective and search engine optimization to create an alternative reality. Journalists who initially came to her defense started to back away when they realized they weren’t really in the same business.

On the surface, it seemed that the blogger, Crystal Cox, was doing the people’s work. A blogger and real estate agent in Montana who spent a lot of time fighting with the National Association of Realtors, Ms. Cox took an interest a few years ago in the bankruptcy of Summit Accommodators, an intermediary company in Bend, Ore., that held cash to complete property exchanges. The company went belly up and a federal grand jury indicted three senior executives — a fourth pleaded guilty — charging them with conspiring to defraud clients of millions.

Kevin D. Padrick, a lawyer in Oregon, was appointed as trustee in the case after the company entered bankruptcy. Prompted by the postings of someone whom Mr. Padrick was going after to recover assets — the daughter of one of the men who was indicted — Ms. Cox began suggesting in her blog posts that Mr. Padrick had used inside information and illegal measures to take control of the remaining assets and enrich himself.

In a long-running series of hyperbolic posts, she wrote that Mr. Padrick and his company, the Obsidian Finance Group, had engaged in bribery, tax fraud, money laundering, payoffs and theft, among other things. Her one-woman barrage did not alter the resolution of the Summit affair, but it was effective in ruining Mr. Padrick.

In a phone interview, he told me his business as a financial adviser had dropped by half since Ms. Cox started in on him, and any search of his name or his company turned up page after page on Google detailing his supposed skullduggery, showing up under a variety of sites, including Bend Oregon News, Bankruptcy Corruption, and Northwest Tribune.

As it turned out, all of the allegations and almost all of the coverage in the case were coming from Ms. Cox, who churned URL’s and cut-and-pasted documents to portray Mr. Padrick as a “thug,” and a “thief” who “committed tax fraud” and who may have “hired a hit man” to kill her while engaging in “illegal and fraudulent activity.”

Here’s the problem. None of that was ever proved, nor was it picked up by other mainstream media outlets.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but there is nothing in Mr. Padrick’s professional history or the public record that I found to suggest he is any of those things. He was appointed as a trustee by the court, he was subjected to an F.B.I. background check, and there have been no criminal investigations into his conduct. About 85 percent of the funds have been returned to the creditors, which seems to be a good result.

Annie Buell, the chairwoman of the Official Unsecured Creditors Committee who was appointed by the United States Trustee’s Office, said in an interview by phone that there was no basis in fact for Ms. Cox’s scabrous postings about Mr. Padrick.

“He did a very good job for the creditors,” she said. “He was above-board, had all of his cards on the table and was competent and fair. If I ever was in the same situation again, he would be my first choice.” Lawyers I spoke with who had done business with Mr. Padrick used similar adjectives to describe him.

Mr. Padrick, a lawyer who is a member of the bar in four states and has never been disciplined or investigated from anything I could find, said he spent a lot of sleepless nights wondering how he ended up as Ms. Cox’s bête noire.

“A woman who I did not know, who had no connection to me or my company or with this case she has been making statements on, has turned my business life and personal life upside down,” he said. “Companies who are considering doing business with us do a routine search on Google and there is page after page of these allegations. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody.”

And it has. Ms. Cox, who calls herself an “investigative blogger,” has a broad range of conspiratorial/journalistic interests. She has written that Bruce Sewell, the general counsel of Apple, “aids and abets criminals”; that Jeffrey Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, is “a proven technology thief”; and that various Proskauer Rose lawyers have engaged in a pattern of “conspiracy.” And don’t get her started on the local officials in and around her hometown, Eureka, Mont.

When she gets in a fight with someone, she frequently responds by creating a domain with the person’s name, some allegation of corruption, or both. Many of the negative posts about Mr. Padrick appeared on obsidianfinancesucks.com and there are many more like it. In order to optimize visibility to Web crawlers, she often uses the full name and title of her target, and her Web sites are filled with links to her other sites to improve their search ranking. She has some 500 URLs at her disposal and she’s not afraid to use them.

“I have a gift for getting on top of search engines and I want to give voice to victims of the corrupt judicial system,” she said in an interview by phone. “The system wants to shut me up and they have been trying to for years.”

“I’m glad I lost the case, because it gives attention to what I have been doing,” she added, saying she doesn’t have money to hire an attorney — she represented herself in the defamation case — let alone $2.5 million to pay in damages. She plans to appeal.

She said she remained convinced that Mr. Padrick would be indicted, “even if I have to stay on it for the next decade.” But, as Forbes first pointed out following the verdict, she had been willing to negotiate a cease-fire.

“At this Point in my Life it is Time to Think of Me,” she wrote in a letter to Mr. Padrick’s lawyer, David Aman. “So I want to Let you know and Obsidian Finance that I am now offering PR Services and Search Engine Management Services starting at $2,500 a month,” she wrote, to promote “Law Firms” and “Finance Companies” and “to protect online reputations and promote businesses.”

What looked to be an unsubtle offer to holster her gun in exchange for a payoff was signed, “In Love and Light, Crystal Cox.”

Ms. Cox said that she sent that note in response to a request from Mr. Padrick’s attorney — Mr. Aman said he made no such inquiry — and that she was “not on trial for writing e-mails.”

In the pre-Web days, someone like Ms. Cox might have been one more obsessive in the lobby of a newspaper, waiting to show a reporter a stack of documents that proved the biggest story never told. The Web has allowed Ms. Cox to cut out the middleman; various blogs give voice to her every theory, and search algorithms give her work prominence.

Mr. Padrick, who had never met Ms. Cox and had no idea why she seemed intent on destroying him, sued her last January. Judge Marco Hernandez of United States District Court in Portland, Ore., threw out most of his claims of defamation, ruling that Ms. Cox’s posts were so over-the-top that no reasonable reader would conclude that she was making allegations of fact.

But Judge Hernandez did allow that a single post published on Christmas Day in 2010 charging all manner of criminal conduct could be read as containing “provable assertions of fact.” A one-day trial took place on Nov. 29, and after deliberating for 75 minutes, the jury awarded Obsidian $1 million and Mr. Padrick $1.5 million.

“I view our case as a blow for the First Amendment,” said Mr. Padrick. “If defamatory speech is allowed just because it is on the Internet, it cheapens the value of journalism and makes it less worthy of protection.”

Mr. Padrick signed off by reminding me that those who have been in conflict with Ms. Cox frequently find their names showing up in newly registered Web addresses. I’m thinking of buying RottenScoundrelDavidCarr.com as soon as I’m done typing.

Then again, I’ve got some institutional muscle when it comes to how I’m perceived on the Web. All Mr. Padrick had was his good reputation. Too bad there’s no algorithm to measure truth.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Like gossip, mud slinging on the Web leaves a permanent stain, until there is some kind of legislation to force Google and other sites to erase it, when and if that is possible.

Those who lined up a day and a half early for Black Friday sale items at the Best Buy at 86Street and Lexington in Manhattan were able to get $500 Sharp 42inch LCD TVs for $200, and others were able to buy PNY 16GB flash drives for $11.99 and Ultra SanDisk 16GB SDHC cards for $17.99, and 8GB for $9.99, instead of paying $39.99, $49.99 and $29.99 respectively two days later.

Cuts of 2/3rd may seem as deep as you can get, but according to a New York Times piece on Nov 24 – Friday’s Deals May Not Be the Best by Stephanie Clifford an AI expert, who teaches computer science at the University of Washington, has worked out that prices are actually lowest not on Black Friday but at the beginning of December.

Oren Etzioni writes articles about artificial intelligence for scholarly journals, is a renowned expert on data mining and gained fame when Microsoft paid $115 million for Farecast, an airline-ticket price predictor he founded.
Now, Professor Etzioni, who teaches computer science at the University of Washington, has directed his considerable intellect at the American ritual of shopping for bargains on Black Friday. After examining billions of prices of consumer electronics, he has decided to spend the busiest shopping day of the year scuba-diving in Bali.

Why? It is not until early December, Professor Etzioni’s research shows, that prices are likely to be the lowest for electronics, products that are among the biggest sellers on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

“The bottom line is, Black Friday is for the retailers to go from the red into the black,” he said. “It’s not really for people to get great deals on the most popular products.”

What the professor has determined with a complex computer algorithm for consumer electronics, others have found through less scientifically rigorous means for other products, including clothing and toys: despite all the ads that suggest otherwise, the lowest prices tend to come at other times of the year….

Following the approach of Farecast, now part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, the professor’s start-up company, Decide.com, studies current and historical prices, information about new models and rumors about new product introductions to figure out the best time to buy.

Type in the name of a product — a Soundcast SurroundCast speaker system, for instance. Decide.com will pull prices from around the Web, and tell you to buy or wait. In the SurroundCast case, it showed this week that prices were at $150 in early September and had now gone up to $160.

The verdict: wait. Decide.com said it was 96 percent confident that prices for the speaker system would drop within two weeks.

Introduced this summer, the Web site predicts prices for consumer electronics only, though Professor Etzioni says there are plans to expand to categories like cars and potentially even clothing in a couple of years….

For higher-end electronics, Mr. de Grandpre’s trends show, shoppers should wait until the week after Thanksgiving.

“Black Friday is about cheap stuff at cheap prices, and I mean cheap in every connotation of the word,” Mr. de Grandpre said. Manufacturers like Dell or HP will allow their cheap laptops to be discounted via retailers on that Friday, but they will reserve markdowns through their own sites for later.

“Their best promotions happen during Cyber Monday week,” he said, referring to the marketing name drummed up by online retailers for the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Did Decide.com agree with the laptop advice?

It did. A low-end Dell laptop had dropped to $249 at Amazon this week, and Decide said to buy it now. But for a more feature-heavy laptop, priced at $1,528 at Sears and $1,541 at PCNation, Decide said to wait, as it expected prices to stay flat or decline by up to $339 within two weeks.

In fact, in the period Dec 4-10 Best Buy ran the above PNY Flash Drives at full price, though a 4GB PNY with a different SKU number was only $5.99.

UPDATE: A New Secret Weapon for Electronics Shoppers -by Danon Darlin (December 6, 2011)

IF only shopping for electronics were as easy as buying a car.

There was a time not so long ago that buying a car was one of the worst shopping experiences. As you drove off the dealer’s lot, you couldn’t escape the feeling that you hadn’t gotten the best deal.

Then something changed that made shopping for a car almost, well, fun, like shopping is supposed to be.

That something was information. Much to the annoyance of the dealers, a car buyer could obtain reliable data on auto prices. For only a few dollars, Consumer Reports estimates what a dealer paid for the car and what, after a fair markup, the buyer should pay. A shopper often got enough information to know when it would be the best time to buy the car.

Buying a camera or a smartphone isn’t as easy because we lack information about prices. There is the illusion that the Internet has provided what we need to know about the prices, but that jumble of information makes any buying decision more confusing and anxiety producing.

The fact of the matter is, the shopper is not on a level playing field with the retailers and the manufacturers. They know, thanks to the Internet, more about you and your intentions than you could ever know about theirs. Every time you look at a product on a site, every time you buy a product online, you are providing valuable signals.

When companies scrape the Web and collect those billion of signals and sophisticated software collates the data and interprets it, you don’t stand a chance. It is just too difficult and expensive for you to gather all the information. And in any case, you probably lack the degree in mathematics and computer science needed to parse the data.

Yet nearly everything you spend money on is determined by the algorithms they create. The prices of your airline ticket and hotel room, even your rent, are determined this way. Electronics and other consumer goods are priced the same way.

Over the last few years, price comparison sites like Pricegrabber.com and Bizrate.com have proliferated. Google and Bing have started providing similar information. That neatly solved the where-to-buy problem.

Along came price tracking sites, like NexTag.com, that provide historical information. It is certainly useful to know where you can get a product for just a few dollars less, especially when those sites also calculate taxes and shipping costs for you.

Price-alert sites like FreePriceAlerts.com inform you by e-mail when the price of a coveted item drops. That all these services are available on mobile devices that you can use in stores to determine the best price has certainly made shoppers a lot smarter.

Perhaps the biggest consumer weapon arrived this year in the form of Decide.com. It is a Web site, and more recently an app for mobile devices, that collects and mines billions of transactions to determine what the best price is and whether there will be an even better price soon.

“It’s the first time when-to-buy is addressed,” said Mike Fridgen, Decide’s chief executive officer.

For example, Decide.com said last week with 81 percent confidence that the Panasonic Viera 50-inch plasma TV (model TC-P50S30), a popular model, would drop within the next two weeks. It also predicted, with 62 percent confidence, that a new model would come along within three months.

Scoff if you will, but a week before Thanksgiving, Decide.com was advising shoppers to hold off buying a 16-gigabyte iPad because it predicted a price drop. Apple did lower the price of that model by $41 on Black Friday, the big shopping day that follows Thanksgiving.

Then again, it suggested you would be safe to buy the 64-gigabyte model before Thanksgiving, but Apple lopped $61 off the price on Black Friday.

“We are not clairvoyants,” said Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer science professor who co-founded Decide. “We give consumers visibility.”

Decide is run by many of the same people who built Farecast, a site that gave consumers a fighting chance against the airlines, which are constantly changing prices to match demand.

“Consumers have no access to big data,” said Mr. Etzioni, who also founded Farecast.

After he sold Farecast to Microsoft for $115 million — it is now part of the Bing search engine — Mr. Etzioni went looking for another consumer problem to solve. He discovered that there was also considerable price volatility in electronics. Certainly, over the long term, the prices of electronics steadily drop. But during the shelf life of a new product, prices rise and fall. And, to Mr. Etzioni’s surprise, it was not random volatility. Companies were constantly changing prices to meet changing demand just like the airlines.

That meant his company’s computers could search the Web for prices of products — it looks at 10 billion of them in a 60-terabyte database — note changes and then look for patterns. It also searches for news reports and rumors in order to guess when new models may be coming out. Mr. Etzioni calls it “scaling information extraction.”

He said that Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, had recently stopped by his lab at the University of Washington and looked at Mr. Etzioni’s research. “He was surprised by the degree of volatility in consumer electronic prices, which reminded me just how unaware even the most savvy people are of the prevalence of dynamic pricing in consumer electronics,” he said.

“We really feel the industry needs an honest broker,” Mr. Etzioni said.

The access to big data and analytics improves how we make decisions. That this information is available on mobile devices only enhances its utility. The increased information transparency coupled with the use of smartphones in stores is driving a consumer revolution, said Mr. Fridgen, because it provides shoppers the information they need when and where they need it.

The balance of power has shifted, he says. Most retailers know that shoppers can easily find a better deal using their mobile devices. Almost half of American retailers have a policy allowing store personnel to negotiate prices, he says.

As the software gets more refined, the power relationship between consumers and the retailers and makers will change, although, Mr. Etzioni concedes, it will never really be a level playing field.

Guessing where prices are going is a big step forward. It was not easy, and it is still not complete. But Mr. Etzioni already has his eye on the next problem, which he says is even harder: a Web site that tells you what to buy. The decision-making process, it turns out, is remarkably complicated because he has to build an algorithm, a personalized “value formula,” that finds the sweet spot for each shopper. “Some people value some things more than others,” he said.

“What we really see, and I am very excited by this, is the increased transparency,” Mr. Etzioni said. “The inexorable trend is towards transparency.”

Sounds a little too much like stock market forecasting, which science has shown does not yet reliably do any better than dart throwing, regardless of what experts say.

But Decide.com is an attractive page with its advice to buy now or later and forecast of the price trend on anything tech you may be thinking of buying.

TripIt Pro Phone App, the mobile trip organizer from Concur, also winner

SHOWSTOPPERS: The consumer tech press in New York City has its holiday research done for it annually by Showstoppers, who collect some of the best upcoming Christmas hardware and software each year and show it off at tables in a hotel to the assembled hacks, their critical tendencies softened up by high quality hot snacks at several tables (beef with tangy sauce, pasta with mushroom sauce, mini egg rolls, roast beef, etc) with an array of drinks, generally ignored.

This year the bash at the Millennium Hotel just off Broadway on 44th Street towards Sixth was only a little smaller than some of the Showstoppers before the housing/WallStreet/global crash of vivid memory, but almost all of the offerings were worth noting.

In the order of tables from left to right:

Nuvyyo Inc jetstreamHD to “mobilize your media” ie transmit all digital media – video, somgs, photos – to your iPad (25% off off the list price of $199.99 USD until December 25, 2011 currently at www.jetstreamhd.com) (JetStreamHD is the world’s first Mobile Media Streamer on the market. JetStreamHD allows remote iPad users with a Wi-Fi or 3G connection to instantly access and view all of the digital content that is stored on their home network regardless of size, including movies, TV shows, songs, photos and more. The result is the most vivid HD viewing experience possible in any situation, without stuttering or freezing on a mobile device),

Audyssey speakers either in a pair or in one unit. Audyssey demoed its new Lower East Side Audio Dock Air, the company’s premium audio dock, which uses AirPlay to stream music wirelessly anywhere in the home. On the hardware side the Audyssey speakers seem very promising, though it was hard to tell given the uproar that surrounded them, exactly what their quality of sound was. Audyssey’s algorithms are used in everything from IMAX to Denon home theater, and with acceptable spatial volume shrinking every year, better algorithms are more and more necessary. The all in one unit (two tweeters, two mid range, two “passive bass radiators”) was a chunk of black gold, sonically, as far as one could tell: deep firm bass without being hard or unnatural, the “passive bass radiators” being “guaranteed to play deeper bass than anything its size.”. Labelled rather intriguingly the Lower East Side Audio Dock Air, it streams Apple AirPlay anywhere in the house from all the iSources including iTunes from any PC and Apple TV.

Pretty cases for phones etc from Otterbox

HP with a touch screen desktop and colorful Netbooks at every price point, now with the sad gap which the Touchpad used to fill.

E FUN touch screen premium Nextbook Android tablet computers and Apple-compatible APEN Digital Pens to digitize handwritten notes and drawings for work, school, and leisure.

a 360 degrees lens which attaches to your phone for circle panorama video,

Excellent fold-under keyboards for iPads from Logitech, among its latest accessories, including the newest Logitech tablet line-up and the new Wireless Solar Keyboard K750 for Mac.

Kent Displays / Improv Electronics offered replacements for pen and paper in the form of Boogie Board Rip™ LCD Writing Tablets,the newest eWriter from Improv Electronics that combines a paper-like writing experience with the ability to record your written and drawn images and upload them to your computer for editing, organizing, archiving and sharing.

System Mechanic PC clean up software (recently awarded not one but three prizes in Abu Dhabi) from Iolo, iolo technologies which has the newest version of System Mechanic, the #1 best-selling PC performance software, backed by new research results from busy iolo Labs on file fragmentation and program misalignment.

Lifeproof waterproof iPhone cases (happily residing at the bottom a three small full aquaria, one cohabiting with a salamander), which preserve the iPhone intact in six feet of water and when dropped six feet to the ground, not to mention have glass lens so that the quality of the iPhone 4 camera is preserved too,

Sideline’s very light and portable extra screen for a PC (and soon, they hope, for an iPhone), Zerochroma cases with handles for iPad (Vario-SC for iPad 2) and iPhone (Teatro-S for iPhone 4/4S)(Vario-SC for iPad 2. A triple-function case, the Vario-SC protects the back and sides of the iPad 2, while enabling multiple viewing angles in lap-mode (with Apple Smart Cover), table-mode and handle-mode. Unique to ZeroChroma cases is the super-slim, built-in, rotating Theater-Stand™, enabling users to aim the screen in almost any direction. With 11 angles in both portrait and landscape modes, it significantly enhances both productivity and comfort. Vario-SC also features a textured anti-slip surface, making the iPad easy to hold and stay secure on any surface. For users of the Apple Smart Cover, the Vario-SC is the perfect companion case. When used together, the pair provides full coverage while enabling multi-angle, any-orientation viewing. The Vario-SC is available at www.zerochroma.com in black and white for $49.95, and Verizon online and other retailers this Fall.)

Finally, TripIt Pro the mobile trip organizer from Concur (www.concur.com)

PLUS:

Nuvyyo, your own cloud server: Allows you to use your mobile device anywhere in the world to enjoy and show off every video, song and photo you own. The JetStreamHD enables iPad users to access and stream any video, song, or photo from their home network while traveling or visiting colleagues, friends and family, without upfront planning, conversion headaches, download time, sync hassles, or iPad memory limits.

More 99c Touchpads coming!

Is Ballmer the big fly in the ointment at Microsoft, a huge company with vast resources that has missed the boat ever since the Cloud appeared – actually ever since the cell phone appeared.

Steve Chen reports that at least one heavyweight investor thinks so.

Here’s the champion quote from the Master of Microsoft, which launched tablets as large and heavy as laptops in the early 2000s and then just sat there as touch screens became available. It concerns the iPhone, when Ballmet encountered it before it launched in 2007:

That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine,” Ballmer said in a January 2007 interview with CNBC. “I kinda look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot.

So what are we left with in 2011, as Microsoft’s decline continues? Surpassed by both IBM and Apple now in terms of market value, and the world moving away from desktops and Microsoft’s relatively meaningless “simplification” upgrades of OS’s that shoud have worked better in the first place, nothing much more fruitful than a desktop software company for outdated equipment, the big and heavy desktop PC.

But then Bill Gates never had an original idea in his head that ever went anywhere, ever since he proved his coding genius by running across town and buying DOS to con a big order from IBM. He proved it again with his laughably blindeyed book about the future, The Road Ahead.

The most annoying thing about late stage capitalism as exhibited in the US is that a cheating monopoly appears to be the most profitable enterprise still, just as it was in the robber baron days a century ago.

Even Apple seems to be falling into this mode, as the reliability of its devices – the whole point of its vertical strategy – seems to be declining month by month, judging from the genius lines at the Apple stores.

But no one can gainsay the simpleminded genius of Jobs in demanding his engineers work on his nerd fantasies, which he dreams when faced with a new item like the touch screen.

The really interesting question is, why is a Steve Jobs so rare? Soon we won’t have even one of thm, judging from his sadly spare appearance.

HP runs for dry land

Now we have the new CEO of HP, Leo Apotheker, announcing the shocking news that HP, the king of personal computers in that it sells more than anyone else, is abandoning the kingdom in order to chase IBM and profits in corporate territory. So a new guy comes in from SAP which is a business software company he revamped and decided to revamp HP into a totally different company? Sounds like stupidity to us.

Profits are not there for HP, it seems, as the desktop PC turned into a commodity with dwindling sales numbers as ultraportability reigns. But to write off such a huge investment in so many shiny machines and a leading position seems prima facie a desperate move partillay fueled by lack of faith on one’s staff in the face of Apple’s steamroller, especially when one walks around Best Buy and sees how big HP’s footprint is there.

Well, we could always read the writing on one wall as we tied up the phone lines to the support people and had three visits to fix our own HP desktop, the s3500t with Vista Home Premium, which as a matter of fact we rather like.

But that’s no way for HP to stay in business, having innumerable Phillipino and Indians politely answering your call whenever anything goes wrong, and putting you on hold while they look up the answer in their manual, which they are not often familiar with, and then send a repair guy out to your site with a replacement part after first trying to get you to take the machine cover off and reseat cables and other parts. But the buyer satisfaction was sure tops.

The TouchPad giveaway!

The a second stunner. Not only promising a wholesale retreat from its hard won (expensively paid for with the $1.2 billion CHECK purchase of Compaq) PC kingdom, Apotheker also retreated from the smartphone market and dumped his shiny new Touchpad after only seven weeks of marketing after a year or more of development what was the only potential rival to the iPad, though it couldn’t yet compete on speed, or applications available- 300 compared with 400,000.

Priced the same as the iPad it was bound to go under. But at $99 for 16GB and $149 32GB version, the lines were around the store at Best Buy till the last one left was sold today (Thursday Aug 25).

We snagged a 16GB at 86th St after three hours in a line where we were one ahead of Bill Robinson, an ebullient fellow who claimed to be columnist for Ariana Huffington, as their token conservative. But we could not find him at that vast site.

Update Sep 5: There are reports (stemming from a blog by HP spokesman Mark Bludgell and notified by Nicholas Kolakowski at eweek on Aug 30 atHP TouchPad Revived Zombie-Style for Limited Run) that HP will produce another last run of TouchPads “in a few weeks” to satisfy huge demand for the tablet at these same price levels, though the devise is said to costs $340 to produce. Maybe it sees some kind of future for WebOS after all, thus getting something back oin its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm. Earlier Apotheker did claim to be adding WebOS to all its desktops and computers in 2012.

Keep an eye on Blodgell’s blog at More TouchPads on the Way and on twitter at
Bryna (@BrynaatHP) and Mark (@MarkatHP) for timing.

To our taste the original machines were classic in design and the current offerings with their fashionable curves a little less pleasing visually, but the internal works still stand out as easy to operate and just as easy to trouble shoot if a line comes disconnected or some other minor hitch develops.

Among the facilities offered are individual ring patterns for master and extension lines .

Any problems are self-diagnosed by the OOMA device which presents an individual array of lights on its buttons signalling the problem (keep the manual by to interpret these). Thus if the top two buttons are lit orange-red the problem is that the device is not connecting to the OOMA network, as it didn’t today (for only the second time in four years).

We have had OOMA premier installed for four years with its little extension device (for a second line with a second number) and have grown to rely on its pleasing blue lights which signify that it is ready to do everything that you need in 21st Century phone service.

Messages are taken by and accessible on each machine, master and extension, as well as voice mail accessible from any phone.

The only lacks we find are that 800 numbers will not always go through – the response may be a message to try again later, which is invalid. In that case a land line is needed, which is not the case for 911 calls.