Carol Bartz was fired Tuesday as Yahoo Inc.’s CEO by the Web portal’s board of directors.
The company says Bartz will be replaced by Chief Financial officer Timothy Morse on an interim basis.
When Apple needed someone to fill in for Steve Jobs, it chose COO Tim Cook. Any company that puts the CFO in charge feels like it is in trouble.
Apple rumor headline of the day:
iPad 3 to Carry Thinner and Lighter Battery?
Hm.
There are driving and flying experiences for all kinds of wheeled and winged machines, but what’s been missing? Obviously, a place to play with heavy machinery to relive the sandbox fantasies of one’s youth. Leave it to Las Vegas to fill the void with Dig This, a giant dirt pit where anyone at least 14 years old and 48 inches tall can pay a fee to spend hours pretending to do the kind of job many people would rather avoid.
At your disposal are some of Caterpillar’s finest: three 15-ton excavators and two 10-ton bulldozers. After a bit of classroom instruction, you’ll be led to your workhorse for some in-cab instruction. Then, depending on which of the three ‘experiences’ you’ve purchased, you have anywhere from 1.5 to 3 hours to perfect your earthmoving technique.’
Noting its poor stock performance, lack of innovation and loss of market share, Jaguar Financial is leading the charge to have something done at RIM.
In a statement on Tuesday, Jaguar Chairman and CEO Vic Alboini called on RIM’s Directors to maximize shareholder value. This includes putting the company up for sale and selling off the patent portfolio.
With an 80 percent decline in stock value since 2008, I think stockholders are probably ready for something to change.
I would have though Apple would be installing its own server network to handle the workload rather than farming it out. At the same time, Apple may be focusing on the iCloud service and meeting user needs than building out its own network. If iCloud proves to be really popular we may see Apple roll out its own network down the road.
I never thought Apple would stuff that North Carolina data center full of Apple-branded gear. The company has never had a strong enterprise presence outside of educational markets. For iCloud to be successful — and for Apple to overcome the MobileMe stigma — the service has to run well, from day one. Third-party hardware is key to that goal.
I’ve always wondered about the future of technology. While I’ve never been a flying car kind of guy, I do look forward to technology becoming more integrated in our lives.
A simple way I see this happening is being able to deal with my computers in natural language processing.
This dream is an old one. The foundations of NLP can be found back in the 1950s. Apple explored this topic with the “Knowledge Navigator” project. Here’s a video from Apple, outlining the concept:
Now, speaking with computers hasn’t panned out as well as the writers behind Star Trek would have liked. NLP is still mostly text-based.
Calendaring applications have gotten the most NLP love in recent months. With Lion, iCal gained NLP, and apps like Fantastical and Alert Notes have become quite popular.
These applications can take something like this string of text and turn it into an event or reminder:
Meeting with Jeff at 6PM Sunday
When adding events to a calendar, natural language is much easier than clicking around a bunch of menu items within iCal.
With lots of voice-command-related rumors floating around about iOS 5, I’m hoping natural language is about to take off in an all new way for iOS.
Android, of course, has offered voice-control for some time now. It’s the single thing I miss the most about carrying around a Motorola Droid. Being able to pick up my phone and dictate a text message, search command or something else wasn’t only futuristic, but made using my phone in places like the car much safer.
But the pretending to be Spock was way more fun.
Jacqui Cheng at Ars is a genius.
MG Siegler got his hands on the Amazon tablet. From what he describes, it sounds like a killer product. Thankfully, it is expected to be sold alongside traditional e-ink Kindle readers.
This part is especially telling:
They are not working with Google on this. At all.
It’s clear Amazon wants to control its own destiny here. Which is good.
File this under “WTF.”
People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society. The preservation of our cultural heritage may not seem to be as politically sensitive an issue as “when life begins” or “when it should be appropriately terminated,” but it is important because it goes to the heart of what sets mankind apart. Creative expression is at the core of our humanness. Art is a distinctly human endeavor. We must have respect for it if we are to have any respect for the human race.
These current defacements are just the beginning. Today, engineers with their computers can add color to black-and-white movies, change the soundtrack, speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder. Tommorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with “fresher faces,” or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor’s lips to match. It will soon be possible to create a new “original” negative with whatever changes or alterations the copyright holder of the moment desires. The copyright holders, so far, have not been completely diligent in preserving the original negatives of films they control. In order to reconstruct old negatives, many archivists have had to go to Eastern bloc countries where American films have been better preserved.
In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be “replaced” by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.
There is nothing to stop American films, records, books, and paintings from being sold to a foreign entity or egotistical gangsters and having them change our cultural heritage to suit their personal taste.
Say what you will about this piece, I don’t think Steve Jobs is doing anywhere near the amount of good someone like Bill Gates is.