Katt Channels Dirty Hairy

From: spencer_katt@ziffdavis.com

Sent: Monday, March 7, 2005 12:53 AM

To: eWEEK readers

Subject: A Clint of recognition; grin and Barrett; pressing his pants

"Go ahead, make Craigs day," mumbled the Mouser as he watched a skywriter etch "Turion" above San Franciscos skyline.

Turion is AMDs name for its upcoming family of mobile AMD64 chips—probably not exactly what outgoing Intel CEO Craig Barrett wanted to see during the Intel Developer Forum.

Maybe it was Clint Eastwoods recent Oscar win for directing or the news that Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment had signed the actor to lend his voice and likeness to an upcoming "Dirty Harry" video game for next-gen consoles, but the role-playing Rumormonger was in a Clint state of mind as he entered Moscone West.

"Would I have liked Itanium to have ramped faster? Duh!" deadpanned Barrett during his keynote, which, as usual for the exec, slammed U.S. schools.

Faster than you could say, "IBM dropped Itanium," a fellow attendee told Spence that Bill Gates had also critiqued U.S. education in a speech to the National Governors Association the day before.

"Of course, this is from a guy whose Microsoft TechFest touted a robotic teddy bear prototype to baby-sit children via a camera phone and wireless Internet connection," laughed the latchkey Lynx.

At the Thirsty Bear across from the Moscone, Spence tossed a couple back with a crony, who told him Salesforce.coms next update to its hosted CRM services, set for May, is supposed to be heavy on reliability and stability improvements.

Despite rumor-mill rumblings that some users have experienced sporadic outages, the company claims a 99.9 percent uptime for the hosted offering.

The crony also heard that Samsung, which just issued a dismal earnings forecast, expects its reps to tote a Samsung phone—after buying it themselves.

"You improvise, adapt, overcome," cackled the Kitty, still channeling his Magnum Force.

Spence asked his friend if hed seen the brouhaha over a faux screenshot on the Web that appears to be Microsofts AntiSpyware program fingering Mozillas Firefox browser as spyware.

"It was posted as a joke on Zeropaid.com and was taken seriously at first by several tech news sites," said the pal. "Speaking of which, I have a cool new blog at blog.ziffdavis.com/katt," puffed the Puss With No Shame, pulling the stub of a thin cigar out of his mouth.

The crony said hed heard that Masao Nakamaru, president of Japans NTT DoCoMo, is so proficient with a handset that once during a meeting he sent a text message to an engineer without taking the phone out of his pocket.

"Do you think you have enough finesse to try trouser texting?" asked the Furballs friend. "A mans got to know his limitations," grinned the Grimalkin, still lost in his Eastwoodian blur.