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Spencer wondered if eWeek would foot the bill if he flew to Prague to check out Czech President Vaclav Havels rage firsthand. Havel is attempting to sue the owner of a porn site named after his wife, Dagmar. The subscription site reportedly offers sexual acts featuring a dead ringer for the Czech Republics First Lady. “Lets hope they call in WIPO before they need NATO,” groused the geopolitical Grimalkin.
The Puss had to ponder the departure last week of Thomas Meredith, one-time chief financial officer and senior vice president of Dell. Meredith surprised analysts earlier this month with predictions that Dell would be “ruthless” in future cost cutting. The Kitty cant help but wonder if the remark contributed to his departure. Officially, he left to spend more time with his family and to work in politics. But it should be noted that Meredith made the “ruthless” comment May 3—only weeks after Chairman and founder Michael Dell promised on local television no more layoffs would follow the 1,700 job cuts earlier this year. On May 7, Dell said that 3,000 to 4,000 more jobs would be cut.
“It doesnt take a psychic hot line to fill in the rest,” cackled the clairvoyant Kitty.
Will Microsoft and IBM rekindle an old relationship? A Deep Blue tipster tells Spence that IBM really is going to have a port of Microsofts upcoming XP running on the Power PC. “No way,” said Spence, “those two havent gone out on a date since 1997.” “Way,” said the source. “Youll see in October.”
Just when it seemed that the Hewlett-Packard OpenView folks were finally getting traction with their VantagePoint brand name, a Katt crony informs the Kitty that the company is pulling the plug on the effort. The VantagePoint rebranding move was an attempt to consolidate product names among the OpenView performance management and availability management product lines. At the launch, officials said they wanted to “present a cleaner message to the market.”
“Mmm, I wonder how the market will perceive their current message,” mused the Mouser.
It looks like the recently touted Sun ONE architecture is getting a much-needed endorsement of sorts. According to a friend of the Furball, iPlanet (formerly known as the Sun-Netscape Alliance) and supply chain company i2 hope to work directly with Sun to provide an integrated services package by next fall. Besides lending credibility to the Sun ONE initiative, i2s future forays into CRM territory can only look to benefit from a deal with iPlanet.
El Gato heard from some geeky pals that somebody leaked the beta test site info for Windows XP last week. Supposedly, the leaked info allowed thousands of Nosey Parkers to download the latest interim build of the future Windows product. The Windows beta site reportedly shut down after being overrun by unauthorized users for more than 7 hours. Whether the shutdown was due to strain on the site or because Redmond realized the site was being overrun by unauthorized users is unconfirmed.
How the information, which should have been known only to authorized beta testers, was leaked is also unknown. Its assumed that once the cat was out of the bag, instant messaging most likely helped spread the pirated passwords so quickly.