The viral amusement item of the day is this dry erase board photo presentation by a cute young thing allegedly composed and sent to co-workers on the occasion of her quitting her job.

If the story really is on the up-and-up, I would guess that it will quickly attract new job offers. I have my doubts though. She is too pretty, and the storyline is too pat.

From the Chive.

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UPDATE, a few minutes later.

As predicted, it was a hoax. These perfect little gems that completely fit our expectations always are.
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Another UPDATE, a few more minutes later.

But, wait! Prankster brother tells Media Memo, No, no, “Jenny’s very real.” An update is promised for tomorrow. “Jenny” may be appearing on Jay Leno and Good Morning, America.

Darth Jobs in mufti

Blogging is the kind of ivory tower intellectual activity resembling college that seems to take place at one level of remove from ordinary reality. Bloggers don’t really typically think of themselves as possible subjects of police raids and lawsuits by giant corporations.

And that is, doubtless, why Gizmodo thought that purchasing an iPhone prototype lost in a Redwood City bar and reviewing the prototype would not be a major problem as long as they offered to give the prototype back to Apple in the end.

Clearly, they did not reckon with the rather old-fashioned kind of influence large employer corporations have over certain California counties. (Who even knew that the San Mateo county sheriff’s office possessed a “Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team?”)

I recall thinking myself that, yes, Gizmodo can just give back the prototype, and Apple cannot really prove damages from Gizmodo’s story, so the whole incident will simply fade away, but that theory failed to take into account Apple’s corporate cult of secrecy and and the propensity of Apple management (Steve Jobs) to be vindictive.

CNET:

Police have seized computers and servers belonging to an editor of Gizmodo in an investigation that appears to stem from the gadget blog’s purchase of a lost Apple iPhone prototype.

Deputies from the San Mateo County Sheriff’s office obtained a warrant on Friday and searched Jason Chen’s Fremont, Calif., home later that evening, Gizmodo acknowledged on Monday.

In an article on Friday, CNET was the first to report on the criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the iPhone prototype and Gizmodo’s acquisition of it, including that Apple had contacted local police. A San Mateo County judge signed the search warrant, which said a felony crime was being investigated, a few hours later.

“When I got home, I noticed the garage door was half-open,” according to an account by Chen. “And when I tried to open it, officers came out and said they had a warrant to search my house and any vehicles on the property ‘in my control.’ They then made me place my hands behind my head and searched me to make sure I had no weapons or sharp objects on me.”

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told CNET on Monday: “This is such an incredibly clear violation of state and federal law it takes my breath away. The only thing left for the authorities to do is return everything immediately and issue one of hell of an apology.”

Dalglish said that the San Mateo County search warrant violated the federal Privacy Protection Act, which broadly immunizes news organizations from searches—unless, in some cases, the journalists themselves committed the crime. The 1980 federal law requires police to use subpoenas to obtain information instead of search warrants, she said.

Editors at Gizmodo, part of Gawker Media’s blog network, last week said they paid $5,000 for what they believed to be a prototype of a future iPhone 4G. The story said the phone was accidentally left at a bar in Redwood City, Calif., last month by an Apple software engineer and found by someone who contacted Gizmodo, which had previously indicated that it was willing to pay significant sums for unreleased Apple products.

CNET has not been able to confirm whether the investigation is targeting Gizmodo, the source who reportedly found the iPhone in a bar, or both. Apple has acknowledged that the lost device is its property. Calls to law enforcement sources on Monday were not immediately returned.

Gizmodo said on Monday:

Last Friday night, California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team entered editor Jason Chen’s home without him present, seizing four computers and two servers. They did so using a warrant by Judge of Superior Court of San Mateo. According to Gaby Darbyshire, COO of Gawker Media LLC, the search warrant to remove these computers was invalid under section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code.

Darbyshire was referring to the portion of California law that prevents judges from signing warrants that target writers for newspapers, magazines, or “other periodical publications.”

In 2006, a California appeals court ruled that the definition of “periodical publication” protects Web logs. “We can think of no reason to doubt that the operator of a public Web site is a ‘publisher’ for purposes of this language…News-oriented Web sites… are surely ‘like’ a newspaper or magazine for these purposes,” the court concluded.

The federal newsroom search law known as the Privacy Protection Act is broader. It says that even journalists suspected of committing a crime are immune from searches—if, that is, the crime they’re suspected of committing relates to the “receipt” or “possession” of illegal materials. (Two exceptions to this are national security and child pornography.)

The police hauled away three Apple laptops, a Samsung digital camera, a Seagate 500 GB external hard drive, USB flash drives, a HP MediaSmart server, a 32GB Apple iPad, an 16GB iPhone, and an IBM ThinkPad, according to documents that Gizmodo posted.

My liberal classmates rant and rave regularly about the nefarious behavior of Wall Street banks and big corporations, but in their eyes government can do no wrong (as long as Republicans are not in charge).

Coyote reflects on the strangeness of the statist perspective.

I have total sympathy with those who distrust corporations. Distrust and skepticism are fine things, and are critical foundations to individual responsibility. History proves that market mechanisms tend to weed out bad behaviors, but sometimes these corrections can take time, and in the mean time its good to watch out for oneself.

However, I can’t understand how these same people who distrust the power of large corporations tend to throw all their trust and faith into government. The government tends to have more power (it has police and jails after all, not to mention sovereign immunity), is way larger, and the control mechanisms and incentives that supposedly might check bad behavior in governments seldom work.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

The bar in Redwood City

Poor Gray Powell, a 27 year old software engineer working at Apple, inadvertently left his prototype of the next iPhone on a bar stool at Gourmet Haus Staudt, a German beer garden in Redwood City.

Steve Jobs is probably going to roast Gray over a slow fire, because that next generation iPhone was picked up by a guy sitting nearby, who tinkered with it and found a new iPhone camouflaged in an old iPhone package. After a few weeks, he sold it to Gizmodo (who paid $4000, some say $10K).

Gizmodo got its money’s worth, having a great deal of fun analyzing what’s different technically and in the design of the new prototype (and scoring off Apple’s notorious secrecy policy concerning new products).

They awarded the prototype excellent reviews. The new design was sturdier and more attractive, and the new model has a bigger battery and spectacularly sharper resolution.

Now, we get to sit back and see what Apple does to Gizmodo.

The Oldest College Daily reports:

Information Technology Services administrators plan to join with Google Apps for Education to bring students, faculty and employees the Gmail e-mail service by the end of this month, said an undergraduate member of the Student Technology Collaborative who asked to remain anonymous because of ITS policy. The service, tentatively called “Bulldogs,” will also offer users a suite of tools for communication and collaboration — including Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs. The new interface will look like the standard Gmail layout, but without advertisements, the student said.

The Gmail-based service will gradually replace the University’s current e-mail client, Horde, the student said. The incoming class of 2014 will be the first to go directly to the new Google system, and current freshmen and sophomores will have to make the switch. Upperclassmen will have the option of keeping Horde, but the University plans to phase out Horde by spring of next year, the student said.

Planning for “Bulldogs” did not include computer science faculty, computer science professor Michael Fischer said, adding that he and his colleagues have not yet discussed the transition with ITS administrators.

“It’s a complicated issue, and I’ve just learned about the plans for the switch myself,” Fischer said. “They’re certainly not finalized yet, and we’re going to be holding discussions over the next few days to work things out.”

The transition to Google Apps will also give users more storage capacity — 7.4 gigabytes — than the two gigabytes that the University’s Pantheon data storage system currently offers, the student said. Students and faculty will be able to upload any file smaller than one gigabyte to the Gmail server and share it with other users. With Pantheon, students can upload files of no more than 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte.

Another student tech, who also asked to remain anonymous, said switching data to Google Apps would save Yale 12 gigabytes of on-site storage per student, totalling tens of thousands of gigabytes’ worth of data.

“Now [Yale] can host it all off-site and allow Google to maintain it for them,” the second student said in an e-mail. “The extra space can be reallocated or shut down to save money.”

Yale’s in-house disc space will then be given to only faculty or graduate students who need large amounts of data storage for academic purposes, the first student said.

Another factor in the decision to make the switch, the student said, was Gmail’s user-friendly interface.

“Since settings for ‘Bulldogs’ will be identical to Gmail settings, e-mail forwarding and the use of e-mail clients (such as Thunderbird or Outlook) will be easy,” the second student said in an e-mail.

I’m so old that I can remember the days when IT at Yale consisted of playing Star Trek and Adventure on a PDP-10.

Bruno Ganz’s portrayal of everyone’s favorite demented dictator chewing the carpet in Oliver Hirschbiegal’s “Der Untergang” (2004) is becoming a reliable vehicle for parody subtitling.

This time Der Fuehrer is displeased with some of the limitations of the Ipad.

3:59 video

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Personally, I thought the recent version depicting news of Scott Brown defeating Martha Coakley reaching the bunker was a good deal funnier.

Which version of Win7 do you need? CNET explains the options featured by the four different editions, varying in price from $119.00 to $219.99.

Win7 Launch Party video (Don’t watch it!)

Charlie Booker, at the Guardian, knows that Windows sucks, but explains that he still hates Mac and Mac users more.

Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible. Trying to get it to do anything was like issuing instructions to a depressed employee over a sluggish satellite feed. When I clicked on an application it spent a small eternity contemplating the philosophical implications of opening it, begrudgingly complying with my request several months later. It drove me up the wall. I called it a bastard and worse. At one point I punched a table. ...

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That’s why Windows works for me. But I’d never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, “Hey, have you considered Windows?” Not in the real world at any rate.

Until now. Microsoft, hellbent on tackling the conspicuous lack of word-of-mouth recommendation, is encouraging people – real people – to host “Windows 7 launch parties” to celebrate the 22 October release of, er, Windows 7. The idea is that you invite a group of friends – your real friends – to your home – your real home – and entertain them with a series of Windows 7 tutorials.

Win 7 Launch Party video: A very serious contender for lamest (interminable at 6:14) video ever made.

Read the whole thing.

Charles Gasperino, in the New York Post, describes how a large portion of the New York financial industry’s senior management fell for Barack Obama’s tone of moderation and failed to look at the democrat candidate’s actual political record. They’re sorry now, experiencing the Obama Administration’s economic naïveté and unrelenting commitment to leftwing radicalism.

In the depths of the financial crisis last year, people like Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Greg Fleming (then of Merrill Lynch), JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein were telling everyone that candidate Barack Obama was a “moderate,” and moderation was what this country needed.

What a difference a year makes. They won’t admit it in public—but in private conversations, the top guys on Wall Street are feeling burned.

The guy who seemed like such a steady voice—vowing to curb runaway spending and restoring order to the banking system and the economy as a whole—is instead so driven to achieve his big-government policy goals that he and his policy people are ignoring their own economic advisers on the severe economic costs that his agenda will cause.

I’m told that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers have both complained to senior Wall Street execs that they have almost no say in major policy decisions. Obama economic counselor Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, is barely consulted at all on just about anything—not even issues involving the banking system, of which he is among the world’s leading authorities.

At most, the economic people and their staffs get asked to do cost analyses of Obama’s initiatives for the White House political people—who then ignore their advice.

It’s almost the opposite approach, the Wall Street crowd complains, from the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, whose main first-term achievement—deficit reduction—was crafted by his chief economic adviser, Robert Rubin.

Like Obama, Clinton and Rubin promised to raise taxes on the “rich,” and they did. But Clinton didn’t raise taxes to embark on a wild-eyed redistribution of wealth and massive programs. In the early Clinton years, Rubin convinced the president that he needed to avoid the grim consequences of runaway spending—and after the Republicans took Congress in ‘94, it was no longer an option.

Of course, the Clinton tax hikes came at a cost—before the tech boom ignited the economy in 1995, growth was mediocre at best. But government spending remained under control, and lower interest rates followed, as did an economic recovery.

Obama, according to Wall Street people who regularly deal with his economic and budget officials, is acting as if he has a blank check to do what he wants, while ignoring the longterm costs of his policies.

As one CEO of a major financial firm told me: “The economic guys say that when they explain the costs of programs, the policy guys simply thank them for their time and then ignore what they say.”

In other words, the economic people feel that they have almost no say in this administration’s policy decisions.

Warren Buffett spouts conventional pieties in the New York Times, but in the middle of Warren’s bromidal call for fiscal responsibility, the astute reader will find a shrewd assessment of what is really going to happen.

With government expenditures now running 185 percent of receipts, truly major changes in both taxes and outlays will be required. A revived economy can’t come close to bridging that sort of gap.

Legislators will correctly perceive that either raising taxes or cutting expenditures will threaten their re-election. To avoid this fate, they can opt for high rates of inflation, which never require a recorded vote and cannot be attributed to a specific action that any elected official takes. In fact, John Maynard Keynes long ago laid out a road map for political survival amid an economic disaster of just this sort: “By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens…. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

Warren Buffett’s share of the federal bailout

Rolfe Winkler so admired Warren Buffett’s old-fashioned market fundamentalism that, when he was a lad of fourteen, he wrote his idol a fan letter.

Winkler is not so admiring of the whited sepulchre of Omaha today.

Were it not for government bailouts, for which Buffett lobbied hard, many of his company’s stock holdings would have been wiped out.

Berkshire Hathaway, in which Buffett owns 27 percent, according to a recent proxy filing, has more than $26 billion invested in eight financial companies that have received bailout money. The TARP at one point had nearly $100 billion invested in these companies and, according to new data released by Thomson Reuters, FDIC backs more than $130 billion of their debt.

To put that in perspective, 75 percent of the debt these companies have issued since late November has come with a federal guarantee. ...

With $7 billion at stake, Buffett is one of the biggest of these shareholders.

He even traded the bailout, seeking morally hazardous profits in preferred stock and warrants of Goldman and GE because he had “confidence in Congress to do the right thing” — to rescue shareholders in too-big-to-fail financials from the losses that were rightfully theirs to absorb.

Keeping this in mind, I was struck by Buffett’s letter to Berkshire shareholders this year:

“Funders that have access to any sort of government guarantee — banks with FDIC-insured deposits, large entities with commercial paper now backed by the Federal Reserve, and others who are using imaginative methods (or lobbying skills) to come under the government’s umbrella — have money costs that are minimal,” he wrote.

“Conversely, highly-rated companies, such as Berkshire, are experiencing borrowing costs that … are at record levels. Moreover, funds are abundant for the government-guaranteed borrower but often scarce for others, no matter how creditworthy they may be.”

It takes remarkable chutzpah to lobby for bailouts, make trades seeking to profit from them, and then complain that those doing so put you at a disadvantage.

Elsewhere in his letter he laments “atrocious sales practices” in the financial industry, holding up Berkshire subsidiary Clayton Homes as a model of lending rectitude.

Conveniently, he neglects to mention Wells Fargo’s toxic book of home equity loans, American Express’ exploding charge-offs, GE Capital’s awful balance sheet, Bank of America’s disastrous acquisitions of Countrywide and Merrill Lynch, and Goldman Sachs’ reckless trading practices.

And what of Moody’s, the credit-rating agency that enabled lending excesses Buffett criticizes, and in which he’s held a major stake for years? Recently Berkshire cut its stake to 16 percent from 20 percent. Publicly, however, the Oracle of Omaha has been silent.

This is remarkably incongruous for the world’s most famous financial straight-shooter. Few have called him on it, though one notable exception was a good article by Charles Piller in the Sacramento Bee earlier this year.

Buffett didn’t respond to my email seeking a comment.

What saddens me is that Buffett is uniquely positioned to lobby for better public policy, but he’s chosen to spend his considerable political capital protecting his own holdings. ...

To me this feels like a betrayal. There’s a reason he’s Warren Buffett and not, say, Carl Icahn.

As Roger Lowenstein wrote in his 1995 biography of Buffett, “Wall Street’s modern financiers got rich by exploiting their control of the public’s money … Buffett shunned this game … In effect, he rediscovered the art of pure capitalism — a cold-blooded sport, but a fair one.”

But there’s nothing fair about Buffett getting a bailout, about exploiting the taxpaying public for his own gain. The naïve 14-year-olds among us thought he was better than this.

What would Ben Graham say?

Maybe readers allowing you to purchase electronic copies of books from giant impersonal corporations are not such a good idea after all.

What happens when Amazon decides, for reasons of its own, that you should not be in possession of a particular book? Pop! It’s gone. Eliminated by your friendly corporation’s software update system.

Big Brother came calling on Amazon customers yesterday, as the New York Times reports.

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.

Lifehacker tells us that Google will be be releasing its free, open-source Chrome Operating System later this year. Google says:

We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Chrome OS is going to be netbook oriented in its earliest version, and the idea apparently is ultimately to replace PC software with on-live Google applications like Gmail and Google Docs.

Persuading users to give up the familiar isn’t easy, but Microsoft has done a fine job lately, particularly with Vista, in creating a real opportunity for anyone able to offer more speed and convenience.

Contemporary Britain is competing very seriously with California in the contest for the best nonsensical ideas applied in daily life.

Newcastle’s onebestway, a small design and marketing firm facing tough economic times, took serious steps to deal with the crisis. It hired a swami, excuse me! a business psychologist, to help in improving morale.

The Telegraph reports:

David Taylor, a business psychologist, told workers at design and marketing onebestway, in Newcastle upon Tyne, that a Naked Friday idea would boost their team spirit.

He was called in to help the firm after six staff members were forced into taking redundancies at the start of the credit crunch.

Mr Taylor told them that, by stripping off their clothes, staff could also strip away inhibitions and talk to each other more openly and honestly.

He said: “Inviting an organisation to go naked is the most extreme technique I’ve used. It may seem weird but it works. It’s the ultimate expression of trust in yourself and each other.”

Despite some initial reluctance, nearly all the staff took off all their clothes – except for one man, who wore a posing pouch, and one of two female workers, who kept on black underwear.

Sam Jackson, 23, the house manager, was the only woman to go fully naked. She said: “It was brilliant. Now that we’ve seen each other naked, there are no barriers.

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The Daily Mail reports that careful preparations had to be made, but assures us that the experiment proved a grand success.

During the week leading up to the strip-off, the workers were encouraged to photocopy parts of their bodies to make them more confident about themselves.

A nude model was also brought in for the workers to sketch and talk to.

Sam added: ‘It took a week of David being in the office for us to build up courage. The first few steps were very nerve-wracking, but once I got to my desk and got used to it, I felt totally comfortable.

‘It was emotional but we found we were much more able to talk to each other honestly – and have been since. The company

Managing Director Mike Owen, 40, said: ‘We’re either brave or mad. But I did tell everyone they didn’t have to do it -only if it felt right.’

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Naked Office, a television program which filmed all this, will be aired July 9th on Virgin1.

Declining Newspaper Quarterly Ad Revenues From 2006

Another graph, this one is from Tech Crunch:

Total newspaper ad sales dropped by an unprecedented 28.28% in the first quarter of 2009, a deep plunge that represents a loss of more than $2.6 billion in ad revenue compared year-over-year. Compared to 3 years ago – 2006 was a pretty good year for American newspapers – we’re looking at a drop of more than $4.5 billion in ad sales in just three years if you only take into account the first quarter.

The sharp decline is caused by the lousy state of both digital and dead tree ad sales: the stats posted on the Newspaper Association of America website show that print sales fell by 29.7% in the first three months of this year (to $5.9 billion), while online sales dropped a record 13.4% (to $696.3 million).

Buggy whip sales figures probably looked a lot like this after Henry Ford’s Model T hit the market.

Of course, some of us think it isn’t only the Internet & Craig’s List producing this decline. The arrogance, insularity, partisanship, and dishonesty of establishment newspapers has to be having some negative impact.